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How I Turned $2 Into $14M/Year Digital Marketing Agency

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– With a track record of dying companies here in America. Eric Siu turned $2 into a $14 million business a year. – It’s really simple. I mean, you can start this working in your boxers in your dorm room. When you look at the Logan Pauls of the world or the MrBeasts of the world, they went audience first. They built their audiences first and then they have their monetization vehicles. The misconception here is that you can just put money into the ad platforms and then you’re gonna magically have a business, and that all goes back to understanding the platform and knowing how to play the game for each platform. It’s about learning and then doing, and that’s how you build something great. – Stay tuned to see how he did it. (upbeat music) Alright Eric, so tell us your story. How did you start with Single Grain and what’d you do before that? – I was a VP of Marketing at an online education startup, and at that point in time, my now podcast co-host, Neil, he asked me to come help save a failing agency. It was an SEO agency known as Single Grain. I came in as the Chief Operating Officer, 26 years old. Didn’t know how to operate. I made the company go from bad to worse. We dropped all the way down to one employee, and my outside accounting firm called me and said it might be time to shut it down. And at that point I was like, "Whoa. "I think I want to take over the company." And it was myself and then four other partners. Neil was a partner as well. I paid $2 outta pocket to buy the company. So $1 for Neil’s shares, $1 for his other partners, and then I seller financed the rest, meaning we paid through the profits of the company. – Oh, I’m excited to hear more. Alright Eric, this is such a beautiful view. I’m jealous, but let’s get back to your business. You said you bought your business for $2. I mean, how in the world did you score something like that and where’d you find that opportunity? – Yeah, so I guess I found the opportunity because I was hired by the company. And again, six months into it things weren’t getting better because Google had changed its algorithm. So we’re an SEO company, right? And the work that we’re doing was no longer effective. And so I came in. I thought I was this knight in shining armor coming from tech. Basically the founder said, "Hey, I think I’m gonna shut it down." My podcast co-host, Neil, he said, "Hey, I think you should leave. "There’s no brand equity here. There’s nothing." And so I was the naive optimist. I said, "Hey, like, I might be interested in taking over." He’s like, "Oh, okay, tell me more." And so Neil decided his shares were worth nothing, and then same with his partner. So they both owned 10%, and so you have to pay at least a dollar, right? And so basically, okay, here’s a dollar, here’s a dollar. So it was $2 out of pocket. And then at the time, at 26, 27 years old, I had no idea what seller financing meant. I was like, "Well, okay, well, why don’t I buy the company "through the profits of the company?" That’s actually seller financing. – [Nick] Wow. – And again, I put in a contingency saying I would owe nothing if the company failed. And so to me it was a no-brainer deal because I was gonna learn. It was gonna be hard but I was gonna learn, but I was still in my 20s, so I thought I had a lot of room and I had already succeeded in the startup world before, so worst case scenario, I’ll go get a job somewhere. In hindsight, in retrospect, I should have started from scratch, ‘cause when you think about from an investing standpoint, if a stock goes down 50%, you have to recover 100%. And we were already down way more than that and it was just a pain in the butt to do it, but I don’t regret it. So that would be my advice to everyone. If you have a chance to buy a business, don’t do a turnaround business. And I’m happy to give a checklist later on what you should look for if you wanna buy a company, but do not do a turnaround business. And that’s what I’ve, I’ve done like a couple of turnarounds, so. – All right, so we’re standing, and behind of us is a library of books. – So here I probably read maybe 10% of these books, but I remember that Nassim Taleb, he’s the author of "The Black Swan" or a lot of different books out there, he’s like, you look at a library as reference points. And even when I look at a book, I’ll look at the chapters and I’ll look at them as blog posts, pull the reference points, move out, go execute, and it’s about learning and then doing. – Wow. That’s pretty cool. So when you first started your business, I know that you were offering free services. At what point do you think that’s a good idea and at what point do you start charging? – I think if you’re starting out, so actually someone reached out, right, reached out to me on LinkedIn and it was actually a good reach out. It’s like, "Hey, like I’m just starting out "right now on LinkedIn. "I want to write for you for 30 days, "and if it’s good, then we could work "on a longer term arrangement." And that was good. He actually got my attention. I was like, "Show me examples of your work." Problem was his work wasn’t that good yet, and so I told him, "Look, I think you need to work "on your craft a little more and then come back to me "in six months, 12 months or whatever." And what I did when I was about 24, 25 years old, so I was working on a company, but at the same time I was already creating content. And so I was posting to Quora, the question and answer site, and I kept answering a lot of SEO questions. And someone eventually reached out to me and they’re like, "Hey, we need help with SEO." And then I started creating way more content and I was making screencasts every day, 20-minute screencasts. I had to upload the screencast. There wasn’t great software, and I’d send it to people and I just kept doing it. I would make like, you know, 10 of those a day and I’d just be reaching out to people. It was like nonstop reach-outs, nonstop hand-to-hand combat and nonstop willing to just get my face pounded in every day. – Wow. (upbeat music) All right, Eric, so what mistakes did you make when you first started Single Grain? – So, one of the biggest mistakes I made is not focusing. And so one of the biggest problems with entrepreneurs early days, and I still have this sometimes, it’s called the entrepreneurial ADD, where we are looking at the next shiny object, this thing, this AI thing, this blockchain thing, this and that. – [Nick] Yeah, yeah. – NFTs or whatever. And oh, "I wanna invest in this company, "I wanna build this software, I wanna do the education." And so it’s really important to focus on what’s in front of you and water the grass where it’s in front of you, ‘cause the grass is greener where you water it. It’s not on the other side. – I like that. And you also mentioned earlier that anyone can start this business from $100. I mean, how do you start from $100 and gain traction? – Yeah, so it’s really simple. I mean, you can start this working in your boxers in your dorm room and you can be reaching out to people, like I mentioned before. You can just be hitting them up on different platforms. Let’s say you’re doing videos, you’re editing for Reels or Shorts. You can be hitting them up on Instagram saying, "Hey, I edited this for you, "and would you like more of these? "I’ll do a couple more for free "and then we can work out a deal." – That is so cool. – That’s the way to do it. – All right Eric, where are we now? – We are in the boardroom of the Beverly Wilshire. – What is one place that you should not be doing things such as social media? Do’s and don’ts? – Don’t post the same thing to each channel. What I mean by that is if I have a long-form podcast interview like this one, let’s say this is an hour long, it won’t work for YouTube Shorts, okay? And I can’t just post it on LinkedIn. It’s not gonna work that well, but I should think about what works natively on the platform. So what works well for LinkedIn? A long-form post or maybe a carousel post with multiple images, that’s what works well. You have to understand the platforms really well, and then you have to understand what’s working well with culture. And so recently I had a video with MrBeast that did well. Why? Because A, it’s MrBeast. Two, I had a unique insight to share as well. Three, the storytelling was pretty decent, and four, the cuts, the editing was sharp as well. And so it’s a combination of things. But again, that all goes back to understanding the platform and knowing how to play the game for each platform. – That’s great. (upbeat music) All right, Eric, where are we? – So this is the ballroom at the Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills, and this is where I will be doing my next founder’s mastermind. So they were gracious enough to let us use their space. – That’s cool. So check this out. Tomorrow you’re starting your business all over again and you have one chance. What would you do different and how would you look today? – I would stay completely locked in on one thing, and I know it’s really hard to do. I think I had to learn the hard way before I realized what everyone else says. The Bill Gates, the Warren Buffetts of the world is just focusing on one thing, looking at that one egg like a hawk. Not having a bunch of eggs in different baskets. – Cool. So what are some of the key top strategies that you implement in your business as a digital marketer? – Yeah, so me personally, I subscribe to the mantra of building your own audience, right? And so when you look at the Logan Pauls of the world or the MrBeasts of the world, they went audience first. They built their audiences first, and then they have their monetization vehicles. You’re actually seeing that happen more in B2B now, but they’re more B2C. They sell chocolate bars, they sell drinks and things like that. But even if you’re in real estate, let’s say, or even if you are, like you have a services business like I do, because I learn and I teach around marketing, my whole thing now is, oh, I’m just gonna keep doing that. My audience is gonna continue to build. Because of that, people will know, like, and trust me, and then people wanna do business with one of the business vehicles that I have. And so a good example of this would be, Gary Vee does this, right? My podcast co-host Neil does this as well, and I do this, too. So we have the agency and there’s other stuff that might be plugged in. And so because marketing’s getting harder, but still right now there’s good organic attention that you can get from platforms like LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube. It just takes a long time, probably two to three years to build this stuff. I look at our podcast. We’re close to over 100 million downloads now for the Marketing School podcast. – Wow, way to go. – We got about 2 million a month, right? – That’s incredible. – But it takes time to do it, but most people are just like, "Oh man, you know, I’m not good enough." It’s, "Oh yeah, I tried." How many months have you tried for? "Oh, three months." Well, no wonder it didn’t work, because that’s, you think you’re gonna build something in three months? It doesn’t work that way. It’s a long view on things and it’s being willing to suffer for a long time, and that’s how you build something great. – Well, consistency is key. – Yep. If I were to start today, I would be starting a YouTube channel, right? And what I mean by that is I would be documenting what I’m doing. And let’s say, oh, I have zero experience as a real estate agent, right? So I might be documenting, hey, here’s what I’m doing. I might not be getting views, maybe five views here, seven views here, whatever, but I’m constantly getting better, right? And then over time I might create a podcast. And so you have a video podcast. I’m gonna post-produce this and make Shorts from it. I’m gonna make five-minute clips from it and I’m gonna distribute it to my channels too, and hopefully this becomes 100 or 150 pieces of content, and one of them might take off and get 100,000 views. Who knows? And that’s the game to play today, and that’s, you have to understand kind of the macro, what platforms fit in with today’s day and age and then play to that game. So SEO I wouldn’t do today ‘cause it’s gotten way harder and it’s gonna change a lot with a lot of the AI stuff that’s happening. – Oh cool. Thanks Eric. That’s a lot of good information. – Yeah. – If you’re tuning into UpFlip, I bet you are a lot like me, busy building an empire right from your digital workspace. But do you ever get that feeling that you are not alone in there? Like companies are always lurking in the shadows, peeking at your emails, snagging your contacts, and cashing in on your sensitive information. Whether at a cafe, in the airport, or in the library or just chilling at home, an internet service provider or a cyber thief might be out there ready to snatch your secrets. But that’s where today’s sponsor comes in handy. Not only did Brave VPN make today’s video possible, but they’re always giving you and me the ultimate security. One simple app and your phone, your computer, and your entire digital world is encrypted and protected with a powerful VPN and firewall combination. How’s that for a peace of mind? Download Brave at brave.com/upflip and use the code UPFLIP to get your 25% off your first three months. Check it out. So how do you develop resilience as an entrepreneur? I mean, I’m sure you have a lot of setbacks and moments like that. Is it all your mindset or are there certain skills that you’ve learned over your times? – I think if you’re starting out, you should learn sales because you get rejected all the time and you eventually learn that every single no brings you a little closer to getting a deal done. And it just becomes part of the journey. No’s gonna happen a lot and you better get comfortable with it. And I think the most people that struggle with no, they end up staying at the same level. I don’t know anybody that isn’t someone that will push through adversity. – Well, that’s comforting, because a lot of people are afraid of no’s and they think that once there’s a no, that’s shutting them down, but you’re saying just keep going. – No might be not right now, and then you can move on to the next thing. At least a no gives you a definitive answer to go do something else. – All right, so now let’s get to the fun stuff. So what on average do you see a gross for a month and what are your expenses in your business today? – Yeah, so high point, you can call it, let’s say 1.2, 1.3. That would be the high point of the business. – One a month? – Yeah, a month. – Incredible. – And then the profit margin would be about 20%, and we try to aim for the gross margins to be be around 50% or so. – Wow. – And, yeah, you gotta understand your margins. – All right, so what are one of the best advertising websites for a business to use? – The answer is, it depends based on where your audience is hanging out. So Marketing 101, you have to first understand where your audience is hanging out, so. – Cool. – If I might be talking about blockchain related stuff, Twitter’s a good spot for it, Reddit might be a good spot for it. Or let’s say I want to advertise my enterprise software. Maybe I’ll go to some podcasts that are very tech-oriented and very high net worth. – That’s so good. – I might do that, or let’s say I have marketing software. Well, I have a podcast called Marketing School. That might make sense. And so the answer is, it depends. – Okay. – And so you have to kind of do your research first. And then usually people might say, "Oh, you know, 10 to 15% of your revenues "might go into marketing and sales." I say baloney to that. Sure, you can ask ChatGPT or Google Bard, these AI tools, how much you should be spending, but the reality is, if something’s working really well and you really wanna push growth, then you might be spending sometimes 25, 30% of your revenue on marketing. It just depends on how much you want to push it. – So if someone’s watching and they’re like, "Well, I don’t have a lot of money to play with "or to start this game," how much would you recommend to start off with? – Fantastic. I mean, I would recommend they start with nothing because there’s these ad platforms, they, LinkedIn, Twitter. Facebook, by the way, I don’t know if you know this, but 93% of Facebook posts now, they’re all Reels. And so there’s a lot of organic reach that you can capture, and there’s no excuse for anyone to say, "I don’t have any money." Well, you know what? You have a lot of time, so go do the work and suffer for three years and then tell me that you didn’t put it in, right? – That’s right. – And so every single person, they gotta put in the time. And they’re like, "Oh yeah, one year, two." No, three years at least to build an audience and to build a business. – So you grew a podcast with over 100 million downloads. So what’d you do, how did you start that and what’s working for you right now? – Yeah, so the podcast is probably one of the hardest things to grow, but it’s also one of the most rewarding because people that listen to a podcast, they listen for almost the whole thing. The retention curves are really high. And what I mean by that is someone that listens to a podcast, like a five-minute, six-minute episode of ours, it might go 80% people listen through 80%, versus YouTube, it might be like 30, 40% if you’re lucky. – Wow. – Now, my point is you’re able to build a much deeper relationship with people at scale, and that’s why I love podcasting, because people know who you are and so they feel like they’re your friend, you know what I mean? And so podcasting has been great for us because it has allowed us to create events. There’s advertising revenue from it. Also, it feeds in with the main businesses that I have, which is the advertising agency or whatever else I might create. So it does have a down funnel effect. And right now we get close to about $2 million a month and we want to grow that to about 5 million kind of views cumulatively each month. – That’s cool. – So. – What’s one common myth about digital marketing that most people believe and what’s the reality like? – Yeah, so everyone thinks digital marketing is tied to paid media. In fact, during 2020 and 2021, more than 50% of VC or venture capital dollars were going towards Facebook or Google Ads, and now easy mode has turned off. Marketing has actually gotten a lot harder. The misconception here is that you can just raise money and put money into the ad platforms and then you’re gonna magically have a business. The reality is it’s not that way. There’s a lot more that goes into marketing. You have to be really creative. You’re ad creative, it’s gotta hook people in, right? And then you gotta have a landing page, so when people click through, is the landing page consistent? And is your product actually good? That’s the most important thing, right? It’s gonna be a much easier job for marketing. Marketing’s job is to ultimately bring people to the point of sale and nothing more than that. – All right, Eric, so this is the fan blitz. So this is where I’m gonna ask you four questions and we’re gonna go try to answer ‘em within 10 seconds or less, and let’s see if you can knock ‘em out. – Blitz away. – All right, so first question is by Laszlo Peter. He’s asking, "What advice would you give "a middle-aged person getting into SMMA as a career shift "and how to stand out "from the ever-growing crowd of younger service providers?" – Understand who you’re targeting. Do free work for them, then try to negotiate a longer term deal. – Great. All right, The Palanco Company is asking, "Does marketing differ based on the business type? "Can a food business do better on TikTok over Instagram?" – You have to understand where your audience is hanging out and where the attention is. – And then someone else is asking, "Can spending a $1,000 on ads like Google "and Facebook guarantee a profitable return? "Asking because I do a window tint business." – There’s no guarantees in life. You must test. – There it is. Last one. Alex is asking, "For your SEO services, "how do your guys go about building links? "Guest posting or PR, and what has been the most effective?" – For us personally, it’s a lot of guest posting that’s worked for our own marketing. – In your opinion, AI, what role do you think that’s gonna play in digital marketing? – First, I’ll start off with, it’s gonna play a huge role in everything. And so when you think about the internet, you don’t say, "Oh, I use the internet every day." Now it’s just the internet. Same thing with blockchain technology, and even though people poo-poo on it right now, I’m still very bullish on it long term. Same thing with AI. It’s just gonna be integrated in. And so let’s just talk about SEO because that’s my background. The way we go to Google now and we look for when we search for something, there’s 10 blue links. That’s gonna fundamentally shift. It’s gonna become a lot more conversational and the ads might be integrated into the answers instead, and there might be follow-up questions and prompts and things like that. It’s gonna become a lot more conversational. For example, I’m planning a trip to Italy and I literally used Google Bard, which is their competitor to ChatGPT, and it’s showing me pictures, "You should go here," and it gives me this plan. I was like, "This looks logistically difficult. "Can you make it easier?" Boom, boom, boom, and it’s like it flips it around around. – Wow. – And so I think the time to value, meaning also the time to getting things done, is just gonna move a lot faster, and I think we’re gonna save a lot more time as human beings. Our AI-enhanced content is performing better than the pure human writers and our costs have decreased by 80%. – Wow. – And we’re gonna see a lot of that across the board, so. – Wow. That is incredible. So if someone does not know anything about AI and they’re like, "What is that?", and they’re just hearing glimpse here and there, TV commercials, billboards, what would you share? How they can get some more knowledge about that? – There’s one called "The Rundown", which is a AI newsletter. I would check that one out. And Google actually released something. I think they have this whole AI library of stuff where you can learn AI from scratch. I think you can search for that on, you can just Google that or you can just go on YouTube. The news cycles are moving basically a 24-hour news cycle, so what might be new this week might just become old next week. That’s how quickly it’s moving, so you have to be on top of it. Most importantly, you have to be experimenting. – So earlier you talked about leveling up, where your business is not running you. You are running the business, correct? So tell me more about that. – Yeah, so the idea of starting a business, you start a business for freedom and you don’t start something to become imprisoned again. ‘Cause I’ve worked at places before, and as much as I enjoy working at places, it didn’t feel like I didn’t really have control of my schedule or my freedom, and time’s the most valuable asset. And so you feel at a point you’re waking up in the morning and it no longer feels like you’re having fun anymore and you’re out of control on your schedule, then something needs to change because you have basically bought yourself a job. – But that’s hard. – Well- – Come on, Eric. – I mean, people have to figure it out, right? And you don’t deserve to go to the next level until you beat the current one, and the other people that have figured it out, they’ve beaten that level. And so most people stay stuck in their life. They remain NPCs or non-player characters because they don’t have the grit or the resilience to push through. And after being in this game for a while, you realize that all you really need to do is outlast and you just need to be a little smarter than the average person. You don’t even need to be that smart, so. – Yeah, well, the average person right now is listening to this and like, "I have grit, "I have these things, but I’m scared." There’s this great fear that’s holding you back, like, "I’m gonna fail." Like, how do you tell people that? – I mean, it’s tough for me sometimes too, but you’d realize that nobody really caress about you. And so when you go out and you go post content, we were talking about that earlier, if you’re posting content, the ones that matter, they don’t really care, right? And the ones that do care, they don’t really matter. And so life’s too short and people are busy with their lives. They don’t really care about you at the end of the day. If they do care about it in a negative way, it’s because they’re projecting something. – Yeah. Eric, so you have helped companies like Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, these huge companies. How did you land these clients and were they high premium for you? – Most of these clients came through either referral or SEO. So what they would do is they might search for a marketing agency or something like that, and we’d pop up first, second, or third, and then they’d have a conversation with us. I remember when we started working with Amazon, we first started working with their, I don’t wanna say the word right now ‘cause then it’ll turn on but their Alexa business. And so we started there. It was their software, actually. It wasn’t the speaker. Eventually they’re just like, "Oh, can you help us with our other business, Amazon Ads?" And so we started running ads for Amazon Ads and now it’s like one of the largest ad platforms out there. – Wow. – So it did grow significantly. Lyft would be another good example, so Uber’s competitor. So we worked with Uber and Lyft at the same time. My main point here is if you’re gonna do a service type business, like an agency, you want to get to the point where about 50% of your customers are coming from referral, and that means you’re doing genuinely good work. You don’t wanna rely too much on referral because that means you don’t really have a business and you can go bust any day, and so that’s what’s really important. So a good combination of marketing and referral. – All right, talking about hiring employees. How do you find those A game players, like the ones that are like just pounding it, they love you, they respect you and they wanna just please you in everything they do? – You know what’s interesting? When it comes to A players, there’s people I’m talking to right now who I want to have fill out my exec team. I’ve been talking to some of these people for two-plus years. Sometimes to hire a really strong executive that’s been there, done that, it might take a couple years, but you’re just constantly checking in with them, right? – Wow. – And so there’s this one CEO I’m looking at, there’s this one VP of revenue. There’s like this one person that’s a good chief operating officer and then, like, they’re all over the place, right? But it’s important to when you can meet up with these people and just talk about, hey, not come with any agenda, but it’s more so, "Hey, what can I help you with? "What are you working on right now? "What are you excited about?" And then you’re just building rapport that way. And that’s important, ‘cause then you’re thinking long-term. And I will say the A players that we have hired over time, some of them might apply, but I’ll tell you that most of the A players that you wanna hire are not looking for jobs. I would say probably 90% of them are not looking for jobs. – Really? – And you have to reach out to them on apps like LinkedIn, and you might say, "Oh, I don’t have time to reach out." Like, recruiting is one of the most important things you can do as a leader. You have three jobs as a leader. It’s to recruit, division, and to make sure that you got money in the bank, financing, if you need to close sales. Like, those three things, right? – Wow. – I’ll tell you, when I sit in these rooms with other entrepreneurs, we all kind of grew up together. We used to talk about all the tactics and stuff. What’s the new thing over here, right? Now it’s just like, "Man, and this person’s over here. "I wanna hire this person. "I want this person." It’s all a people game. I don’t care what business you’re in. – Yeah, I love it. Eric, so one thing you do in your business today is you’re continually growing and you’re learning. How are you cultivating in your business today? – One of our core values is improvement obsession, so you have to be improvement obsessed. And obsessed is a very strong word. It starts with recruiting. And so for example, if I’m interviewing you, I’ll be like, "Okay, "Nick, tell me what you’re interested in." And I’ll say more so, "Nick, what are you obsessed about?" And you might say, "Oh, well, you know, "I like playing golf." I go, "Okay, well tell me, "like, how do you get better at golf?" And if you tell me you’re practicing every day, you hire a coach and all that, like, I know you’re obsessed about it, and that is a hallmark of what we’re looking for. And so it starts with the very beginning of it, ‘cause it’s hard to say to hire someone and then try to change ‘em afterwards ‘cause we’re very hard to change as human beings. And so that’s one piece of it, but also constantly asking them questions or if they’re doing something that violates the core value of being improvement obsessed, we call ‘em out on it. "Hey Nick, unfortunately, "like this goes against our core value "of being improvement obsessed. "And it’s okay if you don’t wanna do it. "It’s just not for us," right? And so you start to have these conversations. But be very quick about your feedback loops and not wait to make these decisions, because personnel people, people, people, it’s everything. – Ah, so good. Thank you. Every businessman that I know has their low points or stress points. So what do you do about not getting burned out? – So I speak at a lot of conferences internationally. And so last year for example I spoke at a conference in Barcelona and I made a little vacation out of that as well, and I came back with a lot of new ideas. I came back really relaxed. I was still working during the trip, but it was just, I like the different settings, I like the different perspective and I like trying new things and I think that makes me really happy. So I would say if you could find a way to travel, and you don’t necessarily need to travel internationally, but even a staycation would be fine too, and just reset and kind of get away from the day-to-day and think and have the space to do it and then write, you’ll be a lot happier. And so there’s a lot of people that end up taking these one week, two week sabbaticals or so where they might just get away to the woods or they might go to the ocean and not really look at their technology that much. In fact, they might not even bring their technology. – So you had issues with retaining employees. So I’m just curious, what did you do to change that factor and to getting them to stay and motivating them and working with them? – It’s funny, it’s like a roller coaster, right? So in the beginning the roller coaster was, oh, up, I took over the company, and then down, it’s like everyone’s dropping. And I remember one of the guys actually he messaged me last week. He left because it’s like, he’s like, "This is too unstable." And what matters when you’re gonna have people at your company is you need to have a stable foundation built on trust, and if there’s no trust there on either side, then you have nothing. Everything else falls apart. When I came in, I had read a book, I think it’s somewhere over here. It’s called "Let My People Go Sailing", or "Let My," sorry, "Let My People Go Surfing" by the Patagonia co-founder. And it’s a great book, by the way. I’m not poo-pooing on the book, but literally, I think I remember a passage and everyone was like, he’s like, "Yeah, you know, you don’t wanna micromanage your people. "Let ‘em go surfing," and so they would go surfing during lunchtime. So, oh, okay, let my people go surfing. Okay. So I stopped showing up to the office. – No way. – And so what ends up happening is people start showing up in their pajamas, people stop going to work, or when they show up, they’re eating chips and watching "Family Guy". And I’m not hearing any of this, right? Nobody’s telling me ‘cause the trust isn’t there. And so just churn, and people are churning out, people are churning out. Clients are leaving too because I had abdicated my responsibility. I didn’t delegate. Delegate means still holding them accountable, but I completely abdicated and stepped away because I still in the back of my mind thought I was too good for a services business, and that’s what it was. – Someone today’s watching and they’re like, "I wanna start my own agency." Would you recommend them starting and how can they do it with $100 to gain traction? – Yeah, I mean, they can take the $100 and burn it. They don’t even need the $100. They can go use it to go buy fast food or something, I don’t know, but starting an agency, there’s not a lot of capital expenditures or CapEx and anybody can do it. I think the key thing is you have to make sure that you specialize in one thing ideally and you become world class at it before you try to do 10 different things. And so let’s say you don’t know anybody, you don’t have a book of business. Well, go reach out to people that you think could use your help, friends, family, and then start to branch out into other circles and offer to do work for free. And don’t do it forever, but that’s how you need to kind of get things going. And people will give you a shot because the people that give you a shot, they know that they’ve been there before and there’s always gonna be someone that will extend their hand out to help. – So what role does self-belief play in your entrepreneurial role? – It’s everything. So you might hear when you watch these self-help videos or these gurus, and I look up to all these people, but sometimes there’s a negative connotation to ‘em. I certainly look at Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger as gurus or my uncles, right? They always talk about how mindset is the most important thing. ‘Cause if you don’t have the mind, like Nick, you wouldn’t be working out right? If your mind has to first tell you to work, and this is rah-rah stuff we’re getting into, but it is absolutely, like when you get beat down, when you get punched in the face every day, when an employee resigns or key clients leave or multiple people leave or whatever it is exactly and some random lawsuit comes at you, it’s tough and you have to tell yourself that that’s okay. That’s what you signed up for and that’s part of the level that you have to be at right now. So the way I look at life is very much like a game, right? So anyway, short answer to your question is self-belief is everything. – So you wrote a book. When you’re writing this book, did you have a goal that you wanted to accomplish in your ROI or certain stats? Can you share some of that with us? – Yeah, so the book is a labor of love and it took years to do it. And what I’ll say is we sold about 10,000 copies or so. – Wow. – And most books don’t even get close to that. My goal with it was just to get my philosophy off my chest. It wasn’t necessarily to win any of the bestselling, bestsellers list, and we got on some, but that wasn’t the point. The point is how can I really articulate what my philosophies are? And then people that wanna understand how I think, then read the book. And so to answer your question around why I created a book, it’s because my philosophy is that. The book’s called "Leveling Up: How To Master The Game of Life", and I just look at life as a game. And if you could just look at it that way, you’ve already kind of mastered life ‘cause you just realize it’s a journey and it’s a game to be played. And this that we’re doing right here is a game and there’s multiple games within it, and it’s a fun puzzle to solve. – So what are the best social media platforms one can use to generate more customers? – So I would say if you’re B2B, take a look at LinkedIn, take a look at Twitter and definitely YouTube too. But YouTube is a huge, it takes a while to get that flywheel moving. – Okay. – And if you’re B2C, if you’re selling to consumers directly, it might be TikTok, it might be YouTube Shorts, it might be Reels. Those are the platforms where you have good organic reach. And I would say if you’re in the media business, you’re trying to grow a podcast or let’s say you wanna build a media company, Nick, right? You wanna build a podcast company, then I would make sure that I have a setup like this where every single podcast is getting recorded. Maybe it’s an hour or two hours, whatever, and chopping it up for short-form, distributing it to all the channels to try to maximize reach ‘cause you can build a flywheel that way. And even MrBeast himself, one of the largest YouTubers in the world, he has said that podcasts are so OP right now. So they’re so overpowered because you can get that flywheel on the reach and then you can just make something from nothing. – Wow, that’s pretty cool. What is one thing that you do every single day that helps you be successful? – Yeah, so I do a lot of weird things with sleep, and so I wear sleep tape when I go to bed and it stops me from having to get up and use the restroom and not have to drink water, so that goes a long way. – Sleep tape on your mouth? – Sleep tape, yeah. It’s like a little X that I put over my mouth. And keep the room at 66, 67 degrees and have this nice little silk sleep mask that I buy for $30 on Amazon. And wake up in the morning, I go train, I do my little five-minute journal, I do my breath work for five minutes or so. Go for a nice walk and then have my protein shake and then I’m off and running, so. – Wow. – It’s a little, these little power-ups, right? So the reason, what I talk about in "Leveling Up" is just you gotta go around life collecting power-ups. They can be positive power-ups or negative power-ups, but your morning is your chance to do that. And it’s not a crutch for me. Like, sometimes I might not get to all these things, but I try to be consistent 80, 90% of the time. – Wow, so it’s literally your morning routine. – Yeah, it starts with that and then everything else is kind of a bonus, but waking up earlier at 5:30 or 6:00 or so. I’m not a four AM-er, but still, you get a lot done during that time and you feel good. And when you get ahead, you get that head start on the day, it’s hard to, it’s hard to be, now, I’m giving you a basic answer there. But for me, in terms of how I keep going, it’s also understanding that this is an infinite game. It’s not a finite game. I play infinite games and I wanna play with people that motivate me. And so the people on my team better motivate me, my friends better motivate me, and just making sure that I’m enjoying the ride. – All right, Eric, so earlier you have told us that you have used a platform to scale from 250 to 1 million. What is the platform? What’d you do? How’d you land that? – Yeah, so back in the day there was a platform called Elance, and Elance is actually now called Upwork. It’s a combination of those platforms. – Oh, I didn’t know that. – Yeah. So Elance was like, "Oh, everyone, I wanna get a job, "a writing gig or whatever." So at the time I was still learning SEO and I wanted to test my chops, and so I applied for a couple gigs. I had actually worked a couple gigs. I was getting paid like 25 to $50 an hour. And there’s this t-shirt company based in Philly, and I worked with with him for like a month or two. And I was getting on calls with him. I was like, "No, you should do this." And I was calling him out too. I wasn’t afraid. I was like, "You’re doing this wrong. "You shouldn’t be doing this, da da da da da." And I think he really liked it. And he actually went on a whole recruiting pitch. He’s like, "Look, I will pay you 250 grand a year "and I will give you "5% profit sharing equity in the company actually." – Wow. – And you have to move to Philly. And then I was like, "Oh, yeah." And at the time, my full-time job, I was getting paid like 70, 80 grand a year or so. – Wow. I’m like, yeah, not interested. – Really? – And, so, yeah. – And that’s double your income, more than triple. – It was, yeah. Money is only gonna take you, so here’s one thing I’ll say, like, if it’s more so not about chasing the money. It’s about chasing the opportunity. And so even though I worked at the beginning, I had five different jobs my very first year of being employed, I changed five jobs, right? – Wow. – But each time I had a better opportunity, better opportunity. And eventually you have to settle down, and there’s very much an entrepreneurial ADD, like you wanna try every single project out there, but you gotta, you gotta in the very beginning, you gotta focus on learning versus earning. – So I’ve learned a lot here with my conversation with Eric and I hope you did too. And if you’re wondering what it takes to become a millionaire and how you can do it, be sure to watch our next episode with Todd Johnson and fast track your way into becoming a millionaire. So just click or tab the tab below and check it out. (upbeat music)

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