I just would wonder how many people even know whether we're the brand that we have and they just put a commercial in there. But I feel like people sometimes don't even understand that this is a successful thing if we're building this going well. Nobody ever asks us about it, ever. So it's like, I don't know if we're hiding it or we're just really bad at marketing or else. I'm proud of it on the one hand because we put a lot of hard work into it and we built something unusual. ♪♪♪ Future optimist, you sure. Welcome back to the extra special episodes, the in-between episodes where we talk about some random stuff. No, it's not a good joke. We're going to talk about something business-related today because there's this thing that's always bubbling under the surface but we never actually get to it very often because when we do the podcast, I'm interviewing other people and I'm getting their stories all the time. So let's take this time to talk about this thing bubbling under the surface which is the building of a digital marketing agency which is both of our bread and butter. It's this thing that I've been building. I started doing it on my own for a few years and we started this company in 2016 so I thought it might be interesting to talk a little bit about the journey of building an agency and what it takes to take an agency away from solopreneur and freelancer up to seven figures per year in revenue and beyond. Yeah, I actually like this topic. So where should we jump in? Like how did you come up with the idea? Sure, well a lot of things come from evolution of ideas and in fact if I were smarter, my life would have taken a very different trajectory from the time I was 10 or 12 or 13. My life and Bill Gates' life and Elon Musk had a lot of similarities up until the time I was 13 because when I was 13, I was programming my calculator in assembly language so not in basic for the nerds out there but actual assembly language, I was programming games and they still exist online, you can see this game. So I was coding for real and also learning HTML and PHP at the age of 13 and building websites but of course like an idiot, I had no concept of commercialization of that as a skill. I knew that I was interested in the future. I knew that I was interested in online communities and I was chatting with people from around the world. I was in coding, clubs, digital, ICQ channels and IRC channels, chatting with people about coding and learning. So I was doing all of the right things but what I didn't know is I didn't even conceptualize the idea that you could make money from this. And when I made games, I made them for free on a platform that you released them for free because that's just what the culture was at the time. I had some dim understanding that might be valuable, neither of my parents or entrepreneurs. I was not raised with entrepreneurship as a skill set, which is something that I wanted to change with our kids. So I just didn't have the sense of you could actually make big money if you could just flip that skill slightly over there. I just did it for the fun of it. So I was always good at technology but then I took a huge detour when that technology came into making music and digital music and then my knowledge shifted into learning logic and Ableton and synthesizers and all of that stuff. And then I wanted to be a DJ for basically 10-15 years. And I was. And I worked at a record that wanted all those things and toured and stuff. But I basically left that behind but it was always a skill that I had. And later on, just like you meet your destiny on the path you take to avoid it, I was working at a record label but it became very apparent that I had skills on the website. So very quickly, I was taking over the running of the three major websites for a major record label and applying my skills because I had those skills. I actually didn't know this. Yeah, I was running. I'm learning something. And it was also doing a startup when I graduated with a handful of the most unethical people I've ever had. The displeasure of meeting in my life. And so I was doing a startup but that was also digital and remote and using a lot of these tools. So I've always been kind of ahead of the curve in embracing technology and using digital tools like SoundCloud, Slack, Skype, just being one step ahead in these things than most people but not obviously not the top. So that was percolating. And then you began a logical progression. When you're trying to make a bunch of money, you think, "Okay, what can I do?" I had to start from scratch because I started business books in what, 2015. I read my first ever business book. And that began that entrepreneurial journey of me learning from the basics of how to build a business. What is a business? Why do you build a business? What's the attitude, right? And quickly, it became apparent that some people would ask me, "Do you build websites?" And I built some websites for people for a fixed amount of money, a very small amount of money. All myself, and I improved and used my skills to do that. But what you kind of learn as you do stuff like this is that people ask follow-up questions all the time. And those questions are, "Cool, I have a website. Now what?" Because a website doesn't mean anything to anybody if nobody visits it. So then I would say at that time, "I don't know now what." That's not my responsibility. I just built you a website. But then you start thinking, "What if I knew the answer to that question?" What is now what? And then you learn stuff about what is SEO or search engine optimization? What is content marketing? What is blogging? And then I started learning what is digital marketing in general? What is social media marketing? And you become aware that all of these companies and organizations have the same fundamental questions. And they're very predictable, and they're very sequential often. It's like, "We got to start here." Then the next question is this, and how do we turn that into money? So each one of those questions that they're inevitably going to ask is a potential for learning something new and offering a new service that can be money. And so it's the combination of all of those things stacked on top of each other. The answers to the question that everybody has that leads to much higher paying, much more valuable work. So it was just me figuring that out literally step by step over the course of many years. I love that answer. So good. Yeah, never thought of it that way. Yeah, that's true. You just basically solve a whole bunch of problems. Yes. And that is what we do. We solve a whole bunch of problems for people. Yeah. And we have experience doing that. And of course, the full circle moment is I got very good at audio making dance music tracks and mastering and all of this stuff matters. This is audio. This is video and video audio. That's what content is and copywriting and all of these things that we have done separately in our own lives. That's the kind of stuff that comes together in this thing called marketing or digital marketing or digital agency. So it is in some way related, but we took a very long road. I think that's how to understand that. Yeah. But I think that's how it always goes, you know, with businesses. Not for Bill Gates. Okay. Maybe not for everybody. Bill Gates started where I was at 13 and then there's a million here by 19. Okay, we did everything wrong. Yeah, that's that's clear. Anybody listening to the show will know that we did. I did everything wrong. That's obvious. Yes. Each piece of content we put out is just further proof of that in case anybody had me down. Yep. Yep. Yeah. No, exactly. Okay. So let's talk about I'll ask the question that comes next. So again, it's all about the logical, the logically following question. Yeah. I'm answering questions for clients in terms of what comes next for their business. It's like, how do I get people to my website? How do I convert those people? Yeah. What are the language that people are using, right? So when you, and this comes back to ego and solopreneur versus entrepreneur or solopreneur freelancer versus business builder, especially when you consider that you have multiple talents and when you consider that you're capable of learning anything, which not everybody has, but some people have many different talents and skills. Mm-hmm. There's this belief that I need to be the best graphic designer. I need to be the best copywriter. I need to be the best of all of these things. Yeah. And you can hold on to that illusion for a little while, but pretty quickly, if you try to build your business, then you realize that's no longer possible. Yeah. Even if you could theoretically do it, you can't practically do it. Mm-hmm. So then you have to confront the question of how do I build a team? Yep. So I get other people to help me do more than I can do myself. Even if it's offloading some tasks, and that's a part of it, I think, is just offloading stuff that I could do, but I don't want to do even house cleaning. You could do it, but you don't want to do it and maybe you can pay money and somebody else can do that, so you can do something else. This is all from the basic business books, obviously, but something that really struck me was from Henry Ford's biography. He said that his success was built on surrounding himself with people who are smarter than he was, and hiring people who are smarter than he was. That seems real simple, but when you're first starting to build a business, it almost feels impossible to consider doing that. For sure. Because you think, "How would I hire somebody who is smarter than me? How would I manage that?" Yeah. I really didn't know how to do that for a long time. Yeah. So what changed? What changed is gradually you take steps towards building a team. Immediately you expand, and of course, as you know, if one employee, one person on the team, and then now we're up to 14 people on the team and it's growing. From your experiences with that, you get some positive encouragement, but also you get some negative things. You get some complexity. Dealing with other people's lives is difficult, also because people are not machines, people are not robots. Each person has their own set of challenges and baggage or needs, or you can't say with absolute certainty that anybody is going to be somewhere or do something, "What if they get sick? What if something happens? What if their hard drive crashes?" Any time you bring another person into something, the complexity and potential difficulties goes up, that's a fact. But what also happens is the capacity goes up, and that starts to unlock something which is a really powerful feeling of when you feel that your team's efforts are multiplying something, that was the first time that something really changed in my brain. It's when you see how all of these talented people add up to something that's more than each of them individually. That was also something from Steve Jobs' story and Steve Jobs' biography is that he considered himself the conductor of the orchestra, and other people thought that was not valuable because Steve Wozniak was the guy building the chips, and I can see both of those things. I think they're both true. Wozniak was the genius behind Apple, but would it have become Apple without Steve Jobs? When people who have never built a business see that story, they don't understand the value that Steve Jobs can have being the conductor and not the player of the instrument. It's so funny because people also say, "What does a DJ do?" It's not just a bunch of people you throw together. There's a strategy behind it, I think you're a really natural manager, you're really good with people, you're really compassionate, but also no nonsense. I'm really proud of you. I think you're doing really great. We're doing it together. I like that I started a little bit later than you, you started by yourself and then I came on board and I like the yin and yang energy we have. I think you're really good with your team, I think you're really good with sales, I think you're great with just getting shit done. I'm very much focused on client experience. I think my mission in life is to help people and brands connect with, "What is my inner voice?" Whatever that means and how do I bring it out in the best way? I really like applying that mission and that skill on to our agency. You're good at the intangible stuff and you're good at the human relations part of this and also the expectations part, expectation management, client services, I guess you can say, what is the human part of the human body? What's the why of the things you want to get done, if you want to get from A to B, what does that mean and why do you want to do that? When I'm focused on the let's go get it all done, oftentimes that kind of stuff goes by the wayside and not just for us, but for every company, and that's why they need some help oftentimes is because everybody is just frantically trying to make as much money as they can as fast as they can. Very few people have the time to sit back and really engage with some of those other questions and we can do that for them, which is appreciated via you. It's the systems that I think that we're working on now to think of how can we go from a million in revenue to 10 million in revenue in a year and do we want to do that, like we comfortable just keeping things where we are, do we want to grow and I think we do want to grow, but I think we're both a little bit scared of what that would mean, if we have a $10 million company, our life is completely owned and we can't be there for our kids. I think there's this excitement about that, but also fear about that and wondering what exactly our temperature is, but it is clear as you get beyond 10 staff, as you get more clients and more projects, organization, system, profitability, all of these things become much, much bigger concerns and that is the part of the journey that we're on, it's like, okay, how do we systematize this? How do we replicate some of our processes? Because we have such amazing people, but how do you duplicate an amazing person? It's like, okay, we know Michael Jordan can buy basketball, great, now I need five of them, there's only one, right? So it's like, how do we put the stuff in place that allows us to serve 5, 10, 15, 20 clients equally at that high level of standard that is still a premium product without sacrificing across the board and that seems to come down to systems and organization and stuff like that. Yeah, I think so. Next piece. I think there is a sweet spot that maybe constantly changes to, I'm not sure, I'm not sure yet what our sweet spot is, but... Don't think we've headed yet. No, not yet, but I think we're close and also it's really easy to only think of growth because you want to, yeah, I think we're kind of stagnation is death kind of people, but we love growth, but then sometimes more is not always better. So I'm not sure yet what our sweet spot is, I can think of a couple of versions of that and I think that's why it's important, again, going back to the why do you do what you do and what is important for a great life experience, what do we really want from life? And it's one of our friends said that success is like a snake eating its own tail and that and I've experienced, we've experienced that for the first time where as you get more successful as more money comes in, then you do have more of a new type of problem that comes out. Jay-Z said, "Momoney, well, that is an element of truth to that." And it's almost like the further you go, the harder it is because in the beginning when you're first starting out, you have less money coming in, but there's also no risk because if something goes away, it's already broke. So you can't really get much worse than that, but then as the amount of people that you're responsible for, the amount that you're on the hook for goes up every month, the complexity of dealing with that goes up. And so it's almost like, then you feel, I need to make even more money to deal with all of that. And then you need more people to do that. And then you need more and I said, it's almost like this never-ending game that I think, and that's how people fall into that trap where it is never enough. And I think it is a real art form to be able to say like, okay, this is enough and this is where we want to be before you become a victim of your own success. And then before it becomes success for success's sake, and I think we're both really aware of people who have everything, but they have no family. Their kids hate them, their wife hates them, their divorce and it's like, that's not success. No. That is failure. If I had a hundred billion dollars in the bank, but I don't have a family and my kids hate me, that is failure, just full stop. That is not success. Yeah. 100% great. When the music world was successful, DJ, they're touring like 280 days of the year and it's like, why? You have hundreds of millions of dollars. Why are you still touring every single day? I don't know. But they can't. They can't because that idea of stopping that train is so terrifying to them that they can't face the stillness that we'll be waiting for them. Yeah. And that's the kind of thing that I know we're both really sensitive to and really scared of. Yeah. And have a lot of conversations about it. I'm not worried. Either. But because we constantly ask that question and because we constantly know what is most important, family is most important, doing it for that reason is most important. Exactly. But yeah, you know, flying on private jets all the time, that's not the only goal to be gained in life. Yeah. No, but it's like, you know, before this life, we lived the artist's life, the musician's life, and that has something sexy and glamorous. And it's easier to talk about it and be like, yeah, I did this cool thing and it speaks to people. And it makes people go, whoa, that's amazing. But now our wins are very different. And they're not easily communicable on Instagram. Exactly. And I can feel so happy about this. One thing that. It feels really bullshit. Oh, we figured out. Yeah. We went to notion database. Yeah. Yeah. I'm so proud of like the client portal I built and I love it. Yeah. Right. But it's not as cool as making a music video, or maybe set or something. Even though, yeah, it's like people who make way less money doing something, you're in a beautiful place. Exactly. Yeah. But that's social media and a nutshell. That's that's it. Yeah. I rarely talk about what we do. It's much more private, but yeah, it's I'm happy with this life now, even as less glamorous. Right. Yeah. And maybe now one person will ask us sometimes. How did you do that? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah. (upbeat music)
