Navigate Today's Changing Landscape with Erik Huberman

Foreign. This episode of the Todd Hartley show is going to be talking about what I always talk about. How do you get next level in your life? How do you accelerate your growth? And one of the best ways you can do it is talk to remarkable people. And I just love surrounding myself with people. Well, like maybe you heard the last episode with Justin Donald, the lifestyle investor. Justin and I are friends with Eric Huberman, who's joining me on this episode. Eric is the author of the Hawk Method. This is the goodie box that Eric sent me when his book launched the three principles of marketing that made over 3,000 brands soar. And this box that he sent me has goodies inside for me, and I'm super excited to showcase Eric. Eric is remarkable. His career continuously goes next level. His business is ginormous. And Justin Donald, Eric Huberman, Shep Hyken, who's coming up in one of these next episodes, and maybe 10 other rock stars were all at Eric Huberman's house.

In Cabo in the pandemic. Learning from each other.

What are we learning from? We're learning how each person accelerates their growth. And in this episode with Eric, I want you to pay special attention to his career and what he's done up in his brain to evaluate where the next leverage moments are. And it's my hope that when you listen to my interview with Eric, you look for that blueprint. What is it that Eric does remarkably well that I could learn from and then leverage down into my business or my life so you can get to the next level. Can you do that? Because if you're willing to look for these patterns and these trends, you're going to get to the next level significantly faster. I think that is my mission on this show, is to help show you what successful people do regularly, how they get themselves prepared to learn new things and how they're not comfortable staying stagnant with the same tools and the same skills. So when you start to feel like, by the way, I think comfort is the enemy of growth. And if you have some type of growth mindset, you should be very comfortable learning a new trick, putting yourself in awkward situations, and studying people who are crushing it, like Eric Huberman from Hawk Media. But first, a word from our sponsors. This podcast is brought to you by the Wirebuzz team. Now, if that name sounds familiar, it's because I've spent the past decade growing Wirebuzz into a digital marketing powerhouse designed to maximize clarity in complex sales processes so we can help accelerate revenue. And we do this in three phases. Phase one. We transform your website to function like your best salesperson and then also incorporate persuasive on demand sales videos. Now your entire team is aligned on messaging and they're injecting massive clarity into your prospect's head. So your site looks great, but it also has engaging content that helps your team sell on demand 24. 7. The next phase. Phase 2. We train your sales and marketing teams to sell remotely or in person to expand the impact of your sales team. And the third phase is we develop and run targeted ads to your prospects. Scale those ads to help you achieve more business results. Sign up for the Wirebuzz Company newsletter to learn more about effective and simple ways to improve your company messaging, attract more digital attention, and ultimately make more sales.

Dude, I'm so excited and fired up for Hawk Method. Like, I remember when you were writing the book and I was picking your brain about it and I'm going to get to the book and I also, for the audience, want to unpack what's made Eric so successful. Like, I know there's inflection moments in your career where you've gotten to the next level and then when you got to that next level, you looked around and you were like, wait a minute, there's another level. And you keep doing that throughout your career. And Hawk Method is, is, is just coming out right now. Do me a favor, talk to me about these three specific areas that you've discovered inside of every one of these campaigns that have made it successful. And let's get start talking about it. And then I want to unpack them a little bit for the audience so they can have their own acceleration moment.

Sure. Yeah. I got one of the first prints right here.

Beautiful.

Yeah. So we talk about in terms of on the marketing side, there's three principles of marketing and we've grown over 3,700 brands at this point. And so those three principles are awareness, nurturing and trust. And think of it as a tripod. You kick one leg out, it all collapses. And so awareness being how do you introduce your product or service to a new potential customer, to someone new that didn't know you existed. It could be advertising, word of mouth, pr, different ways to get the awareness out there. And then nurturing is what you do from when they become aware to when they actually buy. And what the biggest mistake I see in marketing sincerely is people forget that it takes people weeks to months to buy a product. It's not days, usually it's not hours. I'm talking about averages. And so what you do during that period is critical to actually turn all your advertising into sales. And so you need to do things like email marketing, sms, ongoing content, even more advertising to that same audience that has already received it. Just ways to continue to stay in front of them to build your value propositions to get them through that nurturing period and is critical and then what you do post purchase to keep them coming back. Because frankly lifetime value is critical for a business's survival too. Meaning getting sales over and over again from the same customer. And then the last piece, trust, which is synonymous with brand. Early on, when you don't have a brand, 75% of people won't buy from a company. They don't inherently trust. And so early on you do things that create third party validation like reviews, testimonials, PR influence marketing where someone else is basically lending you their trust. And then once you build enough consistency around your delivery that people start to know you for you, that becomes your brand. That's when you can start building trust just directly. So you take the biggest brands in the world. Nike. I buy a pair of shoes from Nike. Generally my personal experience is they last. I like Nike running shoes. They work well for me. I'm going to keep buying. I don't need anyone else to tell me what they think of Nike. I know what I think of Nike. And so that's building that trust over time. Now before that I'd look at running blogs when I started running and go, who's wearing what and how do they work? And I'll try different things based on what these people like because they don't have a horse in the race. And they're telling me, and I trust these people to be impartial and give third party validation.

All right, so these may awareness naturally happens first, but is awareness also from where they show up on social and discover you or see you in an ad? But then when you get into this nurturing phase. Can the nurturing phase be something like a customer journey page?

Both. I mean nurturing is that a whole experience from when they first become aware for the rest of their time with you? To me, okay, and so the reason I built it this way and you just alluded to it, it's not like queer lanes where it's like this is nurturing. This like PR is all three. It's awareness for people that didn't know you exist. It's nurturing for people that may have already heard of you, about you, but are now reading an article. And it's trust because if you're in Forbes. I might trust you more because Forbes is writing about you. So it's all three. Certain channels or certain tactics cover all three basis. The reason for this is to be able to diagnose what you're missing and where you need to double down and where the low hanging fruit is. So we see it all the time. A company has incredible conversion rates on their site. They're converting every customer that comes through the door, but they're not building any new. Their business isn't growing. Easy answer. They're not building any new awareness. They're probably not driving anyone new in. So they're just churning through what they already have. That's one example. The other side would be they're creating tons of advertising and they're out there all the time, but they're not getting any sales. Why? Well, let's look at nurturing or trust because it could be either one that could affect conversion rate, those kind of things.

All right, so one of the things that makes Eric really super interesting as a marketer is he. Well, he's been very successful for brands. He mentioned 3700 of them. He's got a full service outsourced CMO agency in Santa Monica and Hawk Method, you can get it off of Amazon. I've got a fly that is buzzing my tower. It wasn't here. But one of the things that's interesting is Eric has massive fricking data over the years to see what's worked. And that's why when you're following the Hawk method, it's really going to be significantly easier for you because you're learning from somebody who's already gone through the process. Now, Eric, in your career with how long did it take you before you started to recognize the Hawk method was a valuable tool for your client projects? How long did that happen?

First time I've been asked that. I think it really started to solidify a couple years into Hawk Media, which it's been eight now. But that was also after I built three E Commerce companies and sold two of them and had worked with quite a few brands by that point as well. I started to just see this consistent sort of theme across the companies we work with. And I was also looking at tons and tons of brands to analyze the marketing and see if we should work with them. And I started to run the same process over and over again when I was looking at our existing clients, when I was looking at new clients of like, well, let's dive in. What do I look at? I look at, oh, how are you driving New people to your company, how are you nurturing that? What are you doing there? And then how are you building trust in that validation? Because if you're not, you can scream from the rooftops how great you are and do it on awareness and nurturing. But without building trust doesn't mean anything. So that started probably, I think it was a couple of years into Hawk and then I started doing actually keynotes about it because people kept asking me to speak about how I did marketing and what I knew about marketing. And it was like I just kept going back to this theory that we had developed and then I started training our people in it, et cetera. And so about two and a half years ago, met a guy that asked me if I would want to write a book. And he had a book marketing agency and wanted to help me write it. And I went, yeah, great. I actually have been speaking about this for years now and want to put it into, into written words. So I know this.

But for the audience, give them an.

Indicator of some of the brands that.

They would know because it's exciting to hear, but it also gives you more street cred. Who are some of the brands that your company supports?

Yeah, I mean, we just completed a campaign with Crocs, but Red Bull, Verizon, hp, Unilever, as the Lauder, Nike, those are the big ones. But we are, our mission is accessibility to great marketing. So it's also tons of small and medium businesses, tons of up and coming brands. We've grown brands from zero to hundreds of millions and billions in revenue at this point as well. We did not come in and start Nike, but we've grown other sneaker companies. We had a sneaker client for two years and grew them for two years and sold them for 100 million bucks. So we have those sides of things too. And that's the fun part. We like working with all these brands, but the ones that are really fun are founder driven, high growth companies.

All right. And so for those that don't know, Eric and I are friends. I sat next to him each night in Cabo and were members of a mastermind group that loves giving to each other. And I picked Eric's brain in Cabo every night at dinner because like you're discovering in this interview, there's a lot of value and juicy kernels that all of you can benefit from. Eric, in your career. Take me back to when you left the original company and opened up Hawk Media. What was going through your brain that made you realize that you had so much value that you had to get up and start serving people.

So the real story is I was working at my last company, which was an activewear brand, and we sold it and I got asked to create a business plan for another activewear brand. And I was making. I had a small piece of the business and I was making 100 grand a year. And this new company said, hey, we want you to write a business plan on how to go into E commerce for us. What would that take and what would it cost us? And I could write that business plan in an evening, Honestly, at that point. And I was like, ah, it's gonna take me like a month, month and a half, and I'm gonna need $25,000. And the guy went, sounds great. Can I pay you half up front? Half? After? I was like, sure. And I was like, I had made 100 grand for a year before that I was making minimum wage for like four. The fact that someone was going to be paying me 25 grand for an evening of my time was absolutely absurd, as it is absurd. So I went, wow, like, maybe I've built. Like, I was trying to look at it like, this guy's not an idiot. I don't think. I just pulled a fast one. And you realize, like, he paid me that because the value to him wasn't about the hours I put into it. It was about like, if you build me a business plan that I can go run with, I'll make. The guy had a. He told me all the time he had $50 million in EBITDA, you know, 400 million revenue business. He's like, wow, grand. Yeah, fuck, it sure sounds good. Like it wasn't even a number that came across his radar. So I sort of realized, like, maybe I've created value above and beyond what I actually think. And so then after I sold that company, I started consulting. And people were paying me thousands of bucks for a few hours of my time a month to like just oversee their marketing. And then with that, that complemented with, I started trying to get agencies to serve these companies that was just like their one guy fractional CMO kind of thing. And these agencies, just, all of them dropped the ball. They were all shit. And I realized 99% of marketing agencies out there are absolute garbage. And so that combined with. I knew that I had some value and knowledge that people wanted that was working, frankly. I started the early workings of the HAWK method. I started to see that I had developed a marketing strategy that worked over and over and over again just from a framework perspective, not necessarily the Individual tactics. But the way I thought about marketing was working for everyone I was working with. I went, okay, so this is. There's something to this. I should continue to go down this path. And that's when I started bringing on a team. I started to see that it worked more and more, and that's really what led into growing it. At the time when I first hired my team for Hawk, I thought I was going to start a tea company. And we were talking about this before the podcast. I don't even drink caffeine, but for some reason, I thought I was going to start a fitness tea company, even though I didn't even want to drink my own product. This was what I was going through. I was 26. It was, you know, very early in my career. Just turned 27 when I went. But I did launch the tea company. I just realized pretty quickly Hawk Media was a better horse to bet on.

Yep. Okay. Super fascinating to me. And when.

When you had this inflection moment and somebody was willing to pay you value.

For what, how it was going to impact their business, and it wasn't really about the. The hours it would take. It was the outcome they would get from it. That was an acceleration moment where you probably realized that if you could replicate this.

Yep.

You could start growing exponentially.

Walk me through that.

What I think.

Yeah, you just nailed something that most people don't get. It's because so many service businesses charge it hourly. It's like, I don't give a fuck how long it takes you. I hope it takes you 10 minutes. I just want the result. And so that. That's also how. So that's how we charge. But that's also. It's beneficial both sides. Because now I have consistency and billables that I can predict my revenue, but they also have consistency of expenses, which they want to. And as long as we get our job done, we don't carry the side. And by the way, it aligns with how I pay my people. I pay my people salaries, and it's the same line I give them. Like, my business partner is a little harsh about it, but he says, like, if. If it takes you longer to do something, you're just not as good at it. Like, that's his view of it. And I think it's a simplistic but fairly true view of things. The longer. If you take a longer to do something than someone else, you're probably just either not as good or not as savvy in it, because someone that's really good at something can do something really quickly and well. So that's how we look at a lot of that. And so that when it came down to pricing, when it came down to build, that was definitely a highlight of like. And also just understanding in general value. It's not about your time, you know, and there's always the people. Like, there's the argument that I've heard that's like a cliche in our service businesses now where it's like, you're paying me for my 20 years experience, not the hour I put into it. It's like, yeah, sure, I'm actually paying you for the result. I'm not paying you for either. I don't give a. Like, if you've been doing this for 20 years and you still suck at it, I don't care.

Right.

Are you going to get the job done? Well, and then I'll pay for that. And so that's how we priced it.

Okay, I love that. And then I think I'm willing to.

Guess because I've never asked you this, but I'm willing to bet that once you started to realize that you could exponentially grow outside of the hours that you were putting in, then there was like a newfound excitement that was happening inside of you and the potential of bringing on other people.

Yeah, I mean, I never thought that I was just going to. Again, this was, I don't want to say a means to an end, but I started consulting just because I didn't want to burn through my savings while I built my T company. So I'd already built businesses and had scaled off people. So it wasn't like some epiphany of like, oh my God, I can leverage people. It was like, yeah, of course I can. Like, that wasn't ever a big. That wasn't a big aha moment. I figured that one was just like I naturally understood from a young age.

Yeah, it's interesting. Okay, so when, when people are going.

Through your book, is it something, Is.

It an exercise that they can start to dissect their, their strategy and be able to. Okay.

And it does have what I mean, first off, it's how do you assess? What are you missing? Like, you're always going to want to. Like, marketing is an opportunity cost driven center. So meaning whatever you're not doing, you're losing money on hypothetically. So this is a way for you to go, where am I weakest? Because you're going to be weaker somewhere. And where do I need to spend my time improving to make my marketing better? And then from There it actually does go into all the different channels and tactics. Whether it's like, how do I leverage Facebook or Google or TV or radio or podcasts or email marketing, sms, brand in general, how do I build a brand? What do I think about when I'm designing my logo? Like, everything. It goes into every detail on those. And it's. But I say that and it. But it's not a, you know, a tome. It's not. It's a quick read, 200 pages with a lot of narrative to. To try to make it easy. Because frankly, I hate fucking reading too. And I. If it's not a quick, easy read, I'm not going to do it. And so I wrote this for sort of the way I read, where I want this to be something that people can get the picture, go, walk away with understanding all these different channels and how to do this, but do it. I've had people read it in a day already because we've sent out a few copies and been like, yeah, I read it. This is awesome. I just wanted to show. What about marketing? So that's the goal.

It's cool. I mean, I purchased copies for everybody at my agency. I'm excited for people to go through it. I love surrounding myself with nerds that are interested in growing.

Eric, your.

Your ability to stay on the cutting edge in our industry is remarkable. What is your process like? Like, what is your Eric Huberman homework? Like, for how you stay up to speed? Cause I know you're a voracious reader.

And actually this has been coming up a lot. No, I don't read a lot. I don't visit a lot of podcasts. I'm more socially driven, if that makes sense. So what gives me energy is being social. And I've realized that a lot more. That being said, I don't feel like a lot of people felt lonely during the pandemic and all that. I didn't. I was like, oh, it's a reprieve. But then when I go to an event, like, I love this. I don't want to leave. Like, it's like, I really thrive in that situation. And I'm not the guy that walks into a room and meets everyone in the room, but I'll meet a few people and go deep with them is kind of my way of doing things. So I'm not like a robust extrovert in that way. Like, I have employees, frankly, salespeople that will, like, go in, make sure they get 100 cards, walk out. They knew everybody. For me, it's Like, I'll meet three people, but I'll make three great connections. And so got lost. My train of thought. Not a voracious reader, but my process for keeping on top of things is a few things. One, got a team of 350 people that tell me what's going on, and I try to stay on top internally and understand what they're seeing and what's changing. So there's a lot of those conversations. Number two, drinking your own punch. I'm constantly trying things of my own and then saying, like, oh, that worked. Oh, that didn't. And by the way, most we are pretty good at setting up proper tests now that I can get a pretty good amount of data out of a test. So, like, podcast advertising, I can. We just did a bunch, and I was like, oh, so this is what I learned from it. It does this well, it doesn't do this well, et cetera. And now we have some anecdotal evidence of how to look at it. And a lot of times that anecdotal evidence is actually pretty valid. The biggest one, though, is network and peers having a ton of people around me that we shoot shit back and forth. I call with thoughts, and I'm, you know, as you mentioned, we're a part of a mastermind group, but I'm a product of several groups that I meet with pretty regularly, and we talk about what's going on out there. And I've always been really good at picking up, like, one thing, but I have a really solid memory. Like, my. My sister was convinced as a kid that I would actually watch movies over and over again to memorize lines, even. But it's like, I can watch a movie once and memorize all my favorite lines. How that's helped me in my career is if you will be on a call for an hour where John Kaiser is ranting and everyone's throwing things around, but someone will say one thing, like, yeah, by the way, guys, I just launched my book, and yeah, it was crazy. Podcasts were huge for me. But anyway, that will stick out. I'll remember that. And then six months later, we'll be watching my book, and I'll remember that Shep Hyken said podcasts were great for him. And I'll go do a bunch of podcasts. Like, it's that kind of thing. That.

Right.

I can pick those out. That.

And, dude, I was in that conversation. Yeah, I remember all those moments.

I would say that things don't change as fast as people think they do. So the things that are Working in marketing. Google and Facebook are just, I'd say Google's still fine. Facebook's seeing a chink in its armor for the first time in 15 years or 13, whatever it's been. So it's not like it moves that fast.

Okay, Eric Huberman, I know that you like to invest time in emerging networks. Like I remember Clubhouse launching and you getting your name, just blowing your name up. Why are emerging networks like investment opportunities that you like to be in early?

Yeah, so what I, it's twofold. I try to get value out of it in the meantime. But the thought is if Clubhouse actually, and it hasn't really, I hope it figures it out. But if it had taken off and become the next Instagram. Getting in early, it's always early. It's easier early to get that momentum to start building a following. And then you become one of the thought leaders and you build with the growth of the platform. So if you do pick the right platform early, it can do you a lot of good and you can end up with a huge following of people and frankly end up celebrity level if you pick it right. Clubhouse specifically didn't go that way. But I met so many people. It was like the perfect thing until Covid really opened up last year. And it was the perfect thing to spend time on when I was again, I thrive in these networking social settings. I made a lot of great connections on Clubhouse just hanging out and it kind of satiated that for me. And then also, like, I found ways to make it complement what I was doing in work and it made a bunch of again, connections. But also I would literally, instead of a lot of times I'll have the TV on and on CNBC or something or I'll have the radio on in the background. I just turned Clubhouse on in the background while I was punching through emails and doing things. And people always wanted me on stage because I had a huge following. So it just, it was a snowball at that point. Once I built an early following, then everybody wanted me as a part of their stage, which got me more of a following and ended up with like 70,000 clubhouse followers like that.

And here's a lot of marketers consider themselves like the coolest kids in, in the world and won't show up at a social network that's being born until it's bumping and it's going off. And what Eric just taught you right there is early adopter advantage and how you can get in somewhere early. And then everybody ends up knowing who you are because you invested at the right time.

Yeah. But I would say also be careful chasing the shiny object. It's a, it's a. Yeah, of course. Because there's, There's a new network every day out there doesn't mean it's going to go anywhere. And like, watching it, like, keeping an eye on it, I think is what's worth it. And I saw Clubhouse, like, I saw a lot of people I want to spend time with hanging out on it. So great. And if it had gone somewhere awesome, I don't feel any regrets of my usage there. That being said, now, like, I'm investing in TikTok and I'm pretty confident TikTok's already massive, but it's going to continue to be. But if it goes away, I'd be like, that was kind of a waste of time. That sucks. Like, that's how that is.

I actually was an early adopter on Google and people will giggle when they hear Google. But the reality was the early adopter advantage there was so helpful to my career. It helped me generate 1.1 million followers in a year. And the most, the most important thing was it helped me. Whenever people signed up for Gmail, they got me as a recommended follow. So it's like, that's bananas, right? And that only happens for early adopter advantage. Eric, when people are going through your book and you've got these three, three key areas, three principles of marketing that they need to be aware of. Awareness, nurturing, and trust. Typically, people think they start at the very top, right? And like, for example, I don't know about you, but I carry my sales funnel everywhere I go. And in here it's always, you know, awareness, consideration and decision stage. But you don't start always at awareness like you usually said.

Walk me through that.

Because I don't think a lot of people understand that and it'll help them as they're reading through your book.

Yeah. The best way I would put this is when we talk to people about building their email marketing marketing funnel before they've driven traffic. But I don't have any emails yet. It's like, yeah, but the first time someone signs up for your email list and doesn't get a single email for three months because you haven't built any and you've decided to catch up once you have 10,000, all those 10,000 people are like, who the fuck are you after when you email them that far? Waiter. So it's like the idea is to build that net first and that nurturing, at least some of that nurturing first, so that when you start driving an awareness, you can capture it again. You've got weeks to months before that person converts. If you don't do anything during that period, you're going to lose a huge portion of them. So make sure you set that all up. We've actually seen companies that haven't built this out, the nurturing side of things. When we've incorporated it, we've seen companies up to triple their revenue, literally triple. Because it's like, oh, yeah. All of a sudden everyone's like, oh, yeah, this company whoops. Like, it is crazy how much more ROI you can get when you have that built. And for. If you start driving awareness before you have it, you're losing. You're basically losing 80% of the efficacy of that awareness. Or in this. Actually, it's 66%. For the argument.

I always think of it like, if you're into, like, building a residential community, and I know you and I both come from families that are builders, so we can nerd out on this. If you're building a residential community, you don't put up the billboard signs on the freeway before you've got some stores and main streets set up so people can picture themselves going there, like, create the environment that people are going to go engage around and then start driving the traffic with the billboards off of the highway. And it's very similar because once you start nurturing those people, you can bring them back in.

The argument I hear against this a lot is like, well, we want to test out our advertising before we go in on the nurturing side. It's like, but you're not testing it because you're not actually giving it the proper chance. You're just going to get the data you're going to get is invalid. Unless you don't plan on ever doing a better job of marketing.

Right.

So if it's. If you have good data, well, then you're kind of like, I mean, it's good data. Great. Let's say you do really well without doing nurturing. Great. Now, you know that if you did nurturing, it should be better. And so you can move forward. But for the 90% of the time, it doesn't go well because you're not doing anything on nurturing. That literally doesn't tell you anything other than you just wasted some effort because you should have just done what we said and start with nurturing.

Yeah, it's so cool. A lot of people don't nerd out on that topic, but they should. And, and I'm Glad that you spent the time in the book to help people understand those three core principles. He's Eric Huberman. He's the CEO of Hawk Media. His new book, you can get it on Amazon and it's the hawk method, the three principles of marketing that made over 3,000 brands take off and soar. Eric, where can people go besides Amazon? Is there a better place for them.

To purchase your book? Amazon's great, but Walmart, Target, Barnes and Noble, HawkMethod.com we have our own WIX setup, but whatever you guys want to use, we're just happy to get the book out there.

Awesome. Hey, I'm happy to get to spend some time with you. I know how busy you are. Dude was on Drew Barrymore show recently and a bunch of other things as he's promoting and he was kind enough to come on to the Toddcast. Eric, thanks for joining me.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Yo, that was a powerful episode. And from what we just learned, it should be obvious how you can now implement these lessons in your life to get to the next level. Now, before you bounce, I just have three quick thoughts. First, thank you for taking me on your incredible life journey. Second, if you receive some value from me and you want to pay it forward, it would mean the world to me. If you left an honest rating and review at Apple, Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, I'd be incredibly grateful. And lastly, if you share this episode, whether it be a screenshot or a photo from where you're listening, anything via Instagram stories or LinkedIn, Facebook, or any of the social media sites, just tag me and the guest. I'll repost your content and I'll reply back in the comments because I love mixing it up. In fact, I'd love to share your shout outs in my feed too. Not only are these shout outs really good for you and for me, but they also help us book more amazing guests because they'll be able to see the reach that you're helping to cultivate. This is a way for you to help contribute to the show. So thank you again for listening and I look forward to earning a regular spot inside that ear of yours. Let's grow.

It.