Caleb Ulku Guest, Efficiency and Data & Hiring for Lead Gen

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[00:00:00] How is everybody doing? I know. It’s going on, but we let some more people in here. You guys have a good week, everybody doing good. Yeah. My buddy, Caleb is going to be joining us today and. Maybe taking some questions, given some of his sage advice. There we go. All right. But start off with some wins. Does anyone have any brains to share anything exciting going on?

[00:00:41] No. Wow. That’s right. What do you guys have been doing all week?

[00:00:47] Glad. I hope I’m having an impact because I want to hear some wins. All right, let’s see here, Jeff, you got any wins. What do I have, I have

[00:00:59] Wins, I have a couple of new clients on on deck two. I want to hear some wins. Oh, wait a minute, hold on. I’m messed up here. I have a couple of new clients on deck to to join on with us within the next couple of weeks. They’re just kind of getting their ducks in a row with their and all of that. So we’re doing the model where we we charge an upfront set up fee and then we don’t charge them again until we rank and get them leads. So that’s the model we’re taking right now.

[00:01:27] Jeff, why? Why did we decide to go that way?

[00:01:31] Well, because we were charging like a basic monthly fee to get to get going and then running ads in to get the leads. In the meantime, until we sort of ranking organically and it just we would bleed money, go underwater, trying to run the ads and get them the value that they wanted or needed. And then the client sometimes would end up bailing for one reason or the other, or they just weren’t happy with the quality of leads that were coming in. Then we have an asset that may be producing minimally by that point, and we are still underwater on the ads and we don’t have a client. So we had to kind of really get smart about how we were taking on new clients and spending money and keeping them as clients and keeping them happy long enough to to make money on the back side.

[00:02:24] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So just kind of drive down on the more the strategy that we started out with when when I joined JC is to build the site, rank the site and then find someone and then you want to scale faster and you want to go faster. So then we started doing a lot of prospecting, and that’s something that was a strength within our agency is the ability to find these clients. But the problem that we realized when we started closing a lot of clients is that we were actually making less money. So and this is why, because we would be doing everything we could to try to keep the client happy, which means that we’re building the site. We’re trying to rank the site. So we’re right, a content, we’re finding gaps. We’re doing all these things that cost money, getting backlinks from different sources. And then we’re running ads. And because Google ads are expensive and they are also very time consuming to do correctly between the money that we were spending on ads, which a lot of times would it be almost the full budget that we were allotted, plus all the money we spent to build it, we would go in the red client wouldn’t be getting as many leaks just because more people click on the organic ranking areas than they do on the ads area.

[00:03:38] So in the end, what happens is Google wins. We probably lose in the client, maybe wins or breaks even. So additionally, we’re under a lot of stress and pressure to deliver when they’re paying a monthly fee. So we decided the best strategy would be to take a startup fee so they have some skin in the game and then let them know you’re not going to pay anything until we have stuff coming in. So it’s a little bit harder sale than, like promising them the world from the beginning in some ways, because it’s like, Hey, pay now, and at some point in a few months, we’re going to have stuff coming in for you. But it also has resulted in a lot more client satisfaction when they come on because they’re not, they’re not going to pay once and they’re not locked in every month. And, you know, I just kind of felt like that put a lot of pressure on strain the relationship. So now it seems like we’ve given ourselves a lot of breathing room. So either. What I also learned is either way, you do it like whether you take that monthly from the beginning or you take a startup fee and then wait a few months like you’re not going to make money until it ranks, usually like you could make money.

[00:04:51] I think it was. I can’t remember who I was talking. It was Cody. Yeah, I think it was talking to Cody this week, and we’re talking about bringing people on. And, you know, he’s got he’s got a national client that he landed. He’s seven weeks in and he he landed himself a really nice deal. But I was like, You’re going to have to spend most of this money, just try to keep these people happy. Right. So it’s. You know. You have the ability now to go and build your sites and rank your sites. And if you do that, then the sales part of it gets a lot easier. And when you do close that person, then it’s like all profit. So it’s a lot less stressful situation. Maybe that’s not ideal for everyone, but it’s certainly been a learning like going through this and kind of losing clients and having people not be completely happy. And it’s. That’s kind of where we gravitated towards over the last four or five months, and it’s been a lot better, I wish we would have been doing this for a long time.

[00:06:00] I think there’s there’s something to be said for that, too, Patrick. You know where you are in your business model and you’re still tweaking and evolving as you go. And some of these things that you have made money at in the past may not be working as well as they are today, or they could have been working better all along. So I think that speaks volumes to just the business model in general and that you always need to be pushing the edges and the boundaries and trying to figure out like, where can I squeeze more profit or more efficiency out of this? Where am I going? How am I going to make the clients happy? Or how am I going to keep myself happy and keep a lifestyle that I want to live? That’s why I got into this business. So all those things are always in play and always be pushing the edges of what you can do.

[00:06:45] Yeah, yeah. One hundred percent agree. You guys, you guys and Caleb who’s on the call, I think is kind of a master at this is you need to be looking at things. Evaluating your strategies just because you’re winning doesn’t mean that you’re doing things the optimal way. Right. And so this, like always optimizing, is going to move you in a better direction. Right. So this was a big deal. A lot for me. A lot of a lot of my my thought process goes back to poker. When I was playing poker, I would win and I would evaluate my session as if I had lost. Like I would look at every hand I played like, think about, was that the best way that I could have played the hand just because I won and doesn’t mean, like, let me just like pat myself on the back, everything is cool. We’ll put that one on the shelf and not think about it, and we’ll only think about it when we lose. So that’s the way you can only think about it when you lose and you’ll improve and you’ll get better, or you can think about it when you win and you’ll get better 10 times faster, right? So for those of us that have successful agencies, right, like let’s continue to evaluate things and look for these opportunities to improve things, you know? I know Caleb is a huge proponent of Upwork and using Upwork system, I pulled my people off Upwork, which I think is against their terms, but it ended up saving me tremendous amount of money on a monthly basis. Right. I know they had reached out to me at one point and said, Hey, you’re like in the top percentage of during our VP status of Upwork people.

[00:08:13] And we want to make sure like two weeks later, I essentially pulled all my people off there because it was just too expensive, you know, charging on both ends, charging transaction fees and monthly like bank account fees. And it’s save you money. And you know, there’s obviously pros and cons to the decisions you make. I’ve shifted a lot of my contractors to looking on online jobs instead of Upwork. I’m going to kind of have Caleb be a he’s going to do a lot of talking on this call. I hope we’ll see. He looks like he’s in a good mood so that, you know, we’ll help you. All right. So before we get to him, I’m going to show you guys a couple of things that I have coming for you guys. So we have, you know, we have a number of big updates that are stacked up that we’re all kind of interrelated and we’re having a hard time releasing them. We released part of it this morning and it caused an error and we had to like, I think some of you guys saw we had a crash this morning, so we rolled part of it back. We fixed some of the errors, but we have some big updates that we’re going to roll out. One of the ones that I haven’t really shared with anyone yet is what I’m going to show you guys now, so. I will share my screen here and. You guys can just quickly, Patrick, as you launch into

[00:09:30] That, I wanted to acknowledge Grant, we’ve got a couple of new prospects for his legions and Patrick close to 2000 CEO Legion.

[00:09:40] That’s awesome, man. Nice work, Patrick.

[00:09:42] And I just want to acknowledge these people because I’m trying to hype them up and share their wins. And then if I don’t share them, it’s like, you know. Yeah.

[00:09:50] Yes, absolutely. And I don’t know if you guys saw it, but Lulu Lou is. I think his son is. He’s got like a baseball game or something today. So he wasn’t able to join the call, but he actually closed his first client. Today, so, you know, he’s been in it for a little while, he’s been granted and he was able to get his first closed today, so congrats to him, man. I know that first one is it’s a big deal, know it’s a big deal when you go from having a zero percent return on investment to something and you start to like, it’s one thing to believe, but it’s it’s another thing when you actually start to experience it, you start to get money coming. Yet right, then you can kind of see the vision and in full. So congrats to. All three you.

[00:10:38] Yes, just the shout out to you and Jeff. I posted in the group

[00:10:42] Last week just after the call that we had and talk that I have with Jeff.

[00:10:49] We landed that four website deal five grand a month to start

[00:10:54] Back in month, July 1st seven thousand five hundred, and then it moves to nine Grand August 1st. That’s for four sites that are in the market, and they have been for the last year and a half to two years.

[00:11:05] I was getting listen to this. I was getting 12,

[00:11:09] 50 plus two and a half percent and now I’m

[00:11:12] Getting nine grand

[00:11:14] Plus two and a half percent with just

[00:11:15] A couple of tweaks that you taught me and a prospecting strategy that Jeff taught me. So kudos for the tweaks. I know that a number of people in the group were kind of waiting. They wanted to hear some of the tweaks you made, and I didn’t know that we were on a call that day for maybe an hour and a half, and we talked about a bunch of different things, so I wasn’t sure what the tweaks were. I know that we went over a bunch of different things. I don’t think I knew what I had my hands on for sites producing about two hundred solid leads per month.

[00:11:43] I was underselling it. You brought it up about home advisors and the niche that I’m in.

[00:11:48] How much each lead is worth. So I started doing the math, realizing I am underselling this big time, right? A large number out. And just like someone else had mentioned before, you don’t try. You don’t win through the large number out

[00:12:01] There like, OK, tell me more. And that was it. At that point, I knew I had them. So that was

[00:12:08] The that was the tweak. Just knowing what I had or the volume.

[00:12:12] Yeah, knowing the value. And then Jeff had

[00:12:15] Said, and I kind of used it before, but never really

[00:12:19] Hit up these Facebook groups, you know, in an area in the niche and just say, you know, you’re looking for. And that’s how I generated three or four different

[00:12:28] People, and one of them turned out to be this one that we put a deal in place for.

[00:12:32] So right, guys, I owe you beers and dinners

[00:12:36] At our next event, wherever that’s going to be.

[00:12:39] That’s awesome.

[00:12:40] Paul can ever let you out of Canada again, huh?

[00:12:43] Yeah, we’re shut down. Pretty big here.

[00:12:46] So anyway, thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Man, I’m I’m super excited to hear that. Is that your biggest client? By far, yeah, by far. Awesome, awesome. So you guys, we have tremendous value with the stuff we’re doing. We don’t always realize what it is. So the tweet just to kind of like dive a little deeper. We looked at the lead flow that was coming in. So you had a record of of his leads, right? And we looked at the value of the lead. We went to the Home Advisor sheet to see what they’re selling it for because this is what people are usually looking at. So it was like, I think, 70 to 90 dollars. And then he had, you know, whatever, whatever the lead cost was, times that we volume equaled around nine thousand. So that’s how we set the number. So we so we know this is where it’s at now. It’s easier to close somebody on a number like that, or it’s easier to close them on any number. When you give them kind of like a Faizan to it, right? So he started them, you started about five grand a month. Yeah. Phased in at five in one, seventy five and then three months, nine nine. Ok, so we had like a three step process there and the tweak that that he or the prospecting method that he’s mentioning. I’ve mentioned this on the call to you guys. So basically, you join a national Facebook group. I believe this is what you did, right, Paul, because I know it’s what me and Jeff have done a lot with a ton of success is you join a national Facebook group for the niche that you’re in.

[00:14:20] So let’s say it’s like in whatever window washing right. So there will be some huge Facebook group that specializes in window washing. You go in there and you join it and you say, Hey, I’m looking for somebody that does. Does anyone know anyone that does good work in whatever city? Right? You’re not saying that you have leads or stuff like this. You’re just posting it out there. So it almost looks like it’s a referral. But the point of the post is create the conversation, right? Once the conversation comes in, Nepal’s been selling cars for twenty five years, and you know, he’s he’s got he’s got that, you know, he’s got that ability. If he gets into a conversation, it’s going to go well for him, a part of his pitch. What he does is he sends over a Zoom call, you know, with with like. A screencast, right, he sends over a screen cast and then puts them onto a zoom right, so we even talks about the the screen cast a little bit. We talked about some of the verbiage, so I know that Paul, I saw the screen cast that he sent over. I gave him some feedback. I don’t know if he tweaked it, but some of the verbiage that he was using is the same stuff I shared with you guys.

[00:15:30] Look, hey, I’m looking for something that that is I want to create a fair relationship where we can have something that’s mutually beneficial long term. So some of that same language, some of those trigger words that are going to kind of force people to get it in your shoes when you say fair, like for the most part, good people want to be fair, just like they have this kind of like not everybody does, but the good people they want to be fair, right? So they have this kind of innate drawl to that. And when you say that, it lets them know that like, Hey, this, this guy is worried about the same thing. I am a little bit, you know, not not everyone’s going to think that way, but a good portion of them will want to hear that. And you know, I encourage Paul to stress that, look, I put a lot of work into this stuff over the years, and I’m just trying to get. So you can focus on your business and you can just have this stuff delivered up to you. So that’s awesome, tall man. I’m happy to see it. I think you’ve only been in this group for for one week. I know you and I have been friends for several years, but it was kind of like like, you jumped in and then it generated a conversation. And then, you know, and I appreciate you sharing it with the group because there’s you look at all the faces around here on this call and you telling this story when you’re on the other side of it, it seems one way.

[00:16:51] But you know, everybody’s looking at you like, Oh man, I wish I could do that. And then two weeks ago, you were on the other side of it thinking the same thing, right? So you know, when you go and you share the stuff, I think you just kind of lets everybody know what’s possible. We’ve all gone through this thing. I’ve been in the same, the same spot before. You know, it’s like, man, if I could get nine k coming in a month, that would change my life. That would be unbelievable. Right. So you guys all have the ability to do it. It’s not that Paul built some sites that are one hundred times better than everybody else is. He chose a good niche. He chose it in the right area. He built multiple sites. Just like I’ve been trying to teach you guys to. It’s like attack of the niche, take over the entire area. When you do that, that’s where you get these, these sites that are going to come in and starting at five thousand and moving up to ten thousand or more dollars a month, right? I believe that this client of Paul’s, this is for four areas, but I also think that they have a bigger plan to take over a larger area. Is that correct, Paul? Yeah, I’m already building out more assets in in around that area to expand the area because they can handle the volume, right? So this is a he could potentially get to 15 or 20 K a month, right? So congrats, man.

[00:18:07] That’s awesome. Couldn’t happen to a better guy that comes with that. I’ll take the drink, but I’m still I’m still holding you for that jet ski ride. I’m going to find a way to get there one day. I think that if we get on the American side of the border and you drive the jet ski over that river, they’re like, I think we can do. I’ll bring my passport and you can pick me up, but we can make that happen. All right. So without further ado, I want to show you guys the update. I think this is going to be awesome for you guys. This is a revenue stream waiting to happen. All right. So this right here. Is this is going to be our white label. How this is going to work is. Let’s go back over here, so we’re going to add. In here, a white label option under reputation management. Ok, so there is going to be there is going to be an additional fee for this on a monthly basis. It’s going to be pretty nominal, but there is a lot of extra stuff that requires us to do on our end. So but how it’s going to work, like it may be like seventy nine dollars and then you can basically sell this as many times as you want.

[00:19:25] So this is how it’s going to work. You’re going to be able to set up a subdomain of your domain. So for instance, if it’s Paul’s agent, then he could set up reviews. Paul’s agency within that, he’ll be able to set up the login page as well as a background photo. And this system styling is going to be this side of things. I’ll show you what this looks like. Ok. So this could be what your user see. So let me step it back, and maybe it’ll make more sense. So we go to Reviews Paul’s agency and you see this screen. You don’t see anything about me generated, right? So this the users that want to purchase reputation management from you. There’ll be no there’ll be no connection to be generated here. They’ll think that this is yours. So there’s no way for them to potentially go around you and see the price that you’re paying for. So I’ll tell you, Paul and I were actually at the lmv event in San Diego and there was a girl there from Australia who all she does is sell reputation management. She’s at ten thousand a month. Ok. So she hired five five full commission sales people to go out. So. So the way it works is they get one hundred percent of the commission for the first month. Ok, so that means that they go out. And if they land it for between two and four hundred dollars, then they get two to four hundred dollars for that.

[00:21:09] Jeff, you guys skimping down on the Wi-Fi down there, what’s going on? My wife, I’m in, I’m in Joshua Tree, so I thought it was my wife, I

[00:21:18] Got it works for most reputation management. Nine dollars, I think that’s what she was paying to clean from your clients, being able to tell where it is. So this would be the site. This is kind of what this is. If we flip back to the street here where we have the login page styling, you can upload your logo, you can change your color, right? So you have tax color and colors. So that’s this stuff right here. This is your logo where you can upload that and this is the button in text colors. This is the background photo on this page, so you’ll see here you can upload your own background photo. If you don’t like ours, you could change this out. Create your own so completely brand this to yourself when they log in, this is what it will look like. They log in here, and if you go back over here, the system styling. This is where you can change if you want to use a different color combination or maybe like you want this bar. You wouldn’t want to use a dark colored logo on this right here because it’s going to blend in. So we’re kind of giving you that flexibility if you use the same color or whatever you want to do, but you just have that option to change the text color or the background color, upload your own logo. So they log in, the clients are only going to be able to see these areas right here, right? So we’ve kind of ripped out all the other functionality that’s associated with Lee generated, and they just have the review management areas here.

[00:22:39] So what’s missing up here? We’re still kind of working out the kinks. I’ve started out kind of like a two pronged approach to all of our development. So we have the design, so our developers have started building this. I think this is going to be available probably the first week of May. So we’re not that far away from it. There’s just a lot of moving pieces here with our system admin to create the subdomains, so it should only take a few minutes. Once we get this, it’s all going to be automated. So, you know, once you set this up, you should be live pretty soon. We have to wait for like the DNS stuff to propagate, but you’ll set this up. All your users will log in here. They can see your agency logo up here. They’ll only be able to see the stuff that’s assigned to them and then they’ll have like the dashboard. This all companies is not going to. It’s not going to be that they can edit the funnel. They can look at the review, they can send the review requests, either the the feedback set up, the notifications add their email. So a lot of the functionality that we have, but just kind of like pulled out so that they can, you know, they they they they think it’s completely your brand and your stuff, right? So white label reputation management.

[00:23:53] I recommend that you sell these between two to four hundred dollars per month for people to manage their stuff. Ok. You can use this as a great way to get in the door with people, right? If you’re having trouble closing someone, it’s very easy for you to convince somebody why they should be purchasing reputation management, right? So there’s a lot of automation that’s going to be coming with this review request by text message stuff like this. We’re going to once we have our campaign donor where you can build that workflow, we’re going to pull pieces of that in here. It’s not it’s not in that spot yet to drop this off. So I think it’s going to be awesome for you guys. I’m really excited to get it in here. There is a lot of value to being able to sell this and just get yourself in the door. So that’s coming very soon. Another feature that’s I’m going to bring over regenerated. So we dropped in a feature. It’s kind of been flying under the radar. We dropped it in this last, I think it was Monday. So let’s talk about lead flow for a second, and I’m going to make sure that you guys understand this and understand why it’s necessary. So we have this article here called Lead Flow. This is a really important article for understanding how our system works. So just kind of a refresher when someone fills out a form submission on our site, then it’s going to.

[00:25:34] Sorry, if you cut it out for everybody. I’m not sure there’s anything you can do about it, so I haven’t stopped him because he just he talks. Everybody else in this.

[00:25:46] Are you in bed right now, Jeff?

[00:25:49] It’s something that would

[00:25:51] Be generated instantly using Weebly or WordPress. So as soon as it’s going.

[00:26:00] Again. They patriots to watch the video on these two pot degenerated come

[00:26:10] To know what it was.

[00:26:15] Hey, Patch, Fred.

[00:26:18] All right, well, Patrick’s out, hi, gee, I just pinged him on Skype. Did you? Ok, good. All right. Well, what do you guys think about reputation management until he gets back on? I think it’s pretty cool. I was at that event where myself and Patrick and Paul saw the lady speak about it, and I think she did. She was making like 10k a month just off of that. So that’s that’s a pretty amazing opportunity for all of us. You can just get some 10k a month total or per client. Oh, no, total. Got it. But she was. She just had a people on autopilot. They were doing all the work and like Patrick said, she was paying them, letting them keep, I think, the first or second or maybe even the first and second month. I can’t remember exactly fee and then that motivated them to sell more, sell more so more once you get them in the system, it’s just like a subscription. So they’re paying and getting all that functionality. Great. Can you tell me a little bit

[00:27:17] About what

[00:27:18] Reputation management is and what it consists of?

[00:27:23] Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, without going through every module in that interface that he just showed, it’s basically just a way to manage reviews coming in and kind of automate the system so that your clients or your customers can get notification. Requesting a review, go in through a simple interface and click through the link that you send them into the review platform Google and then leave the review. And then you also have the ability to split them off if they will leave a five star review. We’re forced to argue. However you set it up, then it’ll it’ll send them to Google. If they want to leave a three star or four star. Whatever your your boundary is, then it sends them into sort of like a customer complaint funnel where it will go internally and not go to Google. So it prevents you from getting more bad reviews on Google. It allows you to have the opportunity to address the issue complaint before they actually do leave a bad review, and sometimes it’s just a misunderstanding. A lot of times I think it is just a misunderstanding where if you had an opportunity to to discuss it with them and maybe resolve the issue before it gets to the review stage. So overall, it’s it’s just an amazing tool and you also get the opportunity to start training and teaching these people how important reviews are to the overall power and credibility of the GMB in general and how to direct clients to different things like that. So then they’re like, Oh, wow, this is this really works. Now what? Like, what else can I do? And you’re sort of in a great spot to start teaching them new tricks as well.

[00:29:05] Let me let me just do a demo of it real quick. So so everyone can kind of see it in action. Sorry, guys, I lost my internet connection there for a second. Ok, you guys can see my screen right? Yes. Where did I get dropped? Where was I when when it dropped out, Jeff?

[00:29:28] That is a good question, because it dropped off for me a couple of times and that

[00:29:34] You just read the first balloon. The first balloon or button

[00:29:40] Streaming to Facebook groups.

[00:29:43] Yeah. You know, they did all those updates last week. Caleb was nice enough to help me through their changes, but maybe they don’t have it all ironed out yet. I don’t know. Ok. Any other questions about any of this stuff before I jump onto the

[00:30:04] Ipl is asking. I’m not sure it’s specifically related to reputation management, but he figured out how to zap the lead to lead generated. Is there a way to to zap? So we can listen to a call in lead generated

[00:30:21] That really will depend on where you’re zapping from. Right. So like if you’re using whatever phone system and then they provide a link to that recording, then you could potentially add it in there. You know, like, like, like I’ve put it kind of puts me in a I’m trying to do my best to give you guys the best product possible, but I’m also trying to avoid conflict of interest. So the default phone system that’s supported for this is called. Right? Trying to. Like there’s there’s a lot more than the phone systems that are being used with Zapier, and we’re trying to make our Zapier integration as strong as possible for that. But it’s technically I’m not trying to find ways to. Add in a bunch of other phone systems, right, just to try to make sure that I stay in integrity with with my arrangement. Any other questions? That’s all I see right now. I see. Mark Miller. A Julie. Ok, cool. I don’t know your opinion on Yelp, but I know someone who works there and their job is to write bad reviews when people refuse to pay for leads. This is not surprising at all. For me, I’ve heard one issue like I kind of personally categorize Yelp. Similar to how a lot of people, especially our clients, view Home Advisor. They’ve had lawsuit after lawsuits and, you know, they masquerade themselves as this like independent, independent, third party review site.

[00:31:59] And personally, I don’t believe that’s the case. I don’t know all the inner workings of their business model, but you know, I’ve had a lot of clients who have had just terrible experiences with them. And, you know, it seems like there is a correlation between. The quality of reviews that you get and the money that you spend with it, that’s just seems what has showed up time and time again. Ok, so. I’m going to go back over to the lead flow real quick and. My screen is still shared, right? Yeah, OK, cool. All right, so let’s talk about this lead flow thing here. This is a really important concept. For more on this, you guys can look at the getting started area here and click on this lead flow. This will take you directly to this article that I’m in here now. Ok, so there’s a video that covers this in more depth, but this is kind of one of the central pieces to the lead management module. So this is how it works. When someone comes to your website, there’s like three things that are going to happen, right? The first thing, unfortunately, in the overwhelming majority of what’s going to happen is they’re going to come to your website and then leave. Ok, so like if you have a really good conversion rate that might be 90 percent or more of the time, they’re going to just leave the remaining times when they convert, it’s going to be usually one of two types of conversions a phone call or a form submission.

[00:33:28] So this right side here is all about form submissions. The left side is phone calls, so when a form is submitted, they’re submitted on the site. It’s going to show up inside, regenerated, generated right away. It’s going to be run through the spam filters. It’s marked as spam. It’s going to be held there for 30 days. If it’s not, it’s going to come down here and we’re going to look to see whether auto Ford is turned on or not. Ok, so if it is turned on, it’s going to be sent to the client associated with your region immediately. So it’s almost like it’s filtered through. We generate it and we take out the scum. It’s kind of like a Brita filter, right? So it’s taken out the dirt, and it’s just like passing the good, high quality water onto your client, right? So if it’s turned off, it’s just going to sit in the Al Weeds area and it’s going to wait for you to do something, so sometimes we want like some kind of manual process in there. Maybe we have. Maybe we’re splitting our leads between clients. Maybe one client does this and not that or they cover different parts of town. So with phone calls, what happens is the call is going to come in and a lot of times it’s going to be forwarded right to our client, right? So that’s this pathway here.

[00:34:33] And then some of the times we’re going to take calls in our agencies. So I was talking to I can’t remember who it was, but I was talking to someone this week and they were. So they were taking a lot of calls, and then they were like filtering through them and sending it on. So that’s that pathway, that’s that’s not an uncommon pathway. We do that in our agency for certain situations. Ok, so what happened in has been happening is when you hook up, call Sling. This has caused problems for for several people. So you hook up, call Sling and the call comes through and this is combined. We need to talk about the qualified call filters. Let’s look at these real quick two. So it’s kind of the scenario where two things are going at the same time. I’m going to go through it this way because that page takes a little while to load, pulling a lot of stuff. So. Qualified call filters the way these things work, if you guys are not using them, these things are great because. The way it will work is you can set up what is going to be moved from a phone call over into the Leeds area. So so we don’t want all calls that come in to automatically be added as a lead because preserving your lead count is one of the main functions of the software, right? Giving us an accurate lead count of our clients and all the telemarketers that are calling our clients relentlessly would would mess up our lead count.

[00:35:58] You have the option to do that if that’s the way you want it by just turning the switch on for your each company. And then all calls that come in will automatically be added as leads. Or you could qualify them further and say, I only want calls to be added as leads if they are answered and they are at least 90 seconds long. So now a phone call comes in. It’s ninety one seconds long. Lead generated moves it from the all calls area into the all weeds area and we’re considering that a lead. And now you’ve got like this semi-automated or automated way of determining what’s a real lead. Ok, so here’s where the problem comes in. So what happens if a phone call comes in your client and we’re on this side of things, right? Your client’s answering the call so they take the call. We counted as a lead. It’s more than 90 seconds long and you have qualified call filters on for 90 seconds, so it gets added as a lead and then it gets moved over into this leads area. So it’s almost like it’s getting routed into this step right here.

[00:37:03] And then since auto forwarding is turned on, your client is going to get an email sent to them saying they have a lead, but they actually just spoke to this person. And what our system does is it’s going to pull the caller ID information, which is going to be confusing for the client. So we added in more automation that recently created this problem, right? So we have a solution for it. Ok, so here’s the solution you guys may have noticed. We just updated this, this kind of user interface over here, too. But if you go to lead forwarding now, you’ll notice that there is an option for form and call separately. So what some of you guys may need to do is turn the one off for calls if your clients are answering the calls so that way that if it comes in and it’s a phone call, it won’t automatically be sent to them. Ok, so I know that this is a little bit there’s a lot of moving pieces here, and this is a little bit of a confusing thing, but I’ve also seen tickets for this. So we’ve we built this update in here and this should solve that problem for any of you that are experiencing that issue. Are there any questions on that, does that make sense? Explain that. Well, on that one budget? Yeah, sure.

[00:38:14] So with the forms forms being court versus the call’s not being caught, if a call does come in, does it get routed to somebody else? And same thing with a form.

[00:38:29] I’m confused by your question, I’m sorry.

[00:38:32] Ok, so if somebody submits a form on the site, yep, that form would go directly to that one company. Right? Uh-huh. Is there a chance that that form could go to a second and third company as well?

[00:38:48] Yeah, absolutely. So the way that you can do that is. All right. Let’s let’s take a look right now. I am under the. This is the perfect example for this. Here is I’m on a company, right? So I’m on the edit company screen and I have two clients assigned to this one company. I have this Anthony Anderson and Anthony Baker. Ok, so if I want them both to get the sleep, then I can turn on auto forwarding for both of these people and they’ll both get it right. So what you guys may want or like, one thing I’m excited to is when I get to the campaign builder in there is to start setting up like round robins for our leads that can be done for the form submissions or setting up like weighted distribution for leads. So I can say, Hey, I want to give this guy 30 percent of the leads in this other guy’s 70 percent of the leads and we can go through and do that. Or or even better is like if this field equals this value, send to this person. If this field equals this or does not equal this value, then send all of these to that person.

[00:40:00] So that’s part of the campaign builder that we’re building in is that sort of like logic, conditional logic and routing with the weighted average stuff built into it. It is the most complicated piece that we’ve built that we’re building, and it will take us a while. But I think it’s once we get this thing here, I think it’s going to add a tremendous amount of value for you guys and a lot of automation. It’s not only going to be done with the leads, it could be like, Hey, said this person, the text message moved them to this like pipeline. Assign them to this user. Create this task for follow up for the contractor. If this stays in this status, for this amount of time, it’s like the automation is going to go off the charts when we get in there, get this in here. And, you know, just to kind of rehash that, see if I can find it real quick. I’ll give you guys a visualization on this. We started a follow

[00:40:50] Up question if I could Patrick go for it on the on the people that have actually gotten the call in lead and they’re connected to to, let’s just say, Anthony Anderson, right? Ok, but but that same call in lead is not just going to Anthony is also going to Anthony Baker.

[00:41:11] So only one person can answer the phone call right back.

[00:41:14] For whatever reason, and wants to get in touch with Anthony Anderson, are they going to be connected to Anthony Baker or will the system automatically recognize that they were talking to Anderson first?

[00:41:28] So. I think I think there’s a. So here’s the thing is the call is going to be answered by one person in this scenario, right? It’s either going to be answered by Anthony Anderson or Anthony Baker. Right. Ok, so right now. The way we have it set up is you’re deciding where the calls are going. Right. So we don’t have it where it’s like sinking with the answer on our end yet. Right. So right now, it’s kind of like an on off, so you can turn this on and send the call, send a lead if it’s a call to this person or you can have it on. So those are the two different options. And you know, that kind of like dynamic routing. There’s a lot of stuff that cost would have to do on their end, and I’m not sure that they’re even providing like, I don’t I don’t even know if it’ll be possible. We would need them to make development changes and maybe we can set that up. But as of right now, that would go a little more about, you

[00:42:28] Know, we go same thing hand in hand with text messaging back and forth is somebody that’s actually working with Anderson going to end up text messaging. Baker and Baker doesn’t know what the hell’s up.

[00:42:40] Right? So that’s that kind of automation is going to be a part of the campaign builder, and we’re going to build that in a way where you can say, like, put conditions in there, like if this person answers it, then assign to this person or text this person, right? So that part of it is not part of this that’s going to be part of the campaign builder.

[00:43:02] All right, thank you.

[00:43:03] You are welcome. I think I have. Trying to see if I have that, I know that I’ve showed this for any of you guys that. I would like to see it. We it’s been included on previous calls, I don’t have the lead candy. I wasn’t planning on going back over that tonight, but. Is there is there any other questions on on this on this update here? Why it’s important, how to use it, how this could solve problems if we so that the scenario that this is probably going to be relevant is if you have auto forwarding turned on for a client that is answering their own calls. Ok, so that’s the if that’s if that exists for you, then you may want to switch this call button off. Otherwise, they may be getting emails for calls that they answer, which may not be. That might be confusing for them. Ok. All right. So moving on, I would like to have Mr. Caleb. Is he still? I know we had multiple breakdowns there. Did we lose him? Are you still around?

[00:44:11] He’s out of his chair. He’s not back at the command center.

[00:44:15] Oh, is that him there? Ok. All right, we’ll circle back to him. So for those of you guys who don’t know, Caleb runs a, I believe he runs a seven figure agency that’s that’s focused on SEO. He teaches a course on how to win clients with Upwork. So these are mostly SEO type clients that he’s landing. But, you know, I know that not everybody in this group has probably seen Kayla before. My personal opinion, I think Kelly was brilliant. He thinks about things a lot differently. He previously worked as an engineer for Exxon, I believe, right? Caleb, you want to be talking

[00:44:57] About somebody else? I heard you say brilliant, and that doesn’t sound like me.

[00:45:03] I’m sorry. Sorry, Caleb, I wasn’t talking to you. There’s actually a second Caleb on the call.

[00:45:07] Oh yeah, sorry. I’ll mute myself. Then that sounds right.

[00:45:11] Give us a little background, Caleb, and tell us about your what you do with your, your Upwork Group and how that works.

[00:45:19] Right. So I mean, the short version, right? So I don’t know. I I went to college like a lot of people I grew up in North Dakota didn’t want to be in North Dakota anymore, so I went to college in New York City. You know, just about as far away from North Dakota as you can get. And because I’m a giant dork. Those of you who know anything about me probably know that because I’m a giant dork. When I was in college, I worked at the computer lab. That’s right. I worked at the computer lab in college, and one day I was a chemistry major because I did well on a chemistry test. One day I brought in my physics textbook and there are two physics classes at college. One was like the regular physics class and one was the physics for engineers and for physics majors. And that’s not the one I was in because I wasn’t a physics major, so I showed up with my regular physics book and somebody at the computer lab said, Oh, why are you in that class? I thought you were smart. So obviously, being the competitive person that I am, I dropped that class later that afternoon and registered for the harder physics class and ended up going into chemical engineering purely on a dare. And from there, you know, ended up transferring to a different school because the school I was at didn’t have an engineering program. So I transferred to a different school that had an engineering program, a very small school in New York City called the Cooper Union. Every admitted student gets a full tuition scholarship, so let’s hope you don’t get what you pay for when you go there, right? So from there, ExxonMobil offered me a job and they brought me to Houston, Texas, for the

[00:47:07] Interview where we have,

[00:47:09] You know, one second.

[00:47:10] Oh, somebody talking? Somebody talking. What’s what’s that?

[00:47:20] When I meet all and then, Caleb, I’m going to unmute you.

[00:47:26] I’m OK, so sorry, yeah. So I never been to Texas before, and I’m invited to go down to Houston for this interview. I’m convinced I do really well at this interview because the whole time I’m there, I’m like, There’s no fucking way I’m moving to Texas, right? I live in New York City, I’m not moving to Houston, so I do really well at the interview. Meet a lot of really clever people and they offer me a job. It’s a great job, so I end up taking it. I moved to Houston, met my wife in Houston. She actually went to medical school at Tulane in New Orleans. And when Hurricane Katrina came, she relocated to Houston because her Tulane was basically destroyed. So she relocated to Houston. Right around the same time that I went to Houston, we met. It was lovely work for Exxon Mobil for 10 years, got married, had kids. And yeah, I mean, we’re in a situation where my son, you know, he was like three or four years old at the time. And, you know, if you’ve had a three or four year old, you know, they can barely speak, you know, they don’t really know how to talk yet. They’re getting there, but they don’t really know what they’re doing. And I would come home from work and he would look up at me and he would say, Daddy, are you happy today? And it’s just like, Man, what a sign that life needs to change.

[00:48:49] I mean, I was commuting an hour and a half each way. My wife was commuting an hour each way. Everyone is stressed out all the time. So we decided to throw everything away and we moved to Biloxi, Mississippi, which is where my wife grew up and still lived there in Gulfport, which is next door. And when I came down here, I decided to start a new business, saw an ad on Facebook. Like a lot of other people for this lead generated or not, Lee generated this lead generation J-K program, joined and learned how to do SEO sounded great. Turns out, after a lifetime of being a dorky engineer being trained by ExxonMobil when it comes time to sell people on SEO on the phone, this is not something I was very good at. To put it mildly, this went very poorly. I remember one particular pitch it a referral from someone, and it was a marine construction they built like docks and piers. You know, we live on the coast, so you know, they wanted a website. So I roll in to this meeting with them and I’m wearing like a suit because of course, you wear a suit when you’re pitching, right? So I’m wearing a suit and I brought a laptop and I had a little projector and I was going to project data and is going to be great and the client potential client, they walk in and they’re like wearing the waders, right? Which are these rubber things? I don’t know if you know what these like basically rubber pants that start at your feet and go all the way up to like here so you can walk through like four feet of water, like muddy water and not get.

[00:50:31] So anyway, this pitch did not go well. I did not land them as a client. And yeah, so I put like, Patrick said, right? Like my basically, my entire agency is from Upwork. So I started. I heard about Upwork. I think I read a book about Upwork. So I start sending proposals on Upwork. And like any good, dorky engineer, I started tracking data, started playing with different proposals and cover letters and all this jazz and and yeah, ended up basically building an agency from landing clients on Upwork. So that’s the I don’t know if that’s what you intended, Patrick. Sorry, as long as I wanted it to be.

[00:51:15] Yeah, that was. I hadn’t heard that a lot of pieces of that story before. I’m sorry that you wore the suit to the other clients.

[00:51:29] Yeah, me too. Me too. Yeah, I didn’t go well.

[00:51:32] So let me just ask you a couple of questions to put some things in perspective for people. And if you feel like you don’t want to share this, that’s fine. How many people do you have working for your agency to?

[00:51:44] So I have five people working for my agency. Ok.

[00:51:50] Are you in 20 20? Were you in the six figures or seven figures? Seven seven? How many hours a week do you work? On average, I’m personally

[00:52:05] On my SEO agency. I don’t know like. Three or four, I guess it depends on the week, four

[00:52:12] Hours a week, five people working for him running a seven figure agency. So this is what this this is amazing to me. Part of what has led Caleb to this spot is that engineering background and this like efficiency in managing people. And I know that something that people struggle with a lot is that the scaling, right? It’s like, how do we run these processes? And this is an area where I think that you excel and I think that you look at things a lot differently than most people, just just like having conversations with you quite a bit and having conversations with other people. Caleb is somebody that that I’ve gone to for advice on how to like, set things up, right? So I think, you know, as a part, just to get like, look in your mind, your mindset, I believe you know how long it takes to set up a GMB, right? Like. You I think you have that down to like a minute calculation.

[00:53:08] Yeah, so I have two guys who do it and one of them does it in like two and a half hours and the other in three and a half.

[00:53:16] Ok. So, so, so so you know, it’s almost kind of like what I would equate to when we go to our restaurant and we’re going to make an order. We’re like, OK, this sandwich is going to cost this much, right? I think the way a lot of us run our agencies is like, there’s no price on the menu. We’re just like, Hey, let me get a legion site set up. How much does that cost? How long is it going to take? Like, those expectations are not there, and there’s a lot of benefits to kind of getting a hold of this data right? And one of the things that Caleb advised me to do and I’ve been doing this is I have a degree in accounting. But it’s, you know, it’s been 20 years or 15 years or something since I graduated, but Caleb is like, Hey, you should be reading stuff on manage your accounting. So like Caleb wants to, I’m already a dork, but he wants to pull me further further into that direction. So I got a book on managerial skills. That is what’s that?

[00:54:16] I can’t help myself. I mean, pretty soon I’m going to be asking you, I’m going to be asking you to be Dungeon Master.

[00:54:21] So I don’t I don’t know what that means, but if you need whatever you need from me. So, Caleb, what what have you learned and what have you seen from your time in J.K. and helping the people in your group? What are some what what are some advice that you have for people if they’re kind of starting and they want to scale? What are some of the systems that you would put in place? What are some of the skills that they should be working towards?

[00:54:51] Right. So the biggest thing that is so, so common is just, you know, you have something that you need to do and then you just go and do it and then you move on, which is, you know, there’s nothing wrong with that if you have a handful of clients. But that mindset of, Hey, I need to do something, I’m going to go do it and then move on. That’s that will not lead you to being scalable. And a lot of this mindset comes from when I used to work for Exxon Mobil and we can talk about political opinions later. It’s not that big of a deal, but regardless of what you think about oil and gas companies, the point is a company like ExxonMobil, they’re one of the most process and systems driven companies on the planet. And I spent 10 years there and it was like ingrained in me, like to the nth degree. So one thing that we used to joke about pretty frequently is, you know, you’ve heard the thing like if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it that the tree really fall, the the equivalent was, you know, if if somebody did something incredible and no one was there to steward it, did it really happen because everything was about making sure we call it stewardship, making sure that what was supposed to happen was happening? And how long was it taking? What did it like? What was it requiring to get it done? What training needed to be updated or improved? So in every case when I when I’ve talked to people about, Hey, how do I scale? How do I build systems? How do we build processes? I mean, it starts with you, right? Because whatever you’re doing is working.

[00:56:32] You have an agency, you, you have clients, you’re making money. Things are good. So when somebody comes to you one of your clients and has a request and says, Hey, can you take care of x y z? There are only very few clients who have unique requests and clients who have unique requests more than like a couple. They get fired as clients because that’s really annoying to deal with. Most clients have the same things, the same issues over and over again that all of their clients have to deal with also, right? So the best way to scale is to not deal with those requests anymore. Ok, I know that sounds trite, but not dealing with those requests essentially means that you have to train someone else to manage those for you, and you can’t just do that with, you know, crossing your fingers. So what I always start with is recording myself doing things right. So whatever the thing is, setting up a GMB, managing a monthly CEO engagement sourcing blog, comments, prospecting, whatever that thing is, right? If I know how to do it, then I’m going to record myself doing it, and I’m going to record myself doing it in, you know, a series of five to 10 minute steps. And I do that in Excel sheet because of course I do it in an excel sheet, right? Like, you can’t get away from dorks and excel. That’s, you know, they’re linked together. You know, you can use Google Sheets. If you want

[00:58:10] Caleb in your Excel sheet, you’re you have like the name of the step and then you have like a link to the video. Is that

[00:58:18] How you? That’s exactly right. So something like setting up a GMB, it’s I don’t know. I’d have to look. It’s like a nine or ten step process of what needs to happen to set it up. So I’m going to have like step one, go to Google business and then I’m going to have a video where I go to Google.com slash business and then step two, OK, request a postcard, and then I’m going to have a video where I go in and I request the postcard. And to request the postcard postcard, you need to enter the name. You need to enter the address and into the phone number. All right. Well, then maybe I have a video before that. Where I figure out, OK, how am I going to get the phone number, is it call Sling? Is it some other system, some other process, whatever it is and whatever processes, it’s OK, you’ve got to go get a phone number. Ok, well, here’s how you get a phone number and then you realize, Well, OK, I need to know what the local area code is before you get the phone number. Ok, well, how do I figure out what the local area code is? Maybe I do a Google search for local area code, right city name. Cool. I’m going to court a video of myself typing local area code Gulfport, Mississippi, which is two to eight if you’re interested. And then now I know what the local area code is. But more importantly, I’ve recorded a video so that somebody who doesn’t know anything about phone numbers, about GM’s, about anything is going to be able to follow the system. And at the end of it, they’re going to have a name, address, phone number and postcard on the way.

[00:59:48] So, yep, yep, makes complete sense now you’re you’re the way you’ve set this up, I believe you’re relying on them going through the Excel steps in the training rather than having like a series of checklists. Is that correct? You’re kind of like.

[01:00:03] That’s right. So it’s a combination of those excel sheets and asana. So Asana is going to be the like master task list, like the master to do list. So we land a client who needs a new GMB. I have templates in asana for, you know, three or four different types of clients because again, right, there aren’t that many different types of clients. There’s a local client who has an established website, there’s a local client who doesn’t have an established website. There’s a non-local client who has an established website and there’s a non-local client who doesn’t have an established website. That’s it, right? There are four categories of clients, so I have a template for each one of those because we treat them very differently. And in a local non established website, we obviously have the setup for how do we create a GMB in the asana task? Because one of the things we learned early on dealing with Asana is if we put like 50 tasks in asana and assign them to one guy, I mean, that guy is going to get overwhelmed. It’s going to be hard to track. He’s going to get a bajillion emails, but all these tasks. So instead, we have one task and it’s just like set up GMB. And in that task, the great thing about Asana, when you create these templates, you can put like links and information like that in the description. So in the task of set up GMB, we have a link to my Excel sheet and my excel sheet is going to be on SharePoint. I use SharePoint, you can use whatever you know, Dropbox, Google Drive.

[01:01:38] I use SharePoint for a couple of reasons. One, ExxonMobile uses SharePoint, so was used to it, but also two. It seems weird to use Google drives and Google Sheets and Google Docs when we talk about SEO. So it’s good. Nobody really cares about being SEO. So Microsoft seems like a fine platform to host all of our SEO related stuff. So we have a SharePoint for Excel. We can put a link in there. So then the great thing about that, right? So then we land a client. That client needs a GMB that my template says, you know, Elliot Go set up the GMB. It has a link to the SharePoint, where it’s step by step video instructions and how to do it. If we decide we want to make a change to that, to how we do a GMB or we decide we want to add steps or we find some clever new trick which happens, someone tells us a clever new trick and we’re like, Hey, we should be doing that. We can just go and add it to our Excel sheet. That’s on SharePoint. And then every future template we create automatically links to that newest version. So we’re not like emailing everyone like, Oh, use this one now, not the prior one. I mean, it just makes it super easy to make improvements, make changes. And from a scaling standpoint, you just link everyone to the same sheet with a bunch of, you know, very clear steps to, you know, do the tasks.

[01:03:05] Yeah, it seems like one of the things that that you’re doing is something that I learned to do over time, which is the simpler we can make these things, the easier they can be followed and then the more scalable it is. Like, like Caleb was saying, if you load this thing up with too many steps and checklists and all this stuff, then it’s hard to know where you are and it’s hard for the person to follow all these different things. So it’s relying on the training and giving a link to the training, but each one of these videos that they go through, he’s only got nine of them to set up a GMB. You could easily break that into like 60 steps, right? But yeah, they just have nine to go through, right? So the simplification is, is you don’t want things to be too complicated. It doesn’t mean that we’re going to have like cars going down the the assembly line with their steering wheel. We rely on the training for that. But you don’t need to like, Hey, turn this screw, do this. Do this like it would be overwhelming for the person, right?

[01:04:08] And you don’t do that in the sauna, but we do that in the Excel sheet where every single infinitesimal step. Absolutely. Yeah.

[01:04:17] Yeah, exactly. Makes a lot of sense. I tried doing it in the sauna with like having every step in there and it was just a nightmare. So this is awesome. Caleb, any other pieces of wisdom to add on this scaling stuff that yeah.

[01:04:31] So one thing. So one of the fun things and heavy air quotes on the word fun about being at a company like ExxonMobil is every year. You know, a lot of companies do a performance reviews where you get to sit down with your boss and talk about how well you did. The year, so at ExxonMobil, like most things, it’s very systematized, so we call it, we called it rank and rating. So every employee at the company is ranked from like number one to number eighty thousand because there’s 80000 employees for how well you did that year at your job. And we separated those into three groups, right the top third, the middle third and the bottom third. And you can imagine so I was a supervisor there and a company like ExxonMobil, like when we’re looking at hiring people like new hires coming on board, we’re looking at people who have a three point six three point seven GPA who have an engineering degree at the best schools in the country. Right? So these are kids and literally they’re like twenty two. So these are kids who have spent their whole life, the whole like elementary school through high school, through college, being told to the smartest and brightest people ever for them to get into these schools and get these GPAs.

[01:05:54] And then they come and work for me, and I get to tell half of them that they’re below average because that’s how our system works. So you can imagine how this goes for these poor kids who have been told that they’re amazing their whole life until they get to sit next to me and I say they’re below average. But the way that I used to try to soften that blow right is I would say that if you come into this job and you’re the best, you’re the best that we’ve ever had. And in the two hundred year corporate history, John D. Rockefeller didn’t know anyone better than you at your job. Ok, that is a solid middle performance, because if you want to be in the top, if you want to be one of the top performers, you need to leave the job better than you came to it. So if you, you know, when you start to have these conversations with your employees, the rule of thumb is use. If you’re bringing a new employee on board in the first month, it’s going to take you more time than it would take you just to do it yourself.

[01:07:02] Ok, that’s very normal. Very typical. Don’t get frustrated. The best new guy in the world or the best new woman in the world is going to take it, take more time to do the job than you would and have a lot of questions and issues that you’re going to spend more time than if you just did it yourself. Ok, so just suck it up. That’s the first month month two is usually closer to breakeven, right? If you have the right person, it’s somebody who’s motivated. That person really wants to do well. It’s about break even. But you’re still not really saving any time, right? You’re still spending the same amount of time helping that person get better and better at the job as just doing it yourself. It’s really month three that you start to save time and it’s really month six, nine 12 with that same person that you see that person start to make suggestions to your excel sheets like, hey, it would be easier if we adjusted this step and had it this way instead of what you had in that original training. It was like, Hey, that’s awesome. That’s a great idea. I’m going to update it. Thank you. Because at the end

[01:08:15] Of the day, the process you’re talking about of them leaving the job better than it was when they came in, right? Exactly. Also with the company with 80000 thousand people in it, if everyone is taking that mentality, it gets progressively harder for them to get into that. Like when they come in to be in the top right because like everyone has raised the bar over time and now they’re coming in not knowing anything, right?

[01:08:41] So yeah, I mean, imagine going into a company, a big company with a two hundred year history and the only way you can do well is if you leave the job better. But the job is one hundred and fifty years old and everyone who’s had the job before you, you know, had a perfect GPA in chemical engineering, right? I mean, that’s the type of mindset that leads to now with the pandemic. The company had some issues and they had some bad decisions with layoffs and blah blah blah. But that’s the type of like the type of systems that sets up a company to be the longest running company in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

[01:09:20] Right, right. It’s that constant improvement. So what do our so if we were to kind of extrapolate this, yeah, it’s great that like ExxonMobil, is this, you know, amazing, huge company. And I don’t get anything. I don’t know if you still get any royalties every time you say their name, but I certainly will. So like if we were able to pull that out and put some of these ideas that have worked for. Obviously, you’re not running this like huge oil conglomerate company, but we’re running agency and there’s lessons that Caleb was able to pull out from working at Exxon and apply it to this. And this is a big part of the reason why he’s able to run his agency in the way that he is since he’s measuring things. He’s simplifying things. So we’ve talked about this on a few of our calls is like, take some time kind of zoom out, think about what you’re doing. Build the systems. Build the strategies. Make these adjustments. Take that investment that Caleb is talking about with month one, we’re going to lose. Two is break even. And then month three is like maybe a small edge. It’s really over time that this. So this is why it’s important for hiring Caleb. What are some of the themes that you look at when you hire? I know that you only have a few employees, but what are some of the the strategies and thoughts for your hiring processes, right?

[01:10:38] And it’s funny. So real quick. One thing that I really like before I cover your question, which I will. The question is how do you motivate people to leave the job better than they came to it, right? And a company like ExxonMobil, you could be like, Oh, that’s your rank and rating and blah blah blah. But you know, my my four employee company, I can’t really like, you know, rank and rate them because there’s four of, well, there’s five, including me. And obviously, I’m going to be at the top because I’m amazing. So there’s really only four other spots. And, you know, I’m not going to take one of my employees and be like, Yeah, you suck. You’re number five of five like shape up. But anyway, so the the better way to do it, and it’s actually the same thing I do. You know, some of you might be members of my Upwork Group and we have the same offer there that I offer any of my employees, right? Like, look, if you make a suggestion and we implement that suggestion, we change the training, we change the Excel sheet. If we implement your suggestion and change something, yeah, I’m going to send you money because that’s amazing. That’s what I want you to do. I want you to tell me how you can do what I taught you, how to do better. And if you do that, I’m just going to give you money at the end of it and we’re going to make it better.

[01:11:55] I love it. I need to be doing this with. I love that idea. I think I’m going to start putting that into my agency, right? I’ve got I’ve got some people who have made some great suggestions and I have shared my appreciation with. I think I’ve given them bonuses for this, but it’s not like a known policy that like, think of a better way to do this and you’ll get paid. You know, a bonus. Maybe you say like, you know, I’ll give you 10 times whatever your hourly rate is or something like this, if you do something that’s going to make a change, right, so you can really push people. So the goal here, though, is, you know. We’ve talked about traction a lot, and that’s the system that that a similar system that I’ve used. And we have meetings on Mondays with my with my managers and our managers. I’m always we have an issues part of that meeting at the end where it’s like, what issues are we facing? And what I’ve been trying to push them to is like when you bring up an issue, come with a solution to go just like, say, Hey, this is an issue like this isn’t working. Like, what’s your idea to fix it? Because that’s the shift. We want to leverage the people’s mentality. And it’s hard, you know, like when we move into this agency, we could be looking for like Exxon was, we’re looking for college graduates that have like this GPA.

[01:13:12] We could make those requirements right. But you’re also probably going to be paying people forty dollars an hour instead of. Four dollars an hour to someone in the Philippines, right, or maybe 10 dollars in India or whatever, you know, so one of the strategies that I’ve started doing is I give my people logic tests that they have to do during the interview. So here is here’s like five logic problems. Let’s solve them. Let me hear how you think about this work your way through it. I think that it’s very hard and I’m someone that I consider myself good at kind of reading people. But I’ve been surprised where I like have some conversations and then like, I’m giving this person the training, talking to them, and then like a month later, they ask a question. And I’m like. So you didn’t understand any of that if you’re asking that question. That’s a really revealing question. And how do we locate that? How do we assess these people? There’s brilliant people from all over the world because somebody lives in a country where four dollars an hour is a lot of money to them. It has no reflection on their intelligence at all. Right. And we need to be able to sort through that because investing in that first month like Exxon does, that’s where you’re going to be in the red, right? So you want to improve your hiring processes in a way that when you get to month three, that it’s profitable because Exxon is choosing like the the like the best and the brightest, but like and they’ve got all this like multiple interview stuff.

[01:14:43] They’ve got an HR department, they’re paying them a lot of money to to work them through this, to have interviews with technical interviews with engineers I know I had when I was prior to kind of going into J-K, I was looking to work as a software engineer for Facebook, Google, Microsoft, these different places and I know they for Facebook, they were lining me up with technical interviews and asking me technical questions. So since our business model is mostly relying on, we’re going to educate these people, we don’t think we’re going to hire these people with the skill set that we want them to have, so we need a way to. Ask them the right questions and kind of like test them on the right things so that we know that they have like the personality traits or the characteristics to do this. So I spent a lot of time talking. I just posted a video the other day in the group. It was one that I had posted in J-K a couple of years ago. Now it’s in the in the regenerated group. Is there still a lot of relevant pieces in there? I’ve changed my processes somewhat, but you guys haven’t seen that and you’re wondering how you’re going to hire people.

[01:15:49] It’s a really good video that will take you through time tracking how to pay people, how to communicate with people. Some interview tactics that you can use to sort this out. Remember that when you go to hire for a position. So Caleb is kind of on the other side of this because a lot of what he does in his agency is he is approaching people on Upwork to send proposals. But when you are the person that is actually posting the job, you’re going to get a lot of people applying. Sometimes a thousand people will apply. You may only need one person, right? So. You can afford to be very picky and you’ve got to build systems that are going to make it easy for you to sort through this sort through the stuff, right? Some of these people on these job profile sites are going to just like taste the same canned stuff on everything. How do you sort through the ask them questions, right? Ask them to ask. So, so I mentioned this in the video. One of the questions I like to ask people when I’m hiring on Upwork, especially, is what rent your English skills from one to 10? So I don’t care what their English skills. I don’t care what the number is that they’re rating themselves from one to 10. I care about whether that number is consistent with the rest of their application.

[01:17:04] Do they say they’re a 10 and then they have grammatical errors all over the place? Ok, so now you’ve kind of lost my ability to trust you because you’re like, self-evaluation is not good, right? So now I’m like. And another one I always like to do is I want to ask them, Tell me about a time where you failed and why did it happen? So you’re going to have people fall into a few different groups. This is a mindset question. This is. Is this person the type of person that’s going to take responsibility for for their for their work? So some people are going to say like, Hey, I’ve never failed because I’m awesome. That’s not true. Like, they’re just not willing to share it. The second type of person is going to say, I’ve failed, but it’s Caleb’s fault because Caleb didn’t get me what I needed. The third type of person is going to say, and this is the person that I want is like, I failed. And it was my fault because I didn’t communicate with the client or I was like, I had too many clients at the time. They’re taking responsibility. So that’s that’s a mindset that I would love to have. I’m looking for that type of person on my team, so I go over that a little bit in that video, so I don’t want to beat that to death.

[01:18:12] Another strategy I like to do is like in this freelance world, it’s hard to find dependable people that are going to show up. So if I’m talking to them, I will say, Hey, can you jump on Skype? We’ll have like a two minute conversation and be like, Hey, I’d like to set up an interview with you. I’m busy right now, so maybe it’s Tuesday. And I say, Can you send me a message at 9:00 a.m. Central Time on Friday, I’m going to push it back far enough that they have enough time to forget about it. I want to find out how important this is to them. I will be there at nine a.m. if they don’t send me the message until nine oh, two. This is not important to them, right? They’ve just showed you who they are. I like the people who are like, Hey, it’s eight fifty five. I’m ready when you are, you know, so there’s some little tricks you can put in there. Once we get in the interview, then I start doing the logic test and I’m going to talk to them. I’m going to disarm them. I find that to be like some of these people are going to be really nervous. So imagine that Caleb and I’m interviewing Caleb. Caleb, where are you from? What do you do? Like, tell me a little bit about yourself and they’ve got this like, Oh, you know, I’ve been in like web development for five years.

[01:19:17] And, you know, I just love web development and it’s, you know, I would love an opportunity to work with you. I’m like, Hey, Caleb, just chill out, man. It’s totally cool. Just tell me a little bit about yourself. Tell me about your family. This doesn’t have to be such a formal interview. Ok, this doesn’t have to be like, so strict by the book. Just get like, get them to be comfortable because you can make false judgments on people because they’re nervous. People will say stupid stuff. When they’re nervous, they’ll like it’s just not their true self. So you’ve got to like, break that down a little bit, get them comfortable. If you could work a little bit of a joke in there, maybe say a little bit about yourself, like, Hey, my name’s Patrick, I live in Texas. You know, I’ve been running this business for like five years. We’ve got people from all over the world. One of the things that’s important for us is that everybody really respects the cultures. We have a really great environment here. You got to kind of skirt this line. You don’t want them to come in thinking that this isn’t a serious job, but you also want them to be comfortable and like. So just just a couple of strategies that I use. Caleb, in alignment with that, any any additional things to add that you do

[01:20:19] A really good line that I like. I used to use it when I was recruiting for ExxonMobil and interviewing these poor, you know, twenty one year old kids wearing like the power suit with the power tie and I still use it. Sometimes now is, you know, we’d sit down and one of the first things I’d say is like, Look, you know, we’re not we’re not here to decide if you’re a smart person or not. We’ve already decided you’re smart. Otherwise we wouldn’t be talking, right? So you can use that simple like, look, you know, I’m not trying to decide if you’re good at your job. If you if you weren’t good at your job, we wouldn’t be talking. So right now, I’m just trying to figure out if we’re a good fit, like if we can work together. If you have the right personality and mindset to work in my organization and more importantly, if my organization is something that fits your work style and your work ethic. And one of the things I always keep in mind that I make lists for everything. Of course, there are two types of people that I hire on a regular basis, right? One, I hire people to do something that I know how to do, or two I’m hiring someone to do something that I don’t know how to do. And if I’m hiring someone to do something that I know how to do, I don’t want an expert in that field, right? Like if it’s backlink building, if it’s writing content, if it’s setting up a GMB, I’m not going to go and try to find an expert at setting up a GMB and hire him to set up my GMB.

[01:21:49] I know how to set one up. I know how I want my employees to set it up for me. I want someone who doesn’t know what GMB stands for, but who’s motivated to learn my method to set it up. Because if I hire an expert at backlink building, they probably don’t do backlink building the way I want it done. So I’m going to spend three months d training all of the bad habits they’ve learned over the years. And then I’m going to start from zero and start training them to do it. So I don’t want anything to do with someone who says they’re an expert in the field. If I know exactly how it’s done, if I have an excel sheet, that. Has like step one, step two, step three, step four. I, you know, I want somebody who says they’re a virtual assistant. You know, I want somebody who says they’re looking for a remote job. You know, one of my first employees was my father, who didn’t know what SEO stood for. And he’s now one of the best CEOs that I know because, you know, we went through and like, Hey, here’s how I want you to do it.

[01:22:56] Here’s the Excel sheets. The the formal performance reviews got a little awkward when he was ranking at the bottom, but we’re getting there. And if I’m hiring someone for something I don’t know how to do. Ok, that’s very, very different. Obviously, in that case, I’m going to hire an expert because I have no idea how to do it. Like if I need video editing or something with YouTube or something with Pinterest, which you actually do quite a bit because Pinterest is amazing. If you’re not using Pinterest and your clients have a product that can target young mothers, if you’re not using Pinterest, you’re an idiot. Pinterest is ridiculous. It’s super cheap. Super easy. I have no idea how to use it, but finding people who do is easy. But anyway, so I don’t have training for how to do Pinterest. I just hire people who know how to do that, and it’s probably five or 10 times more expensive. But that’s fine because I don’t want to go and learn how to do it and then do the training. I just I’ll just hire someone who knows what they’re doing and move on with my life. But if it’s just a job, you know, I want, I want a virtual assistant. I want someone who’s like, Patrick said. I want somebody who’s motivated. I want somebody who isn’t going to try to pass the buck if they make a mistake.

[01:24:13] It’s funny. And you know, Patrick and I, we’ve talked about this. If something goes wrong with your client or someone like that and you and they say, like, Oh, what’s going on? This is terrible and you say, I’m sorry, I fucked it up, it won’t happen again. No one says that in business, like everyone is trying to make excuses, like if you say something like that, you disarm that person so quickly. It’s incredible. So just like own up to it and say, like, Yeah, my bad, I shouldn’t have done that. It won’t happen again. Here’s why it happened. And here’s here’s what I’ve implemented to make sure it won’t happen again. Like, I want to hire someone who has a similar mindset, not someone who you know is blaming their boss or whatever else you know, take take ownership, take responsibility. At the same time, if someone messes up, it’s ninety five percent of the time their bosses fault and not theirs. Most of the time when someone messes up, it’s because they haven’t been given the tools to succeed. Almost everyone there are, of course, exceptions, but almost everyone wants to do a good job if they’re given the tools to do a good job. They usually will. And again, every once in a while, they won’t, and you need to fire those people.

[01:25:29] But most of the time they messed up because they haven’t been given the tools. They haven’t been given the motivation, they haven’t been given. They don’t know what a good job looks like. So, you know, make sure you check those boxes. You’re very, very clear on what a good job looks like. You’re very clear on what success looks like, what you want this person to do and assuming you know how to do the job. And that’s one of the common mistakes in this field. I see a lot of people hiring people to like, you know, build back, but they’ve never done it before. Oh, I need 10 backlinks, and I don’t want to deal with building backlinks because building backlinks sucks. So I’m going to hire someone on Fiverr to build backlinks for me. And then guess what? It’s a disaster. Of course, it’s a disaster. You hired someone on fire to do something. You don’t know how to do what you know. What’s your step to in this process? You know, like when I started in SEO, I spent two months full time job, two months building backlinks. And yeah, it sucks, but you learn how to do it. And that’s so important to successfully manage a team. You need to know how to do what they’re doing, or you need to pay one hundred dollars an hour for an expert that you don’t need to worry about.

[01:26:48] Yeah, yeah. Caleb, that’s a

[01:26:49] Great sort of addition to what you were talking about. And there was a question in the chat about. Can you talk about the beginning of your SEO journey, which you kind of naturally gravitated towards? Did you learn SEO strictly from JC? Clearly not. And what were your other sources of education? And then another question that came in How many salespeople do you have? I assume that’s coming because that’s not something you’re an expert at, so you outsource it. I don’t know. I think you’re right.

[01:27:19] I don’t actually export export sales. Maybe I should. But most all of our sales come from Upwork. Upwork, make it. Upwork makes it very difficult to outsource sales, so I do most of. Myself, so I actually don’t have any salespeople. It’s all me. And the reason it works really well for me, like if I’m talking to a business owner and trying to convince them that SEO is a good fit for their business, that conversation is going to go bad. I’m going to be wearing a suit. They’re going to be wearing waiters. It’s going to be a disaster. If I get on the phone with someone who says, Hey, I need help with SEO. And then I’m like, Hey, I can talk to you about SEO. I mean, that’s going to be amazing. We’re going to be on the phone for two hours and they’re going to come across. Come away from the call like trusting and knowing that I know how to do SEO. And on Upwork, everyone that I talked to from Upwork has posted a job saying I need help with SEO. So it’s a very different sales process than a business person who’s never heard of it. Just want calls, just want leads. That’s something I’m very, very bad at, so I don’t do. Everything I do is someone who already knows they want SEO, and I just talk to them about how I can do that for them. Now, when I joined JC, I will say I didn’t know what SEO stood for when I joined JC and I started applying to jobs on on Upwork. I got a couple of big early wins on Upwork. One of my first jobs was this website Code Blue Code Blue Labs, an app development firm based out of India who wanted SEO.

[01:28:56] So all those people who think Upwork is people trying to hire people in India for typo? That’s false. Completely wrong. This was a company in India who hired me, not in India, to do SEO forum, and they were paying like three thousand five hundred dollars a month and life was great. I had no like literally I was buying like JC Influence Domains to do this SEO forum. I had no idea what I was doing. It was a complete disaster. I ended up getting their entire website indexed. But I learned a lot about SEO and ended up landing more and more clients on Upwork. The big one that I got a lot of you probably heard the story. I got Skillshare. Com as a client. Real quick sideline, right? I pitched them on a relatively small project to get started with. We did that for a few months and it went pretty well. You know, we just built some links, added some content. It was cool and they were like, Hey, why don’t you come to New York? Come to our headquarters? We want to talk to you about a bigger engagement. So I go there. The headquarters is in the East Village. I go there and I walk into the lobby and I tell the person the lobby like, Hey, I’m Caleb, I’m here to meet with my contact. They want to have a meeting today. Ok, we’ll just sit and wait. They’ll come and get you. So I go and sit down in the lobby

[01:30:20] And they interrupt you and ask, Were you wearing waders at the time

[01:30:25] You did that? I should have worn waders. I was actually wearing a suit, no tie. I lost the tie by this point because if their headquarters had been in the West Village, I would have worn a tie. But it was in the East Village, so I knew enough about New York to not wear a tie for an East Village headquarters.

[01:30:42] Did you have some statistical information on on ties in the different villages there?

[01:30:47] Of course I did. Do you not? I thought that was common knowledge like the East Village. Yeah, so I’m there in the lobby and and Rand Fishkin walks in. And if you don’t know the name, he’s the founder of Mars, one of the biggest names in SEO. Rand Fishkin walks in, checks in and then comes and sits down next to me and I’m thinking, like, You know, shit, I’m here to pitch Skillshare on SEO and Rand Fishkin just walked in like, How is this going to work?

[01:31:17] So essentially he’s he’s at like basketball tryouts in Michael Jordan just sat down next to him, right?

[01:31:23] Yeah. Or like when I say when I have a client who is like a local insurance agent and I say, like, Oh, who’s your competition? And they say, my competition is like Allstate or like an E client. And they say their competition is like Amazon. They’ll be like, Yeah, that’s exactly the same as like if I picked up a basketball and then told you that my competition is LeBron James, right? I mean, we’re kind of playing the same game, but not even really that like not even really playing the same game. Yeah.

[01:31:55] So it’s also it’s also like you’re playing against LeBron James and you’re jumping in in like the third quarter and you’ve got to start from scratch and

[01:32:04] They’ve been playing already down.

[01:32:06] Yeah, like all states, been there for a long time. You have a brand new website. Can you catch me up with this company? They’ve been here for twenty five years. It’s just like. Yeah, I mean, they’ve got they got a backing from the New York Times in nineteen ninety nine and it’s like, Yeah, right? But sorry, continue. So yeah, down next to you.

[01:32:27] Yeah. So I struck up a conversation with Rand because of course, at this point, we’re on a first name basis and he clarifies that he’s not there to pitch them on SEO. He’s there because Skillshare is paying him to record a course on SEO. So if you go to Skillshare, it’s an online learning platform and you search for SEO. You search for Rand Fishkin, you will see the course that he recorded on the day that I was there, which is very cool. But I mean, so anyway, so you know, I did this crazy pitch and they ended up signing on and it was it was five figures a month and I had no idea how to do SEO. So what I did, and this is important, I waited until I had the job. Ok. Don’t approach people and ask for a lot of their time. If you’re still in the pitch phase, but once you have the job, once you have somebody who is giving you money to do something for them, it becomes a lot easier to approach experts. And in Lee generated, they’re experts. Obviously, in my group, they’re experts. If you’re still a member in J-K or LMB or whatever Facebook group you’re in, if you have someone who’s paying you money to do something, it is much easier to find an expert to help you along. So I found someone who knew a little bit more about SEO than I did, and he actually Skillshare was paying. He actually came down to my house in South Mississippi. We live on the beach and the Gulf Coast, and we sat in a room together for three months figuring out how to do SEO for Skillshare.

[01:34:07] And we are we are launching split tests like we buy domains because we like, Oh, should we do a or should we do B? So we buy random domains and try to rank for random like words that had no results. And we do things to a and we do things to be. And then we’d see which one of the two ranked higher to get an idea for what Google was rewarding. So we did that over and over again. But you know, we had the budget to do that because we had skills paying us and it was a nine month fixed engagement. So, you know, the first three months are pretty rough because we didn’t make a lot of progress because, you know, we didn’t know what we were doing. But you know, we were we tried really hard and we started to figure it out and we started to get there. And by, like, you know, month five, six seven, it was looking pretty good. We ended up hitting the goals that they laid out for this nine month engagement. So everyone is really happy when we left it. We’ve actually worked with Skillshare on three or four other engagements since then because they’re, you know, pretty happy with what we did. So I mean, you know, I know there’s a very long answer to how did I learn SEO? The very short version is I learned SEO by jumping in the fire.

[01:35:24] So the strategy here is you get the basics and then you start to like, test the basics and tweak them. You can’t do that. It’s a mistake to do that before you have like a basic understanding, right? Like, we have to like, learn how to you don’t just like get in the car and go one hundred and seventy miles an hour, right? You got to like, let’s drive down. Let’s like, let’s get kind of our Bering Strait here, and then we should be challenging these, these ideas that we’ve been taught. Because the idea is, no matter where we talk and there’s there’s dozens and dozens of different programs out there that teach the skills that we’ve learned and whatever. How have you guys arrived in this group, right? So we should be testing those and maybe adding on other ones. I know that Kayla goes to other he’s gone to seminars and that’s something I’ve done reading reading books on this stuff, like taking courses on Skillshare or Udemy or one of these other other platforms, right? Don’t let this education stop with the first, but master this before you go on to the next one, right? Like, learn it, try it, and like what we’re doing now, I don’t know what percentage of it.

[01:36:38] I got my start way before JC. Like my first job out of college, I was doing SEO for this company, and I spent maybe four or five months doing that before I decided that I didn’t want to work at that company. And I had always kind of been in the tech space, you know? And then I played poker and I built websites before, and then I learned the J. K stuff and I kind of like added that piece on, but I’ve probably taken. I don’t even know 20 corpses on the side away, like away from like the JFK stuff and, you know, it’s hard for me to know what came from where. And you know, part of it is timing like, right, if I were to go back through the J-K course now, I don’t know how much I’m going to take away from it because it’s just where I am in my development, right? So you guys should be seeking that information, right? And don’t just like, take everything that you, you hear for granted. Right. So yeah,

[01:37:36] Just for a little context, Patrick and Caleb, in case I can’t remember, if you said it earlier and I missed it, Caleb, how long have you been in Jake and Patrick? When did you join? Just just for reference for everyone.

[01:37:47] So I joined Jake in 2016, and I left last week.

[01:37:55] Right, so I’ve been in for five years, in four days, my five year anniversary is the twenty fourth of April, so I’m still a part of the group for the most part. Ok, so.

[01:38:10] So the one thing I would say, which is like building on what you said, Patrick, if you’re interested in like SEO, right? Because that’s SEO is ranking higher on Google at the end of the day. And if you step back and think about how Google works, Google exists to serve its users, it searchers. So the best hint for what do I need to do to rank higher is whatever your target query is, whatever you’re trying to rank for, if you type that into Google. Google will happily show you exactly what it wants to see in order to rank right. So whenever I’m talking to potential clients, whenever we talk internally, we always say SEO is like the ultimate open book test. Google will happily give us the answer in the website’s its ranking. All we need to do is look at those websites and do whatever they’re doing, but a little bit better.

[01:39:09] Exactly. It’s a lot of pattern recognition where you can just let me see what they’re doing here. What is what do they have in common with this second? Like, maybe they’re like, Hey, we’ve got this information and this gets. Look, there’s different levels of difficulty ranking the Skillshare across the country, that’s going to be something that’s that’s much more challenging when trying to rank a local site, and here’s the benefit is like. Pick your fights. You get to pick your fights with with this Legion stuff, right? You get to decide who you get to go after, like it’s a crude example, but the boxing analogy of like boxing third graders, right? Like I could get like if I’m walking down the street and I’m passing a bunch of people and I don’t know the backgrounds on these people, but I’m going to have a good idea of the person that I would want to fight for one person versus another, right? Like, OK, this guy is like six. Five. Two hundred and fifty pounds with a tattoo on his throat. And then there’s like a little, you know, like a child. Like, I wouldn’t never want to find a child, obviously, but there’s not quite as prepared. Like we get to pick that right. So when we do that and then we can look like one of the things I do when I’m trying to decide what I want to write my content.

[01:40:30] If you guys saw the content video or how I’m going to build my site is I’m going to who’s ranking best in the country for these terms? Now let me build my local so that it’s better than them, but I’m only trying to rank locally. Right? I’m only trying to beat like these people, and I’m choosing the market that doesn’t have the big bruisers in there. I’m like selecting this little like, Oh, this just looks like this looks like a lovely little field for me to build my my house, right? So that’s kind of the stock. So Caleb, one of the things that we’re doing with our calls and I’d love for you to join me on this is we have what’s called our spotlight session. So each week we have someone. And for anyone that’s interested for next week, please put in your volunteers or send a message to me or Jeff if you want to be spotlighted next week. So this week we have Eugene Song. Eugene, I I think you may have met him before he was at. Yeah, we met in March. Yeah, yeah. He was with us in San Diego. I had a couple of drinks. Really nice guy. I’ve kind of like followed him. I believe that he was living in San Francisco and then like pandemic maybe has forced him.

[01:41:44] Or maybe it was other reasons. But he’s in. He’s in Arizona now. I think he’s been in maybe a year and a half, but let’s bring you Jean on. And then so the strategy is here. Caleb is I just kind of ask questions and try to find out where they are with their business and then give them an action plan, try to pinpoint problems and issues. So any thoughts that you have towards this? I would love to hear those as well. I’m sure Eugene can benefit. I’ll tell you guys right now with SEO and with most things in life, there’s a lot of different ways to be successful, right? Caleb and I have different strategies. There’s a lot of things that we do the same. We’ve had in-depth conversations. I’ve certainly learned from him. I I think and hope that I’ve given Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So we’ve kind of like put a lot of our strategies together and had conversations that are multiple hours long where we’re discussing strategies on things. So but we still do things differently, right? And doesn’t necessarily mean that that one is right or wrong. You’ve got to find what works for you, right? So but let’s bring Eugene, how are you doing, man? Are you? Are you ready for this? Are you ready for the hot seat?

[01:42:54] I’m as ready as I can be, I suppose.

[01:42:57] So you you just recently, I believe, moved from California to Phoenix area, right?

[01:43:02] Yeah, pretty much. From L.A. to Scottsdale,

[01:43:05] L.a. to Scottsdale. Ok. How are you liking it there?

[01:43:08] Um, you know, honestly, I’m just right now, I’m just I’m in total grind mode, you know, I’ve just been working, working kind of part of the reason was just so I can have less distractions out here, you know? Good.

[01:43:19] So I like the I like the commitment. So how long have you been in in this using this business model?

[01:43:27] You know, actually, I started trying to get into it like a little bit before I jumped into J K. But just, you know, having wasn’t really doing much, I just had like one legion and the locksmith game. And then then I was kind of looking, Yeah, you know, and then I was looking at, well, also because you just can’t get a GMB, so. But then, yeah, so I was like looking at YouTube videos like looking up legion techniques and I see EPWs videos and I’m like, Oh, that’s a pretty good idea, you know? And not really knowing, you know, that you know what? You know what he was really up to, you know, and then I would just keep coming back every week. Yeah, I kept coming back every week. I’m like, That’s that’s another great idea. And at some point I was like, There’s so many good ideas here. Like, you know, I got to talk to somebody.

[01:44:12] So, you know, I signed up, how long ago was this?

[01:44:15] That was probably August and like twenty to twenty nineteen.

[01:44:20] So, OK, so you’ve been in for about a year and seven months or something, right?

[01:44:26] Yeah, something like that. So.

[01:44:28] Ok, cool. And I think before you started this, you were. I remember we had a conversation at that bar at LMB when you were telling me, I think I’m pretty sure you were doing some marketing for another company. Maybe it was in CBD or something. Am I right? Do I have that that right? You had some kind of marketing job prior to coming into this, so you were kind of already in the same industry. Am I correct with that?

[01:44:54] Yeah, yeah. So I was working in like a like a like a pretty big finance company finance.

[01:45:00] I don’t know why.

[01:45:02] It’s all good. It’s probably the hair. So, yeah, no, I was just I was pretty much I kind of came on board because like as an SEO guy, quote unquote. But like, you know, I was just doing pretty much all of their marketing, like all their channels like email, AdWords and and, you know, whatever they they’re making me, do you know?

[01:45:23] Yeah. So so you came into this kind of hot already where it’s like you. You know what, like a lot of people and probably people on this call don’t even really understand what AdWords is yet or like now. I think Google ads, right? So so you came in. So it’s important as you guys come on. I know there’s a lot of people on this call that are from with different backgrounds and different walks of life, right? So don’t compare yourself to other people. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday. I think that’s an important philosophy, right? Like, learn, we’ve all got different skills in different areas. I came in as a software engineer. I had a web design company when I started JC. Does that give me an advantage over someone who doesn’t know how to, like has never heard of like a website, doat or anything like that before? They have no clue, right? Absolutely, it does. So we all have different skills, and I just I think that’s an important thing to recognize because otherwise you get beat down when someone has more success than you where it’s like we didn’t start at the same start anyway. Ok, so sorry for that part departure there. So, Eugene, how many sites do you have built?

[01:46:28] Uh, probably like let me take a look, I have a little ballpark. Yeah, so about like. Probably like close to 30 30.

[01:46:39] Ok. Yeah. How many of these sites do you have rented?

[01:46:43] Um, so, you know, only about two are really like producing for me, right? Ok.

[01:46:48] So yeah, and then I assume you are on last week’s call and I think the week before that as well where we have this kind of 60 percent rule, right, where we don’t want to spend our time building more sites unless we have at least 60 percent of our sites branded right? Yeah. Ok. So yeah, I know.

[01:47:07] Definitely. Yeah. And I just jumped on to the teams, too, so they had us build 10 real quick. But, you know, but I’m assuming that they’re going to have us kind of on a path to like, get those up and ready soon. So that was part of it to, you know, so awesome.

[01:47:22] So with your you have twenty eight sites that are built but not rented of these. What do we have? Do we have some that are like ready to go and we can’t find a client?

[01:47:37] Um, well, so a lot of them are just kind of like not having as consistent leads, so, you know, some of them I have like I’m sending the leads out to people and, you know, just on a percentage basis, like a commission structure deal. Ok. Yeah. So but yeah, we’re going to be doing a lot of work in terms of putting more content on there and just getting the backlinks. That’s kind of like the next phase, you know?

[01:48:02] Ok. Have you plugged your stuff into that spreadsheet that I added in there a few weeks ago?

[01:48:08] I did. Actually, should I have it ready if you want me to share it, if you can, if you want to kind of audit it.

[01:48:15] I could. But it also comes with like, you know, that’s all your private stuff. And I don’t know you want that exposed to this.

[01:48:22] Well, yeah, I just I act out all the

[01:48:25] Stuff, though. Ok, cool, Scott. Yeah. Let’s let’s I will let you share. We see here. Um.

[01:48:39] Ok, I’m going to let you go to Caleb’s and Caleb’s in your point, though earlier, you know how Caleb was like, you know, I want to hire somebody who doesn’t know stuff sometimes. And I think I think that kind of like Dan mentioned it to, it’s like, you know, I came in with like a lot of SEO knowledge, but you know, I was doing SEO like competing against national people with like a huge budget, you know? So like some, some of that didn’t really translate into like, you know, I didn’t really know what a third grader looked like. So I jumped into like more competitive niches, right? You know, not realizing that I have to pay for those backlinks eventually.

[01:49:14] So right? Yeah, right? The hard way, I think, you know, it’s kind of like when you’re hiring somebody, I’m 100 percent on board with Caleb. I would not want to hire a back linker that had backlink experience. And I have actually we had a conversation a few weeks ago with my managers on this where it’s. It’s if if somebody has been doing the wrong thing for a long time, it’s really hard to train them, but if you can get someone in that has the right personality traits and like level of intelligence that you need, then teaching them is great. But when it’s yourself and you’ve got that work ethic behind it and you can come in and just kind of like, add in different knowledge pieces, I think it’s like, I’m certain that you started out ahead of almost every like most people that come in here with your knowledge, right where you’re in there fighting these big fights. And it’s nice to just be able to go and be like, OK, now I get to go and run around with the kids a little bit instead of like getting punched in the mouth by Mike Tyson all the time, right? So but let’s you should be able to share your your your thing now. So. All right,

[01:50:24] Cool. Let’s do it right here. I think it’s this one share. Ok, great. So this. So basically, yeah, I kind of commandeered your sheet and just kind of split them up into the different phases here. Ok. And then so in the teams, they were like, OK, what’s your 90 day goal? So I kind of one of the so I just kind of picked like a random goal. And then so I divided up my properties here. These are ones that I’ve built that are that are mine exclusively. These I have. So I made a partnership with some of the other daycares who have producing sites. So we’re going to kind of do sales for them. So kind of get some fast cash in there. And this one, I partnered up with another care and, you know, we’re kind of splitting the costs here, and I’m going to be doing a lot of the legwork legwork to set it up. And then these are brand new agents that I set up with this last push and teams they made us, do you know a certain amount of allegiance, you know?

[01:51:35] So the first the first thing that I don’t like is you chose a random number. I think it’s very important that you choose a number that is meaningful. So the way that this should work in my mind is what Eugene, what do you want your life to look like? What what what’s your goal three years from now? What do you want? And I’m not. That’s not. I’m literally asking you that question. I want an answer. What do you want three years from now? Two years from now? A year from now?

[01:52:09] Well, you know, I have

[01:52:09] Some things like, I want this, maybe I’m like in your life,

[01:52:14] My life, you know? Yeah, ideally. You know, I mean, I mean, if it gets this comes back to some of the whys and you know, exactly, you know. So yeah, I do have some, you know, family members that I think, you know, in the horizon I’m going to be needing to take care of and stuff, you know?

[01:52:31] So what does that cost per month? This is where your number should come from. And then you need to tie it. Have this emotional bond between that number and the life that you want, because this is if you want this to be the vehicle, it can’t be some random number, right? Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah. This is like critical for success because this is going to get hard at times. It’s going to suck. At times, it’s not going to be fun. And that connection is what pushes you and make sure that this is the vehicle that gets you there. So I know that it’s like, Hey, I chose this number. It sounds like a good number. This number is probably will suffice for that stuff, but I think it should really like do the math like spend a day or something or four hours and be like, OK, this is the place that I’m going to live. Here’s a picture of it. This is why vision boards work for four people is like you’ve sent out to the universe. This is what I want. So I’m saying take it a step further and don’t just like put it, what does it cost? Like, what is this like? What like, I’m going to live in this place and this is where I want to live. This is the car I want to drive. I’m going to need insurance. I’m going to need this.

[01:53:44] I want to pay for my mom, my dad. At this point, I think they’re going to be maybe facing some, some health issues, and I need to make sure I can support them. What does that look like? Maybe I could go and find somebody else that is in that situation that I predict I’ll be in. What? Ask them, what are you paying for that? What does that cost to get those numbers? Add all that up and then say, How many sites is that to get me there, right? Right. So like, I know that it might sound like I’m like splitting hairs or something because you just chose this number, but I just think it’s so important. It’s the most important part of this process is to have this connected emotionally to what you want to achieve. Ok, so but let’s let’s continue on to it. It just I see a lot of people choose that 10k number because it sounds sexy. You made it even sexier, you made it k, but like, let’s have it be based on real, like real stuff. Ok, so if you need to rework that, I know you probably I don’t know the team process they have going on, and maybe you’re kind of locked into this, but I think for your own personal stuff, you should know what that is and that obviously should go for everyone in this group.

[01:54:54] Yeah, no, I know you actually I remember you were kind of giving me that advice to like kind of tie in the tie in your way, like more specifically to to your goals and stuff. And yeah, now that makes sense. You know, actually, like I remember when when we were doing the teams, you know, they were telling us to kind of pick out like a goal like and the time frame to so, you know, ideally actually, I pick like a 90 day goal. And initially I wanted to try to just get to like a six K based on, you know, legion like kind of recurring passive income, you know, just to like kind of set my, you know, just set me up so that I can, you know, kind of build more, go more into build mode. Yeah. And so actually, I have like one of my properties is is like, it’s where we’re working on a commission basis, but it’s been producing pretty consistently, you know, every month. But but, you know, some months they’ll be like, you know, five six K and then, you know, some months they’ll just be way lower.

[01:55:57] So are you are you doing commission in a seasonal niche?

[01:56:02] It’s not seasonal, but it’s in a it’s in a tourney niche, so it’s like the turnaround, the turnaround time is along for ranch deals. So yeah, so.

[01:56:14] Ok. Yeah. I personally don’t like the commission, but I think there’s some exceptions, and I think working with an attorney might be one. I know that. And Jeff probably knows more about this, but you know, there’s like certain like I think most attorneys aren’t technically allowed to do like fee splitting unless you’re an attorney.

[01:56:36] But yeah, I have my business partner is an attorney. Ok, he’s licensed with the bar.

[01:56:41] So yeah, so that is. So just like these are the justifications why you deviate from what I almost have as a rule where it’s like commission because we’re bringing on people we don’t know. As nice as they seem, they may be great salespeople. I think my experience is that I’ve gotten screwed when I tried to do commission deals because I’m relying on their organization and it may be intentional or it may not be intentional, but I know that either way, I’m usually the one that loses on a commission deal if if there’s like, if they’re like. Not organized enough to send a follow up proposal or call people back. Now I’m going to rely on them to like, identify what lead came from me and pay me a commission for it. When they’re like losing from that decision, they’re just not as motivated. So be careful with that. I think what you’ve done, though, with this, that’s that’s the good, good exception. Ok, cool. Keep going, brother.

[01:57:35] Yeah. So so right now with the other stuff, what we’re doing is, like I said, some of the J-K partners that were in the group that they didn’t have, they have producing legions. But I don’t know. It seems like a lot of them are kind of short on time. So I actually have another business partner who’s who has sales experience. And so we’re trying to get these placed right here. So yeah, to your point, you know, we’re kind of starting off with like the commission just to, you know, entice them in. But yeah, we’re know. But these are some of them are producing, you know, pretty heavily. So we’re, you know, I imagine we’re going to try to convince them to go do a monthly afterwards. I don’t know. What would you say that would. I mean, would you and Jeff just kind of go straight for the fee right off the bat?

[01:58:20] Because I personally look at, look, it’s always going to be easy for us to close people on commission deals and sales is one of the most important business skills that you can have. Ok. Just regardless, and it doesn’t mean you can’t be successful because look at Caleb and he says he’s not good at sales, but all that money that he has coming in came from him closing people one way or another, right? So I wouldn’t want to use commission as a crutch for sales because you’re going to be able to close people on commission deals because the business owner has no risk, right?

[01:58:55] Right.

[01:58:56] So. I think it in like when the stars line up, it can be more profitable than a flat fee, but I don’t like it. I don’t think it is as scalable either, because, you know, in our agency. Jeff, do you know how many leads we had come in in the last 30 days? I know that you.

[01:59:16] I know we have about 10000 calls. I know that those aren’t vetted. But you know,

[01:59:22] Probably how do lock, right? That’s my point right there. It’s like, yeah, right? You build your structure based on commission and then you like, we probably had thirteen thousand like like three thousand form submissions and ten thousand calls, right? So what should the High Commission be for each one of these clients? It’s just like, Holy cow, how am I going to? I’m going to spend who knows how long? Trying to figure that out. And it’s never going to stop because I’ve set the structure up and I want things to be scalable for me, which means flat fee, right? I don’t like the paper lead, even though I would rather personally take a little bit less money, not Red Line the client and have it be automatic where it’s just like, I’m going to build them on the 1st of the month every month. This is how much it is. I’m going to pay attention to it. I’m going to say, like, just like Paul said at the beginning of this call, right, where it’s like we know about the value of this lead, we know the lead volume. Let me stick something below that so that they’re not red blind, and then I’m going to keep trying to make that number bigger. And then when I do, I’m going to ask for a raise, right? So this extra time, like if you were to calculate your hourly versus like getting paid a little bit more, I think you’re always going down, even though you might make more money because like, I don’t have to do anything. I’m just like, You can be

[02:00:33] Good for us as a stepping stone for an interrupter. I think it can be good as a stepping stone or in certain circumstances where you maybe you have somebody who you believe is a really good client. It’s a very specific type of a niche where maybe they’ve been beat down by other services and they just don’t have the trust. And it’s a way to get your foot in the door and show them a little bit of the magic you can create. I think it can be a valuable tool, but I would not rely on that as a default way to run your business, for sure.

[02:01:03] It’s sounds good, but you need to. You need to anchor them. If you’re going to enter into that relationship at the beginning of that relationship, like, Hey, I’ll tell you what, you don’t know me. I don’t know you for this first month. Let’s do commission, but we don’t do commission long term. This just not how we run our agency. We’ve got even if you don’t like, we’ve got we’ve got a growing business and you know, it’s just not sustainable for us with the amount of the amount of leads that we have coming in, it’s too much. So we don’t like that unpredictability in our business. I would rather make less but long term we need like say that from the beginning, don’t like it’s one thing you’re like, Hey, let’s do a commission deal. And then three months later, like, I don’t really want to do that anymore, right? That’s like, like you need to set the parameters of that relationship from the beginning.

[02:01:51] So, yeah, another idea is you could set it up that way and set the parameters and then say, Hey, look, I’ll just give you the first leads for the first couple of weeks or whatever. You go close and get some money in your pocket, and then that’s going to be my fee. So you’re not you’re still not requiring anything of them. You’re giving them something in advance leads in advance to build some trust and credibility. But at the end of the day, you’re anchoring them to, I want you to come and spend that money back with me, right? If it’s a roofing site, for example, I mean, they close one deal, they could get enough to pay a fifteen hundred or two thousand or whatever you want to charge them. So that’s another way to frame it if you wanted to frame it that way.

[02:02:31] True. Awesome. So, Caleb, I’m sorry, Caleb. Eugene, looking down your your list of you were also I can see that there almost every single one of them is in the same niche that that’s on this tab, at least. I assume. Go ahead.

[02:02:47] No. We have about like, what’s

[02:02:50] A some niche, I thought that said same niche. Ok.

[02:02:53] No, no. Yeah. We have probably like four or five niches, probably in this this batch.

[02:02:59] What’s this cash column represent?

[02:03:03] So I was just kind of making like a little estimate on like what I can get for a monthly. You know this for for a lot of these I picked. This is just one niche here. You know, I mean, it’s a brand new niche that I’m getting it to. So I just have no idea what to expect. So I just kind of estimate it on the lower end what I was going to get out of it, you know, OK, for what I’m able to produce in three months, you know?

[02:03:31] So, so this is this kind of like the long term estimate, or is this like the first or like what are your what’s your thought process on those numbers?

[02:03:42] Yeah, no. I was just kind of estimating out for 90 days, you know?

[02:03:45] Ok. I know that that maybe we’ve been taught and led to believe that like this, 90 days seems like this magic number, and it can be disappointing when it doesn’t happen in 90 days. My experience is 90 days is really fast to rank something like it’s it’s it sounds cool, but you know, I feel like our average is longer than that. And you know, part of it is we don’t always get to choose the niches that we go into and do, you know, like because we get a lot of referrals, but when you choose, obviously it’s going to be faster. It’s hard to get everything set up and just crushing it in 90 days. That’s what I’ve learned. And maybe it’s gotten harder in the last few years, too. So I just want. To make sure that expectations are set correctly now when these things are ranking, well, I would be disappointed if those were the numbers that they were producing. And my concern is the reason I was asking about this stuff. Some of them say like one hundred and two hundred dollars, the niche selection is is going to be really important. You want to make sure. I kind of have a rule in my agency of I don’t want to go into a niche where the average ticket cost is less than seven hundred and fifty dollars because if I send 20 leads where it’s, you know, maybe it’s a dog groomers, the one that I go to.

[02:05:12] So like, let’s say I send 20 weed, so the person is going to close like maybe a third of them, right? So let’s say they close seven out of the 20 weeds and then those are worth like 40 dollars. So the revenue for them is going to be right two hundred and eighty dollars for the seven. Now, like, what can they pay me? So if I’m going to get 10 percent, they’re going to give me twenty eight bucks. Now what if it was like swimming pools and they were like forty thousand and they closed seven of those leads? Right now, they got two hundred and eighty thousand. And you know, so make sure that you’re choosing these where you can get the big numbers right, like the niche that Paul was playing in, where he’s getting nine thousand a month. Those are high ticket leads that are coming in. So you want to balance the volume with the with the cost of the the ticket item costs, right? So. Are you doing that correctly with like looking at these numbers, or is it that you chose lower numbers just because like, hey, this is just like after 90 days, hopefully?

[02:06:19] Yeah, yeah, no. Yeah, I think I mean, I look at ticket price too, for sure. Some of these ones, when I jumped in with the JC partners, these are ones that they picked out already that weren’t so high ticket. I mean, they actually have some some pretty high volume, though, so we’ll see what we can do with that. So actually, for some of these ones, there were, you know, I had talked to somebody else who said that they can take leads nationally. So I’m just figuring if I put up, I got probably 10 in that same niche, you know, kind of spread out here. And so I was figuring, you know, and they’re pretty low hanging fruit. So I’m figuring, you know, on average, maybe it’s going to be I’ll start to see some leads trickling in. But you know, to me, it’s a completely brand new niche. So you know, that’s why I didn’t really know how to like, estimate it. So just kind of

[02:07:12] Pick another piece of advice. I’ve got two of them. I want you guys to all be very careful when you create partnerships. Ok, a lot of times. They’re not going to go right. They’re not going to go well when you are creating this partnership. My advice is that you should know this person very well. And the reason that you’re partnering with them, your skill sets should complement each other. So this person is great at sales. This person is great at tech and like, we both have similar work ethics and you’re not going to know that at the beginning of a relationship. Ok. That has to be done over time, and I would hesitate. To form any partnerships personally, OK, like it’s it’s something that that I probably won’t be doing again any time soon. But there’s there’s chaos that happens. I’ve got a partnership that exists now with with a few people. And you know, I love these people, but it’s it’s been like a lot more to organize than I normally have to deal with. And it’s it’s I just think there’s a lot of pieces that go wrong, and I want to give you that cautionary before you go into this. Don’t. Partner with this, because partner with someone, because of that, you’re trying to avoid doing like the back linking or whatever. I think that’s the wrong strategy personally. That’s why you learn the back linking like Caleb says, and then hire somebody to do that. And and then you have. The ceiling is set by your ability and not by the joint ability of the partnership where you’re having to rely on other people. So that’s something I want you to be wary of just looking at this where you’ve got these, these different partners.

[02:08:56] Ok, so the next the next thing is, it looks like you said you have a new niche and I don’t know how many of those sites are in the same new niche, but I would pump the brakes on building out more in that niche until you really know the niche. Like, I personally wouldn’t want to build like more than like two or three sites in a niche and kind of see that one through before I start copying those all over the place because you could find out that like. I don’t want to be in this niche, and this isn’t for me, and now I’m like, I’ve spent all this time and money on it, right? So I think if I were in your shoes and 100 percent of what I would be focused is not necessarily I’m building more sites. It’s it’s more like you’ve got 30 sites here. Thirty one or 30, I guess like these need to be ranking and and money needs to be coming in from these things before. That’s because. Like, they require more of your attention if they’re not ranking and if you put it somewhere else. These aren’t moving forward on their own right like or maybe they are. Maybe it’s just like somebody walking down the street and you’re trying to walk from like Phoenix to to Dallas, right? But you need to get these things in a vehicle of some sort. And you know, that means like putting more content, more backlinks, doing that type of thing, not just letting an age, right. So if you’re applying that attention somewhere else, that can’t happen.

[02:10:23] You said, Eugene, that’s a few of these are pulling significant number of leads. So what’s the status of those as far as like the sales process? Like where you at? What’s the hold up?

[02:10:34] Um, right, so. So, yeah, so these are the ones that, you know, so I put a post in in J. K, you know, and I was just like, Hey, we’re going to do we’re going to do some sales for you guys here, you know, if you have producing legions. So probably about like, you know, maybe three or four of them are like seriously producing like probably three or four calls per day, you know? So what? We’re what so. Yeah, no. Yeah, a lot of volume, so but we’ve so my sales guy has been able to kind of get, you know, I mean, he’s like relatively new to the lead gen game as well. You know, I mean, I’ve been talking to him about because we were co-workers before at my old company. So like, you know, we’ve been talking about lead gen forever now. So and but like, he’s so he’s he’s linked up these people with some business owners that are on commission basis right now. But he did do a good job. Yeah, we mentioned to anchor it so that we’re going to kind of make that transition eventually. But so right now, what’s what’s kind of holding us back, I guess, is we’ve been sending lots of leads. And I guess so far, the business owners haven’t really been like converting them yet, although although some of them are, you know, they’re going out and giving estimates and stuff. So I think we’re kind of on the process of maybe two or three of them.

[02:12:00] And how long have they been taken kind of weighing them, you know, the sales cycle and how long it takes them from Senate kind of soup to nuts from when they get the lead until they close the deal? Do the deal get paid? Like, what is that cycle look like?

[02:12:16] Um, yeah, some of them, yeah, they’re kind of in like like, you know, the home improvement fields for some of them. And so, yeah, no, I I don’t know exactly how, you know, it probably should take like about a week to close something, you know, I think some of them are pretty high, high ticket items as well. So. So, yeah, I mean, I think like one of the problems we had even was, you know, one of the business owners, he went out and gave a bunch of estimates, three or four estimates and you know, he didn’t wasn’t able to close them. So he was like, Hey, you know, I don’t know if this is for me. So we were kind of trying to coach him on that sales process. I don’t know if we got to maybe try to find somebody else at this point,

[02:12:56] But you know, I would be asking him how he closes his normal deals and what the difference is between closing these compared to his normal business because he just he may just not be a very good closer, you know? So that’s an issue. Yeah, for sure. So these are higher level niches. I’m wondering why you have such low numbers there for your expectation of what you would be able to make off of it.

[02:13:20] Um, yeah, I just figured that that’s also because we’d have to split that commission with the.

[02:13:27] So that would be like your cut. Well, you know, that would be like, Yeah, yeah, OK. Yeah, yeah, I would just like to be. How long you keep these people going? You know, and I fall into this trap, too. You know, I believe in somebody, you know, I want to believe in the people that I want to have as clients. And we don’t take on everybody, right? If I find somebody that has promised in my eyes and I think they might be the right person, I’ll sometimes go way too far and give them way too much leeway in getting them on into actually paying monthly, paying a monthly fee so that can be, you know, I need Patrick to keep me in check and other people in our agency to keep me in check sometimes as well. So I think, you know, maybe think through that process and really set those boundaries for yourself or with your other partners so that you’re all accountable and you’re not just being taken advantage of or taken for a ride by some of these people. If they’re just taking the leads and they have no intention of ever paying you anything or whatever the case is, you know?

[02:14:29] Yeah, yeah, we try to track that better and make sure that, you know, keeping.

[02:14:34] Yeah, I would give them a deadline from the beginning and be like, Look, and everything with the sales process is positioning, you know, you need to be. Justifying why there’s a deadline because there’s so much value like this is worth a lot of money and, you know, we don’t know each other and I know that all these other people claim that they can do what we do to prove it. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to give you, I’m going to give you. And this number needs to be based on the sales cycle for the lead, right? So that time period you’re selling yachts, you might need to give them a longer time period than carpet cleaning, right, because they’re going to be closing things right away. So there’s money coming in and that makes the sale easier. But so look at the sales cycle and be like, OK, I’m going to give you 14 days. So today is like whatever the twenty eight. So on the 12th of May, that’s going to be end of this trial and we’re going to talk and see and look, you don’t owe me if you close any of these, these, I know these are worth a lot of money and I’ve got partners on this with me, so I can’t let this go on forever like we’ve got.

[02:15:41] We can’t give this stuff away forever. We’ve worked really, really hard to get it to where it is now. It’s producing. It’s worth a lot of money to the right company. So I’d like to have a conversation. I’m going to check in with you a couple of times over the next, whatever, 14 days, but on May 12th, like we’re going to shut it off if it’s not right and if it’s not for you, no hard feelings, right? So setting up that framework based on value is is great positioning, and that lets them know that this isn’t going to go on indefinitely. They can’t try to string you along, right? Because they start to string you along. Then it’s going to be really, really hard to close it because now it’s like you. There’s a level of desperation where this is. This is acceptable that I mean, they’re not stupid. Most of them, right? So they’re going to come to that conclusion where it’s like, this guy probably can’t find someone else. Whereas if you’re like, Hey, this is how it is, I’m going to give you this date. This is a business. Is it worth a lot of money like you’ve set everything up really well? Does that make sense?

[02:16:37] Eugene Yeah, man. I mean, it’s true. I mean, there’s the opportunity cost if you got three calls coming in every day and nobody’s closing them, I mean, that’s literally money that’s, you know, flying out the window every day. So I mean, it’s you when you frame, we haven’t really framed it like that to put a deadline on it, but that’s definitely something,

[02:16:56] You know, when you look at this sheet, Eugene, like what is your like? What’s your goal? Overall, I know Patrick asked, you kind of like your what your purpose is, but I mean, your goal is to like, monetize all this stuff as quickly as possible, I’m assuming, right? So it’s like, what? What’s your biggest holdup in doing that?

[02:17:15] So, yeah, so I guess, you know, moving on to so this was just kind of like the overview of like the, you know, the projects I will be working on like that 90 days. And then so yeah, I took Patrick’s Patrick’s spreadsheet and kind of, you know, put those out here as well. So I guess I guess I guess the the biggest holdup would be just kind of finding a way to like get through all the all the pieces here. I mean, I’ve I was been able to keep up on pace so far just kind of like putting my head down and doing it a lot myself. Like I said, I’m jumping in a couple of new niches, so I’m at this point. I’m doing some of the content myself just so I could learn the niche at the same time. But I guess I guess the biggest holdup would be just getting getting through this production here. You know, I tried to do some of the Google, got some of the Google reviews, you know, I figured out a way to do that. But yeah, it just it was just kind of taking time as I was learning each piece, you know?

[02:18:18] What is your role in this in the partnerships and what is the other people’s role you’re doing sales for some of the people that are in JC, right?

[02:18:27] Yes. So I don’t know why it didn’t show up here, but for like the for the JC partners ones, yeah, we’re just 100 percent doing the sales. Those are already made and producing to different degrees. For this one, I found another JC partner where, you know, I’m basically kind of, you know, being project manager and you know, we’re, you know and kind of he’s got some some resources put into it. So I’m kind of just probably going to do sales for those. And then and these are the ones, you know, I’m just building from scratch and just doing all the good things.

[02:19:07] So, you know, I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you that there’s kind of like three categories that people fall into Eugene, and I think you fall into the best one. So the first one is you have people that can follow the steps and do the tech stuff, but they don’t do sales. And then you have the second one where they can do sales, but it’s like it’s just nauseating for them to try to do the fulfillment side of things, right? And then the third is somebody that can do both. And it sounds like in these partnerships, you’re kind of like, Hey, we’re doing sales here, but over here, I’m doing fulfillment, right? So I think the best reason a partner is when you’re in one of those first two categories and like, look partners, great, like we can shake hands and like learn from each other and all this stuff. But when you’re in that third category where you can do sales and kind of do the fulfillment, this is where. You know, you can move into that third category from one of the first two categories, I’m a big believer in that, but if you’re already present in that third category, then in my mind, the value of a partnership goes down.

[02:20:12] Ok. So because they’re not bringing a weakness, they’re not filling in a weakness as much as some other partnerships may, may feel like, for instance, like Caleb was in this game, and if he really was in fact bad at sales, then hiring a salesperson could be phenomenal for him, right? Because now you can like, focus all the systems and fulfillment, right? He’s an easy example for us to to look at and be like, This dude is a fulfillment master. Right? And maybe he’s not comfortable. He shows up in a suit to try to sell like dock with the waiters. That’s like. Like that would be a big compliment for him, so I just want I want you to be aware of this man. This is like trying to give you my best advice. It’s a lot of times it might not be what you want to hear. I know that you’ve made these partnerships, but there’s a long road ahead with, you know, how you decide to set your business up. And that’s just my read. Am I correct that you’re in category three?

[02:21:11] Yeah, I think so. You know, actually, I used to do phone sales like I was. I did headhunting when I was first starting out in the corporate world. And that’s a brutal, brutal sales game, man. You know, cold calling people for 30 G’s, you know?

[02:21:26] Yeah, yeah, I can imagine.

[02:21:27] Yeah. So on no commission. So yeah, I definitely I don’t I’m not afraid to take lumps and stuff. And but I guess I guess my main issue overall would be like, you know, from from when I started, I think I’m, you know, thanks for putting up the spreadsheet and stuff. It’s kind of helping me organize. It’s just like knowing where to prioritize my time and on on what’s what’s most valuable. You know, I think I can handle all the steps, but it just it just I feel like I got overwhelmed with so many different things to do. And I think that’s been my big what’s been holding me back. And that’s kind of what I’m focusing on right now is just making sure like, all right, let’s put my head down on where we’re most important thing is and get it done. And so but yeah, so I guess to bring back to to Jeff’s point to, yeah, it’s like what’s holding me back? And said, Yeah, I guess just just being able to have the resources to produce. And so that’s kind of why partnered up right now is just to get that fast cash coming in. So I can, you know, you know, you know, be able to produce a little more quickly, you know? And yeah, this is the space, you know?

[02:22:35] Right, right. It’s I mean, as don’t let the partnership be like Caleb said earlier, if you’re going to. Don’t not learn part of the process because you’ve got this partner that does it because I feel like if you unless you just want to be a lifelong partner with all these people, you don’t want to run your own agency. But if you want to like, run and manage it or they just say, you’ve got to learn every piece of this and you need to, you know, we got to wrap this up. It’s after 9:00 here, and I’ve got I’ve got to get off here in a minute. I know that we had like a lot of a lot of I’m trying to target 15 minutes for the spotlight part of the call. And then obviously it was a real gift to have Caleb on here and share all the stuff that he did. But I’ll tell you the story kind of like, I want to ask you if you have any questions after this. But you know, I’ve been skiing for a long time and I went to this this like self-improvement course that lasted like five months. And through that, they really start to try to and I’m not saying you’re doing this, but when you see something that you’re avoiding or you’re afraid of, basically what I came out of that is you’ve got to attack it. And I had been this like skier all my life, and I’d always kind of been afraid to do the black diamonds. And, you know, I was avoiding them all the time. I would go. I would just like focus on the Blues and I would just be like zipping around the Blues. No problem. They were easy. After this course, I went skiing.

[02:23:57] I did the black diamond on like the first run. I had this mentality that I’m scared of this and I’m afraid of it. Let me go after it not telling like somebody never ski. Don’t go do black diamond. That’s not the point of this right? But like when something is like, I don’t like doing back linking because it’s tough or I don’t like like this because like, go after it, solve it, beat it down. I went down the block time and I was fine. Did the blacks the rest of the time, and it was much better and enjoyable, and it was just the fear and I was avoiding it. And I don’t know that that’s what you’re doing, but attack this stuff like wherever your weakness is in this, if you want to run an agency, you’ve got to go after whatever, whatever that that piece is that you don’t like doing. And then you get to the point where you’re competent that you understand it now. Now, pass it off to somebody else and have them do it right. And it’s a lot to give up when you work really hard for these pieces. It’s a lot to give up a big portion of your business for a partnership when you know, like you didn’t join this stuff to like, maybe you did. I don’t know. I certainly didn’t join this thing. I wanted to be my own boss and I wanted to, like, be in control of my own destiny. Right, so. Maybe you’re not doing that, but I just I’ve seen people set things up this way. With that being the motivation for doing it and if that is, then that’s a word of caution. If not, it wasn’t directed at you then.

[02:25:28] No, no, definitely. There’s definitely aspects of things that I don’t know, even just totally ideologically where you just have like a a stress from it and you just kind of like put stuff off. And that’s definitely stuff that, I mean, that has has had been happening. But yeah, I mean, now I just I mean, you know, I’m in it to I mean, it’s a win it now, you know, so it’s like, you know, there’s no there’s no other options. So like, I’m

[02:25:53] Like, Can you have you have you don’t have a job, right? This is just this is just what you do.

[02:25:57] Yeah, it’s just I’m out here now. Yeah.

[02:25:59] What’s your income on a monthly basis right now?

[02:26:03] Like I said, like, I only really have that one producer actually actually one of my other business, one of the other commission guys just closed one today. So I mean, I guess that was a win, but so we’ll try to. I mean, he’s he’s he’s got some high ticket jobs that he’s working right now. So like a hundred k project that, you know, it looks like it’s going to close. But but yeah, I mean, it’s kind of fluctuates from like three three to six K. Ok.

[02:26:31] Ok. I mean, that’s that’s obviously enough to live on, right? So. So that’s good. And you you’ve given yourself the availability because you’re doing this full time. You can really like you don’t have to spend 40 of your best hours during the week doing something else. You can focus your attention and your time on this business, right and turn that into more. So it sounds like you’ve got some 90 day goals of 17 K. I think it’s important when you set these these 90 day goals up that you’ve got like check in periods like don’t just say like, Hey, 90 days here you should be, you know? Whatever like, you should be 50 percent of the way there, and it may not be linear, but forty five days through. You should be at this checkpoint to get to that spot right and then make adjustments throughout the week. Are they are they taking you through that with the teams or?

[02:27:23] Um, well, so far, we haven’t had too much like the first little push, but I mean, based on like what you were saying with the phases, I kind of set like little milestones to get through. So I love it so far. So far, I’m on pace. Yeah, but so

[02:27:38] That’s awesome, man. So we’ll see how

[02:27:40] We’ll see how it goes, you know? Yeah, yeah, that was definitely I was definitely very helpful. Your spreadsheet, I wish, you know, like I feel like that could have been pretty helpful earlier on, you know, but you know that now the real value in it, too. So, you know, thanks for sharing that with us.

[02:27:57] Yeah, yeah, you’re welcome. You know, it’s. This is like version probably 15 of of like my attempt to organize my agency and on, you know, after the call, after the like, the call tonight, I’ll spend like, OK, what are we going to go over next week? And I’m always trying to think of it, and I had a really busy week and. It was time for that call when I was in my spreadsheet messing around and I was like, Oh, I should just like, throw this into the group. So I had one of our managers like cleanse it of our data, and it was a split decision, and it seemed like it’s been very helpful for people. And it was in conjunction with having a conversation with Paul, where he had all these sites that he was building, but they weren’t ranking it. And like you, if like, if I was in your shoes, I would be doing what you’re doing here where all my attention is on turning these things into moneymakers, right? Because building more of these things that don’t make money is just going to reduce the amount of money you have right now. Right. So like, there’s nothing worse that happened. Like unfinished. Stop, because it’s like you’ve spent the time and money, but you don’t have any of the benefits and like like you would be like, so make like you’re doing the right thing, you’ve got these deadlines. I love that man. I think having a goal with no deadline is just like, it’s just like an idea. It’s not. It’s not anything right with no schedule of how you’re going to do it. So. Eugene, do you have questions? On on any like a specific question.

[02:29:34] Um, I mean, not not specifically now, I think. I mean, I think you guys gave me some, some really good, good pointers to you and Jeff, so I’m just I’m ready to attack it now, you know?

[02:29:46] Yeah, and I love it. So when is so when does the 90 day start?

[02:29:55] It started back a week before so on for twenty one, so yeah, so it’s supposed to end on seven twenty one here.

[02:30:04] Ok, so you have a July twenty first. I love it, man. I’m excited, I’m excited to see this. You know, I think you have an aggressive goal and but like, hey, if you don’t, if you don’t get to 17 10, you get to like 12 K. That’s still like between four and two times two and four times as much as you’re at now. So. But, yeah, you know, assuming on the niche, the niches. I would certainly say it’s possible. You know, obviously you’ve got to be aggressive with this stuff and really go after it and. But cool, man, I appreciate you. I hope the rest of you guys got some value from from Eugene. Thank you for sharing this. Thank you for being the spotlight man. You got any other questions about any of this stuff along the way. If there’s anything more personal that you didn’t want to bring up on the group just just hit me up with that. The rest of you guys, I know this has been a really long call. We’re at like two hours and forty five minutes, and I’m trying to keep these things at an hour. So we had some technical difficulties and we were lucky enough to have Caleb on here. Hopefully, you guys got some good value for him, but send us some send me a message if anyone wants the spotlight for next week and send us the message. Yeah, you guys have an awesome week and you know, hopefully we can get some of these new updates with be generated out to you guys. And as always, we’re always open for suggestions on regenerated or ways that we can make it better. So thank you guys. All you guys have an awesome week and I will see you in the group. Adios, amigos.

[02:31:42] Thanks, guys.

[02:31:44] Welcome. All right.