Scott Empringham | Scaling an Agency to Over $10M, Losing It All, and Rebounding in 14 Months

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Welcome to the Revolution, the Smart Business Revolution podcast where we ask today's most successful entrepreneurs to share the tools and strategies they use to build relationships and connections to grow their revenue. Now, now, your host for the Revolution, John Corcora.

It. All right, welcome everyone. John Corkin here. I am the host of this show and every week I get to talk to Smart founders and CEOs and entrepreneurs of all kinds of companies and organizations ranging from Netflix to Kinkos to YPO, EO Activation, Blizzard, LendingTree, OpenTable, Axe Software and many more. I'm also the co founder of Rise25 where we help to connect B2B business owners to their ideal prospects. And this week we've got a great guest. His name is Scott Embringham. He is the CEO and owner of Emperor Media Group. For more than 21 years, his passion has been helping Fortune 50 companies to break through the clutter using digital marketing and social media to drive results in areas that matter most, customer retention and acquisition. So you're going to learn all about that here. Today, he and I connected through eo. He's a member of EO Orange county. And of course this episode is brought to you by Rise 25 Media where we help B2B businesses to get clients referrals and strategic partnerships with done view podcasts and content marketing. If you're listening to this and have ever thought, should I start a podcast? Well, I've been telling everyone I know for 11 plus years now that they should start a podcast because you get to talk to smart people like Scott all the time and it's such a pleasure. So if you want to learn more about that, go to rise25media.com and Scott, you've got this amazing story. When you and I first connected, I was like, I got to share this story because one, I love and respect your candor and your willingness to share. It's, it's, you know, it's part of the spirit of entrepreneurs organization that you share candidly things that you've been through for the benefit of others. And you'd scaled up your business to eight figures, 11 million a year in revenue. But you had about 80% of your revenue coming from your three biggest clients and it all came crashing down in about three or four months. Horrible experience. Had to lay everyone off. Just incredible, incredible story. And you've rebounded from that and are still rebounding from it. Of Course. But I want to hear the story in your words. So take us back to that period of time, if you will, what that was like as your business kind of crumbled in a short period of time.

Well, thank you first. Thank you for having me, John. I appreciate it. And I feel like the same, I have to say, about your whole, about Rise 25 and the podcast. I feel lucky to be able to talk to you. I'm already learning something from you. I would say probably for me, the story sort of starts in January of 2018. Taken off, we just hit 10 million on our way to 11 million. Ford, Chrysler, GM, Home Depot, lots of, lots of great clients. And we just launched a million dollar package. And I was convinced it was going to roll out to five or six other clients and we're going to get to 15. And my goal was to get to 20 and maybe sell it for 100 or 50 million and take my earnings and travel the world. It didn't work out that way. I ended up going the other way.

Wow. And in retrospect, what are some of the takeaways from that experience? Obviously, customer concentration. So you were big in the car world. You had a lot of the big car companies were your clients, Right. And then I believe that you said that the problem was that they decided that they're going to. They all like at the same time decided they're going to take things in house.

Well, I had two clients that actually were behind in their payables to me, and I dipped into my line of credit. I figured they're Fortune 50 clients. I'd never had any problems with them before. They were ad agencies themselves. I was selling to the ad agencies who had the client accounts with the car companies.

So it was a couple steps removed, correct? Yeah, correct.

And so after about 60 days, 70 days, I was buying lots of media. I had about $300,000 in just payroll. And every month I would check in with my bookkeeper with the accounts to see where my, where we were with the receivables. And then it went from 30 days to 60 days to 90 days to 120 days. I had to dip into my line of credit, which I'd never done before, but there it was, convinced everything was going to be fine. And then one day I came into the office sometime probably in March or April, and I looked online and I saw an article that said my client had lost the national account to this car company. And that's how I found out they lost the account. And then my phone started ringing and Then I put two and two together and I realized, holy smokes, they lost the account. That's probably why they were holding on to my bills. And then simultaneously, about a week later, another ad agency, they lost their account. Major car company client. And I got caught holding the bag after I'd already dipped in a line of credit big time, expecting the receivables to come in. At that point, I had about a month to figure out what I was going to do. But by then it was too late. I was already in the line of credit and I was in big trouble.

And you had to come in, I think you said it was on a Monday and you had to let the whole team go.

Yeah, for the folks who are in EO or entrepreneur organization. On a Wednesday or Thursday, I got together with my forum, that small group of folks. I sat down with them, we called an emergency meeting. And in the forum I had an attorney. I had somebody who's like a cfo, really, really smart people, very, very smart people. And I sat down with them and I started doing kind of a brainstorm on options, like a team consult. I looked at my options and I had a follow up meeting with two of them on Friday. And that Friday one of the guys said, listen, you have a big decision. My recommendation, if we can go non gestalt. My recommendation. And I was looking for recommendations, by the way. I wasn't looking for experienced shares. I was saying, hey, what are your thoughts?

So there's a, there's a big, no, no, you're not supposed to give advice in EO normally. So it sounds like was well past that.

I was well past my waving that rule right now 100%. I was waiving the rule. And somebody said, look, based upon these numbers, if you don't shut things down on Monday, you're going to be in big trouble as it is. You're in, you're in very, very big trouble. You're going to end up going BK and everything else. So they said, my recommendation on Monday, you shut it down. No sleep over the weekend. On Monday morning I walked in and I shut it down. I called a meeting and just told everybody it was over. And the toughest professional day of my life. And that began kind of a week, 2, week, 3, week, 4 week period. Hiring an attorney to do the assignment for the benefit of creditor, also an EO guy. Winding everything down, shut everything down. Just a very, very tough time. And at the end, of course, I think I shared that part of the story that when I thought it was all Over. It wasn't over. The attorney said, you need to go see the bank because the bank had called. They said, we're really sorry about everything, but you got about 90 days before you need to start making payments on the half a million line of credit, or we got to get our money. And it's like, well, there's only one thing, one way they're going to get their money, and that's how I sell my house. I had a bunch of homes before I was down to one and I was going to lose that if I didn't come up with the money.

Wow. And then you also had a very dark period where it was right around 4th of July and you. We had to make this decision about whether to be honest with your forum mates. So your forum mates are out, they're out having a good time. You're out enjoying fourth of July and you're in this very dark space and they're messaging you on your phone. Tell us what happened there.

Yeah, yeah, Fourth of July, probably 2:00 in the afternoon. I hadn't gotten out of bed the night before. I had a night of drinking and I don't drink anymore, but I did then.

And by the way, you'd gone through a divorce around this time as well. To add on to everything else.

Add on to everything else, yeah. June and July were the toughest couple months of my life. I lost all the homes, all my wealth was gone, lost, my marriage was bouncing around an apartment, finally ended up in my rental that I was renting out and had nothing and basically ended up half a million dollars in debt. And that right around fourth of July rolls around. And then I was just imploding. I was in a very dark place, far beneath the waves, and I just didn't know how I was going to get out. And on 4th of July, some people reached out to me on WhatsApp, my forum, and they were all enjoying Mexico and Palm Springs and everything else. They said, how you doing? And they knew kind of what was going on, but they said, how are you? And I just disappeared. And I was really in a bad place. And I finally messaged him. I had a decision to make, which was, am I going to be honest and maybe ruin their 4th of July? I was being sort of self conscious about it or just say, I'm fine. I chose to be honest. And I said, I'm not doing so good. I mean, I was thinking some dark thoughts. And 20 minutes later, one of my former mates pounded on the door. He heard the. That in my voice in the WhatsApp. And he banged on the door and came and who knows, maybe saved my life. I don't know. But he was right there at a time when I really needed him.

God, it's amazing what a good friend can do at those dark times. There was also a moment where you realize you're going to rebuild. And I think it was. You were sitting with your daughter, and your daughter was helping you. Tell us about that.

Yeah. Yeah. So you just touched a nerve here. That's probably the most. It was another tough day. The very last day, I was shutting the office down and handing the keys to the attorney, and the office was empty. My kids were there sort of playing, and I was in my office. I just lost it. I was crying. I had the door closed, and I was looking out the window, thinking, the hell am I going to do? And she walked into my office, and she was like, you know, tiny little, little things. She was like 9, 10. And I sort of wiped the tears, and she said, daddy, are you. Are you crying? And I said, oh, these are happy tears. I'm thinking about, you know, the next step. And she. You know, little kids, they don't. They don't know. You know, they don't know. And part of that beauty is that this sort of genuine thing. She goes, I said, yeah, we're going to start over. And she said, that's great, you know. So she comes up and she climbs on my lap, and she says, what are we going to do now? I said, I'm going to start another company, of course. She goes, I want to help you. And I said, well, great. And so I pulled out my phone, because, by the way, my attorney had taken my laptop, because I didn't. I couldn't. I literally had nothing but my fricking phone. And those were all assets of the company. So I took out my phone, and she said, I want to help you. So she said, what are you going to call? And I said, emperor Media. And so I opened it up. She set up an Instagram account for me. She already knew how to do that. And she picked out the first post. We sat on the lap, and she said, let's do a quote. And it was like, every day is a new start or a fresh start. And if you look at my account, my very first post on whatever it was, June something, when I shut the thing down, was that post. And she helped me do my first post, and she kind of got me over that Humphrey. And, you know, just. It was amazing, amazing day.

I don't Think you quite appreciate it now, but five years from maybe, maybe 10 years from now, you're going to look back on that moment and just going to so cherish that moment that you had with your daughter.

Yeah.

Maybe even tell it, Tell her the story at her wedding or something like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was because of the kids. It was because of the kids. You know. You know, Simon Sinek, start with why. There's no question that that was the why. You know, my buddy, when I, when I mentioned that my buddy came over and banged on the door, he, he said two things that kind of stuck out. He said, number one is he said, you know, you're not nearly at the beginning. You have 20 years of business experience, you have all this different stuff. And he said, you're not, you're not at the beginning at all. And he said, what you need to understand is when you figure this out, you will have a great, not only story to tell, but you'll be able to share this with your kids. And your kids will be watching you very carefully. And imagine the example you could set for your kids if they see you rebound from where you are now. Imagine the possibility you can create in their mind. And when they realize what dad went through, that he started not only at zero, at 50, but half a million dollars in the hole. If you could pull this off, what would that mean to your kids? And the guy, my EO buddy, Anthony Gerasi, he got under my skin when he was talking about setting the example for my kids. We'll do more for other people than we will for ourselves. But when he brought my kids into it, that was what I needed to take a step forward. Say effort. I will figure this out. I will own this and I will figure this out.

Yeah, that's great. The amazing thing too about this is that it wasn't easy to redo what you did because you had to pick a new market. You needed to generate cash in a short period of time. So you previously had been dealing with these very large enterprise customers with really long sales cycles. And so you actually pivoted. So talk a little bit about the different choices that you made in the market, changes that you made in terms of the client prospect you were going after.

I'm so glad you asked that. So you're 100% right. Automotive clients, 90 days minimum, just to get something going in six months in the year sales cycle. So I knew that was out. But two decisions, two things really changed. I had this plan, I had an eight step sort of blueprint. That I'd always done with other clients and helped them set a target and do all these different things to build a social media campaign. And as I crafted that plan, one of the very first things I did was starting to serve. I started reaching out to people. I met with a guy named David Meltzer, who was the inspiration for the movie Jerry Maguire. And as I sat down with him, I still have this interview. I had a little phone set up and I was walking him through this and I told him part of my story and he stopped me and he got really intense and he said, did you know that when I was like 40, I think he said, did you know I lost everything? He goes, how's everything going right now? And as he told me the story, he asked me if I'd landed any clients and where I was now I was at the very beginning. I said, I'm just starting. And he goes, can I offer you one piece of advice? I said, you can offer me any advice you want. I'm freaking desperate. And he said, the secret to living is giving. When you set out and you put this plan together, the very first thing you should be doing is thinking, who around you you can help right now? Who can you serve right now? Who can you give to and contribute to right now? And it changed my thinking because I was thinking about all these new clients I was going to try to help or go out and get, but it was kind of lack thinking. And when he said that, the very first thing I could think about is, what if I took this eight step blueprint that I have I converted into a workshop. And I called some of the business owners that I work with every day through EO and just offered it for free. And I never really thought about that. And I do all the speaking and I do all the stuff for automotive. And that was the very first thing I did. And a gentleman asked me if I wanted to be on the board. I said, I'd love to serve. I had no idea how I was even going to be around in 30 days. I said, absolutely, I'd love to serve. And he mentioned, you know, he said, listen, if you ever had a workshop or something, now would be a great time. I said, I will, I'll put one. He said, what's your speaking fee? I said, I'm free. I will do this for free. I went and I served like crazy. And in serving, in giving, I was able to put myself out there. And people started saying, hey, we'd love to do it. And then of course, I took that. I Put it on social media. A couple of my automotive clients called, and within 88 days, I generated enough revenue to pay off my line of credit, save the house the full 500,000. Full 500,000 in 88 days. 88 days. And I was able to pay it off. I have a picture that I have in my workshop now where you can see the bags under my eyes. I look like death warmed over. But I did a selfie and she was pretty fine. She's like, please don't do a selfie in here. I was like, no, no, we're doing a selfie. And she right behind me. I'm holding up a check, and it's for, like, whatever it was, and I'm holding up a check. She's in the background. And on that day was the day I paid off the line of credit. I was exhausted, but I'd saved the house. Kids were still in school and life was even.

It's remarkable because I've interviewed well over a thousand entrepreneurs, and so many of them who have had a story like this where they struggled and they had to rebound. They rebound and they rebound bigger than they ever were before. And if you talk to them at their low point, they'll never believe it. They think, oh, it's not possible because they're minimizing how much they know, how much experience they have. But it's made it a lot more complicated by the fact that you shifted markets. So that's what makes it even more remarkable, I think, is that you change your target market. It'd be one thing to rebuild with the exact same target market, but changing makes it a lot harder. And what's phenomenal is you built back up to an EO qualifying business over seven figures in revenue in, I think, something like 14 months.

14 months? 14 months.

Amazing. I mean, there's so many, myself included, that took forever to get to seven figures. And so to do that in 14 months is just phenomenal.

Well, I had one other experience that you just reminded me that years and years ago I had a mining and transportation company. And I'll never forget, I raised all this money and my goal was to mine this agricultural mineral and get it up to Fresno and Bakersfield. And it was this really high quality industrial mineral called gypsum. I ended up losing the company after four or five years of being in business. And the very last day when they were repoing my equipment, I'd shut everything down. I was in my 20s. A truck came up the road and he parked and he said, hey, do you have any gypsum. And I said, no, no, we shut everything down. And he pointed to this massive pile. It's about a quarter of a million tons of low grade, what's called 50% gypsum, this low grade sort of agricultural mineral. And he said, I'll take that. And I'd been essentially stepping over that every single day in pursuit of this high grade gypsum. Because I was so focused on selling the high grade gypsum up to Fresno and Bakersfield, I lost sight of John just taking advantage of what was already on the ground, already mined, less quality. And I could have sold it throughout that valley. I was in Blythe, California at the time. I could have sold it throughout that little market and generated some revenue and that hit home. And it's funny how that experience came back to me 20 years later and trying to remind myself that there's opportunities around us all the time that we're probably ignoring or missing. And sometimes we just need a whack on the side of the head to think about all the opportunities we have all around us. Literally around podcast, podcasting, you make people aware of it all the time. Sharing ideas.

That is, for me personally, that was an asset that I was stepping over for a long time because I'd been doing it for a long time. And it wasn't until about three or four years ago that we started helping others with it. We didn't realize that it was something that people really, really wanted help with.

And then you're reaching out to people who have these great stories to share and they never had the opportunity or maybe the foresight to share them. And then you finally put a mic in front of them and they share it and maybe it helps somebody. And that was the big takeaway that I hope I never forget now that I leveraged a year and a half ago, two years ago, when it all kind of had to start all over, I asked a different question. Rather than thinking about this dream market that was really far away, I thought, who around me can I help today? Because I don't have time to build up a market that I'm going to serve 90 days from now.

And one other thing that's fascinating is that you also had never sold digital courses before, but you realized there were a lot of people that wanted to work with you. You realized that your fees were probably higher than what they were willing to pay for because they're just in a different size business versus the large car companies. And so you started creating digital courses. And that's not easy. Because that's, you know, selling a digital course versus selling a high end done for you. Service can be very different. So talk a little bit about shifting and throwing that into the mix.

So two things. One is opportunity, you know, is it. Necessity is the mother of invention, right? And going back to sort of the principle, number one of just giving. When I created the workshop, when I created the workshop, I'd actually created the blueprint for a course at that time. Now the good news is I didn't have any clients at the time. So I also had all this free.

Time, good time to do it.

I had time. So people were telling me, hey, it's going to take three months or six months to do this thing or it's going to take certain amount of time. I hunkered down over like the holidays, over some holidays, and I put together in November, December, I just hunkered down and I put together the course. I leveraged my workshop. I created in the workshop. I created exactly what to do and the course. I created exactly how to do it. And it was a natural compliment to the workshop. And so when I did the workshop, people would say, great. And a lot of times they would get everything they needed in the workshop to go execute. They already had a team and they could go do what the stuff that I was talking to them about doing. Other times people said, great, how do I hire you? And I'd say, here's my fees. And they'd say, I don't want to pay those fees. I'd say, or you can buy the course. I'd say, perfect, I'll buy the course for my director of marketing, I'll buy the course for my Internet manager, my social media manager. And they would do that. And it was a way to serve and be able to serve at a level that was palatable for small businesses and really worked for me too.

And tell me how things have been different or how you have made decisions differently this time around as you've grown the business, as you grow to seven figures in revenue and above, you have to hire people, you have to invest back up, you have to purchase software, you have to invest in equipment, things like that. Have you made decisions differently at all this time as you've been growing the business in terms of how you've grown it?

That's a great question. I think, number one, the biggest thing that sticks out is I'm far more humble than I was when I got to 10 million, headed to 11 million. I had a good friend, he was my CFO. He's a CPA. He actually made an interesting comment and I just had lunch with him a couple of weeks ago and he said, it's interesting. I think you're smarter than you probably ever have, but you're far more humble. Humble than you were when you had the company. And so humility and self awareness is something that I think is a brand new, hopefully evolved aspect of everything. And so I asked the question, I go in knowing that there's so much I don't know, that I can learn so much from other people. And so now I'm far less likely to a do it on my own. I find people who are brilliant at what they do and I defer to their strengths and I really try to soak it up. And I know starting with nothing, I just don't know. So I try to soak that up. And then two, I've been far more aggressive in looking at outsourced talent, global talent. You know, there's so much talent out there. When people say I can't find, you know, good people or smart people, sometimes it's. They're not looking in the right places. And there's some really wonderful talent in a global marketplace. It's really, really competitively priced and is far less expensive and far more nimble than anything I'd ever known. So I had 40 employees before, and it'll be a while before I get back there.

Your father was an entrepreneur also, and he was really instrumental helping you as you recovered from all this, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, you do your homework.

Yeah.

My dad, I grew up in Emerald Bay. Emerald Bay in Laguna Beach. It's just this amazing little beautiful community on the beach. And he was in real estate and he worked for this big company and he built cities. But while he built cities, he also started mortgage companies and escrow companies and all these different title companies. He had a little piece of those things. He did very, very well. But when I shut everything down, it was right around July when I mentioned. He called me up and he's old school. And I think his exact words were something along the line. We had lunch and he said, well, listen, no more crybaby, crybaby. I'm gonna write you a check for $10,000. I'm your partner. I'll take 10%, go to the bank deposit. Let's get the show on the road. Let's go. I said, no nonsense is it? No more crybaby, crybaby. And I was. I was trying like a.

Actually, that should have been your first Instagram post. That quote Right there. But, yeah, you gotta, like, put that on a poster and put it on the wall. Yeah.

And so then, funny enough, he said. I said, well, I don't have an office or anything. But it was funny. At that time, I was just grateful for the 10,000 bucks. And I was like, all right, great. I'll go start the account. Because I had a client coming in, and I had no bank account. And he said, here's what we're going to do. You're going to be in my office. Now, his office was this tiny little office, and I have a picture of this. There was a young lady who was an intern right here. My desk, no kidding, was wedged between two file cabinets. I had no desk. It was a chair. It was like a 1960s wooden chair. I mean, my back hurt. By the end of the day, I went from this beautiful office. You could draw on all the walls. It was the bomb. My old office, now I'm wedged in. This is like four months after I'm wedged in between two file cabinets. I could put my hands up on the file cabinet. And I showed this. I show this picture because my sister came in and she set up my book. She took a picture of me wedged in with my laptop on my lap, like. And then when they would open the filing cabinet, I would literally have to duck and talk about humility. I mean, it was like. It was. It was definitely. But he was. But he's one of these guys. He's 83 now. He's slowing down, but he's tough as nails. He never complains, he never bitches, he never moans. I mean, he's my idol.

Yeah, that's great. I know we're short on time, but I want to ask. I'm a big fan of gratitude, especially expressing gratitude publicly to people who've been helpful in your business, which I know we've already mentioned a bunch so far. But if you look around at your peers, however you want to define that peers and contemporaries could be other EO forum mates. It could be others you've come across in your industry. Who do you respect? Who do you admire that's doing good work out there?

Oh, wow. Well, I would be remiss if I didn't say one guy. A guy named Keith Fiskus. He was the president of EO Orange county at the time. It's July. I was just destroyed. And right after I had the meeting with David Meltzer, and he said about serving, Keith Fiskus called me on the phone, and he said, I want you to Be. I want you to serve on the board. And I said no. And it was like that tap on the shoulder and I wish I had a story, John, where I said. And I knew right then it was my calling. I was like, you're out of your mind. I can't pay my mortgage. I can't pay my car. I can't pay anything. And he literally, he pretty much threw me metaphorically on his back and drugged me to that board meeting and convinced me to be on the board. And if without his push, without his inspiration, without him literally throwing me on his shoulder and carrying me through that first couple of months where, four or five months where it was really rocky for me, I, you know, it would. I think it would have been a very, very different day.

And why did he do that? Did he know that by getting you more involved, that would help carry you through? Or what did he just literally needed someone to be on the board?

I honestly, I think it was. Well, he was like, yeah, he's not busy now. He just lost his business.

He can. He can do it.

You know, if. You know Keith. You know Keith. And I think I know him pretty well. One, he's, He's a. He was. He was. He was like a Marine. He's a tough dude. Back in the day, he was in Desert Storm, so he's got this real tough exterior, but he's also got a heart as a big. As a lion. I mean, the guy's a very tough dude, but he's a very, very warm and a loving guy. And I think he probably needed somebody, but I think he didn't need me. I mean, he could have got a lot of different people. And frankly, I was a big pain in the neck. There was a couple of times when I was not such a great guy to deal with. I mean, I was getting no sleep and I was just fighting for my life. And he was patient, he was kind. He's just a. He's a. He's a good guy. He's a very, very good guy. And I think he knew deep down that, you know, he was going to throw me on his shoulder and carry me a little the way until I could walk myself. And eventually I did. But I think that's the kind of guy he was.

That's a great story. That's a great story, Scott. Thank you so much for all your honesty and candor and sharing your story and paying it forward and all that kind of stuff. I know you got some new courses coming out and a new website. Well, not so new anymore. But where can people go to connect with you and learn more about you?

Awesome. They can go to scottempringham.com scottembringham.com and that's where you can learn about the free workshop, the course, more about Impringham Media and all of our done for you services and so much more. That would be a great place to start.

Scott, thanks so much.

Thank you. I really appreciate it.

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