Jeff Hunter & Josh Nelson – Agency Success Interview

This is the 7 Figure Agency Podcast. Discover the strategies and techniques to grow a highly successful and profitable digital marketing agency with your host, Joshua Nelson.

Sweet.

What's up everybody? Thank you for joining us on today's, uh, live interview with Jeff J. Hunter. Super excited to have him with us. Um, this is part of the 7 Figure Agency Podcast where we're interviewing highly successful digital marketing agencies from across the spectrum on how they grow and build their, build their agencies. So Jeff, thank you so much for joining us today.

Oh, I'm excited. I'm, uh, I'm gonna try and share this Facebook Live.

All right, I gotta give you a little bit more preamble so you have time as well.

Yeah, no, I'm excited. Um, it's, it's, uh, it's great. And congratulations on the launch of your book, The 7-Figure Agency. Um, really, really great to see what you're doing and supporting, you know, all of us agency owners, you know, doing stuff out here.

Yeah, and this book, you'll notice Jeff was nice enough to write a little bit of an intro to the book for me. So Jeff, thank you for sharing your feedback in promoting the book.

Oh yeah, hey, I'm glad to see my ugly face in your book. I'm not used to people showing my face off in their books.

Let me know once you've got yourself—

I'm— we're good. I am set up. We're good to go.

So I guess let's just start off, introduce yourself, kind of your background, and kind of where you're at in your digital marketing agency. Wow.

You know, um, it's interesting because I actually, if I would have 6 years ago said that I'd be a you know, have an agency that's made $1 million, I'd be like, wow, probably not. Because 6 years ago I was working for the man. I was a Fortune 500, you know, project manager. Um, really enjoyed my job. I climbed the corporate ladder. I was one of the most senior most project managers, um, at Philips Electronics. Uh, it was really fun. I was in the healthcare division. Really enjoyed my job, had a very simple IT life, you know, like probably a lot of you agency owners are kind of IT nerds like me. Always, you know, like back in high school, in high school I was doing Dreamweaver. Actually, I don't even know if we had Dreamweaver back then. I remember doing, I remember coding, developing, becoming a video game programmer and doing stuff in QBasic, you know. Like I was just always an IT guy and, um, I, I had my dream job, my dream life, you know, was working a good 12-hour, 14-hour day for someone else. Um, but I started realizing really quickly that I was doing a lot of low-level tasks and, and actually they weren't even low-level. Like as a project manager, most of my time spent was doing Gantt charts. Right? Like, here's all the different tasks that need to be done in sequence to find out how long a project's going to be. You know, I was managing anywhere from $1.5 to $3 million in projects a month. So I had a company car, company phone, company computer, company credit card. I could charge $75 a day for food. That's how I got fat. Um, but, but, um, one day I just, uh, I felt undervalued at my work. And, um, just kind of the last straw. And I started building a little web design team on the side. Just my very first job was working for, uh, um, a plastic surgeon, helped a plastic surgeon make a website. And I remember all I did was, was go on like, you know, one of those Design River type site things and downloaded a template. Yeah. Downloaded a template. It wasn't even WordPress. I mean, WordPress wasn't even the greatest back then. It was just like, download this HTML. HTML and modified it and updated the PSD file, you know, like, and, and one day I, I said, I'm out of here, let's, let's try this. And, um, now I have about 60 people in my agency, and, uh, I service some of the coolest people in the world, and it, and it feels great. Um, I still work with a lot of ma and pa type locals. I also work with a lot of influencers, and it's just been a really fun journey.

That's awesome, man. So you kind of made that transition from what sounded like a pretty cushy life and a pretty cushy job, started the side hustle, and have grown it to a pretty significant business. So kudos, congratulations.

I know, you know, the thing is that when I had my— when I worked at Phillips, I, you know, I was a 6-figure project manager. I, you know, I felt like I had made it. Everyone thought I was crazy as hell for leaving my job, like, wow, Jeff, you made it. I made the most money of anyone in my family generationally. You know, had a degree, which already says enough. I think only one other person in my family has a degree, my grandma.

Wow.

At that time, now my sister has two, you know, she had to outdo me. But what's really interesting though is that when I left, I always like, I felt like I would never be able to do better than my last job. And Even still today, that was the best and last job I'll ever have. Right. But it was interesting because when I left, the very first year that I left was, by the way, in 2016, not that long ago, technically leap year. So it's only one year. I left on February 29th is what I said in my letter of resignation. But what's really interesting is that the very first year I was thinking, man, this is going to be such a struggle. And of course, running your own agency, especially in the beginning, is a struggle, right? Yeah. Like, I can't even— like, for anyone out there who hasn't started an agency yet, which probably everyone listening already has, they know. Those of you looking to start, get ready and pull up your britches, okay?

Not as easy as it sounds or looks.

Yeah, definitely, definitely want to read this dang book that this guy put out because there's so many things in there that I wish I would have known beforehand building an agency. And as you know, I mean, to think that 3 years ago I started full-time, my, well, 4 years now, I started my agency full-time. And 4 years later, I'm speaking at Digital Marketers Digital Agency Expo 45 minutes before Gary Vaynerchuk, to have spoken twice at Digital Marketers headquarters in Austin, Texas, to teach other agency owners. To work with, with, to, to white label my services for other agency owners. I mean, to work with guys like you, right, who are teaching other people how to do this. You know, I feel like I've been so blessed and, and I've been such, and put in such a great opportunity. And that's actually the motivation behind the Savage Marketer brand, because I feel like all of us have this inner savage, especially when we're building an agency, when we're growing, when we're building a brand for ourselves. Um, we have to do things a little bit different to stand out, and I feel like that's the Savage Marketer. So just like you, how you've now— you've, you've been able to build such a great successful business and you help other agency owners build great successful businesses. What I've learned— my skills aren't your skills. My skills— I've learned how to do amazing storytelling. I've learned how to do really in-your-face copywriting. That's where I've kind of developed out my skill set. So with the Savage Marketing Academy is basically teaching other people how to stand out, how to be more savage, how to get more attention, because that's where we live now. We live in a world where attention is the currency.

Yeah, no doubt. And you've done a— I mean, like you said, done a phenomenal job being able to get those speaking opportunities and land some of the big clients that you have. Can you name some of the, like, the known people you're working with, or is that—

Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, I'm not a big bragger, but You know, I've been fortunate enough to work with Ryan Levesque from the Ask Method. Alex Morton, who's a really, he's a really up-and-comer. He's one of the best network marketers out there in the MLM space. He's got over a million followers on Instagram. He's in a different country every week. We're starting a new project right now. Oh, there's my alarm for this. I guess I was late.

Good thing I called you early, right?

Yeah, I guess I was early. Good thing. We're launching, working with Streamline and Grant Cardone for a new supplement line, 10X Health Systems, which is really probably one of the most crazy, most incredible ventures that I've worked on, period. It's just been, it's been really fun. You know, I just, like I said, and even for me, I launched my own podcast. I'm finally doing for myself Here you go, agency owner. Here you go, agency owner. This is the first year, the last 12 months where I've treated myself as a client. Wow.

Wow. Start to eat some of your own, your own dog food, right?

Isn't it interesting how many agency owners are so busy working for other people that they're not focused on themselves? They're not actually treating themselves as a client and they're still working for you know, the, the same, you know, people, and, and they're, they're struggling to do it. And I think that what the true testimony is, Josh, and I think you and I are in alignment here, is that I've kind of figured out the secret of leveraging your personal brand to grow your agency, right? Yeah. Like, my agency now, I don't, I don't really market or sell. I don't have a sales team. I don't do outbound or anything like that. I'm just purely inbound. The opportunities Just like the Digital Agency Expo, I got shortlisted. I was asked by Digital Marketer to speak there. I didn't submit an application. I didn't pay anybody off. I didn't submit an app, you know, I like literally they contacted me and said, hey Jeff, we'd really like you to speak at the event.

Nice.

I mean, that's the power of using your personal brand and leveraging it instead of having to prove everybody that your agency is awesome. You build out your personal brand. You point them to it and they say, look, I'm the CEO of whatever. And then people are genuinely interested in your business saying, well, Josh, he's doing really well. He's speaking on stage. He must know a little bit about something, right? He wrote the book called Seven Figure Agency. He must know a little bit about building a seven-figure agency, right?

Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I think a lot of agencies miss that. They want to put up a nice brand or a nice logo. And be anonymous behind the scenes, have stock photography, and kind of think that that's going to attract customers or clients. Where the more you can be your authentic self, like you are Jeff Hunter out there in public, the better, right?

That really just resonates at a different level with, you know, one of the things that really took my— and this is something, by the way, I love about your culture, and we do have very similar Is there— can I share my screen?

I think so. Yeah, let's see.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna try because I, I want to share with people how important it is to just share your brand story and also how to integrate your own personal brand into your business. Now, a lot of people say that— a lot of people might think that that's an egotistical type thing to intersect your thing in there, but at the end of the day, people do business with people. They're not doing business with your Facebook page or your company name, right? And if you can establish a strong personal connection with the brand, you're going to outdo everybody else who's just a company logo behind the brand. And for my— when I started my agency, so I have two brands, I have two businesses. I've got VA Staffer, which is my virtual assistant business. Which my target demographic for that is entrepreneurs and marketing agencies. That's the demographic for them. So I do a lot of like white label marketing. We do, we do some SEO. We do mostly, um, you know, web development, uh, design, branding, uh, help, help people get virtual assistants, the people that, you know, help, help empower them. And you'll see exactly the brand message and vision when I share my screen here. So this, this hopefully will give you guys some ideas. So I have to dispel, because 80% of my team is in the Philippines, 80% of my, you know, 50+ people. I think we're up to 60 now. But this image right here of VA Staffer is very specific on us empowering our clients. It's— yes, I'm the only white guy in the picture. And believe it or not, this is right after I left my J-O-B. I had just left. I had just started. I had built this office up, uh, in January of 2015. So one year before I left my work, I was already starting to build my team. Uh, this picture here was August 18th, my birthday, in 2016. So about 6 months after I had left my job, and this was the team that I built. This was—

I love, I love, I love the Authenticity, right? These are the real people. There's obviously, you know, cool colors in the background that it's real. Most, you know, virtual assistant companies, you see white—

they've got a stock photo of some like Russian girl with a headset on with her bright smiley white teeth and her pantsuit on. And I'm like, I own a virtual business. I'm in my underwear right now. Like there's no time at all I'm ever walking around my house taking a phone call in a pantsuit. Or anything like that. And I guarantee you these guys aren't either, right? And so it's really so important to build trust and authenticity. And you know what I do? Here's something that's going to blow your mind. I am so transparent that I even have my own team write their own bio and I don't edit it. So as good as their English is, that's what it is. And I don't do it on purpose. So I wrote my own thing over 10 years in this, and Julio wrote his, and Radora wrote his, and RS wrote hers, and Kavika, and, and, you know, I have American staff as well, um, you know, but everyone here writes their own bio, and it— and I give them— I said, show it now, as long as it's an appropriate picture. I said, I want you to have an appropriate picture that represents you. Like, here's Al, one of my copywriters. He's from Boulder, Colorado. And he's a fantastic guy. This is my own assistant, her name's, uh, her name's Melissa, but we all call her Miles. So we, we, we do this because we're, we're being authentic to ourselves and authentic to our brand. Um, and I think that that's such a huge lesson if you're an agency owner and you're really trying to scale and leverage your own team. And, and like, there's no better marketing for yourself than your team. And if you, if you can't put your team up in the spotlight and showcase them, then there's something wrong with your team. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

I think, I think there's like a lot, probably gonna be a lot of takeaways. Pull up the screen again real quick from this session. But there's one thing you do, go to your website right now and put some real pictures and imagery on it. Just pull up plumberseo.net real quick.

Say it, say it again. Plumber SEO. Dot net.

And the agencies we work with that are willing to do this and like kind of be transparent in this way and like put their team up there.

Nice.

If it ever loads.

Yeah, that's it.

So I think you scroll through, you'll get like, they're real. Like, this is me, this is my face, I'm the person you're going to deal with in our company. Scroll to the bottom and that's where the team shot is. Real pictures of real people.

Oh, there's the team shot.

Yeah, so I mean, even if you've got a small team and it's only you and a couple of assistants, like, put your own face on the website. That will definitely help. Yeah, how well you resonate with your, with your client.

Totally, totally. Because what you don't want to be is just another number, you know. You don't want to be just another SEO company. Like, if we typed in, like, if, like, let's, if we typed in SEO company, um, Let's just see what we have. All right. So we've got an SEO company. Who's— here's— let me, let me type in my locale, let's say San Francisco. All right. SEO services in San Francisco. Now let's take a peek and see what we've got. Victorious SEO. There we go. There it is.

90% of the time. Yep.

It's— no, it's literally 99% of the time. Like, you're not going to see any type of— and this is a nice site, but still, it's just a plain site. And this is a top— supposedly, it looks like number 1 of 285 SEO agencies and whatever. I don't even know what Clutch is, some award that, you know, they probably won. Oh yeah, back in 2018. Um, and, and this is the thing, this is, this is everybody. This is what everybody does. And if you really want to leverage, you know, if you want to get ahead faster, all you have to do is just literally brand yourself because people like H2H, not B2B, not B2C, H2H, human to human. Interaction.

100%. And you know what's funny is I see the same thing for our clients. Like, we work with plumbing and HVAC companies, and they want to do the same thing with the stock photos and the stock images. And when we can get them to put the real picture of the owner or the real picture of the team up on the website, we track this very closely. Where there's authenticity, the, the conversion rates are almost 2 to 3 times better for the same traffic.

Imagine that. Imagine that, that they actually feel in— and Josh, you know this because you, you also, like me, are more visible. And by the way, I want to put this out there. If you're an introvert, there's still a lot of value to this because I will tell you something. I too was an introvert and I say was because it is conquerable. And I think that with that, there is an element like I have to recharge, like even after this podcast interview, like I know I'm going to have to recharge a little bit. Like for me, this is too much. But like for me, What I've learned is that when you are kind of the person who— Ryan Deiss is an introvert, like the founder of digitalmarketer.com. You know that he's vocal about it. He doesn't like to do the spotlight thing. He's a very knowledgeable guy. But what happens is over time, the more that you do something, the more confident you get, the more competent you get, the more confident you get. And it kind of feeds on each other like a DNA strand. It's like, you know, more confidence, more competent, more competent, more confidence, more, you know, just once you get to a certain level. I don't have any problem speaking in front of a crowd now because I know what I'm going to say. I have no problem coming on this podcast because I've probably been asked these questions 100 times. I've been probably over 100 podcasts over the past few years. I've been on, I don't know, 10, 15 stages in the past 3 years. Um, I've spoken at mastermind after mastermind after mastermind, and after a while you, you get it. And you're never gonna get that feeling until you start doing it. So I would totally recommend, especially for introverts, if you're listening out there, hopefully this helps somebody, is that there's going to be some sort of a mastermind or a group or a spotlight or even a group coaching program that you can get into that people will actually put you on a spotlight. Like, when you get a hot seat— and you know this because you're in masterminds— but when you're on a hot seat and you're in front of a bunch of, like, other, like, awesome people that are doing bigger and better things, it always feels like everyone's doing bigger and better things than you, right, Josh?

Always, always.

Um, everywhere I go, I always feel like I'm just the minimal guy in the room, you know? Um, and that's on purpose because I want to uplevel. If I'm in What's the saying, right? If I walk into the room and I'm the most accomplished and most knowledgeable person in the room, I'm in the wrong room. So get yourself out there, guys.

Yeah, stretch the comfort zone. You know, not ever— I mean, I'm introverted as well. You know, the only way you do it, like anything, is like, if this is your comfort zone right now and getting on video or putting your picture up on your website or speaking in front of a group is outside that comfort zone, the only way you expand the comfort zone is to do it, right? Shoot a Facebook Live video. You know, do a live webinar, get on somebody's podcast. You do it once and your comfort zone stretches, and you can start to do it better and better over time.

So funny enough, and you know him too, my very first speaking gig was back in 2017. I spoke at Tony Grebmeier's Ship Offers Mastermind. Okay. And It was called— it's Be Fulfilled Now, but it used to be called Destroying Excuses. And I remember I was so nervous, I wanted to cry.

I'm sure.

And I knew what my comfort zone is. You'll notice I have a giant 8-foot whiteboard behind me. This is my comfort zone. I'm a whiteboard guy. So what I did was before my talk, I went up and I had— because I'm a project manager from a past life, you know, I can— I'm good at small rooms, you know, up to 10 people, 12 people, like I can demand presence, but it's because I like to have a plan when I go in. If I have a plan when I go in, I'm cool. It's when I don't have a plan, that's when I go, uh-uh, you know, I get all crazy. So what I did was I went on the board and I was gonna teach people a fundamental principle of managing a project. So I wrote 3 little examples out. So I stood in front of the board and I told everybody what I was gonna teach them. I pointed to the board on each item and I told them what that meant and I gave them an example and I told a little story about each one of them. And afterwards I got a standing ovation and I literally went back to my desk and I had tears. Like I was like trying to hide it, but I was like so nervous. And my— that was in 2017. And in 2018 was my very first stage gig. In front of 350 people. So it doesn't take a lot of time to do this, guys. I hired a coach in 2016 who made me do a Facebook Live every day, and I hated her for it, but I'm so grateful now because I can do Facebook Lives, I can do video, I can do a podcast interview all day long. And you just have to challenge yourself and set, set a goal and do it.

But I think this is a powerful, just a powerful lesson. You look at someone like Jeff, who's up at the Traffic Conversion Summit, up at these places speaking and you think, well, he's special, he's got all of these, you know, he's got all this training and he's so charismatic. Well, I mean, there was a time where he was that shy guy that just wouldn't even want to do a Facebook Live. So I really appreciate you sharing this as an example, because I know people are at that place where they're like, yeah, you can do it because, you know, you're charismatic.

But this is definitely not the topic that I usually go into because Most people want to hear about, wow, Jeff, you're, you're doing so amazing things. Tell me about this and that. But I, because I know that your audience are agency owners and they're probably ready to step into the spotlight. Um, at least they see the value in stepping in the spotlight so that they can outshine, you know, cause let's be, let's be straight guys. Like, and we'll be, we'll be completely honest here. It seems like the SEO market right now has just become so flooded. And now that we've got Fiverr, it used to be you had to compete with another company. Now you've got to compete with Fiverr and Upwork and all these other freelance websites that these people in India for $5 and they're going to promise the world to these clients. But let me tell you something, guys. The one amazing, great thing here is that everybody, every business owner has been screwed over by that guy, by some SEO guy who promised them the world that didn't do it and were just another name or another company. And this is a really great opportunity for you to invest in yourself. And by the way, build stories with your clients. I noticed something right away, Josh, and I want to, I want to congratulate you because this is great. And, and I love this because you talk about this in your book as well. But at the bottom of your website, you had a 3x3 of testimonials. You had 9. Testimonials on your website. These are real stories from real people that have gotten results from you. They could call them up right now and be like, hey, um, yeah, I saw on Josh's website, you know, Joshua Nelson's website, that, you know, you, you did— he did SEO with you, like, how's it going? Like, they could call any one of those people and do it. So I would, I would always say, like, that human aspect of what you're doing in developing your own confidence— when other people put faith and confidence in you Guess what? It makes you perform. Like, I know when I'm helping my clients do get results, like, I'm just that much more confident to stand there and say, yeah, just like you asked me on the call when I first came in, like, hey, what are some of the people that you work with? And you can call those people up and you can see their testimonials on my website and whatever else, right?

Yeah, no, no doubt. I think that it's not, it's not where you expect these types of interviews to go, but it's a powerful insight and probably something that that, you know, these people, you know, you guys needed to hear today. So I'm glad we, I'm glad we went down that path.

You know what the bottom line is, Josh? We live in the show-me economy. We do. People talk about the gig economy. People are tired of the gig economy already. People are so tired of it because they don't want to have an SEO agency that comes in, takes their money, does, you know, promises the world, doesn't do anything and leave. No, they want someone who And this is what I was telling you before the podcast is that some of the clients I'm working with now, I'm actually doing equity in their company. I'm coming up with commission-based results where I'm like, hey, look, I want to be a long-term partner for your company and let's do some incentives on my side. So I'm keeping driving the revenue to you. And that has been a huge game changer for me and a huge game changer for my clients because now they know that I'm vested, I'm invested in their company. That I care about the results that they get. And the moment that people feel like you give a rat's ass, that you actually care about the results that they get and they start getting results, those are gonna be clients for life.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. And I love what you're doing there. So you talk a little bit about what you do as an agency. You know, you talked about the VA staffer thing, you talked about helping, you know, with influencers. Can you give us the high-level overview of what, what it is that your agency does?

Yeah. So VA Staffer is the virtual assistant company. It's a staffing company basically that helps business owners find, you know, affordable virtual help. And it's kind of an already trained up team. So our team, I have a project management team. We have, we have, like I said, 50+ people that, that do everything from, you know, web design, graphic design, SEO to, just simple basic, hey, help me with my email management and calendar management and doing lead gen. Oh man, you know what? That's still probably one of the biggest things that we do right now is like find opportunities for people. So like scraping data from online, building out databases of email addresses and names and stuff like that so that they can do, you know, calls or whatever. So that's one side of the business. I really have two businesses. The other one—

And that was when you were coined as the king of outsourcing.

Yeah, yeah, I was, I was called that a few times on podcasts and it kind of stuck. Um, and yeah, it's, it's been fun, you know, and I've kind of— in, that's a very, very easy niche for me to dominate because most of the personalities in there, um, I've already, you know, got relationships with. Like, like, uh, like Davin Michaels, um, from 123Employee. He's a friend of mine, mentor. We both are mentors for each other. He's got one of the biggest operations out there. Um, Chris Ducker, um, outsourcetothephilippines.com. I mean, I was in his mastermind. I was one of the very first people to sign up. Me and him, you know, we spoke. And, and, and so I think that that community is, uh, especially outsourcing to the Philippines community, um, I kind of just gained a reputation in there because not a whole lot of people were, were, were like proud about it. Like there was a stigma about outsourcing to the Philippines for a long time. And now people are finally catching on that, like, I don't hire people because I'm exploiting, you know, cheap labor from a different country. I hire them because they're loyal. I've been to the Philippines 15 times. I've invested there. Most of the people on my team, if not all of them, make more money than anyone has in their entire family generationally, just like me. And, um, that is such an incredible thing. And I think for me, we've come to a point to where I don't care where someone lives when it comes to talent. I hire for talent and I hire for trainability, right? And there's a lot of things that I do that I can't really outsource to the Philippines. Like, there's copywriting, right? Like, I really need a strong voice. You and I were just talking before the call about one of my team members, Alex, who— his job is to really find valuable segments. So for example, you're going to send me a bunch of video clips of you speaking on stage and doing podcast interviews like this. And Alex is the guy who goes through and he finds the value bombs. It's hard for me to assign a virtual assistant in the Philippines to do that because they don't know what a good value bomb clip is if they watch the stuff, because to them it's just another— it's just another video, another podcast. They don't, you know, like you have to have people that are culturally a great fit in your company. So that's the virtual assistant business. Cool. And then my other branding agency is Branded Media, and that's been really fun. That— so that's a new invention. And actually, Dennis Yu, who both of us know very well, Dennis Yu is, uh, he flew out to the Philippines in August of 2018. Uh, yeah, wow, I can't believe it's been over a year now. So almost 2 years. But in August of 2018, he flew out to my office in the Philippines in Makati City, and I had my team come over. He was going to train us on how to do some of the processes in his business. Cool. And when we did that, he said, Jeff, your team is so good. He's like, you, you know, I've worked with a lot of Philippine companies, and he's like, your, your team are really something else. He's like, you shouldn't even be an outsourcing company. You should really be a branding agency. Like, these guys are really good. And I was like, really? And he's like, yeah. And then the very next day I showed up to the office and I, I bought brandedmedia.io and he was like, perfect. So what I've done is I've kind of separated my company into two because there's, there's the outsourcing segment, which is support. And then there's the branding agency, which is basically the marketing arm.

Right.

So, so it's kind of split up into two things. The, the VA staffer business is about getting rid of the things that you don't want to do in your business. And then the branding agency is about the team that's doing stuff that you don't know how to do in your business. Right. So that's the dichotomy. And it's, it's been really fun. So Branded Media is focused on creating influencer content, on doing marketing, building funnels, um, you know, helping out with product launches and email marketing and stuff like that. And then the VA staffer side of the business is like support side, you know, doing chat support, email support, lead generation, you know, um, all the stuff that you would think a typical virtual assistant would do. And that, that has been the really fun driver for me and probably the recipe for success that I've had in exploding my business in the past 16 months has basically been from from having a very clear vision and focus for what I'm doing and being able to separate both of those focuses. Um, and actually this, here's a great, uh, I guess value bomb hopefully for your audience is that, and it's the same thing with SEO because this is what I love about marketing and this is why I separated the marketing company from the virtual assistant company. A lot of people look at a virtual assistant as a virtual, a virtual staff or team as an expense, right? Like, oh, I don't want to do this stuff. So I'm going to pay someone else to do it. It's an expense. The cool part about the marketing agency, like what all of us are building, right? And I'm finally building for myself is that I'm a revenue generating asset. If I'm turning on the gas, if I'm actually bringing revenue into your company, If I'm responsible for your sales, you're probably not going to turn me off. Yeah, right. You're probably going to keep that running. And I think that you and I can both agree one of the biggest struggles of agencies is keeping those retainers coming in, right?

Retaining the clients, getting them great results, and yeah, that rolling.

Yeah, it, it always boggles me because just in the past couple years of building my own agency, I realized if people just focused on keeping their existing clients they wouldn't have to keep chasing for new clients every month, right? Right. It wouldn't hurt so much. You wouldn't say, oh, we lost so-and-so and we lost so-and-so. Now we have to build the agency plus we have to build two more, had to find two more people to replace because we're losing two, you know, however many thousands of dollars a month retainers. Like, that is such a huge relief in your company when you have the process in place, you have the systems in place like you teach, when you have the team in place so that your clients are happy and they don't go anywhere, right? I only have basically a 4 or 5-year-old like agency per se, and the brand media side's only a year and a half old. But between the companies combined, my average lifetime, my lifespan of a client is 2.4 years. 2.4 years.

That's really high retention.

That's over 50% of my agency's lifespan.

Wow, that's really good. Yeah. So, all right, so we've got the VA staffer, we've got the branded media. I always tell people, right, you want to try and choose a niche, and I know that yours is not as, as kind of like we talk about, niche-specific. And I also say try and, try and put together a package where you can get consistent, uh, recurring revenue like you talked about. Can you talk a little bit about how you package this?

Um, absolutely.

Okay.

So I have two. So because I have two, and by the way, back to what you said about focus, I want to point out that I did, I actually focused, VA staffer was the focus and I built out the virtual assistant team. So Branded Media was after I had already built that out. I had already focused on it. It was already doing really, really well. And then I said, let's do the branding agency, right? And these are different assets. I didn't have like incredible graphic designers and stuff at VA Staffer. Like, these are new assets. I didn't have the copywriters at VA Staffer. The copywriters and stuff are, are, are the team that I built up at Branded Media since then, right? So it's really kind of a vertical, right? So here's the virtual assistant, and then I realized that most people that came to me for virtual assistant support is because they had really growing businesses and they had a lot of opportunities to help them with their email marketing, all these other things that we didn't offer Right. So I created Branded Media to solve that niche. But back to your original question about the packages on the VA staffer side, I have a very simple model. I have, for example, for virtual assistants, you have a person who's dedicated to you to work on your stuff, to do your email support tickets or whatever the heck you need done. You know, you're like one of the things that's really popular right now is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is huge, right? Because especially for SEO companies, because you guys are able to basically pinpoint exact types of businesses that you want in a very specific locale, and you're able to get business owners, CEOs, founders, whatever the titles are. You could actually search specifically for those people right away, which is amazing. Like, no, we've never had access like that before. Um, so we have a, we have 3 packages that are our main offer. One of them is for $400 a month, you get a whopping 10 hours a week of support, right? And this is pairing you up with one of our Philippine executive assistants to speak, that speak English. They're already, already trained. Um, and like I said, this is to get rid of a lot of the low-level tasks that you're doing in your business. Then we have, we just have 3 main packages there, which is part, you know, which is our 10-hour, 20-hour, 40-hour a week person, from $400 to $1,300 a month, right? Very simple, easy, very easy model, very easy to scale. Um, love it.

So very clear monthly recurring revenue. As long as these guys are doing their job, you, you know, you land new clients and that continues to snowball.

Exactly. And for me, most of my time is spent on the project management team. So my team, I don't really work with all the 60 staff. My focus is on the 6 people that are the project management team, and then they're working with everyone else. And that, and, you know, I'm at the point now to where they hire, they fire, they do offers. They, we kind of have a set guideline on what the, you know, from as far as how much the starting salary is and stuff like that is on the team to where they can make decisions. I don't even have to approve them. They just know if it fits within the guidelines, they can hire and fire however they want. And that's such a great freedom principle, man.

That's true leaders instead of workers, right? You got a leadership team that can make decisions.

I think that was the, that was the trick, you know, of all the things that have helped me really scale, um, getting a project management team, leadership team that that really understands the business and can make those types of decisions without me, man, that's a lifesaver.

No doubt.

Um, so, so that's, that's the VA staffer company. Um, and then the branded media, now that one we have a bunch of little packages or big, big or little packages. Like we have a social media package where we, we do, you know, a post a day or 2 posts a day. So depending on how much content there is We have a video editing type package. We have kind of a combination of both where we do like, because a lot of our clients are personal brands, so we have like a personal brand type kit where we help them build out what we call an omnipresent brand guide. So we put together all their assets. Actually, here we go. I am gonna show you guys, wait, our omnipresent visuals. Yeah, well, I think it's— I'm a visual guy myself. But you'll probably recognize that stage. That's me at the Digital Marketers headquarters. Yeah. And it's funny because after I had given this talk there, I said, hey, while I'm here, I threw up my PowerPoint slide and I got a picture with this in the background. Yeah, baby. Yeah, you got to. So I literally— actually, I went on stage and I recorded my whole pitch for the product.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. Shout out, thanks to Justin and the DM team. But this is what we call the Omnipresent Brand Guide, and this is how we try to lay out all our— now I hope that this will really help because this sells a lot. This is probably one of our most, our highest selling products.

I'm excited to hear this because one of the key concepts I teach in our program is you want to develop omnipresence in your niche, right? So if you look at your targeting roofing companies, and you want roofing companies that are a million dollars or more to come to you, like, you want to become omnipresent in their world, in their social feed, in their email box, in their mailbox, at their association events. And so I'm really excited to hear about this, that you call it the Omnipresent Brand Guide, which is exactly what I call it in my, in my, my trainings.

Get out! So yeah, so omnipresent, and a lot of people are, uh, they get it wrong because they think that omnipresence means you have to be everywhere. It doesn't mean you have to be everywhere. It just means that you need to be where your audience lives, right? Like, for example, for me, like, I'm not— like, if, if you're an SEO agency, you're probably not going to live on, you know, some of these platforms like TikTok or whatever. Like, it's probably not a big focus for you. But if you're on LinkedIn, that makes a lot of sense. If you're on Facebook, and of course Google, you would hope that an SEO agency would be able to rank for SEO terms. Yes. Just saying. But on the Omnipresent Brand Guide, so what we do here, there's a little video pitch that shows up and then we talk about, you'll see a breakdown real quickly of here's the different elements that are gonna be given to you on this brand guide. I even give screenshots of what the brand guides look like. And then I take it to the next level and this is where people mess up. Most people don't make a decision to buy because A, they don't feel that the value is there, or B, they're confused with the process. And so what I do is I put the process in place so simple. Here's number one is we, we do a branding questionnaire to fill out, then we receive your elements, and then we create a color palette, then we do a font picker, then we work on your logo, then we do revisions, and then we give you a final brand guide. And I'll give you And by the way, here's the first look. I haven't even showed this to my audience yet. This is my brand guide for Jeff J. Hunter that I just released. And actually, yeah, here we go. Let me zoom out. So this is my own brand guidelines. So look, hey guys, if you're an SEO agency, if you're a branding agency, whatever you are, it's kind of important that you do for yourself what you say you're going to do for other people, right? I mean, that alone is going to set you so much further because like I said, we live in the show-me economy where a lot of people are having a hard time showing results. So here's my brand guidelines. We call it the Omnipresent Brand Guide. Here's this— we— I started out with a manifesto, and instead of, you know, hey, here's what I do and who I serve and whatever like everyone else, I put a manifesto. I'm not afraid to disagree. I'm not afraid to be different. I'm not afraid to take a stand. I'm not afraid to be real. That's me. That's my brand, right? Down to our logos and the types of typography that's gonna be on the logo, down to how it looks on different formats and what our favicons look like and how not to use the icon.

Don't do that, right?

Right, yeah. Here's what not to do. And then here's, Here's the cross-platform font. Now, isn't it annoying when you see a brand and like they show up on Instagram way different than Facebook, way different than on LinkedIn, way different on whatever, even their videos, and I'll show you in a minute. But if you see the typography, this is, I'm always using the same fonts on everything we do from guides to download files, to websites, to whatever it is. Here's our color scheme and tints and shades and our secondary colors, our pop colors, we call them.

There's a lot more detail to it than you'd think, huh?

Unreal. Yeah, and even our cover photo banners, here's what they look like. I have, like, I literally, you're seeing this before I've even done it on my own social media profiles. Very cool. Like, this is, this is like fresh. This is fresh, freshly done. And then here's our social media post templates. And what's cool is we give this to our clients when they're done with this brand guide, we give them an AI file, a Photoshop file, and then we create separate Canva files for all these assets. So even the most—

So super easy to go in and modify.

Yeah, so even the most ignorant non-design person can click the words and just change the words.

I love it. And Canva is so easy to edit.

It's like you can tell anybody anywhere, If you can't use Canva, you should just not have a computer. You can even do that on the phone now, right? Um, and even down to this, this is something that people don't do, and I know that this excites you because this is what we started working on together for your own personal brand, Josh. But video, like, video is such a great way to build the brand of your company, and so many people don't do video still today. It's amazing. I just got off a phone call with Sean Cannell last night. He's the number one YouTube marketer in the world. Um, he's incredible guy. He's actually speaking at Traffic and Conversion Summit coming up. Um, and he and I are working together on some stuff and he told me that there's basically, I'm not going to tell everybody right now because I don't want someone to beat me to the punch, but there's a specific niche that I'm in that is free and clear on YouTube. And literally Dan Lok is considered the number one guy on YouTube for. And we both know, I mean, don't get me wrong, I like Dan Lok, but he's not the guy, right? So, um, having a video presence and that really stands out and shows people, uh, that's recognizable for your brand, um, it's really important. Even down to marketing materials, what your business card looks like, and the website mock-up. And even I have my team do custom iconography. So these are hand-drawn icons.

That's pretty sweet.

Yeah, so that's, that's a brand guide. But a lot of people, they have a brand guide, they don't do anything with it. Here's the trick, guys. You actually have to do something with it. So here, here's my new website that I haven't even announced yet to the world, um, because I, uh, literally am still working on it. But my team's already built the website, so I can, I can look at my, like, my travel expert page. I can, you know, here's an interview of me on, on TV and you know, a couple of things that I've done and my media page, same thing, you know, you know, if guys, if you want to have media opportunities, if you want to speak on stage, have a bunch of questions, make their job easy. Just go out and think about some common questions that you get, like, why is a personal brand important? There you go. Is a remote workforce productive without being in an office? and I already have pre-planned answers and how long it takes. 90 seconds, 90 seconds, 90 seconds. That's pretty ninja.

That's pretty ninja. I like that.

So think about that. Um, and then, you know, you have your recent appearances. Uh, you know this guy, right?

Yeah.

Uh, Jason Swank. And, um, I was on the ClickFunnels podcast and, um, ex— here's my expertise areas so that peo— people can see right away, um, where, where I'm at and different things that I've, I've been featured on. So When it comes to building a personal brand, when it comes to actually showing up, you just have to stay consistent, like you said, omnipresent. So I love it.

This is, this is super cool. So this is a package that you offer to anybody that needs it, wants it.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, this is one of the core products that we do for Branded Media is because before you do a website, before you do a handout, before you do anything in your business, you've got to have You've got to have clear guidelines, and I'll show you. Here's a perfect example. Here's my team using the brand guide to create a new document that is basically the top 19 podcasts for entrepreneurs. So I had my team go out and compile a list of the top podcasts. You'll notice the branding looks the same. See this? Same branding, looks the same.

Same font, same color scheme.

It's the fonts are the same, the color scheme's the same. Uh, even down to the very last page, which hopefully Google will let load up. There you go. There's a bonus, right? I launched my own podcast. Here's why you should subscribe to my podcast and get access now. Boom. It all looks the same. And even for my Savage Marketer, uh, savage-marketer.com, uh, Savage Marketer Podcast, which is what I literally just launched a month ago. You'll notice that the branding looks very similar. See it?

Yeah.

So you've got this, even my download, oh, even to print media. Check this out. So here's a free guide that people get just for signing up for my podcast.

Okay.

And it's completely branded. It looks just like the brand guide, right? So everything that we do is very branded because the goal, guys, is so that every time somebody sees your stuff, they already know it's you, right? And that's the thing. If you look at all the successful brands, all the successful brands, you can recognize them easily. You don't even have to see the word Google. You can— it could literally just be almost any word, but if they're in those different colored letters, just like in the same colors as Google, you're gonna think it's Google. Yep, right. So, so that's the trick, guys, is to, is to really be intentional with your brand.

I love it. I don't know, can you speak to like what the investment level is for some of these things that you do, or is that a private one-on-one with, with people?

This is this— so our brand guide is probably the— well, I, I, unless somebody can show something more bigger and better and like more involved than this. I haven't seen it yet. So this brand guide is because I do a lot of social media campaigns for my clients. And I always ask them, the very first question is, can you send me a brand guide?

And they're like, I got a logo.

90% of them don't have one. Yeah. The 10% that do have one, it's all over the place.

One version, there's different fonts, there's different spacing from, and you're like, you need some kind of like baseline here, guys.

Or even the elements. Like one time I asked somebody for a brand guide. This is, by the way, No joke, she spent $5,000 for this. All she had was a picture of herself. This is for a personal brand, a picture for herself, a logo for herself, and a look like a Pinterest board. They call a mood board of like what her brand represents. And I was like, you don't have anything to use, right? I'm like, how am I supposed to, you know, how, what do you, what are you going to look like on social media? You know, like So, and then I had another person who spent $30,000, $30,000 for a big design branding agency to come up with something. And it was like a 5-page, here's what you look like, here's the COVID photo and stuff. And so I kept getting all these different mixed messages from people. And then I got somebody who, here's, here's some like print media stuff and a business card and, and this and that. So what I did was this 20— it depends on what you need, but it's usually 17 to 20 page brand guide that we do. Um, let me, let me look at mine just, just for accuracy. So I just want to make sure. So mine is— so that brand guide that had all that stuff, that was 17 pages, right? From the manifesto to the, to the logo and the colors to, um, the social media assets, website mock-up, uh, video frames, things like that. So they, they can average anywhere from, let's say, 15 to 20 pages depending on what you, what you need done. All of these assets and elements were because all these other people that came to me, the brand guides, I just got frustrated because my team got frustrated trying to create elements for them and going back to the client. The client's like, oh, I don't know if that really captures my brand. And I'm like, we're just going to do everything. Let's put together the brand guide and show them what the elements are going to look like on Facebook and YouTube and what the videos are going to look like and what the quote images are going to look like. And here's a, here's a great example of that. So here's Ryan Levesque, which we talked about earlier. Oh, I'm not sharing my screen. Thank you. Can you see my screen now?

Yep.

So for Ryan Levesque, we did all this content for him. So we had all these videos and all these images of him. and we basically took and created all of these quote images based on his brand, the Ask Method. Yeah, right. So, so we were able to take screenshots from his videos and we superimposed, you know, his quotes with the videos and images and even the video frames. Like we can see here's, here's a video of him, um, walking around.

I have the text underneath and the static image at the top, right?

Right. And that way, very catchy. Like, if you see this brand, you know right away, okay, this is the ASK Method, this is Ryan Levesque. It's very consistent, right? The brand is very consistent. The only other time you'll see something that's not consistent is another brand, like his Choose book. We did this video for him for the launch of his new book Choose, which was awesome. We got to, to do that, and he was number one, uh, his book was, uh, the New York Public Library's Book of the Month.

Wow.

That month when we launched, it was a really fun project to work on. But this is an example of an influencer brand, right, who takes their brand seriously, right? So the very first step that we do with our clients is we say, how are you going to show up intentionally across platforms? So we, so we've seen people with the $500, like, 99 design type logo type brand guide all the way up to like the $30,000 used a giant design agency. And we took all the elements that we like from these other brand guides and we put them together and then we added on stuff that no one has video template frames.

No one has—

I've never seen on a brand guide a video template for social media.

And I don't think I have either. Yeah.

Yeah. So we really wanted something that would truly transcend all mediums. And now we, now we've seen that on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn and even Instagram now is that natively they're going towards 3:4 content, a little bit taller than it is wide, a little bit taller than wide. People are going more mobile-friendly now, not full-on 9:16 portrait, On LinkedIn, it seems to be that 3:4, on Facebook, 3:4 is still the dominant, the video format. So now we're even adding, we're going back to our brand guides and we're retro, we're basically retroactively or proactively going out and updating our client brand guides for them for free with the new, with the new standards.

Nice.

So, so these price point, we have a very good price point, $3,000 to do this.

To do that whole grand brand guideline that you just explained there?

Yep. $3,000. Yep.

And that's really good.

Most now, most of our clients are marketing agencies. So that pricing we've, we've put very specifically because we want our agency clients to be able to charge more. And I know it's worth more than that. Right.

Um, I always recommend that to do that kind of thing is like $10K, right?

Or do you know?

Yeah.

I, I, I, I recommend to my clients that they charge $7,500 to $10K for that. Yeah. So the profit margins are like literally 2, 3 times, right?

That's really nice. Yeah, that's really good.

Yeah. So, um, I— so my target market are marketing agencies. So those of you that are out there, hi. You want to—

you want a brand guide for yourself and you want to be able to do brand guides for your clients? This is, uh, this is—

imagine how good you would look If you're doing social media content for your client and you— and this was a bundle. I don't know what you charge your clients for, but if you offered them an upsell to do a brand guide and I can, by the way, one of the things that we can do is we can actually work. I'll even give you a discount on that price to do your own brand guide that you can use as an example for your own agency to show your clients, right? So that's for— if you guys reach out to me and say that you're from Joshua Nelson, I'll knock $500 off of that brand guide just for your own self, not for your clients. I'm charging you $3,000 for your clients, but for yourself, we're going to knock off $500 off just so you can get your own brand guide developed and then prove and show that off to your clients as a sales tool, because that's an investment I can see that's very worthwhile and valuable to me to be able to give you a tool to sell more of my stuff.

Yeah, I think, I mean, I didn't even think about this as something we were going to discuss on the, on the call, but I think this is really a no-brainer, um, you know, even for us, right? It doesn't make sense for us to develop a branding. We've been thinking about developing a branding department because they, a lot of our clients have a bad logo. If they've got a bad logo, their website looks like crap, right? And nothing we do for them works as well as it could. But to go out and hire designers that are going to, you know, go back and forth with the client to fix the logo If we could just say, hey, look, you know, even if it was $5,000, we're going to make a little bit of a margin, but we're able to add a value to our client. This is a, this is a great—

it's $2,000 to your bottom line, and you don't have to hire people, and you don't have to do any of the work. All you need to do is set— and by the way, our process is once you sign up with us, it sends a questionnaire form that I recommend you just print out Or if it's virtual, you can go on a Zoom call and literally take the questions right then and there, and you fill out our form. It's automated. We use Keep Infusionsoft, right? Yeah, it's just, it's just one of those automated forms. So it's like, hey, what, you know, who are your competitors? What are some of your favorite colors or brand colors? You know, what do you represent? A lot of times what people pick as colors and what they're— what they want their brand to represent don't align. So I will usually speak to the agency and prepare you. For example, if you were going back to a client, because obviously I have an in-house design team, and this is another cool part of not, you don't, this isn't like going on Fiverr, Upwork, or using the gig economy that I complained about earlier.

You gotta randomly figure out every little element that you need.

Well, the other thing is once you pay, it's a done deal, right? Like they know that you've paid and they're just rushing to get it done. Once it's done, they move on to the next project. For me, like I just said earlier, like, I'm always constantly improving and doing more to add as much value as I can, retroactive— retroactively going back and fixing brand guides with new updated elements and things like that, whatever changes. Like, you know, we care. We have what we call a brand guide tracker. We've done over 50 brand guides just in the past 12 months. 50. Okay, I have one of the best I know this is gonna sound braggadocious, but I know, I mean, I've shown you just from our own brand guide, like I have probably one of the best design teams right now in the agency world. That's one of the things that's really propelled us, I think, is that I have a really reliable graphic design team. That's the thing, reliable, right? Repeatable, consistent results, not just like, hey, did a great job on this one, didn't do a great job. I can send you links to 20, 30 brand guides we've done. Just in the past 6 or 7 months that will blow most people away, right? So that's—

this is awesome, man. I, I love that. I mean, even if you don't connect with, with Jeff, which you should to do this, just the thought process about like what could a brand guide look like, knowing that as agencies your clients are going to need it, um, and either figure out a way to, you know, build your own infrastructure to do it or shortcut the process and work with someone like Jeff. I think this was an awesome conversation Either way, either way you run with this.

Yeah, and I think the— and like for me, my— like I told you before the call, I don't like to do sales. I'm not a sales guy. I don't like it. So, I would much rather work with marketing agencies that are already in front of their clients and just white label our stuff, you know, and just— and work with us directly. That way, you know, if I know most SEO agencies have, you know, 10, 20, 30 clients, Like, if I'm working for that agency, I'm magically getting 20, 30 clients worth of work now, right? So it— so that's why I keep my prices so low, not only because a lot of my team's in the Philippines, um, but also because I keep the prices low so that you guys can make margins on it, you know, so you guys can actually be profitable and, and, and have to outweigh, like, how much would it cost for me to have a full-time graphic designer on my team? Well, I can tell you one thing it's not $3,000. Yeah, I know. Yeah, yeah.

So a good one, yeah, you might find a graphic designer, but a good graphic designer that can produce real quality work, uh, world-class quality.

And, and everything, and everything that we do, um, is— I focus because, like I said, I have a project management background. So a lot of the stuff for me, uh, that's really important for me is— so I, I showed you a personal brand right? I showed you a personal brand, but if I showed you, um, uh, even like PowerPoint slides, right? Like, how many times have you gone into a presentation and just not had a consistent brand?

Yeah.

And, uh, here, here's an example. I did a—

show your screen again.

Okay, so for example, here is a— this is for my Branded Media, my branding agency. So this is for the biggest soccer team, you know, fútbol, in North America. It's Chivas de Guadalajara, and we put together a report for them to do the social media for the American presence because 20% of their audience is American. They'd like to expand that out because Americans have more money, right? So even down to who we are and my team members that are working on the project and our bilingual advantage to the team members leading this are actually Spanish speakers natively in our workforce and the clients that we work for. You can see like Cox Communications and the Ask Method and Ford and Lincoln. So like all the people that we worked for in the past, we throw that together to build that trust, right? The brand trust. And then we go over the process. In the first step, we do the design phase. We do concept ideation, this and that. And we go into the development phase And let me tell you, when I throw this out there and do these types of presentations, like they get completely mind blown. They've never seen a pitch like this. Like I come to a meeting prepared with a proposal and then I show them this pitch deck and they're just like blown away because no one puts the effort into it.

Very clean, very professional, very consistent branding throughout.

Exactly. And just imagine, like, if you want people to take you seriously, your brand seriously, then you have to take your own brand seriously, right? Um, and so that's— that has been the biggest driver for my revenue. Um, and I would say, and it's crazy because I started this, this company, Branded Media, only a year and a half ago, and it's already about 40% of the revenue between both of the companies.

Why?

And it took—

because it's this brand guide that you do for influencers and then agencies, and then you've got all of the follow-on services to help them. Yeah.

Ah, there's the, there's the hidden magic. Josh already gets it. We do the brand guide and then they're like, okay, great, now we have the brand, we have the video templates, we've got the quote image templates, we have all these things. Now that's when I come in there and I say, hey, look, How about if we take all your videos that you've got right now, or we, or whatever, and now we can create all these social media assets and videos and things from that. And that's where my retainer model comes in. So I have really, really competitive pricing on that. So like we do 10 videos and 10 quote images for $1,000 a month. I already told you about that earlier. Um, and then of course you're going to get the level of quality that you see on these brand guides. They're, that's what they're going to get. Like they're going to get really high quality videos that already come captioned. Like I showed you, uh, Ryan Levesque's ASK Method Instagram earlier, really high quality value bomb style Gary Vaynerchuk videos with progress bars going across and captions and big bold headlines. We do all the work. We have a content team that comes up with the titles that finds out the best content use. So all, for example, if you have a podcast, which by the way, if you have an SEO agency and you don't have a podcast, you are slacking. Yes.

I show all, I show all of our people, look, you gotta do podcasts. You gotta create case studies. Like those are two no-brainers every month. You should be rolling this stuff out.

The podcast is a no-brainer because no one likes to create content anyway. You're gonna send me this recording. This is already so much content that I don't have to do. Like this is an hour and okay, 30 minutes now, right?

We're going long, which is great.

Okay. Well, I'm missing my project management call. This is already 30 minutes long right now. But, um, I'll pop in there and I'll save grace with them. But the point is, is that this type of content right here, this is the type of stuff people love to hear. They love to hear the business of the business. When they hear me talking business like this and like, oh wow, Jeff, he's really got his stuff together. He's, you know, he's, he's working with these clients. He's doing these things. He's on an interview, like super honored to be on here with Joshua Nelson, who's teaching people how to grow agencies and for me to know that I'm an expert that's being called on your show to help your people. I mean, what does that show, right? And you know what, the podcast has given me so much access. Like, I get to speak with the coolest people because they see my audience and they see my brand and they immediately see the value in coming on my show, right? Like, here's a perfect example. This is a great place to leave, Josh, and I think I can't believe you and I could talk for hours.

We probably could, right? Why don't you tell a couple people in comments are asking, this sounds really good, I want the— I want that. How would they get in touch with you?

Oh guys, um, you can just go to, um, so that's not available to the— I, I don't have like a public link you can go get. I'll send that to you. Um, where, where are people at on Facebook?

Like right now I'm seeing you in the Facebook, uh, On my Facebook page.

So here's what I'll do is, um, are they— do you want to add me? You can either add me on Facebook or, or, um, for right now, because, because I'm a white labeler, I don't put all the public pricing because I don't want— I don't want your clients to go find out that it cost you 3 grand, right? I'm an ethical marketer even though I'm a savage. I'm an ethical marketer. Okay, um, so that's what I mean.

The best would be to personal message you on, on Facebook.

Yeah, personal message, or afterwards I can give you a link, and then, uh, however they want to reach out to you, or, uh, we'll figure it out. Or maybe you're in a Facebook group or something, I don't know, um, we'll figure that out. But, but connect to me, and, and Josh, anyone who, who needs that information, I'll send you a link, you can just send it to them either way. My Facebook friends list is full. I, I I'm not saying that to be like, wow, look at this guy. Like, I have, I have like thousands of pending Facebook requests.

You're capped at the 5,000. You have to be selective with who you can—

Yeah, but, but not LinkedIn. I'm fully clear on LinkedIn. So just Jeff J. Hunter on LinkedIn, guys. Connect with me. Just say that you saw me on Joshua Nelson's podcast. I'll send you a link and I'll— I have to make a coupon code. I will honor that. I'll make a coupon code for $500 off. Matter of fact, I'll do that right after this. But with that said, I want to leave with something really cool. Awesome. And I want to show you why you guys should be on LinkedIn. Is that, is that fair? Is that a good place to end, Josh?

Yeah, I think that's great.

Okay, so I want to show you now. I just woke up. I'm on the West Coast. I haven't checked any messages yet or anything like that. So I'm going to just look at, uh, probably a bunch of comments on my content. So I posted something yesterday. There we go. 33 other people commented on my post. How about that? That's a lot since I was asleep. Um, and guess what it is? It's this. This is how I get 100% acceptance rates on my LinkedIn connection requests. I probably shouldn't give this strategy away. Notice how I give them a curiosity hook. Now they're hooked. They're like, what? 100% connection requests. But here you go. This is exactly what I do to get 100% acceptance rate on my LinkedIn connections. I'm going to turn my volume up. Hopefully people are going to be able to hear this when I play it. I think so. But before I look at the comments, I'm going to show you. But it says, don't do what everyone else does. P.S. Don't copy this to send messages to Grant Cardone's guests. I've already done it. Okay, so this is my strategy and this is actually from the Digital Agency Expo that I spoke at right before Gary Vaynerchuk. Sweet. Let me, let me turn my volume up. Hopefully you'll let me know if you can hear this. Okay. Yeah, I'm gonna share with you guys a savage marketing strategy. Can you hear that? I hear it.

It's a little faint, but we can hear it.

Okay, let me turn it up a little bit more. There we go. Yeah, I'm gonna share with you guys a savage marketing strategy. You guys ready for something savage? Yeah. Okay. Who knows about Grant Cardone? Anybody? Do you guys know about a show called Ask the Pro? Yeah. You heard of it? It's his, it's his show that you pay. I'm not going to say how much, you know, but let's just say it's a pretty penny to come out to Miami, sit in his office, and he asks you questions about what you do and make you look good. Sounds cool, right? Now let me ask you a question. If people are willing to pay thousands of dollars to do that, do you think that these people care about their personal brands? Absolutely. So guess what? I'm going to give you my own strategy that I do. And by the way, careful, because I'm doing it. Don't use the same thing that I say right now. I say, hey, just saw your show on Grant Cardone's thing. Was really awesome. I love when you talked about fill in the fricking blank. I hit the connect button. You better believe I got 100% acceptance rate on that. People are like, wow, he actually is. He's not trying to sell me something like the 99.9% of people that try to connect to me on LinkedIn that say, hey Jeff, really cool. I could get you really good results for my marketing agency. Please accept my friend request. No thanks. Right? You've all seen it. Who here gets a LinkedIn message every day from somebody who's going to revolutionize their life? That's right, every freaking day. So don't do what everyone else does. Right? So right there is literally exactly— that's the branding. You notice the branding is consistent, right? And this is the exact type of value bomb stuff. Like, I didn't even know that my team made this video. They just do this. They just do this automatically. And you probably have hundreds and hundreds of those value bombs put out through all your videos. And but look, but that I wanted to show you that clip, not because I'm bragging about how awesome I am as a talker, because I'm not. What I am going to brag about is how valuable these comment sections are. OK, this is, this is what you guys are missing out on on LinkedIn. In the, in the past couple of years, I've been able to grow an audience of 7,000 followers now. On LinkedIn, which actually is not even really that great. And this is what's cool about having a strong personal brand. We've come to a point today to where you don't have to have 100,000 or a million followers. All you need is just a couple thousand of people that really believe in you, that will buy your stuff, that will become your brand ambassadors. And they will— it's incredible when you, when you read some of these comments. So Here's a guy just an hour ago. Yeah, here's the hater. Guaranteed there are zero people in this world, this person included, with 100% of invites accepted. That's a hater. I didn't even get to screen this.

Now, like, that's not what I was looking for.

Yeah, then here's Lane Anderson, who, by the way, wasn't my friend yesterday. I just found out yesterday. He says, I remember you saying this. That's me. In the center of the video with the hat on backwards. He's actually someone who's in the video. Recognize that video?

Yeah.

Yeah. And then let me turn my volume back down. And then also volume is super high over here now. But look at, look at some of these comments in the section like this guy right here. He says, oh boy, now we have a new breed of spammers in LinkedIn. Hey, I just saw your response to Jeff on a show. That was awesome. He's obviously being funny. Yeah, right. And then people saying the videos look good. Here's Daniel Doan, who's like a world-famous copywriter, um, who said, savage guy, savage brand, savage advice. Um, you know, like, these are all messages I haven't even responded to yet. People are tagging other people in the comments section.

Amazing comments on a, on a video that was just basically chopped up from one of your presentations and thrown on LinkedIn.

I posted it 16 hours ago, so probably, you know, right after dinner last night. You know, right before going to bed and I woke up and, and it's already, you know, starting to, starting to take off. It's got, you know, almost 1,000 views and 42 engagements, 34 comments. Like this is the, this is the type of stuff. And of course, this is the whole omnipresence that I'm bragging about that I'm, that I'm saying you guys have to focus on. Check this out. Guess how good that video did on my Facebook page on my Facebook profile. There it is again, right? 9 comments, a bunch of likes, um, people bringing it up. And, and, you know, like, you know some of these people, like Vinnie Fisher. I know you know Vinnie. Um, but this is, this is what the, the value of having a consistent brand is too. Even for my podcast, I have people do these little teaser videos for podcasts that are coming up. Um, there's just so many different ways to use your brand in a consistent way. So that people are actually, you know, engaging with your stuff. They think that you're— that they— it's that know, like, and trust factor, right? So that's, that's the important thing.

I think that that really takes the whole, the whole interview we did today and sums it all up, right? Grown a 7-figure digital marketing agency and growing, um, you know, put systems in place to be able to get it done without having to do it yourself by having this virtual team, and then really focusing on the branding so so that you can develop omnipresence. And very specific examples of the types of posts and, you know, that you're grabbing stuff from videos that you've already done in the past, coming up with a curiosity hook, which is something we didn't even talk about today, but you're world-class at, and creating social content that's extremely, you know, viral and engaging.

Exactly. So, you know, truth be told, I'm excited for any of you guys who want to get into your personal brand. And, you know, for me, It's a perfect kind of an entryway product for me because I know that people that are going to build and they're interested in building a really good omnipresent brand, these are people that also probably want to have an omnipresent presence, right? So, you know, that's a segue into us being able to help you with your content, things like that. Of course, I'll take, I'll take you on for a brand guide, you know, and you can sell it and brag, brag about how awesome you look. And, you know, we, we don't put any of our own branding on it. You know, like we don't stamp it with our, hey, this is created by branded media or whatever, like, this is yours, you know. This is something that we, we really try to over-deliver on because this is kind of our gateway drug, right? Once you, once you understand how valuable building your own brand is for your business and yourself, your personal brand, the sky's the limit. I mean, look what you've been able to accomplish. Look what I've been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time, all because I've been able to leverage my personal brand.

Yeah, powerful. So how does someone get more information about you? Is it just best to go to jeffjhunter.com?

Yeah, jeffjhunter.com, guys, or you can hit me up on LinkedIn. Um, I actually, I actually see that I do have— I have 4,976 friends on Facebook, so my, my Super Bowl halftime post must have, uh, got a lot of—

you made some people mad.

I, I'm very calm. Guys, if you can't handle a little bit of polarization, especially politically, like I call everybody out on every side. I call Trump out. I call Bernie out. If you can't handle— like even for me, like I called out J.Lo and Shakira at the halftime show. And I wrote this amazing story about how this one time we went over to my— we were invited over to dinner. This is a true story. This is a great place to end. Went over to my neighbor's house. He's an elderly guy and he invited my family over to dinner. At the time, my son was 3 years old. And, you know, kids at 3 years old have no filter, right? Like, whatever's on their mind, they say it, right? So, we walked into our neighbor's house and he has 2 wiener dogs. And as soon as you walked in, you could smell some stench. I mean, it was stanky. Like this guy, there was dog pee all over the floor. He probably just freshly picked up the poop so we couldn't step on it. And it just smelled so bad. And I remember walking in, I was so afraid that my son was going to offend our neighbor. And he looked at me and he was like— and I was like, I leaned in and I said, I know what you're going to say. It smells really bad, right? And he goes, yeah, Dad, smells really bad. And I said, just hang in there. We're going to leave soon. And we go over to the kitchen. Thankfully, it didn't smell as bad in the kitchen. And we ate, and then we came out, and then right before we were— maybe half hour later, we were about to leave, and I said— I leaned in, I said, "You did so good. Thank you so much." And then he was playing with the wiener dogs, and he goes, "What are you talking about, Dad?" And I said, "The smell. It smelled really bad. I'm so proud of you." And he goes, "I don't smell anything. It doesn't smell bad anymore." But we were still in the same room. With all that crap. And what really happened was we had gotten so used to the stench that your body adapts and it doesn't stink anymore. That's why bad people with bad odor don't know they smell bad, right? And I drew a correlation on how the Super Times, the halftime show with a stripper pole and a bunch of kids on the stage, it doesn't even, doesn't even faze people anymore because we're so used to crap being around us all the time that that's now an acceptable form of entertainment and national TV, right, where we objectify women and we praise and, you know, there's an amazing happy moment at the end where, you know, Jennifer Lopez says, "I'm just so proud and I'm so— I've just been able to empower so many of our young girls." And I said, "Wow, empowering our girls to glorify a stripper pole at a halftime show. You're really setting an amazing example." And I wrote a post about that. And if you can't handle something like that—

so you got a ton of likes and you probably friend me.

Oh, I got tons of likes, but I also got a lot of dislikes, right?

Yep.

And I think that that's another powerful statement about your brand. If you stand for— what is it? If you, if you don't stand for anything, you'll fall for anything, right? If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything. Um, people like to know, even if they don't agree with you People like to know where you stand because at least then there's a great starting point for the trust to be built in that relationship. I work with people from all ages and genders and self-described genders and transgenders and, and whatever you could possibly imagine, and I accept everybody. But at the end of the day, they should also in return accept what I believe, or if not, if not accepted, they should they should respect it, just like, just like I respect theirs, right? So if you want to join my network, you better respect it.

Well, this has been, this has been awesome. I had a lot of fun. I really appreciate you sharing. I think there were a lot of great insights. Uh, definitely go check out jeffjhunter.com, connect with him. You've got a great resource for branding support, for really even leveraging some of this stuff in your own agency and in your own personal brand. And, um, It was an honor to have you on here, and I'll look forward to chatting with you again soon.

Thanks, Josh.

Thanks, guys, for listening in. We'll talk to you later.