How TikTok Lives Built a $15–18M SEO/PPC Agency (Founder Works 8 Hours/Week)

Jake Plappek, let me make sure I'm getting this right. You have off of basically 110,000 Tik Tok followers, your SEO PPC agency is making 15 to 18 million a year and you have 45 people and you are expecting to double this year and I'm not sure is it ARR or headcount or both that you're expected to double in. Um, you're a little ahead of the curve. 18 is our goal by the end of this year, but we are on track for that. Um, and we will have to increase our size to roughly 60 by the end of the year. Okay. And uh, but I think you you said last time that Oh, yeah. You you're expecting to do 15 to 18. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and you have completely removed yourself from the day-to-day. Yeah. No, I I don't do anything. Well, you bring you bring you bring the you bring the clients. I I do. I do. I am full-time in the content creation for the business. You You put your beautiful face in front of the camera. People go, I I want I want that guy. I want that guy's agency. Uh, actually true though. That is pretty much the whole play. So, so when you came on the podcast last time and shared this Gogan, you messaged me on X and you're like, I want to hear how Jake is doing this. I have all these questions. And I'm like, let's do a podcast. And I said, Jake, are you down? And Jake, you were like, I'm down. And so that's why we're doing this. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think I I've been following Jake for for a while. I don't know how how I saw your Tik Tok or something something in my feed and from there I started to follow but uh I was not joining like uh the lives because of the time zone difference but recently I after your podcast with uh with Edward and I was like maybe I should try to like uh stay up late at night and see like like what Jake is talking exactly and it seems like uh you got a fairly like good audience like who actually engage engaged with your life because I've seen like Some people try to do the live but it's mostly like chit chatting not like industry specific questions but your audience is like I just want to know about marketing SEO and I was like uh this is like a really really good audience that you have built over time. Yeah it's uh it's not always been that good. Um it definitely takes cultivation. Um, I would I would say the the very cool thing about the audience is that I have a couple of regulars who are are very reliable as far as keeping or getting the conversation going. Once people start to see that um I'm engaging and I'm actually responding, they get emboldened and then they get engaged and that just, you know, compounds compounds compounds. Um but I might be getting ahead of myself. Uh for people who are listening that haven't been on one of my lives, the format is remarkably simple. I I don't keep make it complicated. Um, it simply just says ask your marketing questions on the top of my screen and I kind of have like a little spiel stick that I've done over the years. I throw it in every couple, you know, 15 minutes or so that's just like, "Hey, I'm Jake the Wizard. Welcome. Glad you're here. If you've never been here before, I run a marketing agency. I'm here to answer your marketing, your business development, and your sales questions. If you've got anything so you can grow your business, drop it in the chat. I answer every question. You know, something like that. A little variance here or there, but um and I keep it very, very loose. I answer questions that aren't about those things as well. I get random questions all the time. Uh, and it's just a very chill atmosphere to the point where people have told me multiple times that they hop on the live and it's their background music. They're working. They're just doing stuff, making breakfast or whatever it is, and they've just got me on in the background listening to whatever it is I'm saying at the time. How did you end? uh like uh was that a strategy to grow the agency or you just like stumbled upon doing lives and sort it sort of like started to work out for you or did you like plan it actually and you was like this is something that is working out for other people's maybe I should build a similar strategy to grow my business or get more leads. Yeah, I don't know. I it's it's a good question. I think the idea for it came from seeing other successful lives that were not about marketing or business development, but had a similar idea. I'm sure you've scrolled past a live that's like let's talk about Star Wars or uh share your favorite music with me or things like that that are very engagement focused and driven. And I realized very quickly that engagement breeds engagement on these social platforms, right? The more people you engage with, the more activated members of a live or a video pushes that live or a video more and engages more. Um, I've tried other things over the years, you know, having a guest, um, like doing the split screen stuff, um, and nothing quite clicks as smoothly as just doing the Q&A and being fun, being relaxed with it, but acknowledging every question. So, yeah. Yeah. And uh how did you like sort of like decided to move out of like daily operations and just focus on like content side of things? Because I'll I'll just give you like like bit of context. So I run a small marketing agency from Melbourne in Australia and we work with some clients in US and many clients in Australia and uh I know other peoples too uh who run like PPC multiple services agencies and they are like we also want to get out of like daily operations as a founder uh that is something that we don't enjoy like like most of the founders they they have to do sales you know like it's if you are the like one who started the business and you have to like put your yourself out and do the lead generation for the business. But many people are just like c into the two things like uh do your route like like what you are doing right now or just do the operations and many are just in the middle like where they are trying to do the content and they are also having to do the operations side of things like how did you plan this out where you got your operations right and your content strategy is also going going all right for uh lead generation this method of marketing is so effective I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept doing it. It's a form of SEO I call compact keywords. Whereas most SEO focuses on putting up articles to answer questions, how, what, when, compact keywords focuses on putting up dozens of pages that sell to searchers who are actually looking to buy. These pages rank on Google and convert so much better than normal that when I discovered this years ago, I couldn't believe this was allowed. It's less work, too. The average compact keywords page is only 415 words. Compact Keywords is a 13-hour deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer recently said, "Each lesson is dense with information. You're giving years worth of experience boiled down into 15 to 30 minute lessons with no filler or fluff. I feel like I'm gaining a new superpower. Compact Keywords is about setting up an SEO funnel that brings you sales for years and years and years. It works with AI. It's less work than traditional SEO and it makes way more money. You can get it now at compactkeywords.com. Back to the podcast. I think the first part is hiring people that are better than you. I mean, my SEO team, my ads team, each one of my specialists, I'll never catch up to them. They are just better than me. And so when a project gets sold, I don't have to worry about it, right? I think that's uh that's something that a lot of founders struggle with, especially in scale, because they want they want to get the cheap person. I'm just going to be honest about it. I've had that conversation so many times. And it's like, well, we can get a junior person that can take this off of my plate. And it's it's like, okay, you do that. Yeah. You saved $20,000 a year on their salary, but now you have committed your time to manage and train and overview and oversight rather than just getting somebody who's like, I'm great. Talk to you once a week. Like, just send the send me the work. So, I think that's a huge part of of why I've been successful is is just when it's time to hire, I don't try to retain anything for myself or for the business. I get the best person. And what happens is when I get that best person, I retain people longer. I make clients happier and they expand their packages. And uh I I even had a conversation with one client who was like we did kind of the handoff which is always a clumsy piece where it's like I'm not going to be doing this anymore. It's now going to be Josh, right? And they emailed me like two months later and they're like hey Jake I love you but Josh is way better than you. So, I think that that's a huge part of it is like I don't have to worry about that because I hired the right people. And then the other part of getting out of everything, I actually am not out of everything. I'm just in everything as a content creator. So, internally, all of our SOPs and instructional videos, I shoot those. So, I'm still involved in all the departments. In our sales calls, I get on and I'm kind of like an intro agent, right? The person gets in. Oh, Jake, great to see you. Yeah, great to see you, too. I'm here. I've got, you know, Dave with me. Dave is going to take us through it, but I'm here to sit with you on your side and hang out and just kind of listen to what Dave has to sell. And then I kind of almost get to play this like little like it's us versus Dave the sales guy and have like a little bit of banter back and forth and that makes it way more comfortable for them cuz they feel like I'm playing on their side of the table. It's a little bit of a cheat too. So I'm not really out of everything but my core focus is the content and the results of that content across the business. You have a you had an interesting story where you hired what was it like a business mentor and then you made that business mentor your CEO. So how did how did you like when did you decide that you needed a business mentor? What like what drove you to that? How hard was it finding somebody good? Did you get this person the first try and how did you find that person? And then what was it like transitioning that person into your CEO? So, I I had a very hard time. What was it? Hold on. I'm counting the years back. It's 26. The start of 2023 for my agency was very rough. Um, we made a big shift in our package offerings away from kind of very cheap allocart SEO into a more fullervice white glove experience and I had not sold anything that expensive before. Uh, and so getting new clients on that was a challenge. And we kind of put all of our existing clients on like a six-month timer to upgrade to the new packages. Well, that meant that in 6 months, I lost, you know, 50% of the clients. Now granted, the clients that stayed covered financially, like the ones that left, um, but it was we we got tight as a business. And I had had business mentors before, like casual people that I actually knew in real life, uh, that were just ahead of me in their careers that had given me advice. and it was always bad. I don't know how they were so successful, but like it never clicked. And maybe it was right advice, wrong decade or something like that, but um they weren't good at it either. Like they didn't actually help me. And so I kind of hit like a rock bottom. And I remember sitting um in in my office on my couch just like head in hands like I don't know what I'm going to do next. Like my business is on a twomonth timer before it implodes. Wow. Um my my lovely wife came in and she was like, "You're good at what you do. just do what you do and let me let me my wife step in and take care of some of the the things that I'm bad at like I'm terrible at finance management like the collecting of bills and all that. Um and she's like and let's find somebody to help us, you know, not make some mistakes. And so I looked around but no one really clicked. Nothing made sense. And then um I got a LinkedIn message, a cold LinkedIn DM for those of you who are wondering if this trick works from a guy and it just hit me in a different way than any other cold DM did. He seemed more chill like he didn't need it. this was, you know, because he could. Um, and so I went and checked him out. He had agency, multiple agencies, bought and sold experience, and he wasn't like 70 years old, which was a benefit. And so I was like, I'm just going to call this guy and just see what happens. Just going to call him. And I get on the phone with him and we had 30 minutes planned. We start chatting. We don't chat a drop of business. We're just chatting. 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes goes by. And I'm like, I'd love to work with you, Dave. Like, if not work with you, like, give me your phone number. Let's text and be buddies. And he's like, great. Here's my fee. And I looked at it and I was like, there's not a chance in hell I can afford this right now. Not a chance. And he's like, okay, let's do 3 months. Pay me what you can. And so that started and immediately out of the gate, first week, he's telling me things that were roadblocks that were coming up the road from me that I couldn't see yet. Things that he had personally walked into, hit the wall, and gone around afterwards. And so it was like having radar out in front of my business. Um he was able to just see the trend in my business. And and the best part is he didn't take over. If I said I wanted to do it this way, he was like great, let's work it that way. And I still made some mistakes. And he totally let me make them. But it was it was a really refreshing experience to have someone on the team that had made all those mistakes. And so at the same time, I really kicked it into high gear with Tik Tok. And so then 2024, we went from good golly, we're going to close the doors. I hope we can make it to we did over a million dollars. Um and we grew the agency. And then that's when I ended up doing the merger at the end of that year. And um yeah, when I came over to the new agency and we merged everything together, uh the old CEO bounced. Dave, would you come do it? And he's like, "Sure." And so that's how we ended up here. Wait, so you made Okay. So, so your revenue in 2024 was 1 M and now you're on track to hit 18M for end of 2026. And so I don't know, can you share what it was in 2025? Uh 2025 was a combination of things. One, it was streamlining everything internally, getting a handle on internal budget. Um the the so at the end of 24 I ended up merging with Finch. So my agency was called Wizard Marketing. We only did SEO. Finch only did ads. We merged. And so that gave us a little revenue pop, right? Finch was sorry. Finch was your agency as well or somebody else? Somebody else's? Somebody else's. Um, and so we ended up merging agencies, splitting uh share because ads and SEO, they're a match made in heaven as far as a marketing agency is concerned. They had their clients begging for SEO services. I had mine begging for ad services. Um, and it made a lot of sense at at the time. Like I said, the CEO kind of exited shortly after that because their books were very bad. They were not being very fiscally responsible as an agency. Um, and so myself and Dave coming in kind of we had to reset the board and while we're resetting the board, we built a lot of effort behind lead genen. Uh, and so Q3 and Q4 we ended up closing, geez, what was it? What did you say? Like 450K you added like Yeah, like 450K MR. Yeah. In just the last two quarters of last year. So, and that was with no pipeline to start with. Um, no, like outside of a couple lingering things from me, Finch had no prospects when we merged. Um, because they weren't putting any effort in sales. They were all retentionbased. yeah. What percentage of your revenue comes from your Tik Tok audience? And then are you getting like substantial a substantial percentage from any of your other channels such as like Instagram or or YouTube? Is that me personally or the business in total? The business. So right now our marketing strategy outside of cold LinkedIn DM our entire strategy is built around advertising that features me. So whether it's organic channel growth, uh paid channel growth, um pretty much everything is somehow connected to me in that strategy except for cold LinkedIn DMs. These are but these are ads. These are paid ads. This isn't like organic. Correct. Yes. Mhm. And so you don't you don't know the the difference between like ads and organic. Basically, we don't really differentiate it internally at the moment. Um, just it's everything somehow features me. So, I will say this, in the past 6 months, nine months, whatever, uh, we have added three clients that are in our top five clients. All three of them have entered from organic Tik Tok. They saw a live, they asked a question, they DM'd calendar, some longer than others, close cycles, but all three of those came from Tik Tok lives initially. Has your inbound ever ever ever dipped really significantly? And then like how did you handle team costs during that period? Like did you Yeah. Like a backup maybe had a backup or something. I I don't know. Um I mean the 2023 that was that year. Um as an owner I have a hard hard firm stance. Owners eat last. um you pay your people, you pay your bills, um and then you pay you. And so that was that was a hard year. I was when I said we were up against the wall, my options were can a critical employee and step back into delivery, but I get paid. um cut the vast majority of our expense structure um which would have made us go back to Google Sheets as a core management tool which isn't the worst but we didn't want to. We had a very very elegant automated system through monday.com that is phenomenal. um or uh you know fi figure out something else to generate more sales and in the meantime I take no paycheck. Those were the options and uh I chose option three. I went without pay for five, six months and I had to make a lot of personal life changes, you know. Um, it was pretty much just groceries and gas and that was it for a couple months. Uh, but you make those choices and I'm glad I did because all of those people who I kept on payroll stayed on payroll are still on payroll. They're phenomenal. They'll And you know what? Unless they watch this, they probably don't even know what happened. Yeah, maybe. Who knows if they'll watch. When you're doing the lives, uh, how often do people ask you questions you don't know the answer to? Because the thing about SEO is it it's so research heavy and it's so nuance nuanced and case by case basis and like I like getting you know the questions that I get on this podcast it's people asking you about their probably their specific situations in which to give like a really good answer you actually have to look at their sites and looking at their sites requires focusing and quiet. So how do you do that with the lives? Oh okay you caught me. All right. The the the secret is that there are tiers of how good an answer is. Okay. I can give an excellent sounding semi non-answer to something that I know is is that level of investigation. I'm also blessed. I've been doing this for over 13 years and I've seen a lot of businesses. I've worked in a lot of industries. Um, I just have weird levels of experience in random random things uh that allow me to give semient answers to some of those things. But on the flip side, the amount of repeat questions that I get live to live to live to live is astronomically insane. Um to to the point where my regulars have jokes about my answers being the same for some of these questions and it's a like a little internal meme within the community. Are you are you do syndicating your lives across every platform that accepts lives like uh X and YouTube and Twitch and Instagram? I have tried it and there are two reasons why I haven't been doing it recently. Number one is that when you use a specific platform and their specific streaming tools, you tend to get better results if I try to go live to Tik Tok through OBS. All right, I'm going to tell you something. So, I had on um this e-com e-commerce girl, her name is Kada Dervvisi, and she live streams simultaneously to all these platforms. She uses an individual phone for each of them, and she literally has a like a row of phones like this, but and it's it's more effort, but like she makes so much more money because of it. Yeah. And and that's definitely a consideration. Um because so there's the tech component where it just like my Tik Tok lives average at least 60 people for the whole live and it rotates out, right? Um it ends up being about 1,700 people who see the live over an hour 15. Awesome. Um the when I do it through other technology that isn't inate I'm lucky to hold 30. So it's number one it's there. Number two is that the the effort to manage and the confusion that it creates at least for my format. If I'm on TikTok and I get a question on Instagram and I answer it and the people can't scroll and find it in the comments, they go, "What are you answering? You're this is recorded. This is fake. I'm out." And it creates actually a dissonance for me in my format. It would literally be better for me to do like I'm going to be on Tik Tok and then immediately afterwards start an Instagram and then immediately afterwards start a YouTube. Like that would be a better format. Um I could see I could see maybe you would have like the the you would have like all the phones lined up and then you you'd literally put like a cardboard icon of like Tik Tok over one phone, Instagram over another and then you could say, "Oh, we have a question from David on Instagram and from Sophie on YouTube." Uh, Gogan, I've been hugging the mic, so I want to let you ask questions. I'm so sorry. No. Uh, I I was uh just about to ask like you mentioned that uh people engage with you on TikTok. Uh do they ever ask you like like if someone is converting from like a a viewer to a lead and they are asking like maybe run SEO or PPC campaigns, they come to you and they are like, "Uh, Jake, we just want to work with you. We don't want to work with your team." Like how do you handle that situation? because many people like like even my existing clients because I just do SEO and we don't do anything else u SEO web development and uh content writing also uh but no PPC and when I recommend some other agenc Clients are like, "Ah, no, no, no, no. We can pay you. We can pay you more, but you run our campaign." And I'm like, "I don't know SEO and my team don't Oh, sorry. I know SEO only. My team don't know PPC. We can't do that for you." But they are like, "No, we are not asking for recommendations. We just want you to do the PPC, too." And I'm like, "Yeah, uh, fantastic question. By the way, um this is a common question for people who are trying to do like a founder brand. You have to make it part of your process to build the faith you have in your team with the person who has faith in you, right? You're you're a link in the chain, right? So, you build trust with the audience. Let's say Ed reaches out to me with his business. Oh, I like you, Jake, and let's do some business, right? Okay. And we get on a call and it's me and him and my sales guy and you know, it's like, "Well, you're going to work with uh our DSP expert, Jace." And and Ed goes, and I'm like, "Wait, no, I wanted Jake. I wanted Jake the marketing wizard. What is this?" Yeah. So, at this point, it is now my job to build the trust with Jace, uh, between Ed and Jace. So, I would go, uh, Ed, that's awesome. And I am going to be here every step of the way. I'm going to be in on the strategy. I'm going to be in on the deployment. I'm going to be in on your analytics meeting. You don't want me to do it. Jace is 10 times better at this than I do because this is all he does all day long. And so you start to build this conversation of like the person Jake trusts is this other person. And so that's where you start to build that that link. But then you have to be very cognizant of it in the sales and the onboarding process. I need to show up with that person. I need to be a cheerleader for that person. When it comes time to do our first analytics review, I have to be on that meeting to celebrate what that person did for the client. So, you kind of make this weird thing where it's like you're the face of the business. You're the reliable source that they trust. And then when they come behind the curtain with you, you actually are like the giddy little intern that's excited to work with everyone else in your agency. So you're you're on every sales call. I am on sales qualified lead sales calls. Okay. How many how many hours of uh like not including um getting leads, you know, just you know doing doing lives, putting out organic content, how many hours of agency work do you do a week? You mean outside of like content production? Outside of the content production, how many hours of agency? So So that includes the calls with clients or or or potential clients. Uh that includes any management, any research m maybe eight. Okay. Eight hours a week. One one day a week total spread out across the week. Uh I guess uh maybe your team is like giving you inputs on campaigns like uh like before a sales call they already have like a research document for you that you can just review and see rather than you yourself going into like Google search console or J4 or trying to dig the numbers. Yeah. I mean me and my sales guy have a really great rapport. Um, I am very very good at winging it at this point. Like if if you're a potential a potential lead for me and you're hearing me say this, uh, I I I care greatly about your account. I'm just Oh, you just turned down the Could you Sorry. You just turned down the volume of your mic. Put it I thought I was hitting too high. There we go. Um, yeah, I uh I'm very very good at at very little information being translated into strategy. Um, it's one of my my superpowers as a marketing person. So, um, I can go into a meeting cold, pull up a website while I'm talking and develop a strategy on the spot. Um, likewise, my sales guy can do that, too. And we know everything that our team does. So, all we have to do is plant a seed. We don't have to get detailed with it. And that's that's a secret I think a lot of people screw up in sales is they go too detailed too early. I need you I need you to buy on a certain level of trust and vibe. Clients who buy only after you've given them the strategy will always be headache clients who hold your feet to the fire and have no pliability. they're not adaptable. They're not going to be able to shift to a new strategy or a new idea in flight. They're going to want to stick to the plan. Even if it's bad after you've rolled it out and you see that it's not working, they won't want to switch. And so, inevitably, that will fall. So, that's why we always want them to get some level of buy in before we go detailed on the strategy. Uh yes I think uh that is a great approach even like to me like once I feel like it's the sales process is getting too long like they are asking for meeting with brand manager and then next week they areuling with marketing manager and next week they want to do a meeting with some other person and next week they are like oh you we our executive want you to see you and the longer it gets and the more people they want to involve in the sales process the messier it is after that even if your strategy is all right But it's it's going to be like a five six people performance managing your campaign from the client side while it should just be like one or two people from their side. Absolutely. And that's the role that you know once once we get behind the curtain and we get into the sales process that's really the job that I play is if they want to bring in someone that isn't the saleserson right I'm there to catch it because they've built trust with me and if I can play the expert on TV if you will right usually we can get past the well I want to talk to the guy who's actually going to have his hands on the keyboard for Mike. You know, everybody knows that one, right? So, I just kind of intercept that as much as possible and let the sales guy do his magic. But if they want to get into details, if they they're like, "We cannot buy without a plan," we make them pay for it. Yep. How much do you rely on full staff? Sorry, full-time staff versus part-time contractors for delivery. And do you ever sub subcontract to white label partners when demand spikes beyond like what your delivery team can afford? Um, we have a very detailed scaling org chart. We have trigger points that let us know we need to hire this person before it becomes a problem. Um, so we are not caught off guard typically unless we have like a huge week, right? Um, which would be a great problem to have. Uh, that being said, I have very very minimal contractors in the business. They're hyper specialists that we bring in. For example, we have one client that is uh German, German speakaking. My SEO team is all US-based. So, we have a German SEO specialist follows our strategy, our rollout methodology, everything. They just speak German, you know. So, that that's kind of where we'll touch on those elements where it's just like so far outside of the scope typically. Um, but generally very low contractor and rather than white label anything through, we would rather you work with our partner because and and here's the the reason why we like that over a white label. Yes, you have trust with us, but if we use that trust to sell something with our name on it and the other people don't don't drop the ball. don't hit your vibe because I think vibe is incredibly important in picking your agencies, we will lose a reliable good client. Whereas if we say, "Hey, we don't do that. That's not our thing. We don't do email marketing. At least not yet. Work with these guys. We love them. We think they're awesome. But you're gonna have your own relationship with them. If that fizzles, we're okay most of the time. Okay? If it succeeds and crushes, they like us more for bringing them an awesome agency. And the amount of rev we would make on the pass through as a white label is not worth the retention cost of that client. Or you have a bad or they have a bad experience and then they write something negative publicly. Exactly. And it was completely out of our hands. Yeah. So I just we will white label for other companies but we don't do any white label passroughs in like for our Yeah. And even like like to me like many uh clients they ask like which AI content generator SAS tool they should buy and I'm like I can't uh I know the names I I have used most of them but I'll not make like a specific recommendation to you. You should just like go to their websites. These are all the 10 names and just go to their website fill the form talk to their sales team and decide based upon that. like it's it's just uh too uh sort of like a tricky situation because you can uh see that they offer a great product but how your client team is going to use it that's where the outcome is and you can't like pro promise that by your recommendation uh of a specific company you know right right yeah I mean that's let let me just throw a counterpoint in that's the safe way. But if you do give a recommendation, people love when the people they trust have opinions. And it can be a good uh point to build relationship and trust by giving them. Well, this look, I've tried 10 of them. This is the one I I really like. Right. Test these other ones. This is the one I really like. Um it I know you're you're not in the US, but every year the US president is asked which football team are they rooting for in the Super Bowl. And every year they say, "I just hope it's a good game. I just hope it's a good game." You want your approval numbers to spike, pick a team. I swear. Like it's it's that important to people that you just have an opinion. It's a good call. I think it it also like uh depends upon what sort of a relationship you you have with clients. Uh and also I just wanted to ask you about the delivery part that Edward mentioned earlier. I'm not sure like uh what market you are targeting like SMBs or enterprise uh market like how is that split for you like if you you can share anything about that and how do you manage the delivery for like SMBs versus the big big guys you know. Yeah, I mean that answer is actually wrapped up in the way we present our brand. The way that we come to market, our not selling proposition, but um our our point of interest is that every single person on our exact team has built and sold agencies. So, this is like an agency swan song agency, right? Uh our goal is to kind of be your agency's favorite agency, if you will. All right. Uh and we're doing enterprise level tactics because we've all worked with Fortune 500 companies, but we're focused on small lower to mid-market, right? We want clients like our ideal customer profile is anywhere from like 15 to 25 million uh in revenue looking to scale to 50. Like that's our sweet spot. We have about a 60% split of e-commerce to non-ecommerce. E-commerce is definitely easier just from the ads perspective. Like it's it's a home run every single time. Um but we do have a good presence in hospitality. We have a good presence in local service business. Um we have a good presence in uh enterprise software. So it's really more about who wants to grow and go. that's more important to us because the clients who let us run have massive amounts of growth. Like I and I I'm not giving you a marketing line here, okay? Like last year, our blended rorowaz across all of our accounts, so this is account companywide, our blended rorowaz was 12.65 65 for growth. we're going to make your needles move. We're going to find the other problems in your business. Is logistics a problem? Is product fulfillment a problem? Like, you're going to know real quick working with us. So, that's kind of how we position ourselves uh in the marketplace. Joan, you're muted. I think uh uh I think that is great approach like if if you can move the needle for SMBs you can of course do great work for enterprises and if you know you you have already worked with like large brands then of course you can bring those strategies back to the like like small small brands that you're working with enterprise level experience in a boutique setting. So, a lot of people who would pick an enterprise solution but don't want to be lost in the crowd as a number, right? Like, oh, I'm just one of their Fortune 500 companies, you know? Um, we're going to care a lot more about those accounts at our level. You're going to get that specialty experience. Whereas if you went to like, you know, Omnicom or something, you're going to buy who are you again. Yeah, we were talking. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Uh yeah I think uh you you have hit like a lucky spot maybe uh because it's really really hard for almost everyone that I know like who run agency or who is involved with the operation to get uh right at scale of the revenue numbers that you are doing right now. So I think uh congratulations on that. I'll I'll tell you the secret. It's a super simple secret and every single agency listening to this podcast can use this right now. You are not charging enough. You need to raise your rates. Period. Full stop. That is the problem. I was stagnant for five years of my agency because I wanted to make my product accessible. I wanted to make, you know, let people buy it, let them have it. They need it. Yes, they do. And that is a great heart to have. And if that's why you're in business, cuz you want to help your clients, you're a fantastic founder. That being said, your product is probably worth two, three, or four times more than you're charging for it. And the clients know it already. They already know it. They know they're getting a deal. You need to bring your payment in alignment with the value you create. And the people who know that already will be okay paying it. That's it. You're not charging enough. And it feels sickening to raise your rates. Believe me, I've done it three times. And every single time it's made my business better. It's made my clients more satisfied. It's made my relationship with them stickier. Um it's given me more power to do things in my agency I couldn't do before. Like and honestly you burn the chaff clients off like which is really really helpful. So raise your rates. Yep. That's the way. That's it. That's the secret sauce. That is the secret sauce. we were we were talking about margins before and a lot of agencies they see their margins compress as they grow and so it's like uh especially due to like you know added complexity and so how have you protected margins and what has been your biggest margin killer? Oh wow. the biggest margin killer is when you panic sell. when you look at the books and you're like, I need to sell two more clients. And you cut the cost to get those clients on the books and then it burns you for 12, 24, 36 months. That is a margin killer. As far as like an active margin killer, you need to do a uh a credit card review once a quarter. What are we paying for in this business, guys? you you just collect things along the way. It's not it's not malicious. No one's doing anything bad. You probably needed that thing, but the the vast amount of like we're just rolling the card every month is really bad. And then the last thing I would say, and this one hurts, especially if you're a founder who like cares about your people, I can almost guarantee you you have a person on staff that you should have fired six months ago. And if you're listening to this podcast and a name popped into your head, you need to go let that person go. And let me tell you my story of this because this was a killer for me. I had a person on staff who was one of my OG staff members. I loved him to death. I trained him up from nothing. He was great. He was spunky. He was energetic. I cared about him personally. And it was great for a long time. And the business changed. And because of that, his job changed. And he did not like the new job that he was in. But we needed it. Oh god, we needed him in that seat. And so over a six-month period, he dropped the ball on delivery. He was bad at customer uh handling. He ended up losing us um four clients and I didn't want to get I was like, I can save him. I can save him. I can help him. you know, he was in a rough spot in his personal life, too. And I knew this. So, I'm making all of these excuses for him. And I was like, he's not going to have money if I fire him. I'm going to ruin his life. And one of the the things that my business coach came in and was like, "You got to fire this guy. You got to let him go. It's going to be okay. You got to let him go." And I held off. I held off. I held off. Finally, I pulled the trigger. And he hated me. Oh, he hated me. Was so mad. Lost it. Texting me angry stuff. like I had to shut him out of all the systems like really quickly before he did something. Anyways, flash forward two and a half years or flash forward six weeks, I replace him. amazing, perfect fit, happy. Actually paid him a little less because it was just a perfect fit job. It wasn't like a catch-all job. Um, he's been phenomenal. That person's still with me to this day. Uh, and then flash forward to literally last week, I got a text message from that original employee. He's doing phenomenal. He's an allstar at the agency he's at. He has a job that he loves. He's crushing it. He's making more money with with that job than he was going to make with me in that same period of time. Like, it was the best thing for his life for me to fire him. He just didn't know it. I didn't know it. So, don't feel bad. You can feel sad, but don't feel bad for firing someone. Got to do what you got to do. Gagen, you're muted. Oh, one sec. I think uh sometime sometimes you just have to see that a business is growing, but the person is not growing with it. Yes. And uh and you can try everything to help them grow with it, but sometimes it just can't. just it's it's almost like they have a different life that they should be pursuing rather than uh be with you and grow with career letter in your business. So everything is part of your journey everything and that pit stop for working for my business was a part of his career and his journey and it benefited him greatly. And in in his message to me literally last week, he was like, "I am so grateful for the time. I would love to catch up and pick your brain. I have these new problems of my own in this business and I think that you would have a good take on them." Like his trust never disappeared. It was in the moment that he thought I was betraying him, but in actuality, I was freeing him up to go and take the next step in his journey. And you know, that's just one story of that. I've got more of those, but it it seems to work out just about every time. If you truly love a person on your staff and they are not cutting it, the most loving thing you can do is to release them to find the thing that's going to fit for them. And they're not going to be happy about it and they're going to freak out and they're going to panic and then it's all going to be okay. You decided to remove yourself from operations. What was the phase out period like? So, right now you said you're you're doing eight hours of of work a week, but like what was it like when you were phasing yourself out? Yeah, great question. Took about nine months. Took about nine months to fully do the phase out. So, phase one was because I was running all of the SEO strategy and overseeing implementation. So, I had to bring in somebody to oversee that and start training them. So, we kind of sat in a seat together. I showed them how I thought. I showed them how I did everything. And I told him, I was like, "You don't have to do it exactly this way. You have to achieve the same kind of output, right?" Um, and so that was like a 3-month period of just handling that. Um, and then I transitioned into kind of an oversight on the SEO department. Um, and that was really like making sure core clients or key clients were finding success, maybe being on some of their meetings still for the non, you know, tier 2, tier three clients. um being available, sending them some emails, checking in, playing a little bit of a like, hey, my guy that you're now with doesn't know I'm sending this email. How's it going? You know, uh and playing a little bit of that kind of role. And then just still doing some training. Oh, hey, this process should be like this. This output's a little off. Let's do it more like this. Um, and then shifting that into month seven to nine where I was kind of just on call for the team. Um, and setting up all of the ancillary parts of the business that interfaced with SEO. So like making sure sales is dialed in before I step away, making sure that billing is filled in before I step away. Um, and so it it took it was a good process. Um and then yeah starting like starting January I was fully cut off from I'm a department of one now and I have no responsibilities in any other department. So before you started this process did you like announce it to the company that this is your sort of like a yearly goal that you want to achieve or it just like happens you know? Yeah, it was definitely a goal. It was it was talked about. Um the the longhaul goal is that the presence that I'm building now will generate more presence. So we'll be at trade shows and we'll be at speaking stages and um you know getting in front of the more enterprise level and we'll be able to scale up in between that time, right? So, it's like the business is in a good spot to match the strategy because I am getting some good size accounts that are coming through the work that I'm doing, but they're not too big that we can't handle them, right? And they're not too small that they're frustrating. Uh, and then as I scale up, that that should also scale up. So, uh, it's just worked out well as a strategy for the agency. Um, overall. Yeah. And also like uh how did your your like personal brand helps you with like recruiting like like do you do you end up like getting lot of inbound from like really high quality people trying to work for you or or how does that work? Yes, it's it's probably not the quite the volume that you think it is. Um, but we have a careers page on the website specifically for this process because at least two times a week in my lives, people are like, I'd love to work with you. And we are a fully remote global agency. So, if you're qualified and you're a fit, the possibility of you working for us is legitimate and real. Um it's just a matter of when when we're following that scaling growth org chart when something comes available we put it out there and we'll see who gets it. So yeah, when when there's issues with uh with client accounts, I think you were talking we were talking about this before. Is there a management layer that handles that or does it still come back to you and and how did you build that buffer and when did it kick in? Yeah. Yeah, that's a good one. um in so we have a a text channel in our company chats. It's called the red alert channel. Everyone has access to it. Everyone can type in it. And it is there for when you need the exact team's eyeballs on something right the heck now. Um, and that is where I get involved is that if a client is in a meeting, they can be in a meeting with the client and type in the red alert channel and if they drop the link to that meeting, I'm in it or one of the exec team members is in it. Okay. My job in that kind of like red alert process is I sit on the side of the table with the client. I look back at the agency and go, "Ah, these these Like, how are we going to get them? Like, I can't believe they've done this to us, you know?" Uh, and so I get to play a little bit of an interesting role because I get to legitimately kind of come at my own team and they have to defend themselves. I love them and I know that they have a good reason. Like my team's not just going to drop the ball because um, but that's kind of the role I play is like I want them to feel like there's someone more angry than them because there can only be one angriest person in the room. This is a great tactic you can use if you ever have a red alert situation is be the angriest person in the room because there is a natural psychological response in humans you want to calm down the angriest person. So if you become the angriest person, the client who started angry will actually try to calm you down. They will walk back a lot of their their sentiment to the point where the real problem is. So I get to play that role. I get to hulk out and like be that and your does your team know that this is like a thing and so that they it doesn't hurt them when you when you Hulk out. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. It's like, David, I like it was a mistake for you even being born. And the client is like, "Jake, come on. Calm calm down, Jake. This you're going a bit too far. You know, it's just it's just we're spending too much on ads and not making enough. Come on." Like, oh my gosh. One of my favorite moments that I ever had, I had a I had a account representative that was on an account and he got his opportunity to pursue his uh dream of being in Broadway musical theater. Like this was a stop gap for him and always was. And he was on an account that was a little rough. And so he's like, I I'm putting my two weeks in. All like applaud for him. like great stuff. But the client was a little dissatisfied. And so I went in there, I was like, I fired his ass. Like here's your new account manager. Like I can't believe he treated you that way. And it it worked out great. Yeah, I bet. Um, so we we we were talking about this too. What does your what does your leadership team look like? Like uh how do you stay so so you have like the red alert channel. How do you stay aligned with the CEO or general general manager without like really getting I mean you're doing eight hours work a week but without like really getting in the weeds or and does that person set goals for the agency independently or does the strategic direction still come from you? Yeah. So we follow the EOS model from traction. If you've not read the book Traction recommend you go and pick it up. It discusses the EOS model uh the entrepreneurial operating system EOS uh and it has a very very good way of structuring your business specifically from a internal management and comms flow directive. So our CEO the the core part of the EOS system is uh how your executive leadership is structured and how do you interface and communicate. So, I'm just going to give you the whole book really quick cuz it's easy. All right. So, at the top of your your org chart, you have um your visionary, which is usually your CEO, and their job is to think about the business 1 2 3 4 5 years from now. They also can do no work like they cannot be involved in doing anything because they have to hold the direction and look at the business today and say where are are our problems right underneath that person or associated with that person is your integrator. This is your day-to-day person. They take the vision from the visionary and they turn it into operational action. Okay. So, we really kind of have two CEOs in like a functionary, but one is our CEO, our visionary, and then one is our COO. Rachel is our chief operating officer. And so, she kind of really runs the business from like a day-to-day technical perspective. The vast majority of people at the business actually report to her just from an org chart uh alignment. And then the way that you kind of communicate in the business is you do uh these weekly meetings um called L10s. Okay? And so an L10 is simply this. When you sit in your org chart, you have an L10 up and an L10 down. Meaning that you have an L10 with every with the group of people directly above you and you have an L10 with the group of people directly below you or adjacent to you. So, from an executive position, uh, as like kind of the marketing leader, I do an executive L10. That's my ex my up, right? And then I do a marketing L10 with my marketing group, 1 L10 down, and it's a 90-minute meeting. It follows a very simple structure. You can go ask chat GPT what that structure is. It's super simple. It provides so much clarity and it doesn't allow you to have a massive amount of like medium bloat in the week. Eating bloat is awful. Medium bloat is the worst. It doesn't mean it it doesn't try to exist. Like it still tries, but everybody in the uh organization has an out and it's simply this. Is this going to directly impact the business within the next seven days? And if the answer is no, it becomes an item in your next L10. Easy. So, okay, everyone reports to Rachel. Was Rachel in place before you took on this uh this business mentor as the CEO or did that CEO hire Rachel? Rachel worked for Dave, my business coach CEO at one of his previous agencies that he sold and exited. So when uh when we got together he's like we because I am not an operations person. I am crap at operations. Um and he Dave is also not good at operations like like strategically yes but operationally no. Right. Um, in fact, we've we've been on monday.com for two years and Dave still has not accepted his invitation to log into it. Like that that's where we're at. Okay. Um, but Rachel Rachel her favorite thing like she would say this if she was on the podcast. Um, she saves spreadsheet work for the afternoons so she can have fun working in spreadsheets. Oh, I like spreadsheets. Yeah, she loves spreadsheets. Um, and so like she was a necessary piece that we needed uh to help the whole thing kind of click together. How did Dave find her? Uh, it's a great story. Um, he found her. She was a uh like a secretary at a office building. You know when you go to an office building and there's like that one random per check in at the sheet and they don't really do much. That's what she was doing. And she was getting paid technically below minimum wage. Um, and she just had a Jenna Qua. And so Dave was like, I'm going to bring you over. And he trained her up from having no business skills at their one of their previous agencies to being like his she never made it to his right-hand man at the previous agency, but he's like she was capable of it. And so when we made the transition over here, he like reached out to her and was like, "Come over with us." So cool. How for for people who want to find their own Dave, their own business coach to make a CEO, what what would you recommend? Like what qualities would you recommend looking for? What experience in background would you recommend looking for? Yeah. Um gosh, it's a good question. First of all, you need to evaluate if you're a CEO. Like I I think that this is an important part is that a lot of founders are actually great operators. They they have a great product. They built a great thing and they know that thing and they love that thing and they care about that thing. You're actually probably a COO type rather than a CEO type. CEOs, their unique quality is that they know how to have a vision and get people to get to that vision on their own. That's called leadership, right? Not management. Um, and I think most founders just don't have that as a quality. And this is not a knock. If you're a founder and you're going, "Man, I do love the product, but I just can't get people to get on board with the long-term vision." You're not a CEO. That's okay. You can be the owner, and you could be the lowest position in your company. Both of those things are totally like a lot a lot a lot a lot of founders are actually director of sales, like chief sales officer. That is your real role because you you know it and you can bring the energy and you can bring the heat to people. That might be a great seat for you. But casting the vision in a way that gets people to come to the vision rather than training people towards the vision. You still need to train people, don't get me wrong on that, but it's it's not it's not an inherent talent and it is difficult to train. And so if you're in a business and you can't do the books, what do you do? You hire an accountant. Well, if you're in a business and you can't vision cast correctly and in a way that impacts your team, you need to get a CEO. And there's no harm, no foul in that. A lot of people think that that's a bad choice uh because they're very protective of their business. I am I take a little bit more of a realistic approach about that. I like that distinction between management and leadership. Like that was something that I had to learn at one of my previous companies which was it was just you might have ideas of how things should go but if you want people to actually do the best work that they are capable of. You need to let them decide for themselves even when you disagree with their decisions. Absolutely. Um disagree and commit is one of my favorite phrases. I say it all the time. I disagree with your take, but you're closer to the ground on it than I am. So, I'm going to commit to your decision. Um, I think it's a fantastic way to be uh respectful and positive forward movement instead of freezing up the company because decision fatigue is real and the more that they stack up, the worse it gets. So, you've got to choose and go. And I'm sure uh with website design go uh you know this where you get to the end and you're like this website's done and they're still tweaking it and they're still tweaking it and you're like just put it freaking live. Like come on. That's just a microcosm. It's the same deal at every layer of the business. Yeah. And I think uh one of the like the biggest unlock for me was realizing that it's not my business, I am a employee of the business. So if you put like it's my business and you're approaching it from that side, then it it becomes more of like ego approach where you're like I am the best CEO, I can run my business, this is my business, I should be doing the operations, I should be doing the sales. But once you once I personally like like shifted from like this is the business account, this is my company registration and I am an employee and I need to hire better employees who can run these specific things for me. That's where I was like okay now I can grow and until I I until I was like I need to hold on to it. This is my thing. So every problem is my problem and every vein is my my vein and but once you let let uh let go that and you are like I'm just an employee of this business then you approach like this is just a business sales guys we need sales head of sales or or someone uh to run like web development uh we we can just hire hire anyone and anyone's win in the business is their win I should try to celebrate that and not like take ownership of trying to take ownership of that so this was like a sort of like a big thing where I had to shift my mindset because I did computer science at the university and I was like geeking out for like four years. It's not like I was uh talking to like lot of people who are uh running the business or who are studying marketing. So I had like really really technical approach to it where I was like okay this is how you write the Python code and this is how I'm going to run the business and this is how I I'm going to interact with people. But it did not work out. But once I realized that this is not like my thing that I need to hold on to it like so firmly. I'm just an employee of the company and I even though it's my company but I need to consider myself as like a employee and just do the best as an employee would do for my company not like a owner would approach it you know. Yeah. I mean I've said this for closing in on a decade. Great founders want to fire themselves as fast as possible. Like that's that's really what it comes down to because the more time you give yourself as a founder, the more impact you can actually have on the business. So if you have the business running and you kind of sit outside of it, when you have client issues, when you have delivery issues, when you have issues with the books, you can step in and you have all of the space, the time, and the clarity to devote to fixing that. So, don't be afraid to put someone else in charge. My cousin, his he has a business. It's the most insane thing ever, but it works very well for him. His whole business is he buys struggling businesses that have good opportunity, right? and he basically takes the owner and moves them out of the org or to the correct seat in the org and he hires a Harvard business grad to be the CEO and then he forgets he owns that business and he just keeps doing that over and over again. Dude has like 75 businesses at this point and he makes more money than the three of us will in our lifetimes. Tell me if you if you see this when you do with a disagree and and commit. When you when you disagree and commit, it causes people to own their decisions. And so if they do get it wrong, they actually learn from the mistake versus like if you just tell somebody what to do, they might not learn. This is a hard sentence. I know both of you know this. Pain is the greatest teacher. Giving someone a safe space to fail in is one of the greatest gifts you can give a person. And this isn't just a business thing. This is a life thing. I do it with my kids all the time. I'm going to give you a safe space to fail. and they actually develop and learn something from that. I I I think that it's an important distinction to make and disagree and commit is a great way to do that because you've already publicly addressed the direction that you think it should go. So, there's already a backup plan. There's already another route that we can take, but I'm going to give you the safe space to fill. And if you win, I'm I'm super pumped I was wrong. And if you lose, you won't lose again. How many uh we were talking about this earlier. How many distinct service offerings do you have? And how customizable are engagements? Like do you do you hold really firm on standardized productized packages or will you customize offerings for the right client? Oh, also uh sorry. Yeah. Uh I just wanted to add to like uh what you said Jake uh because I think both of you guys are like uh maybe 10 10 to 15 or maybe 20 years ahead of me in terms of like age and carrier and and life experience. So you uh I think uh for me the cost of any small failure is really high right now right now because of my age I I don't have the level of the reputation level of like team skills and everything else you know so it it what would your advice be to like like someone who is just like 25 looking back like like I'm I I'm not asking your age but like if you look back and you say you see you yourself at age of 25 and you're running this agency you're trying to grow then what you will tell yourself like I just wanted to ask it so that's why sorry I interrupted that's a great question I'm going to Gary Vee on you for a second okay you've got all the time in the world when you're young you have the opportunity to make the big swings and the big the big swing for the fence moments take your big mistakes now because I guarantee you as you get older, your you your perspective on being able to make mistakes will will shift and you'll you'll look back and go, I could have made the bigger mistakes back then. It feels like you can't because it it's also fresh and so new and so scary and you haven't probably had enough failures to realize how big each failure is. Right? So what you consider a small failure now might be a extremely nominal risk when you get later on in your And so I I would encourage you like you you have flexibility, you've got capability. I can, you know, just tell from this that you're you're a clever person, which being clever in business is a superpower. Take your risks, do it, and then as you have more to lose in the future, start bringing in that risk assessment, risk management. It doesn't mean you don't still swing for the fences. I just had this right like couple weeks ago. We had a client who was a very, very large SEO client. We had a quarter of their book of business I wanted to get the whole thing. the person who originally signed up with us uh was unexpectedly exited from the company and the new person came in and I could just tell right away we weren't on the same same wavelength. Like it was like oof. I could have sucked up. I could have changed how we deliver. I could have done a lot of things to ride that account out for an extra six I went in, I took a swing, and I put down the I know more than you card. You either trust me or you don't. And guess what? I lost the account. And that was a revenue hit. Not something that we can't survive, but it was a nice cozy. I mean, we were doing $25,000 a month SEO package with them, and that was only a quarter of their You can do the math on that. That's a good SEO account. It wasn't worth all of the other pains in the business for me to not take that shot. And so sometimes the risk is actually multileveled and you got to kind of evaluate it because I didn't want my team to have to change what they did for this client for the next 6 months for them to turn out anyways because she didn't really like me and she didn't really like the way that we did it. She was very old school, not a lot of new techniques in her bag for SEO. And so it didn't pan out. But guess what? I saved my team a ton of effort, a ton of headache, and we've opened up a gap for a new client, and we've already signed two more accounts that have covered most of that. So, take the swings. Yeah. Actually, I'm I'm trying to go as max as possible. Like uh I'll just give you like like one example like uh last year in October I was in Dubai for some time for some business meetings and then I got introduced to like like a management company like who run a businesses for like people who are like out of their business like they are rich enough but it's sort of like like a management company like a family house which manages around like 56 businesses in Dubai in Middle East in Australia in Singapore combined and the guy told me that for free. You will have to audit 56 sites. If you audit all these and prepare a plan, unique plan for each of these site, uh I'll sign you on for all 56 sites. And I was like, uh it's going to be a lot of work and every site was not like a small site. Every site was had like like thousands of pages. Then I just I was just like okay let's take the bet prepare a unique strategy for each of the site and we presented and he signed up for eight sites. He did not sign up for 56 but he signed up for eight but that relationship ended up like me getting introduced to like the biggest airlines in Asia and me doing consulting projects with them and I was like that was the best bet that I took. I feel felt disappointed because we did like audit of like 56 site but we ended up signing like eight but later on when he introduced me to the largest airline and I was like oh my god oh yeah oh yeah it's great I risk is the friend of opportunity you just don't know what doors are going to open so you gota you got to swing take the shot talk about your your service offerings now. So, so you don't you don't customize them. It sounds like you you you just have to have standard productized packages from an SEO perspective. Yes, we have tiers. Every single tier includes all the same stuff. It's just how much of it do you want? Um, so that makes that really easy. Um, and then on the ad side, pick your platforms. you know, we have a platform fee and then we have a percent of spend and that allows us to scale with how many campaigns we have to manage. So, it's it's not cute, it's not creative, it's not clever, it's not new. Uh, but it's reliable and it works and it makes sure that my team is covered, that we're profitable, um, and that they get what they pay for. How did you arrive at at these like at the set of services that you offer now? And like how often do you evaluate them? We evaluate them constantly. Um but we don't move too quickly on changing anything. our sales guy really wanted to always play with the pricing and the packages. We kind of had to put that to bed and be like, "Look, we will evaluate for change once a quarter. That's it for that quarter. That's the pricing. Don't freaking change it." Because 80% of the time, you're probably right. You're probably right with what you're doing. The client just is off in La La Land, right? Our our SEO packages start at $3,500 and that's a pill for people to swallow. Not every business can do that. And the secret is I'm not trying to do it for every business, right? It's it's $3,500 worth of value. You're getting everything. Yeah. You're getting everything. You're getting backlinks. You're getting a lot of technical enhancement. You're getting content creator writers that build a brand voice profile for you. You're getting oodles of competitor and market analysis that go into everything we do. You're getting access to our custom reporting systems that we've built. Like it's it is truly $3,500 worth of value. And there's always the unsaid unspoken thing which is like I got to make some money, right? Like that's what kills me is when people are like, "Ooh, you're too expensive." And then they try and talk you down like, "Well, what's in it? What's in it?" And they're doing their own math and it's like, "I'm out. We're not going to play this game." We literally had a client go to one of our suppliers and find out what our costs were with the supplier and came back to us and was like, "You're gonna charge me this or I quit." And it was like it took our margin like we try to hold a 33% margin. Okay, that's where we try to land. It would have taken our margin to 4%. And we're like, no, no, because it's it's we have you have to make money as a business. It's not just a survival technique. We can't roll over monthtomonth and have nothing in the bank. So, um, the people who don't see the value in it, you, some people are on the fence and you can maybe convince them of it. Other people, they're never going to get there and they're going to think you're robbing people and that's that's fine. That's okay. Yeah. And I think uh for you uh that pricing is is right. But uh I am more flexible on the pricing. If I see potential like like if a startup raises like $1 million and they are coming to me for SEO and and pricing is becoming a problem for them, I'm more flexible because I see the potential that today they raised 1 million tomorrow maybe they end up doing like series A at 20 million. I want that relationship right now. And uh just doing that has worked out really really well for me that I am ready to lower my margin if I see big potential in your business that that you can go from like 1 million raising 1 million to becoming a 100 million valuation company in in next 5 years you know. Oh, and we're going to do the same thing on our side. You know, yeah, if you come to us and you have a ads budget of 10K a month versus a company that comes to us who like we just had one come in our pipeline that we're talking with. They're spending a million dollar a month on paid ads. Of course, we're going to adjust. We want you to get the most bang for your buck. We're going to make sure that we're profitable. But just to kind of put it in perspective, my first SEO package that I ever sold was $300 a month and it was ludicrously underpriced, but I was trying to build up. I was I was getting a different kind of value from it. I was building those relationships. I was getting my name out there. I was showing the world that I existed. And so that was more important to me than, you know, making all of that cash from it. Now I have a lot of employees. I've got to keep them together. I've got, you know, uh a my just cost of running my business on a monthly basis is six figures. Like it's got to get paid somehow. And so there's going to be with all the moving parts and a hundred different customers, I've got to have wiggle room. And so those things happen. But you also get a better product because I have specialists. I have a technical SEO specialist. That's all he does, right? So like you're getting more granular, more detailed, a better output. It's going to cost more. How big do you get? Oh, go on. Oh, and uh just about services like uh what Edward was asking earlier like are you trying to build like AI SEO service as a separate thing because everyone I'm talking with they are like we want AI SEO but we don't want SEO like like why you are trying to say that you need to do SEO we just want to show up in chat GPT but you're coming back to SEO so we have a GEO page on our website because we do SEO for ourselves I always ask them the same question. How do you want me to report that to you? Because I have tested over 15 GEO AEO tools for analytics and reporting and all of them are built on sand. I can report something to you, but it's all about how that information got pulled. And none of it, none of that part is reliable. So, I can report to you this KPI, this metric from this AI tracking tool, but the way that they pulled that data in the first place is functionally unreliable. Is that what we're going to do? Is that Do you want that? And I'll just be honest with them like this is what the capability is or or we can do SEO and then in your Google Analytics we can see referers and we can say hey look your referers this month from chat GBT doubled. Oh next month it doubled again. H let's just walk that back strategically. What what does that mean? Oh, we're showing up more AI derp. So, it's like, do you need something special for that? And I kind of talk them out of a GEO route, but um that's where my my hiccup is with the whole thing is it's like, how do you report it? I can say I'm doing it all day long. How do you report it? Yeah. And also like are you getting leads from like chat GPT or people saying that they found you on like perplexity or AI mode or AI overviews? We've had a few from chat GPT. We've had a few. Uh we rank really well for e-commerce advertising agency as like a topical term. So we've had some stuff come through there. Uh but the leads aren't as good quality as you want them to be. Okay. I think uh almost all the studies which are out there the people say that leads from chat GPT are high quality compared to Google search like uh and and even even like personally uh for my clients I've seen that leads are not like that good good either like it's it's almost as good as what you're getting from Google search like exactly exactly um the problem with B2B in it is that B2B decision makers tend tend to fall on the upper spectrum of intelligence and critical thinking and so they're using chat GPT to generate a list they're not using the data from it necessarily um whereas if I was in like direct to consumer and I sell a specialty toilet toilet brush that cleans your toilet and that shows up in chat and it's $19.99 for the toilet brush. Normal consumers are going to just click go buy. So, um it's it's just a different type of marketplace and perspective on that. Oh, how do you think about this? like how you're expected to do expecting to do 15 to 18 m um annual revenue this year. Do you think about like what you could get to in three years and 5 years? Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean my my six-year plan is 125. You can do it. Say that. You will do it. You will do it. Yeah, absolutely. But not only that, um, with what margins? Probably holding closer to a 25%. Um, it's it's going to dip over time, but we're going to expand our service catalog. We want to become more full service over time. Um, like we're adding creative services right now. Uh, that's our newest ad. Uh, but for me, my my personal goals, like that's the business goal, right? The CEO is holding that vision. That's what he's directing us towards. And there's multiple levels to that strategy. We're probably as Finch only going to get to 60 million on our own, but we're going to go and acquire other companies to expand, right? Like we'll go when we're ready to go add email marketing, we're not going to just add it as a service line. We're going to go buy an email marketing company, bring in their entire book of business, add their one, two, whatever million to the pot, and then have that service line. So like there there's definitely not just sell your way to 125 in six years. Like it's it's not just that simple. But for me personally, my goal is I'm really trying to build um a media organization as kind of the front end of the whole business. Um I think we talked about this before, Ed, but like Yeah. Yeah. I want to build the bar stool sports of business where it's kind of this it's part community part you know entertainment part education resource place where you can go and watch shows about you know what are the top CFOs talking about or maybe a hilarious show more comedy styled about marketing fake products um or you know something kind of like diary of the CEO like we're going to have a lot of programming and the plan is build that kind of as not just a marketing engine for the business but its own entity as well. So building a business within the business and leveraging that in the entire thing as well. So when do you start doing that? It's already started. Oh yeah. So it starts with and again I'm I'm sharing some research that I've done here some hours lots of hours. Um most of these channels start with one person one So so you actually have like multiple channels now. But do you share those or or no? Um, so right now the the year one strategy is a lot of organic discovery and filling up those channels with existing content. So repurposing your content. No, its own unique content. So this is what I do every day is I'm filling up these other channels. Oh, you're posting on other channels. Yes. that people don't know about that they're going to organically start to discover and kind of building up my reputation and then once my reputation gets to a point and I'm speaking on stages and my book comes out next quarter and you know I've got a good following bringing in more personalities expanding to two or three personalities in the network letting their audiences percolate based off of the audience that I've built and then just continuing…

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