Explosive Growth with Cutting-Edge Digital Marketing Tech| Interview by Seth Greene

Welcome to the podcast. This is your co-host, Seth Green. Today I've got the good fortune to be joined by Hernan Vazquez, who works with clients from around the world with one sole purpose, to increase their revenue through the use of the most cutting-edge digital marketing strategies and technologies. Hernan, thanks so much for joining us.

Hey Seth. Hey everyone. It's really good to be here. I'm excited.

Awesome. We are happy to have you. Let's go back in time a little bit. How did you get started?

I started actually around 15 years ago. I quit my day job and without a net, without anything, I knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, you know. But yeah, 15 years ago, the first thing that I did, or actually one of the first things that I did that actually changed my mind around entrepreneurship of what was possible in the digital world, was that I started working on Fiverr, fiverr.com. So fiverr.com back in the day is not the fiverr.com that we know of right now. It was kind completely different. But I was able to, you know, my— the first time somebody gave me money over the internet was on fiverr.com. I was writing articles. I was writing articles for people, you know, in English and whatnot. And I got my first 4 whole dollars. I got them, you know, by writing articles for somebody. And I was like, wow, this is, this is crazy. Somebody, a complete stranger over the internet, gave me money, right? And that was the first breakthrough that I had. And that was kind of my first service-based business, you know, based off of Fiverr. And then Of course, if you overdeliver and whatnot and you're helpful, people will reach out outside of Fiverr and try to hire me as a VA or as an assistant or support person or ask me to do all sorts of different things. And I started learning those things like from web design to advertising to, you know, SEO to whatever. And, you know, and that's long story short, that, that's what took me here basically. So.

Well, I'm sure that the longer version of that story could probably be in a book somewhere if it isn't already. Talk a little bit about the— that's your, your how you started. Talk a little bit about the business, the way it looks now and who you're serving and how you're helping them.

Yeah. So right now, ScaleDriven is my advertising agency. And what we do is we help business owners, entrepreneurs, generally coaches, consultants, people that have a high-ticket offer, high-ticket business, right, that sell high-ticket services, courses and whatnot. And we help them through 3 main pillars. We help them through advertising. We run paid social media ads for them on Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, TikTok, and whatnot. We help them through sales funnels, like we help them through all of their sales funnels. We design, write all of the copy, put together all of the funnels, all of the tech stuff for them, and we help them through emails and follow-up sequences. That's basically the trifecta that we use. So we basically build the entire direct response machine for them so that they can turn more clicks into more booked appointments, more leads, and ultimately more revenue. We're, uh, we're a direct response advertising agency. So that means that every, every dollar needs to be held accountable. You know, it needs to bring $1 or more. And that's how we're— that's what we're focusing on right now.

So that makes a lot of sense. You alluded to a number of different groups of people that you're working with. Who is the ideal client for you?

Well, lately we've been focusing a lot on people that have a high-ticket course or high-ticket service. Could be coaches, consultants. Some we have in our ranks, we have some info product publishers, generally personal brands, right? People that have a high-ticket service or product. We also work with some agencies as well. But I would say our ideal client is somebody that has a proven offer, right? Like they're getting money for what they're offering, right? It's not— they're not experimenting anymore, but they want to scale and they realize that most of their growth have come through organic means or word of mouth, or they built a small community around their name and whatnot, but now they want to take it to the next level. And that's when we come in. We help them put together the advertising machine that will help them take to the next level everything that they're doing. So—

I know that you've helped a number of businesses grow to 7 figures or more. So when you talk about the advertising machine, can you give us an example of here's a client, here's what they hired you for, what you were kind of able to build for them, and then that magical transformation that you were able to engineer and how it happened?

Yeah, for sure. So there's, there's definitely nothing magical about it, right? It's all about— it's, it's there. It does take a decent and considerable amount of work. But for example, There was this client that came, they came to us because they, they have a, they have a course that helps entrepreneurs getting better on camera. In fact, that's, you know, that's their, their, there's 2 actors, they, they're, they own the, they own the, the company and they're helping entrepreneurs getting better on camera and getting better, you know, more comfortable creating video content and whatnot. And they have a course that helps entrepreneurs do that. And in today's day and age, you know, where everything is video content and whatnot, you need to get good on camera in order for you to attract your right audience. So that's kind of their USP. They came to us because they were getting really good results with organic methodologies, right? They built a name for themselves and whatnot, but they weren't really getting the results that they want in terms of scale. Because as you know, organic, it's great referrals, they're great, but they're not scalable. So they came to us and we put together a machine for them. And the machine was what we call a short video sales letter funnel, which is basically people will opt in for a short class, right, that lasts between 15 to 25 minutes. And then throughout that class, we educate the prospect. We tell them why they should be working with us, why they should be working with the client on this case, how much time and money and effort they will save by actually, you know, working with the client. And then we invite them to apply and then to book a call. And we were able to take them for around— they were making around $30,000 to $35,000 a month in revenue when they came to us. And I just checked, actually, we had a meeting with their strategy team today and they're getting close to $100,000 $120,000 in revenue every single month. We added on top of that around $20,000 worth of advertising spend that they didn't have before. But if you do the math, you know, in terms of going from $30,000 with zero ad spend to $120,000 with $20,000 in ad spend, it's a pretty sweet— it's a pretty sweet deal. But they have an amazing product. They had a really good, good following. It was ripe for advertising. And now we're reaching out to colder and colder audiences because they want to keep on scaling.

So Well, a 4x return is absolutely incredible. Congratulations on that. With how— with everything that's changing in the world of online digital marketing, which seems like there's a new social network or a new app every week, right? You have to stay on top of that in addition to the industries all your clients are in. How do you juggle all that?

Yeah, that's a great question, and I love that. So we do a lot of experimenting, you know, having access to many of our clients' dashboards, we can see what's going on and we can kind of condense that and distill that information into, for example, our information products and our coaching programs, which we do have as well. But I think it has to do a lot with going back to the basics, right? If you focus on the basics and the fundamentals of why people do what they do, what— how people buy, why— what makes them buy and all of that, I think that if you focus on those fundamentals, I think that It doesn't really matter what the marketplace does or what the next app is, or now with the, you know, with everything that's going on with AI and whatnot, which we have been, you know, slowly adopting for our processes. But I think it has to do with the fundamentals. There's a fantastic book called Influence by Robert Cialdini. It's a great book. And, and that book kind of tells us why we do what we do, right? It's kind of an operations manual for the human brain. And, and if you keep on applying the fundamentals to the sales pieces that we put out, the ads that we put out, and basically the funnels that we put out and everything like that, like, you will— you can't go wrong because technology changes, economy changes, the world changes, but the fundamentals, they don't really change as much. So that's why we keep on honing in and we try to also bring our clients back to the fundamentals because as much as we have shiny object syndrome, our clients also have shiny object syndrome because they're entrepreneurs, right? So that's normal. So we try to you know, keep them— keep things simple and keep things fundamental. So—

You alluded— you mentioned AI once or twice in a couple of your answers. What are some of the biggest trends you're seeing, you know, kind of coming down the pike in terms of what comes next?

So for us as advertisers and in general marketing guys and marketing people, marketing professionals, I say that AI will definitely change the game and it's already changing the game, right? For example, you know, for copywriting, right? And for general marketing pieces. And whatnot. We can use ChatGPT and it's saving us a ton of time and a ton and it's actually creating better output because we're fusing our frameworks that are proven and tested for ads, emails and whatnot. And then we're adding those to AI so that AI can rewrite them for different offers and whatnot. And it saves a ton of time. I don't necessarily think that AI will replace marketers. I think that if anything, it will empower us to do more meaningful work. And there's a lot of things that AI, it's, I think, a long way, a long way to fulfill. Which is the actual strategy, right? If you think about it, you have leads coming from different sources, you have your sales team calling them, you have attribution touchpoints. There's, there's these, there's this sea of data that you have to navigate in order for you to make decisions, data-driven decisions on marketing and advertising. So I think that focusing more and more on strategy and focusing more and more on how can we provide better services to our customers, to our clients, to our students, I think that's going to be one of the things that AI is going to enable to do. But then again, I think that, you know, content will become better and better. Advertising material will become better and better, you know, as we go through, which I'm really excited about. So.

You've achieved so much success for both yourself and your clients. What's your biggest challenge now?

Well, we're in growth mode, right? So there's levels to these things. So right now we're close to 30 people at the agency. You know, I have an HR person. I just, I just brought in a new COO. So I think that it's taking the shape of, you know, of a, quote unquote, real business, always been a real business. But, you know, I went from having just a handful of people working with just a handful of people to close to 30 and whatnot. So there's always levels. And now I think that the challenges, or at least one of my challenges, to become a better leader and a better manager, right? To lead my team in the best possible direction and to lead my team from a perspective of empowering them and making sure that they're fulfilled and making sure that they're giving the best. I think that that's one of the challenges that I'm focusing on right now. based on where we're at as a business.

So your passion is obvious. What do you like best about what you're doing?

Well, I'm a big marketing geek. I'm a big, big marketing geek. So I love marketing. I love like putting together offers and funnels and whatnot. So I'm a big marketing geek. But I also like to, you know, teach people and also like to give away value. I think that one of the reasons why we're able to grow is because we've put like value on top of everything else in terms of putting out value, putting out content, helping other entrepreneurs and whatnot. And that has given us a lot of A lot of good success. But yeah, I'm a big marketing nerd. So.

Awesome. We know your time's incredibly valuable. We greatly appreciate you spending some of it with us. For our folks watching and listening who want to learn more, where is the best place for them to go to learn more about you?

Hernan Vazquez in all socials. You know, if they, if they look for it, they're gonna find me. We have a YouTube channel that has a lot of material, a lot of good stuff. We've been uploading content there for, I don't know, 8 years now. And scaledriven.com, if you wanna learn about what we do, it's scaledriven.com. We have a little message there. And if it resonates with you, you can schedule a call, talk to us.

So, all right, this has been Seth Green with Hernan Vazquez. Hernan, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you, Seth. It's been my pleasure.

Thanks everybody for watching or listening.