The Exchanges

Q So to make this actionable, like even for me or Sean or listener, what do you look for? Like, what can I look for in my business? And I assume obviously this is only if you are running digital ads, Facebook and Google basically ads. What can you look for to be like, there's opportunity here, or this is stupid. Shut it down.

A Yeah. I mean, we do, we approach it in a few different ways, right? One is top down. Like we use Veros and a couple other third party data sources and our own data to figure out benchmarks of the company. So if you're an e-commerce business with a, you're selling water bottles, what should your click through rate, what's your conversion rate by channel? That's our top down way of kind of assessing where they stand. And so that's just whatever you can get that data anywhere online. And then the bottom up part of it is, for example, for Facebook, right? We'll say like, Is the account structured correctly? Oftentimes, there's too many ads trying to, like, breaking the signal in too many different places, and it needs to be consolidated. The other question we'll ask is, is their event match quality good? Oftentimes, these old, old school companies owned by private equity, they don't even, they have, like, a three out of 10 match quality, which means Facebook's signal is super crappy for them, and I bet Sean's company and most startups have nine out of 10, because they've, like, major data, Facebook's getting all the right data. Then there's all the creative stuff. Are they You know, the easiest thing, someone says, my performance is bad. I go, how many creative do you test a week? A week? What are you talking about? Oh, we do two a month. Well, yeah, of course, your performance is …

AI assessment note: “we approach it in a few different ways, right? One is top down.”

Q What percentage of the deals do you say it's shit? You're like, no, dude, like, there's no opportunity here.

A We've had, I mean, it's, it's a young business. We've only done 20 projects, but let's say on 25%, we've said we, we should, you should stay the hell away from it. One, I mean, one, there was just straight up fraud in the SEO backlinking that they would have never spotted without us. That was a huge win. And I mean, they paid us. Obviously, they didn't do the deal. And then we've had a couple where we were not convinced that there was as much leverage. Like, the management team puts together projections Right? So they're, they share projections in these things. And we look at those projections and we basically go, dude, this person would have to be the best Facebook ad marketer on the planet to hit these projections. Like we, we think they can grow, but we don't think the projections they put together are reasonable and we need to double click. And as they double clicked on that, they lost excitement about the deal.

AI assessment note: “let's say on 25%, we've said we, we should, you should stay the hell away”

Q Was it basically just a plugin? It's a, it's a plugin.

A Just a plugin. So I mean, we had a big vision for it, right? You'd have landing pages and you could put your influencers. I mean, I still think someone's going to figure it out, but I sat there and I was like, I got this other business growth assistant. And here's a funny story. You guys will like this. We go to shop talk and you know, shop talk matches you. And I have one sales guy from Kahani and one sales guy from growth assistant. And they both do the matching thing. The Kahani guy gets three meetings. The growth assistant guy gets 25 meetings. One selling like marketing talent in the Philippines, and I go, man, if there's ever a signal for like solving a problem versus, you know, just a cool thing, this is it. And that was like one of the key decisions where I was like, I don't want to do this anymore.

AI assessment note: “Just a plugin. So I mean, we had a big vision for it, right?”

Q What would we notice if we toured the campus? What would we see?

A It's funny you ask that. So one of my requests to him when, when they invest, I want to shadow your leadership team for a week. Me and my, my 10 leaders are going to shadow your leaders, and I want to see what you guys do. And what you'd find is, you know, these things that are like startup adages, they've done at a scale of 5000 people. Every meeting is short. Every meeting starts with a bottom line. Numbers are the only thing that is ever talked about in levers. And every person is basically trying to optimize more EBITDA in any discussion they're having. And they don't talk about the work that gets done. As independent of that. Right. It's like another example is like they shape teams. So, and you know, for digital marketers, they don't say like, we have a client team and we have a marketing team. We have, they go, we have like team click through rate and we have team conversion rate and we have team traffic volume. Like they literally organize people by the KPI that they're trying to drive so that there's a deep, deep focus into it. They have these really cool things called business reviews where basically Rick and the leadership team sits and you have 20 minutes to come in, give an update on your business. Real decisions are made about the business and he does like Like, 40 of the, or like, 40 over two days, basically. So it's a high energy, very smart. It's like, it's a v…

AI assessment note: “what you'd find is, you know, these things... Every meeting is short.”

Q Great to see you. By the way, how'd you get an Ellie at your birthday party? What was that about? Tell that story before we go. Give us a quick one.

A So, I turned 40 in May, as you guys know, and I have a cool video montage of the party. My wife had an awesome party, but I've been telling all my friends about St. Louis since I was 18, so I went to college. I'm like, St. Louis is the best city, whatever. And everyone's like, I was like, I'll move back there one day. They're like, no, you're not. And then I moved back and they're like, oh shit, you moved back. And so I had 200 people in town who I've been raving to about St. Louis for like 10 plus years. So I'm like, what's the most ridiculous thing you could do if you're me having your forties? They're like, Nelly. I mean, you guys are somewhere similar in age. From my high school to early college, Nelly was like the biggest rapper on the planet and he's from my hometown.

AI assessment note: “what's the most ridiculous thing you could do if you're me having your forties?”