How Eric Siu leveraged his hugely popular podcasts to grow his ad agency

He doesn’t bother with traditional media monetization models like advertising or subscriptions.

Eric Siu has a pretty massive audience; his YouTube channel boasts 161,000 subscribers and his two podcasts — Marketing School and Leveling Up — have generated tens of millions of downloads. 

But Eric doesn’t bother with traditional media monetization models like advertising or subscriptions. Instead, he leverages his influence to drive clients to Single Grain, a marketing agency he owns. As that business grew, he was able to acquire more agencies and add to Single Grain’s capabilities, and it now works with some of the world’s largest brands.

In a recent interview, Eric explained how he met his co-host, where he found his audience, and why he chose to monetize his content with a services business:

So I had an agency where the work we were doing no longer worked. It was an SEO agency, right? And so the work we were doing no longer worked. It was ineffective. And so I had to figure out, okay, not only am I doing this podcast right now, but how do I save this company? But also, by the way, I have no operating experience. So I actually made the company go from bad to worse around 2014 to 2015. We actually dropped all the way down to one employee. But thank God for SEO because we started ranking number one for the keyword ‘digital marketing agency.’

So we started getting all these leads that we couldn't fulfill. And I ended up referring all these leads out to other agencies because we would take like a 25 to 30% recurring affiliate commission on it. So SEO really saved the business. And then we took those cash flows and then we were fortunate enough to hire some amazing people. And then from there, the company just kind of took off. While I was doing the podcast, I was really locked in on trying to save this thing.

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Transcript

Hey, Eric, thanks for joining us.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Simon.

So you currently host and co-host two very popular podcasts, which we're going to get to talk about in a few minutes. But both of them are kind of loosely centered on marketing, but also a little bit of entrepreneurship and a few other things. How did you get into marketing in the first place?

Yeah, so I was coming out of the great financial crisis. The only job I could find was a $32,000 a year salary job doing data entry. And at that time, I was actually playing online poker while I was at work. And then my friend told me about this digital marketing thing.

Long story short, she went to work at Airbnb. Now I think she just joined Netflix. And I picked up digital marketing, learned SEO and started learning all these other things and kind of never looked back from there.

Yeah. So this was like 2010 or so?

Yeah, 2010. Exactly.

And so you say SEO. So like, what does that mean? Like, were you kind of like a freelance SEO gun, just emailing businesses saying, hey, your SEO sucks, let me help you? What was your entree into that world?

Yeah. So I started working for a couple of companies initially. I think I was 23 at the time. And then by age 25, I'd become a director of marketing. I kind of cut my teeth doing SEO at agencies.

And basically that was helping people rank higher on Google and all that, you know, building links, you know, annoying stuff. 

And SEO was kind of like your – I know your agency does a lot of other things, but that was kind of your initial specialty.

Yeah, that was the bread and butter.

So you eventually meet this guy named Neil Patel, which I'm sure a lot of my listeners slash viewers know who he is. But who is he and how did you end up meeting him?

Yeah so at age 24, 25 or so I was reading a lot of blogs. I was eating up a lot of this SEO knowledge and one of the guys that was leading in the space at the time was this guy named Neil Patel, and he had this blog called Quicksprout, and he would often talk about how he spent millions of dollars on marketing and this is the ROI that he got, or he shared all the data and all the information on how his tests are running and everything. So I was like okay, this guy's actually transparent, I'm going to follow this guy. One time he wrote a blog post that didn't make any sense to me. And it sounded like he was just making up words. And so I decided to email him. I was like, Hey, it kind of sounds like you're making this up. Right. And usually when you get called out, you would ignore the person, but he actually responded to me and he responded to me and he kept taking the relationship further and further in a positive way. I'm like, why is he doing this? Right. Eventually he was like, dude, let's just get on the phone. And eventually that led to, dude, let's just meet at my favorite restaurant, which is Taco Bell at the time. And that's how we met in person. And yeah, that's how the relationship started.

He's kind of like a build in public person – how he got so famous is that he will figure out some kind of strategy or something and then he’ll write a post detailing how he did it, and sometimes he’ll actually give you the exact numbers.

Like I remember one series I read of his is where he decided as an experiment to start like a health and fitness blog and develop his own line of supplements and stuff like that. And it was less to make money and more to prove that he could start something from scratch. And he purposely didn't link to it from his website so he couldn't give himself an unfair advantage. Or maybe if I'm remembering correctly, he didn't even name the website on his blog just so nobody could say, oh, you're already famous. That's why the site was successful.

And he generated, I forget how much revenue in like 12 months or something like that. So that's kind of the stuff that he's sort of famous for. And he's also known for SEO, but then also marketing optimization, stuff like that. So you meet at a Taco Bell, you start that relationship. Did you start out like working for him or like what was the business relationship?

No, we've always just kind of been friends. And keep in mind, so at the time I was, again, like 24 years old. He's only a year older than me, so he was 25. And so he was very much getting started with his career too.

So his whole thing was he was just trying to figure out how to make more money in general, right? And then- you know now today he's kind of focused on one thing. I would say in our mid-20s we're kind of trying to do everything, we weren't really sure what we wanted to stick with. Everything seemed like an opportunity. We would attack every single opportunity and we'd end up going nowhere. And so we'd always just hang out on Skype back in the day he'd call me all the time and say, hey what do you think about this title over here, like what do you think about this tweet over here. So he'd always ask me for my opinion. I ran paid media for him for maybe a couple months or so. But we've always just helped each other out.

And even today, he's trying to make some acquisition moves. And just recently, I made two or three introductions for him. So it's never been about a transactional relationship.

So you were never in business together. Oh, you sort of were. We'll talk about the podcast in a second. But like you always ran like separate businesses.

Correct.

Yeah. So how did you get the idea for launching a podcast together?

Yeah, it's funny because he kind of incepted himself into it. So I've always talked about how podcasts have been really beneficial to me. I started in 2013. So it's been 11, almost 12 years now since I started podcasting. And then we were walking around, I think, in Beverly Hills and just down the street, we're getting smoothies. And I was just telling him how beneficial it's been to me. All the amazing people I've met, me being invited to speak at different conferences around the world. And he turns to me and he's like, yeah, let's do it. I'm like, what are you talking about? He's like, yeah, let's do the podcast.

And so that's actually what led to the podcast Marketing School. And we've been doing that for eight years now. 

So you already had a podcast that you were already doing that was leading to stuff.

Correct. Yeah. So I have my entrepreneurial podcast called Leveling Up. That's a YouTube channel. And then Marketing School is the second one that came about.

Oh, I thought Marketing School was first and Leveling Up came second. So tell me about Leveling Up. When did that initially launch and what was the initial format for that?

So that was 2013 or so. And there was a guy at the time named Andrew Warner. And he had a podcast called Mixergy. And he would interview all these entrepreneurs. And I thought it would be really interesting if I could talk to entrepreneurs or marketers and approach it from a marketing angle.

And nobody else was doing that at the time. And I hit it pretty hard. Some of my first guests were people that are familiar with SEO. Rand Fishkin from Moz. I had like Noah Kagan. That's what led to a lot of great relationships, a lot of speaking opportunities, and a lot of business opportunities too. And yeah, a lot of lessons learned.

And obviously, like, back then, podcasting was much smaller, Apple was dominant, Spotify had not gotten into podcasting yet. That was pre-Serial. Did you find a large audience? Or was it just mainly a small, influential audience to start with?

I'll share some lessons here. And so I will say after the first year, I was probably spending like six to eight hours a week on this, keeping in mind while I was trying to save my failing business at the time. But I was spending eight hours per week on it.

And all I had to show after the first 12 months were nine downloads a day, which is peanuts, nothing, right? I did the same thing for another year, 30 downloads a day after the second year. It wasn't until the third year where I started getting like 100,000 plus downloads a month

And so when people say it typically takes probably three plus years to build an audience or a business, that's very true. The other thing I would say is I wish I had stuck with that podcast longer because I was growing very quickly on YouTube. Because back in 2012, 2013 or so, YouTube was still very much the wild, wild west. And some of these interviews would get like 20 to 40,000 views or so. Had I just kept going on with it, I think it would have become really big. But I decided... I got shiny object syndrome. I got distracted by other things.

So I'm making all kinds of bad assumptions here. I thought YouTube maybe came later, but like you were actually early to the trend of posting the interviews. Like were you doing these over like Zoom or something like that?

Yeah, I was doing them on Skype. And I had this weird background, poor lighting, I had spiky hair at the time. So it was a very poor man set up, but it works.

I was using one of our podcast hosts at the time, they would allow us to cross post to YouTube. And that's all I was doing. Eventually, I just took the video and just threw it over. And because YouTube was desperate for content, they were giving anything reach.

Wow. And for context for people who aren't in podcasting ..  now there are tools like the one we're using right now, like Squadcast or Riverside that record really good native video and audio and then upload it to the cloud. And that's what keeps the fidelity and everything high. But I'm guessing a Skype interview was pretty poor quality back then.

Horrible quality. And by the way, funny enough, when I first started podcasting in 2012, 2013, I was using the Yeti mic.

Yeah, I started with a Blue Snowball before upgrading slightly. Yeti's good. So you're posting to YouTube, some of them are popping up and going viral, and then you said you got up to 100,000 views or 100,000 downloads per episode. What led to that? Was that the virality of the YouTube channel, or was that something completely different? One thing I always like to ask podcasters is YouTube driving podcast audio listening or are they just completely different audiences all together?

Yeah, to be clear, it was 100,000 downloads overall per month just on the audio. I wasn't actually taking YouTube into account. And I actually don't know what the number would have been had I combined YouTube. But I think if I combined YouTube together, it probably would be a couple hundred thousand views per month.

But like what was driving the downloads of the audio podcast? Do you think it was YouTube or did it get featured on Apple?

So I'll be honest, we gamed it. So Product Hunt is where you can post your products and get upvotes, downvotes and things like that. There was a podcast section back then. And what we did was we... So we would put Marketing School there and we put Leveling Up there. Back then it was called Growth Everywhere, the podcast. And we just have people from my team upvote, right? And then people would be upvoting. And then every single day you would see Marketing School and you would see Leveling Up basically, top one and two. And that just got us all the downloads in the world.

Eventually Product Hunt had to shut down that section because we're just gaming it all the time and other people were gaming it too. 

And so how far into running Leveling Up did you and Neil launch Marketing School?

I would say I was about four years into it and then we launched Marketing School. 

Okay so Leveling Up was already pretty popular by that point.

I didn't know how niche popular it was, because my friends would send me texts, like they'd be traveling to like Bulgaria or something and someone would be coming out of the cab showing the podcast art, so that's why I was like, oh, maybe I'm making it a little bit.

Yeah. And so Marketing School is unlike Leveling Up; it’s more of just a chat podcast between you and Neil, where you kind of pick a subject every week that's somewhat topical and just kind of talk about it.

Yeah, it's a little different now. Back in the day, all we did was five to 10 minute episodes and we pre-plan all the topics. But after you share all your marketing knowledge for the first two years, really, you start to say the same stuff over and over. So now it's changed to like, I'm going to be recording with Neil in person on Friday because he lives like half a mile away from me. But what we're doing is we're reacting to the news cycle. And then whatever news comes out, we'll react to it.

And that tends to give us a little news jacking juice where we kind of ride the trend a little bit. And it gives us a chance to go viral too, because we cut up a lot of those clips and some of them will get like 6 million views on them.

Yeah. I was just listening to some when I was preparing for this interview. And one of them was just like something you recorded right after the Trump Kamala Harris debate, just kind of analyzing their social media numbers and how viral the videos went and stuff like that. There's kind of like a news peg to it. So once you started running that with him and you were already getting momentum with Leveling Up, were there crossover audiences between the two? Like what kind of synergies were being driven between those two podcasts?

Yeah, I thought there would be synergies, but really not as much as you think there would be. They're really kind of separate. Some listen to both. Some people just listen to one. Some people listen to the other. So yeah, no real takeaways for that one.

Yeah. And so you were also posting those to YouTube early on as well?

Yeah, we were posting those. And that was working really well. But then Neil and I were both focused on our businesses. We didn't realize that the YouTube connection broke along the way. And it was broken for three years. And we had no clue. And so it certainly helps to have a YouTube manager. That's another takeaway. 

And so when you guys launched that, it was what, like 2016 or something like that?

Yeah, something around that year. I mean, this podcast is older than his marriage. It's older than his kids. And so we've been around for a while.

So you said that it was helping you get invited to conferences and stuff like that. What was going on in your careers as all this was happening? I know that it eventually became a more sophisticated lead gen, but how was this impacting your career?

When I first started the podcast, maybe I was 25 years old or so. And then when I was maybe 26, 26, I ended up joining this agency called Single Grain. And then at 27, I was able to buy the company 100% for $2 out of pocket and the seller financed the rest.

So I had an agency where the work we were doing no longer worked. It was an SEO agency, right? And so the work we were doing no longer worked. It was ineffective. And so I had to figure out, okay, not only am I doing this podcast right now, but how do I save this company? But also, by the way, I have no operating experience. So I actually made the company go from bad to worse around 2014 to 2015. We actually dropped all the way down to one employee. But thank God for SEO because we started ranking number one for the keyword ‘digital marketing agency.’

So we started getting all these leads that we couldn't fulfill. And I ended up referring all these leads out to other agencies because we would take like a 25 to 30% recurring affiliate commission on it. So SEO really saved the business. And then we took those cash flows and then we were fortunate enough to hire some amazing people. And then from there, the company just kind of took off. While I was doing the podcast, I was really locked in on trying to save this thing.

And why were you ranking so high for ‘digital marketing agency’? Obviously, that's a very competitive keyword, especially since you would think digital marketing agencies would all have really top SEO skills. Was that pure SEO stagecraft or was the podcast or your online persona helping at all with that?

I would say the online persona had nothing to do with it. It was just purely that ranking because it's such a high intent keyword. And the way we got there initially was we were doing a lot of guest blog posts. So we'd go to HubSpot, for example, or a lot of these highly authoritative websites or Entrepreneur Magazine, and then they would be linking back to us in the author profile. And that probably took around, I would say, a good year to get there. And then after that, our traffic really started to take off. But these leads, I mean, eventually we started taking on these leads ourselves, but these were like Uber. These were like Amazon. These were legit companies all because of that ranking.

And you mentioned this before, but you said you kind of fell off with Leveling Up. What happened there?

Yeah. So with Leveling Up, I was so focused on the business and I stopped being consistent with it for a little bit of time. And then I came back. Then we decided to go hard on the YouTube channel. We hired a videographer and everything. And that's when the channel actually started to do really well. Some videos would get 80,000 views, 100,000 views. And these are all just marketing videos. Everything I would post would work. But then 2020 hit and I started being inconsistent with it again. And I stopped posting as much. And then I started talking about other topics that weren't as related to marketing. So when you do YouTube, you just need to focus on one topic. and then YouTube will give you credit for that. But if you talk about too many different things,they're not going to give you the reach that you should be getting.

And when did you start really ramping it up again?

I would say right now I'm pretty focused on YouTube. I think there's a couple of phases here. So initially leveling up the YouTube channel was really working, I would say in 2014 or so. And then in 2017, I started bringing it back.

So 2017 to really 2020 or so, that's when it started ramping again. And then I kind of took a hiatus maybe from 2020 to maybe late 2023 or something like that. So yeah, there are a couple of phases there. The reason, by the way, you see a lot of people quitting YouTube is that you have to stay consistent with it and it can be a pretty thankless job.

So you took a pause because you were just more focused on the agency and also just keeping the Marketing School podcast going?

Well, we had done these acquisitions and I was really focused on those. And there was a lot of work to do with those acquisitions, to just put it very lightly. And I would say maybe late 2023 till now, I've been able to take my focus off of that.

And by acquisitions, you mean other marketing agencies?

Correct.

And what was the goal with the acquisitions? Was it just to subsume it into the mother brand? 

Yeah, the idea was one, to bring in their logos. So these client logos, like let's say McDonald's or something like that. And then to be able to upsell and cross sell them to expand these accounts, hopefully. The other idea was to add in capabilities that we didn't have. And then also, they can cross sell into our customers and add a talent base. So that's the idea. Ultimately, the goal is expansion. So that was the intention behind them.

And what were some of the main capabilities that you're adding?

Yeah, so one is we weren't going too hard on e-commerce. So we wanted to go very hard on e-commerce. We didn't have a CRO or conversion rate optimization capabilities. So that's another one that we added. And then at the time we had an SEO software where it actually would have made sense to have like a small business SEO team, which is what we went for as well. So those were kind of what we were looking for.

So when you say e-commerce, like e-commerce websites were hiring you to optimize their sites and drive leads and stuff like that? 

Yep. 

And the kind of lifesaver for the company you said was because all of a sudden, you just started ranking really well for this one keyword. When did you start leveraging the success you were having with these podcasts? When did that start kind of directly contributing to the business and creating some kind of funnel? And how did it start creating those funnels?

I think even the podcast today, the good news about it is if they do listen to the podcast, the sales cycles are way quicker. The LTV, the lifetime value of the client is a lot longer too. And then also they actually want to build a relationship, right? They listen to this stuff and then they want an in-person relationship. And it just makes us so much closer. And they're down to do all these other things. I think it's just good across the board because I'm building relationships at scale. And I think to answer your question directly, probably immediately I started to see a benefit from the Marketing School podcast because at the time, Neil didn't have his agency yet. And so all the leads were coming to me. And then this one guy would call me and be like, Oh, I just listened to 80 episodes this weekend, and I think it makes sense to work with you guys now. I'm like, great. The podcast did the selling for us.

And it's like some chief marketing officer is forming this parasocial relationship with you. So by the time they get on the phone with you, like you're a celebrity in their eyes and their small world. So of course, when they're deciding who are they going to go with, they're going to go with the person with whom they've developed the parasocial relationship.

Yeah. People do business with people.

But are you doing anything to directly lead people, or is it just all kind of organically flowing to your website and stuff like that?

It's organically flowing.In the past when we ran the numbers on this, maybe like 10% of our leads had some impact from the podcast. Neil actually broke this down on one of our marketing school episodes a couple weeks ago. People think his personal brand had a lot to do with their business, but it only accounts for 10% of their revenue. Had he known that sooner, he would have not done his personal branding stuff, but how would he have known? 

And how sophisticated has your audience strategy been? Like in terms of obviously now with a lot of YouTube clips that get chopped up and put on TikTok, Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, like do you have people in place that are just constantly pumping that content out?

Yeah, we do. We have an internal brand team. And so we're constantly putting out short form content. We're constantly putting out long form content. When I mentioned I was in New York last week, I recorded an episode with Seth Godin, with Anthony Pompliano. I'll do those things when I can, but my main thing is focused on the business. So we are putting out a lot of content and ultimately what we're looking for is, okay, how much reach can I get? And then those reaches are all touch points. Because the thing with marketing, especially with marketing services, is that 5% of people might be ready to buy right now, but the other 95% of people won't buy for a while. And so how do you constantly stay top of mind and content seems to be the answer. Because oftentimes it's not necessarily they're looking for the best person. It's really whoever comes to mind first. It's like, oh, Simon seems to do SEO. That's what I remember, right? Okay, I'm going to go with Simon. And so that's the exercise that we're trying to pull or push. And then one thing I'll say to maybe add to that I think is interesting is that we drive a lot of SEO traffic. People will type in our website. If Simon, you hit our website and you're like the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, we'll know exactly what page you visited and we'll qualify you based on our ideal client profile, our ICP. And then we'll automatically add you on LinkedIn and send you a message saying, hey, Simon, I noticed you visit this page on paid media trends. What did you need help with? And that actually leads to sales conversations. So we're being a little proactive there.

Oh, so like one thing that when someone builds like a really popular media channel or something like that, they're thinking, okay, how do I monetize this? They're thinking about either kind of traditional media models, like advertising subscriptions or courses or something scalable or some kind of like. actual physical product or software product that scales. A lot of them steer away from services because it doesn't scale in the same way. You have to throw more bodies at it. Your overhead is usually higher with the services company. What's your thinking on that? Because I feel like you have a counterintuitive take that actually a service company is the perfect thing to use to monetize a popular media property.

Yeah. I mean, don't get me wrong. I come from tech and I used to hate service businesses because I thought my poo-poo didn't stink because I work for a scalable company, right? Service businesses, it's people. How do you scale? But some of the creators I'm watching right now, instead of selling ads, they just push directly back to their products. So there's actually nothing wrong with courses. There's nothing wrong with masterminds or things like that. But when you have a service like ours, for example, and then you combine them together, maybe the lifetime value is a couple hundred thousand dollars, if not a couple million dollars.

So that's a lot higher than a course or a mastermind. And that's what we end up pushing. So what Marking School  is now, we didn't have ads before. And then eventually we signed with a hosting partner and then they were great partners for three years. And then now we just have ads to our own stuff, right?

So Neil and I, we started like an agency owners group, right? And the reason we started that group, just to go on a tangent for a second, is... to see who we can potentially acquire. So we might advertise NP Digital, Neil's agency or Single Grain which is my agency, and so we just find that to be better overall, because at the end of the day, the people that are advertising on your stuff, they're making way more money than you are. Sure, you're getting something that satisfies you, but why wouldn't you just try to capture all the value if you do have a vehicle to do so?

So in terms of what you're able to do in terms of setting up the structure of your agency, you look at someone like Gary Vee, you get the sense that he's probably not that involved in a lot of the day-to-day stuff. Maybe he's doing sales calls because he's kind of a celebrity, but he's probably not doing client management work. What does that look like for you in terms of running the media side versus the client side?

Yeah. It's funny because I was texting with one of my friends. I was like, even though I think it's a pretty crappy economy, this is the fastest we've ever grown by a mile, right? And he's like, so why do you think that is? I'm like... I got involved.

And he's like, funny how that works, isn't it? And soI say that all to say, I drank all the Kool-Aid from Twitter, people saying, Oh, yeah, just go hire a CEO, run your holding company and just go do something else. Right. From what I've seen, I've tried that so many times, it doesn't work. And even if you hire someone that's experienced, right? I'm not saying you shouldn't hire a CEO. I'm saying you should, absolutely, but you need to be involved. And so even Gary, for example, I talked to Gary about this, and he's very involved. He does get involved with everything. You know, client strategy from time to time or sales calls from time to time. But basically you're spinning plates and whatever starts to kind of fall down, you jump in and you save it. Not saying you have to micromanage everything, but it's like, dude, if you want to not be involved in the business, just sell the business. But this whole idea that you can hire someone and they'll just grow it for you without you being involved is a joke.

So how did you streamline your workflow? Does that take a lot of discipline? Is that a lot of calendar management and stuff like that?

Yeah, my calendar is not as crazy as you would think it is. I mean, what we've done, like I used to do, it used to be weekly one-on-ones, like face-to-face with people. Now we just have these working one-on-one documents and we're constantly just leaving comments in there and we get things done faster.

If we need to get on calls, we'll get on calls. So I am constantly auditing my time, probably every 90 days or so. I'm just looking and I manually fill out a sheet every 15 minutes. What am I doing exactly? Is it a money-making opportunity? Does it make me happy? Does it give me energy or not, right? And I'm just constantly doing that. So that's how I'm constantly doing it. But for the most part right now, and probably for the future, all I'm focused on are the big things, the broken things, and the new things.

And then there's at least one part of the services, which is a little extra scalable, is you do paid media and you get paid on a percentage of the ad buy, right? So that gives you a little bit of extra scalability that just a straight marketing or PR agency wouldn't have.

Yeah. And that's a good call out. So you can call it the SaaS angle. That's a recurring angle and private equity really loves the recurring angle. You know, if you don't have recurring, okay, your multiple comes down quite a bit, but if you can get your EBITDA above 5 million, like you actually have something now where you can sell it for 15, perhaps even 20x or so. Most people don't know that. Most people are like, oh, service businesses aren't scalable. But if you have an engine like a paid media thing or something where you're charging on percentage or maybe you're charging on a usage or performance basis, you can do some nice work.

Yeah. It strikes me with all these marketing skills. You could get into e-commerce. Like I know it's kind of a maligned term, but drop shipping. Have you tried to build any of those engines on your own in the background or is it just a hundred percent focused on servicing other companies?

Yeah, in the past, both Neil and I have tried a lot of that. So we've tried courses, we've tried coaching, we've done all of it. We've tried products, we've tried e-commerce things. And this tends to work really well for both of us because we both teach marketing. And what's the natural progression after that? Oh, we want to work with you. Okay, well, you want to work with me? Okay, here's my team. And then there's also great investment opportunities that come as well. But I think to me, what I think is the most interesting thing in the next five to 10 years, and I hate to use the word AI because I feel like it's such a buzzword now. But the thing I tell my team every single week right now, guys, we need to have an unreasonably high talent bar, meaning we can only hire the top five to 10% of people because the top five to 10% of people are going to know how to harness the power of 100,000 or a million agents or so. And I believe that the constraint for the future is not necessarily resources. Now, it's going to be creativity. So we can only afford to hire those people, because the work that we do now is going to allow us to build products.

And the way we're going to be able to charge clients too, is going to be much more in line in terms of incentives. So, like if I build something for you and I make you $10 million, but Simon, would it be fair to pay me a million dollars on that? You'd probably say yes, right? If I can guarantee that for you. And I just think we're going to move into that world with the best of the best people charging more on a performance or usage basis.

So that's what you want to do. You want to double down on the agency side, basically.

Correct. I used to hate the agency so much. I used to be ashamed of it. But now I'm just like, no, this is pretty good. And like anything good takes a long time anyway. And, it all sucks. So you might as well pick your suck.

And do you think you're turning away any kind of low hanging fruit by not trying tosell advertising or not sell a membership community or anything like that?

We do have a membership community with the agency owners association. So that thing, we do have a community manager that's running it. So there's a membership component there. So we do do these things. And I was just talking to Neil the other day, like even with their P&L, there's an affiliate component to it, right? There's like a lot of things that we do, a lot of revenue sources. It's not just like one thing or like three services or whatever. It's usually like a lot of different things that add up.

When you're looking at what you're doing now with YouTube, with the podcast, with the agencies, when you're thinking two or three years down the road, what would you like to be doing then that you're not doing now? What's the ambition? Obviously, you've accomplished a lot, but you're a very ambitious guy who wants to keep building, I'm guessing. In what direction do you want to build?

Yeah. I just enjoy playing the game ultimately. So for me, the next three years, the big things are going to be there's a big M&A component to it. But we have to be very careful because I have this whole  agent's thesis, right? So there's that. The second thing is building products.

And the third thing that's top of mind for me is constantly keeping that talent bar unreasonably high, which means I'm constantly involved with recruiting. I found that probably to be the biggest X factor with me getting involved, especially in the last 12 months or so.

One of my theories about agencies is someone who's worked for them and also done client services myself is like they have a hard time scaling past a certain size because once they get to a certain size, then in order to keep afloat, they have to charge so much money that they're 90 something percent of businesses can't afford them. Is doing the performance based stuff how you're kind of overcoming those limits in terms of how big you can scale and grow in terms of like the clientele you can work with? Y

Yeah, that would be one of the ways. So there's an agency out there, my friend's agency, they do about $80 million a year, and then $30 million is profit, and they only have like 25 employees. And then there's another one that does over a billion a year, I believe in revenue, and they came from a very small agency. And now they have PE backers and everything, but they just focus on telecoms pay for performance. The agency I mentioned before is just in the financial space. So I think that's certainly one model.

I think technology is another angle as well. Like us building technology and you have to maintain it obviously too. Right. You have to tend to it like a garden. The third thing would be an unrealistically high talent bar. 

But so the technology thing is so that you can keep your prices low because the tech is handling a lot of the lift, but because it's tech, it can scale, it can scale your services to more and more clients kind of thing.

Correct.