#264: How To Scale Your Online Business By Putting In A Little Face Time w/ Joshua Kennedy
sweq 264 audio
Wed, 9/23 · 4:29 PM35:07
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
clients business people asheville fun playbook podcast talking sweat side employees working sales funnel brain dude salesforce thinking app crm walk
Law Smith
0:01
sweat equity podcast and streaming show pragmatic entrepreneurial advice with dick jokes. I'm your host last fifth sitting to my right on your left. On your screen, Eric register
0:12
all over baby.
0:15
Hashtag
Law Smith
0:17
hashtag sweat equity. This episode is brought to you by Warby Parker Warby Parker. trial.com, forward slash sweat. Get you five free pairs of eyeglasses wear sunglass wear prescription, non prescription try
0:39
to try on and I'll just send them to you for free.
Law Smith
0:41
You pick them out, gotta send some back. I go I got I horsehead I pick them all out. I got him sent to me. goes on the website. Choose
0:49
your animal force. Send them over. I said john
Law Smith
0:52
Elway. horseface fucking fun. What what looks the best for me. And I got five pairs. More like warm in the office asked all the ladies in the office I go Hey, how do these look? They go. You look stupid and all that back. I didn't know how to do it. Now. Now they have it. They you can filter by your face type. Right? When I when I was doing it, Warby Parker first Warby Parker trial.com. forward slash sweat. Five prepares to try at home, pick them out. Have a little runway. They get a little fun in the household. Sure, took a dig in between her legs and walk down down the hallway with a full length mirror with a pair of sunglasses
1:34
on your balls. Exactly.
Law Smith
1:37
That's what we're doing in the COVID era. Wow. Warby Parker Warby Parker trial.com forward slash five free pairs to try on at home that hooks this show up. Which gets this show to be better overall because we be invest our other sponsors ExpressVPN trust me money. Try expressvpn.com forward slash wet. Get you three months free off an annual subscription. reown the fanciest of fancy athletic wear adult adult athletic wear be better than your friends try look down on them. Go to the badass sports gear go to the link try room comm for such sweat 20% off use the link or the promo code bridge 20 grasshopper try grasshopper.com forward slash sweat gets you $75 off an annual plan for your business phone line. Don't be a jabroni with a Google Voice number for your side hustle or in business. And freshbooks go freshbooks comm forward slash sweat it's your 30 day free trial on a accounting software that you get direct deposits the next day. Wow, that's a lot We got Joshua Kennedy. Oh, you bastard you remember from imagine,
2:49
Martin, you're gonna remember to say his name.
Law Smith
2:51
Yeah. And he he brought his, like, his new employee on Logan. That looks like he's the lead singer of the crash test dummies. Fucking nailed it. Or Collective Soul or Pearl Jam in the 90s. You guys are gonna love it. If you're watching this on video, which is on YouTube. Facebook,
3:11
your mom's house? Yep.
Law Smith
3:12
That's another podcast, video, LinkedIn. iTunes, Apple podcasts. If you want to listen to Spotify, laughable app. And if you don't want apps, if you don't want to hit our sponsors, just subscribe rate. me money. CPCs Just give me money that fuck we got to do what hot girls do on all the dating apps? We need to make her own Venmo so people could send us stuff. Yeah. Let's get going. Oh, about my sweater.
Law Smith
4:00
So our ongoing series with you? or once a month we're like your
4:09
podcast jackass.
4:12
We're talking about
Law Smith
4:12
we're gonna record the intro after I know
4:15
but you say that and then you don't do it.
4:17
Yeah, you don't say I got
2
Speaker 2
4:19
it. Yeah, you say that? You weren't gonna do it though. happened. Wow. times. Maybe. Maybe
4:25
we are in
4:26
our production side of things. Maybe.
Law Smith
4:30
Alright. Joshua Kennedy. Oh, imagine what what what's the point? What's the website? I sent him to
4:40
imagine Dasha affiliate.com Okay.
Law Smith
4:43
And your associate that I just met two minutes. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I was gonna say You look like a 90s like, like
5:06
fantasy romance
5:07
novels something like that.
Law Smith
5:11
I'm thinking PCU Yeah, what's going on? Those are the real NHL playoffs your pics? Yeah, no.
5:23
I like he's a pet guy.
Law Smith
5:24
I'm a pet guy can help. From one white guy with long hair to the next. You know we welcome you. I hope it doesn't recede like mine is right now. Or I'm starting to look like Craig t Nelson. From Coach fee ever watched that sitcom, but it's gonna get there. It's alright. It's good. Maybe?
5:49
Maybe too happy. I don't know why.
Law Smith
5:51
Ilan musk figured it out for himself. Maybe he'll help. That'll be one of his things. If you ever look. Have you ever seen the before and after? When Ilan Musk was PayPal? Yeah. And like basically, almost hair's all gone. And then.
2
Speaker 2
6:04
Yeah, no, LinkedIn tells his brain to grow more hair. It's easy.
Law Smith
6:08
Why can't he unleash that to everybody? Whatever he did, he's trying that should be like flame throwers are great. And, you know, ventilators, we don't really need them. But turns out Yeah,
2
Speaker 2
6:19
well, dude, have you seen the robot they had to build to implant the neural link brain thing? Yeah, it's it's like a crazy, super, like, accurate robot that'll
Law Smith
6:30
shoot the thing into your brain. Would y'all if y'all were offered? Would you ever do the neuro link?
6:37
I would need to know more about it for sure.
Law Smith
6:39
No, he doesn't tell you shit. He just walks up to you. And he goes, you get to know nothing about it. Do you want to do it or not? Like he just does it that creepy kind of? He doesn't have a South African accent really
3
Speaker 3
6:51
weird. I don't know. I'd have to go now.
Law Smith
6:54
You'd be the first one to get it. Now? No one. No, no.
7:00
Yeah, it kind of creeps me out a little bit.
Law Smith
7:02
future ahead of you. Maybe that's why
7:05
we're both Sign me up.
7:07
Well, I don't need to like take any higher risk stuff like that. You know,
Law Smith
7:12
we all y'all look like you're living in a you're in Asheville right now. Yeah. Looking for a new new location for the business. Is that what am I?
7:22
Yeah, yeah, pretty much.
Law Smith
7:24
What made you want to leave the hot spot of Coronavirus of Florida?
3
Speaker 3
7:31
Florida. I'm in Rhode Island for the most part. So he and I have been talking for I don't know what, two years now at this point. We met back at a conference in California. In Aubrey Marcus podcast as well. Yeah. He was in like a full suit and tie and I was barefoot in like a rainbow colored shirt.
Law Smith
7:51
That's how that's how I want to imagine you. Yeah, the hacky sack.
3
Speaker 3
7:58
Yeah, we just, we continue talking. I was still in school doing computer science stuff he used to do after after school. And we just kept talking. He was a little cheerleader. Like, yeah, let's do it. And now I'm actually starting to understand what the business model is. And we're just kind of thinking if we got together, that'd be a little bit more energy there for it to take off sort of thing that we're doing here.
Law Smith
8:30
Yeah, yeah. Well, like Asheville. I've heard I haven't ever been there. I've heard it's one of those like, you know, one of those really great cities that is it. Like it's kind of like Austin, Austin 20 years ago, though, like kind of thing. I don't know. What it's not as like Austin like blew up. Denver blew up Nashville is blown up. And it is there beyond the capacity of the city that you know, it was it was made for so those cities are starting to become like really hard to actually live there. Because it's expensive. Yeah.
2
Speaker 2
9:03
So are you guys looking to move home base to Asheville? Is that the deal? Are you just kind of meeting up down there?
3
Speaker 3
9:09
up there? We're tossing around. Yeah, I'm thinking I'm thinking that southern city of Charleston, Asheville, maybe even Greenville. So taking a little tour of that area, and then we're gonna feel that I'm not I don't think I want a huge metro area yet, but I'm sure if I did, maybe Austin would be up there. This is one of the cities
Law Smith
9:26
I think one thing that this whole pandemic is definitely really shining through is that you don't need to I think it's gonna become more commonplace that you don't really need to be in the area.
9:39
I was gonna say why Why are you like why just
3
Speaker 3
9:44
love Tampa SAP, but I've been there for my entire life. I'm just trying to get to because, you know, our organization probably always remote. You know, even regardless of how big it gets or whatever, is that I'm free, you know, and like we're still you know, so we're not learning It all by location isn't same. You know, I don't really have any b2b stuff in Tampa going on keeping me there.
2
Speaker 2
10:05
Okay, so it's more of a life decision than a business decision.
3
Speaker 3
10:09
Yeah, I think something he and I both connect on is that we want to be able to travel a lot and kind of be able to move and pick up and go place to place. So at least from my perspective, right now, like I just quit my job, I was selling appliances after I graduated. My perspective is kind of like, this is something I want to be doing with him. And it's kind of hard to get a business off the ground. Totally, virtually, I think we could, once we kind of get a nice platform established, and we kind of know our roles and know how we're going to be working things out, then we can split off. But at least for me, right now, I think we need to kind of have the sharing of the physical space in order to like build that foundation so that we can so that we can move. Really,
Law Smith
10:50
definitely, you'll have your own COVID bubble. I guess you're not worried. Like how many people are in the you guys look like you're in a startup house right now? Essentially.
3
Speaker 3
11:06
shelter and that's about it. Yeah, we've got probably seven people here right now, but I think four girls live here. Maybe three girls live here full time. I was connected from one of them from St. Pete. And then they just got, of course, like I said, we're trying to start.
Law Smith
11:20
Get connected. Yeah, well, we should probably check that out. We'll fly up. There. Allegiant goes straight there. I think Allegiant airlines, the shittiest airline. But, yeah, for girls, that doesn't sound bad. I mean, that's, that's fun, though. Like, I'm envious that you guys. Look. You look
11:39
very hot. What's stopping? You?
Law Smith
11:45
know, I just, it's one of those things where I I'm looking at you all, and I feel I'm getting that vibe of like, when I was in my 20s. You just like, excited to get stupid? Yeah.
3
Speaker 3
11:59
We're happy with being stupid. Right? entertainment. Enjoy. You
Law Smith
12:03
know, you have that luxury. Right? I mean, like, a bit you can make a bit. Yeah,
2
Speaker 2
12:09
I'm not saying it's a bad thing. Okay. I mean, yeah, dude, envious. Sort of? Not really. I don't know. I did plenty of that. You know? Not necessarily,
Law Smith
12:21
like a guy that didn't have plenty of that.
2
Speaker 2
12:23
Well, I mean, I'm just saying, it's not necessarily my thing. Whatever, we move on, we need to talk about this more in my psychology. So let's break it down.
Law Smith
12:34
No, I just think it's, it's interesting, kind of where you're at position wise. Last we talked to Josh was like, you know, you had solidified two or three clients, I think of my memory and things are going well, if anybody's listening and wants to go back and listen, you know, I think this is fun to do once a month to see the progress as you're going. And it looks like you know, there's something to be said about scalability in remote teams. And so I look I'm I'm looking at this COVID err, I'm not that great at 100% being virtual. I don't like I like being around people I it for better or worse. It's a good contagious he always shows up at my house. And I got COVID
2
Speaker 2
13:21
shows up when he's hungry needs food. Yeah. Oh, yeah. takes a nap. Dad move
Law Smith
13:27
like this. I this is the frat house over here. They've got one in Nashville works out. Yeah. But my thing is like, I think a lot of people are going oh, I think a lot of business articles are coming out that are like, oh, a lot of people can be working from home a lot of employees. It's like no shit. We all anybody under 40 kind of knew that. But I think on the other side of that, I think there's something to be said that you need that interaction. So it looks like y'all are kind of going against that grain of right now. At least in the new normal of it. You see the value of y'all being around each other right now. And the startup? Or I shouldn't say startup like maybe the you know, the the emerging growth phase, whatever you want to call it.
14:11
Yeah, absolutely.
Law Smith
14:14
And so, right now you're focusing on making the playbook scalable, I'm guessing.
3
Speaker 3
14:20
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Right. Because I To be honest, is like my, my strong suit when I was working internally for companies was always growing with growth. I was able relationship side of things, the strategy side, the campaign side, whatever, I got it, I understood it, I could do it. But my thing, my weakness a little bit was on the structural side of it, right and, and the system side of it. So that's one thing before because like right now I'm kind of maxed out with the amount of clients we've got about. Right now we've got about six websites with we're working with maybe in like probably eight within the next month or so. So we're pretty much maxed out as far as manpower. It's just more about, like you said, getting that systems in place, so it can be scalable. So, you know, while we have the time to do it right now we do.
Law Smith
15:03
Yeah, I mean, your time spent, half of your brain is in business development side and bringing in business, always. And the other half is on the ops side. And that's just that is running an agency. And so the one thing, if this helps, I like to use a whiteboard app called Miro MRO, not a sponsor of ours. But what what I like about it is, it's easy to kind of share these whiteboards that are almost endless, really, but you can do mind maps on them you can do, you can get a lot of kind of old school models, Gantt charts, whatever you want to have this living document of a playbook, you know, especially when like, you can do a whiteboard right now while y'all are together. But it might help to take the actual physical line, putting it in the digital form, and then y'all can keep growing. So
3
Speaker 3
16:00
it'd be kind of specific exactly what we're doing right now. Like, right now I'm choosing a CRM. So I think one of the two that I'm looking at right now are going to be active campaign in Salesforce. But I know some of the Salesforce is robust and has all the functionality and stuff but that people say one is just like a little bit expensive. I think it's like $25 a user, you know, I don't know how big we're gonna get. So it may not be that expensive, but I think if you guys have used Active Campaign or have any contacts that you but that one seems like a good solution. I've
Law Smith
16:27
Salesforce was the first CRM I ever used. View Salesforce.
2
Speaker 2
16:31
That's it though. A little wonky. I mean, it's Dude, that's, that's it's a whole, they've scaled it back. Well, maybe I don't know, when I did it. It was like, it was like looking through an encyclopedia of stuff. There's so many things to choose from, it was very complicated.
Law Smith
16:49
They're like the most expensive, they're the biggest like CRM, as you get into it kind of like HubSpot for inbound marketing, you can kind of start out and piecemeal it, but then like, it can become like, you get locked in, they want you to become a zealot for it.
2
Speaker 2
17:07
Yeah, they get their fingers in so many little things that you're doing, then it's like, well, I can't just get rid of this because it affects so many different things, whatever it might be
Law Smith
17:15
serums, like, what do you want to do with your CRM?
3
Speaker 3
17:19
So So basically, my my thing right now is like I, we are an affiliate marketing company, right, so we kind of sit between the advertisers and the merchants, the merchant, advertisers and publishers, and the brands and merchants are the people trying to sell products, e commerce stores. So basically is like one is gonna be a sales funnel for any like clients that we have. So prospecting, all of that kind of stuff for potential clients. The other one is going to be on the publisher side, which is the campaign management side, which is like, I've got a contact at Forbes, I've got a contact at this, whatever, whatever, like, are they doing a deal or a sale or an article or something like that, that we need to be aware of. So we can feature our clients if possible. And that could be any content site, there were any influencer advertiser, but it's just being able like having those two sides of the business where, and the other thing is just the segmentation of the email. So it's like, basically, I think they call it like, lead scoring. So understanding where the opportunities are greatest for the campaign side, like, if I run a campaign, on this website, versus this website versus this website, like what's gonna represent the most value for my clients and be able to email segment, so I can send different emails to the list and then prioritize my time according to that.
Law Smith
18:28
So interesting. Yeah. I'm a fan of pipe drive. I don't know if you've used that before. Because it has a visual sales funnel, it's more for sales, I don't know if it's gonna help you with that other half. But I like going into the dashboard, you can make, you know, your sales funnel, it could be five phases, intro call discovery meeting, you know, follow up meeting in like, proposal and then closed, right. And so we'll give you the visual of that sales funnel when you log in. Right, which I like, I like having that visual and going. Okay, I know, I have, you know, 100 targeted people in the all the way in the left column. And then we've got 20. If we have 20 people that are qualified and interested in the next round, then I'm relaxed. Like the whole idea is to to get you to estimate on like weighted average of all the people all the prospective clients. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. So like, the biggest thing with business development and doing the pipeline. So it's called pipe drive, and I you kind of go back and forth pipeline pipe drive on accident, but
19:39
I think that's the idea.
Law Smith
19:40
I know. But I think there's one called pipeline too. But what you want to do have your sales funnel kind of eventually you have enough statistics you have enough sample size of wins and losses with clients of what worked and what didn't. And you can go okay because The pressure I used to have was like, I never knew every round until I started doing the math on it consistently so I could go, Okay, we've got four proposals out, that are, you know, to smaller clients, but that's, that's going to be fine. I don't have to be that I don't have to go so aggressive, find more business quickly. You know, right. It's all about your sales cycle, eventually. And really, honestly, psychology wise, it's your anxiety. Yeah,
2
Speaker 2
20:28
exactly what I was gonna say you can look at and be like, Alright, the number say that if I have this much here, I should be good. And it'll all work out. But you're still gonna freak out about it.
3
Speaker 3
20:41
If I can interject a little bit, too, I think kind of the point that we're at right now is, I mean, obviously, we're always have a full pipeline of clients, but I'm gonna have to find a way to start bringing people on if I want to, I want to scale it all, too. So I know, we talked a little bit of the system side of things, but now also just onboarding and training as far as employees and finding sourcing employees and all that kind of stuff, too. Because I am, I'm so gonna have to be very hands on with the business because I'm still very client facing. But I need other people to help me out if we're gonna continue to build.
Law Smith
21:11
So that's tough to
21:13
that's like the hardest thing.
Law Smith
21:18
It's doable,
2
Speaker 2
21:19
it's doable. It's just a lot of work. And it's this time that you guys are together that you need to just hammer this stuff out and get it down. Because like a lot of it's, you know, it's front loaded, where it's like, you get that down, you're probably going to be okay, then you're just addressing abnormalities. But, dude, that's Yeah,
Law Smith
21:36
well, it ain't fun. It's so you're, you're right in the playbook, essentially. The way I would try to do it, I didn't kind of sloppy, but I would use Evernote and I try to write down as many notes as I can, while I'm doing whatever work I was doing. In the moment, I try to take a second to go, Okay, I'm writing the playbook over here. Because I want to teach it, I need to be able to explain it. Right?
2
Speaker 2
22:02
Yeah, I always say it was always, you know, the checklist of whatever needs to be done for this task like it. How do I like it does? Yeah, and you know,
Law Smith
22:11
exactly moving down the list. So thank you almost thinking like you haven't, you haven't? You're not even like, you're months away from hiring a bunch of other people, I'm sure. But you have to think like you got to hire him like next week. So how would you do? Right, right. Yeah. So a lot of dictating to yourself in your free time kind of stuff. Like, if you're walking around going, Okay. How can I explain the process of doing this and the way I want it done, right. And just treating Evernote as your own Bible, whatever you want to use no Notes app, but treating that like you're writing, you're literally writing every day, a playbook to get it done by x.
2
Speaker 2
22:50
Yeah, anything was specifics, numbers that you need to like just had that maybe you like something done a certain way, with a certain percentage of whatever, just like, get that down, get all these little things down that you can point to and be like, well, that's how it's done right there. It's easy. Yeah. And I got it out of my brain, because I do a lot of stuff where it's like, I don't tell anybody, the specifics of whatever, you know, like on our logo, right? The wording is tilted negative nine degrees, right? I didn't tell anybody that shit, like, but I should write it down somewhere, probably, you know, for whatever reason, and that's the sort of thing that's like, well, I want to be serious about it. Yeah, you should definitely write that down.
Law Smith
23:30
We got pretty good at one point as like going back and forth video like, and so like, by yourself, essentially going, Hey, you know, this is how I audit a website, you know, for a client. And this is what I look for here, here and here or here. And then I, you know, say this, this, this maybe, and so like, we would use video a lot of the time to kind of at least capture it. Right? You may not go back to it and use it, but you got it there and that you have a little peace of mind there with that. But anything like any difficult process that this is all digital, so you can take a second anything, anything you had to troubleshoot for a client here to really figure out everybody should be you should make it part of your, your, your like, protocol for free all to always kind of do some screen grab video of the laptop or someone talking about the situation. Here's how I solved this problem for the client. And that's all internal, right? Now, eventually, you might be able to turn those internal, you know, problems you solved into marketing, you know, a marketing content thing, but like, it's tough, it's not easy, but you have to go alright if if I was an employee, if I was hired myself, essentially what would I how would I want it laid out? And then as you as you're bringing on people now you need to figure out what kind of brains you want, right? The video things very interesting because you want people that can learn. Like we, we've learned a lot just by filtering YouTube videos and watching those and gain skills that way. It's in an ironic way, you have to have a lot of patience to be able to sit there. And yeah, like, yeah, go through a lot of that stuff and learn how to do whatever app or whatever, whatever system. So anybody that can learn on the fly like that, you know, not afraid to go, Okay, give me anything, I'll figure it out. If you if there's, you know, if there's some information I can work off of a video is even better, you know?
2
Speaker 2
25:41
Yeah, these days, you know, somebody being like, I can't, I'll never be able, I can't even don't even do that with me. Like, it's just like, Well, did you try and google it? Just try and google it first. You know, maybe anything you're teaching is way easier right now.
Law Smith
25:55
video, it just put the phone up and just record it. Yeah. You know, get it get the track, get the transcript done on otter AI. And
26:05
just what is it the clips app?
Law Smith
26:07
Yeah, like clips. It's everybody's iPhone. it'll burn. It'll take the the what is the subtitles? The captions. It'll do it via Siri. But it'll it'll capture that. So you can just do videos with those. And you never know if you're going to use or not. But I yeah, we've got video to your advantage is probably the best way to scale it quickly.
26:33
Yeah, we've got a ton of useless videos of us, pointing at each other.
26:38
We got a visitor. Well, Who's that guy? Who's that guy walking by?
26:43
Is that your roadie, bro.
26:46
Here, he had the leads here. All right, man. Let's see
26:55
that toilet paper and roses. Yeah.
27:01
This
27:05
is scripted, by the way, I was totally,
27:06
totally fucked up the toilet
Law Smith
27:08
paper and I've never had that combo. Well, so perfect. What do you I guess what, these are fun. These are kind of front problems to tackle I that's how I kind of look at it in a nerdy kind of way. But you're in a good position. I mean, look, from when we talked to you the first time you came on. Look, you've, you've improved in an era where no one's doing that well. So that just generally, but look at these problems as these are luxury problems in one way. But you, you can get in that problem where, you know, you always have to be thinking those that both sides of the brain as the agency owner, you know, bringing in money, and then getting the job done and keeping costs as low as you can. Well, a lot
2
Speaker 2
28:00
of work. A lot of the operations stuff you're doing now is so that you can in the future, be the face and be the guy that's going in and making the big deals and all that stuff. Because you get bogged down being like, Oh, I don't know what we're gonna do in this scenario. Let me sit around, think about it. It's like 12. That's how you never grow. But it sounds like you got the right idea on growth and all that. So
3
Speaker 3
28:23
yeah, I'm pretty as you know, as someone who started like we really started in mid April was kind of when we had the website software in place and everything to kind of be at a place where we have, you know, potentially seven ish clients, seven, eight clients within essentially four and a half, five months of operating as a business is pretty, pretty happy about it.
28:44
Yeah, congratulations.
Law Smith
28:45
Yeah, there. There's a couple of onboarding apps that you might want to look into to the one I heard about was called walk me, like you're going for a walk out in that lush forest out there. Just, it's probably just a template of a bunch of, you know, employee onboarding stuff, like we're talking about. But if you wanted something that's a little bit more structured that
29:10
give you a little head start. Yeah,
Law Smith
29:12
nothing wrong with that. It's like if you if you want to write a business plan, there's like, you go to sba.gov. And just, they have a form you can fill out to help you out.
2
Speaker 2
29:22
The good thing about those things is they they, they're reminders, right, you'll go through like I didn't even think about that. Yeah, you know, like okay, well yeah, we can do a dress that whatever it is employee handbook. Got one of those. Have fun with that. Yeah, yeah, that's boring. I have
Law Smith
29:38
our operating agreements How are you? How are you with Oh, yeah, I mean
3
Speaker 3
29:45
Well, yeah, we're we're dealing doing okay on the on that so far. We have agreements with some of our clients in place one of the don't tell them but one of the one of the new ideas that he's kind of come up with me was to charge like a 3% annual fee and like a membership fee to cover Like technology, and they call it a tech fee. But just like kind of based on the performance that we bring them, that's something because we don't have a lot of, you know, we have recurring revenue in terms of like monthly, but we don't have any guarantees. So just trying to get more ways that we can get income into the business. That was something I'm thinking about any place.
Law Smith
30:17
Yeah, look, your margin is tough, too. And, again, you're going to be thinking both sides of the coin, bringing in as much business as you can. And keeping that cost that labor costs down as much as you can. And so you're always going to be kind of messing with that. And you're gonna have to, like, kind of make your own calculator. As you go. I like yeah, I would do like dumb guy math, like, what can I do? All right, I would talk to a client, we can do this for you. And in my head, I'm like, we can do this probably 80 hours labor, you know, you're trying to figure it out. What that labor cost, so your cost rate versus your bill rate is always gonna be something to think about.
2
Speaker 2
30:58
And when you say don't tell your clients, like, I'm not gonna, I'm not editing it.
31:04
Yeah, we're all
31:06
hopefully, listening, but
3
Speaker 3
31:09
my gonna share this with the clients immediately. Send it to him. My clients,
Law Smith
31:18
I was gonna say, as long as you can justify why you have that expense, which I'm sure you do.
2
Speaker 2
31:23
That is the thing, like being a business owner is this like, weird moral feeling that you get, like, it's bad to charge money for stuff, like, just at the base of it. It's like, dude, you have expenses, like, you might need that 3%. Like, right, you kind of have to get past this thing of, Oh, I don't want to upset my class, like, Hey, you know,
31:49
they get to
3
Speaker 3
31:52
write well, and I have a friend that has had a media company that actually about to sell the media company. His name is Mark Lombardi, Nelson, and their companies, throw media at St. Pete. But he always said, like, whenever he's working fine, and stuff, he just tells them what to do, rather than ask them what to do, right? Because like, when you put, when you put the power emphasis on the client, the client might pull back or start controlling the situation. So like I told, I told Logan, I was like, whenever like, you know, we just had that client call today. I said, Yeah, we're, this is the price that we charge as far as the the revenue sharing. And I said, we also have a 3% technology fee. At the end of the year, we charge you once a year, basically, essentially, and I didn't know it wasn't like, this is something we want to consider. So as I move forward with all the clients and stuff, I think it is important not only to not feel guilty, but then also be very direct about sort of you what your processes or your billing or whatever.
2
Speaker 2
32:37
No, my that's great, dude, dad. Yeah, that's a huge for like to be at that point. Because it's like, it seems not like a big deal. But it really stops a lot of people from really going next level,
Law Smith
32:47
I think, Well, yeah. And like my, I'm in a b2b marketing agency, and my my boss had like, kind of I was used to really small, I don't even want to call it small because it's technically not as small business is so broad when you say that term. So like, in my head, small businesses like 10 million in revenue, or like 10 employees kind of thing. We're like, I was we were working with like, local startup micro nano businesses that that you had I was doing, I got used to that conversation of trying to edge ago, I'm going to educate like, I'm going to educate them on what's going on. And you get to this level where I'm working with small medium businesses and talking to them. My boss is like, you don't have to, you don't have to overdo it. Like you can be just right direct, like Queen of England. They want you to be direct. They want the seat as efficient at that level. And I'm like, Oh, yeah, it's not as
2
Speaker 2
33:49
personal. It's not their money directly all the time. Yeah,
Law Smith
33:52
at the small to medium business level for b2b b2b, especially because that's all that I mean, that's all about being efficient. And that's all about just like, no frills kind of kind of world. And so, I had to reprogram myself to like, kind of take that conversation a different way. And just like you're saying, kind of dictate. Okay, well, where are you paying points? And then we're gonna help you here, here and here. Here's the price, right?
34:22
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Law Smith
34:25
Yeah, any anything else?
34:28
You're on the right track every little every time we see a little bit better. This is
Law Smith
34:31
actually the most like business dense episode we've had with yet. Maybe ever. Possibly every
34:44
business most business dense. Yeah. It's pretty girthy as far as the business is concerned today, ma'am, thank you,
Law Smith
34:51
PRI. team player. I like it. He gets it. All right. I appreciate y'all coming on. And, uh, you know, let's talk Next month let's see how y'all are.
3
Speaker 3
35:02
Yeah, absolutely sounds good to meet you guys. See, fellas
