How Ruan Marinho Took His SEO Agency from $10,000 - $100,000/mo

so today i'm going to be interviewing rouen and ruan has an awesome story uh he actually joined gotcha seo academy back in 2018 uh when he was in the early stages of building his seo agency developmark and since then he's really really done a terrific job he's built it into a thriving agency um and i just want to say i'm super impressed with your work man i just really i'm proud of you like i'm just proud of you you know like i am but he's grown into 150 clients which is that is not an easy task um and and we'll be getting into this but like you know he was at when when he joined the training he was around that twenty thousand dollar mark and that's usually the sticking point for a lot of people uh and i'm sorry let me rephrase that 20 000 per month is that sticking mark um and i you know i talked to so many different people about this who are trying to build up their agencies and that range from 10 to 20 is it's tough to get out of that range um so it's gonna be exciting to see like how he was able to go from that to where he is now um and it's it's gonna be a lot of fun so thank you so much for being on man i really appreciate it oh you're more than welcome thank you for having me nathan um i'm more than happy to talk about my favorite topic which is agency right awesome okay so let's let's rewind pretty far and then we'll come back to where we are today okay so what just kind of describe where you were when you found gotcha seo academy like just just kind of broadly so i actually forgot how i discovered you i think in the time i found you on a blog which was about ahrefs i think and i was learning about how to use ahrefs and you put out a massive article that kind of talked about everything that you need to know about ahrefs and so from there i noticed you were publishing youtube videos and then i reached out to you and i interviewed you on my channel a long time ago this is a long time ago probably three four years ago and so from there i wanted to know uh more about your stuff and so i went to your site i saw that you had like an seo training and and the seo training was how to grow organic rankings and so like i popped your your domain into ahrefs just to kind of see like what's going on with your site and i was just like wow about the results you know it was like i don't know if anybody's ever played xbox live but it was like when you go on xbox live and you look at somebody's gamer score and their gamer sport was like crazy you know it just shows that there was experience so from there i was like instantly interested in learning more about your approach and especially because it was white hat and it wasn't black cat and a lot of the information that i consumed at the time was all black cat and because of that um you know i was struggling to grow my business because you can't grow an seo agency black cat you just can't you're not gonna have happy employees you're gonna have customers that are just like really sketchy you need white hat accounts that kind of allow you to grow with them organically and they can wait for those types of leads to come in so i joined your program um i got some huge takeaways on the keyword research the keyword gap analysis um you know how to create content that works creating a schedule for that content the link building aspect of it um got a lot of value from that implemented it into our clients along with a lot of other stuff that i've learned and then kind of just you know started monitoring the results using you know basic seo tools that we use um and started getting good results now at the time i was very focused on our agency's rankings and so i was looking at what you were doing with your your city pages i think you had like indiana something seo or like you had these seo pages and so i took what you did and i did it in new york and i got the ranking and so i even stole what you did like uh you searched new york seo and you found us you know and then that started generating us leads which was awesome and i've always been uh plagued by you can't get leads online with seo which is just complete bs a lot of people search web search online for seo companies so um you know that's kind of how i found you that's how i went through your information and how i implemented it inside of developmark which is our agency that's great yeah so what so let's get more of like non-business so like what was life like at that point in 2017 2018 like what what was your life like uh well it's more stressful now then it was more like i need to figure out how to sell something that works because at the time you know you're taking a lot of guesses from different industry leaders and sometimes it's hard to take all that information and compose it into an offer that makes sense and so at the time i remember like there's just so many ways to go i can go just the seo audit route where i audit a company's website i can go the agency route where i do the services i can go to youtube route and just build courses there was so much stuff that i could do i was very sporadic with everything and i think it now i'm more focused i'm more determined i know what i want i'm doing one thing but it's just become way more stressful but that's because we're growing so i can't complain about that so at the time i remember we got on a phone call and you kind of broke down what you were doing and why you were doing it and stuff like that and you kind of told me like hey dude like you're all over the place you know like you're just all over the place you're doing youtube you're doing this course you're doing this agency they're all getting done 20 effectively and that was the truth and so i really just like tripled down on developmark because that's the business that i love and it's it's worked numbers for me right now um so i would say that i went from like less stress confused to more like determined and understanding of where i want to go with this right right and i still remember that conversation too because we specifically were talking about youtube and you were like i asked you i was like so what like what's your what's your goal on youtube and you were like i don't know so that's when i knew i was like yeah so we need to we need to like we need to focus in on what's going to really drive it and so what let's talk about why you picked agency because you had so many options right you could have you could have been the mr influencer like you know that route and you were making good on that you're making pretty good money on adsense like you could have gone that route um you could have gone the course route like i have done um so you had a lot of options so why did you pick agency to be your you know you're really lasering in on that well first of all i love it i think that's that's that's the first thing is i i'm absolutely in love with talking to clients hearing their problems recommending solutions from you know great teachers that i've learned from and you know delivering results and kind of building up an agency that that excites me i think like for like courses it excites me too just not as much as the agency right youtube it excites me too not as much as the agency and so at that time i really had to make a decision as to what do i actually love doing and keep in mind even at the time i was 24 years old and like you know i didn't really know i had no idea like where i was going to go and like but the agency model is a really a beautiful model because similar to the course model it's very scalable in the sense that if you can build a predictable service the same thing every single time that's why if you look at development.com you look at our websites people say our websites look the same and it's like well duh like we're not a custom development agency we're a website marketing company like websites look similar we run the same ads we get clients results simple so like we get a client i don't talk to them it's when we could scale that that's the part that gets me excited very similar to a course where you record content you get customers to buy the content they get results you can keep scaling um whereas youtube is um it's very scalable because you're in front of a video and thousands of people are seeing it i'm still making that video like you can't replace yourself on that camera at developmark i can replace people you know they people i don't need to do the account management i don't need to do the seo i don't need to do the ads i don't need to do the reporting people do that whereas youtube the most successful channels actually do this um think media has recently done this where they have their employees making the videos but even people like future um who has a large channel with design you know he's not replacing himself in the video so to me it's like i'd rather do something to where i can build this corporate enterprise step away from it let people handle it that's what gets me excited and that's why i chose agency also i had an interesting conversation with neil patel one time and he told me that his biggest regret was becoming an influencer and she should have been spending his time building a corporation because at the end of the day he doesn't really care about how many people know know him you know he's more focused on creating something that's you know sustainable and stuff so i think from your conversations neil's conversations um uh uh uh uh agency was was my pick those are those are all really good points you know you can't separate yourself really on youtube that's that's really the downside like for example pewdiepie like there's no like if he doesn't do it there's nothing like like they just it just does it just doesn't work so um but yeah that is and actually even with with agency really the the real value of it is that you can disconnect from the actual work that is being done and you can grow it without a personal brand too having a personal brand certainly helps i'm sure you've gotten a ton of leads a ton of clients from youtube through your personal brand so it certainly is a path that you can go to attract you know appropriately would you agree with that absolutely um the personal brand has definitely helped me in ways that i you know i can't even fathom at times i get bothered by it sometimes because sometimes people won't even talk to our sales people unless it's me so there's that dilemma but i don't see it as a bad thing it's like i'd rather the opportunity there than no opportunity at all um but the personal brand like if people like look everybody in this room right now you probably do great seo and you probably know great seo problem is is nobody knows your name and when i when i realized that grant cardone said that and it hit me hard and i was like it's not that i'm bad at what i do people just don't even know my name so youtube is a great way to kind of get out there and i'm sure you've gotten clients from youtube too right right yeah and that's you know there's a lot of trust that is built prior to that conversation that you have with people when you have content online so like as much trust that you can build prior to that point it just makes your job so much easier i mean if you don't have any of those existing assets like you on youtube have so much content someone could spend days and days you know watching your content by the time they get in touch with you they're pretty much already warm they're pretty hot already before you've even gotten on the phone so that makes your job way easier um so what are you doing outside of youtube though to attract and you know actually let's we'll get back to that i want to ask you a different question before we get there um how are you able to get from that really really difficult spot of ten thousand to twenty thousand dollars per month how are you able to break through that what was like if you could name just one thing that really made the difference what would that be well i mean so there's there's a there is a um there's a there's a thing that i i kind of follow with business and it's that like i'm not in it to make money right now and um a lot of the money that we make a lot of the profits that we make we reinvest into customers and their success and so it was very slow it was one of those things where it's almost like i got comfortable at 20k and like i don't need new clients i just stay where i am and figure my product out and that was a very nice position to be in because my bills were paid uh my staff was paid my my overhead was paid and i kind of had like this nice little 5 000 margin to kind of just like take home and i just let it sit like that for like three to six months and i really just figured out like what are customers buying from us what's the start to finish process with them and what are the standard operating procedures that we're going to need to sell this as the service if you know about developmark we we do not work with clients unless we take their website company policy we will not ever work with a customer that's using wordpress we don't work with customers that's using uh wix we don't do that we always take their website and host it on our platform that is one thing that we do and because of that we get to kind of clean up the seo as we're taking over the site like you've done seo audits before for clients you've found thousands of issues and to us it's just like the time it's going to take us the cost that's going to take you get a new website out of it and we'll fix the issues as we transition it over and like your course you teach url redirects you teach how to move websites to make sure that it's not creating 404 pages you teach how to crawl those things and so like doing that initially then moving the website over now we have a fresh seo perspective and google knows hey this is a new website register on search search console usually we add a bunch of pages that type of stuff i was figuring out what is something that we can do the same thing every single time with our customers now once i figured that out then we kind of started focusing more on acquisition and that acquisition was really simple we started asking our customers uh do you want free three months of service this is very aggressive three months of free service refer us a client simple we don't get paid on that account for three months but we do get a new client out of it every single time now they know of the program some clients are free for the whole year and it's like wow okay now we know how to get new clients we're not going to make a lot of money from this but we are going to grow our customer base extremely fast and so we started doing this ridiculous rewards incentive for our customers where every time they they give us a success and they go hey ruan phone's off the hook right now you guys are awesome no worries did you know that you can get three months free saving you forty five hundred dollars our average charge is fifteen hundred bucks a month saving you forty five hundred dollars if this type of business owner joins our company great email introduction to like three people right after we send that i swear to god and so from there um we started getting clients youtube started to work better and then obviously just word of mouth started to happen as well um and so once you get that product really dialed in then it's how do you acquire those customers and make financial sense of it me i don't care about money i don't need it i have nice things i have a nice office i have nice employees that's what i care about uh the nice employees in the nice office i don't really need the next things like i have a bunch of stuff here probably throughout but um now i'm at the point where we're at a hundred thousand dollars per month and i'm now doing the same thing take a break what's next and then now that i can pay my bills and everything like that with all the staff that i have focus on existing clients focus on products and services and what's that next step to get us to a thousand clients which is my goal by 30 and that'll that'll put us at a million a month that's terrific man that's great yeah so one thing i really got out of that is that you you figured you figured out a way to standardize your offering which is something that i think a lot of people struggle with because especially with seo there's this belief that every campaign is different and it always needs to be customized and always every situation is unique but in reality you know a lot of things are repeatable a lot of a lot of elements of an seo campaign are very very repeatable and predictable so um what was that process for standardizing the offer i think that would really help a lot of people to figure out and also like what what verticals did you pick and why yeah so i i i if you want to standardize your offer especially in digital marketing take the website that's like the first step because now you're creating a process for a team that knows what to do every time they get an account and it's almost like if you like just doing the seo um is beneficial for cash flow and it works especially if you're a one-man two-man five-man 10-people team um it's very very beneficial but that's like it's almost like you know think about your cell phone you have to unlock your phone go to another provider get a sim card and then do the service well they might as well just get the new phone at the new place right and so we we see the website as the cell phone and then we see the seo as the cellular service and our clients every time you get a phone call right you know that your cellular service is working every time a client gets a lead that's kind of how we're justifying your platform hey development newly developed mark new league development new lead and what starts to happen is something beautiful starts to happen is you start to create um consistency with your stuff and you start to get better metrics and our websites are built this fast we rank people this fast average time for somebody to get a lead after using our services is fast you have more control over this if you're doing the agency route so i would say if you want to productize your service and you're doing the seo stuff right now consider web design as an entrance to get to you doing the seo work for the client many times these clients have outdated websites they're not secure they have incorrect redirects they have crappy pages they have bad texts bad images so we're just like hey nathan's plumbing company you want a new website no problem we're going to fly out photographers to you we're going to rebuild your website we're going to add a bunch of keyword pages like you teach and gotch and we're going to just kill out of the park for you and you're going to work with one company in terms of verticals last year's pandemic was a huge wake up seos there's only a few verticals that you should be working with medical uh uh uh home services and legal anything outside if you're doing national seo that's different um but more local i'm talking more local um those are the three verticals that you need to work with why most of those verticals were open during the pandemic and if they weren't open some of them weren't open for a couple weeks like you mentioned the dentist which we had a few too um but plumbers we didn't have to stop service we kept billing them no problem advertising was cheaper they were the best months was during the pandemic uh uh attorneys no problem people had real estate closings people were selling properties like crazy now you have the realtor now you have the attorneys busy verticals that i found to not be great is anything like uh real estate's really hard to work with primarily because they have listings they have idx's they want seller leads and they're competing with zillow who's actually now a brokerage restaurants are really hard to work with they don't have time they don't value your service they're always trying to penny pinch um and anything that's like a coach or lifestyle coach or anything along those lines are really hard to work with um ultimately because you want a business that's already getting that branded traffic people that are already typing in nathan's plumbing you want those companies because they're not going to be the ones to micromanage your seo results they're going to hear the phone ringing they're going to see the leads are coming from you and that's going to keep them quiet and you can kind of scale right yeah those are those are very good points you have more like recession recession-proof verticals is what you're describing yeah and i mean obviously depending on what caused a recession that could change right so like in 2008 if you were in home services things were not good at all so so it does depend but yeah i mean i i totally agree with that oh oh let me let me touch on that one time i'm sorry no go for this go for the clients that need professional licenses to do things so like you're right home services look remodeling was in the toilet plumbing hvac was not in the toilet because you need heat and you need air conditioning and you can't have your toilet leaking and so the licenses becomes really important because guess what there's less of them meaning there's less competition customers are more willing to call where if you're targeting um i know jonathan henderson does a really good job with power washing companies but that's an example of a vertical that does not need a professional license therefore there's thousands of them and because of that it becomes more competitive yeah and i think that's the difference between essential and non-essential like that's that those you know those nuances are so prevalent now because of kova you've heard that so many times but but yeah i mean in 2008 if you were a general contractor you got nailed like there just there was no business and if you were someone servicing general contractors you also got nailed so there is you know i think the the nuance that you described making sure that it is essential no matter the situation of what's going on i think that's as extremely golden so when you're thinking about standardizing okay so some things will come up right someone's trying to figure out how to standardize or offer how to productize it how to create a consistent delivery process which i think is something a lot of people struggle with how restrictive do you get with leads so you know what the lead qualification process how restrictive do you get and how loose do you get or is it always the same like this is these are the rules this is who we this is who we work with and there's never we don't break that line how hard line do you get that's a really good question and it's something that's bit us before and the behind and it's something that's helped us before so like i'll take on clients where i see there's additional opportunity and else other places um like example we're doing a hair salon right now one of my friends owns a really big hair salon we can't refuse that you know what i mean it's not in our verticals it's not essential but we still do it because she has a lot of connections um but then we'll do this e-commerce store and i'll be the one doing the work the whole time and it never ends up to something good so you know whatever it's pretty hard line it's it's very very hard to get something into development that's not what we do because in reality you think you do digital marketing but really you do a set few things you don't just do digital marketing and so because of that we've gotten really really critical with who we work with and generally speaking those businesses often are the ones that i don't have to do the management of i don't have to look into anything my team can handle and because of that that's who we say yes to in terms of engagement and it's really nice to know this too because when you get this type of lead coming to you you're usually really excited you're like wow this is my perfect customer i'm going to make sure i do everything i can to get this account and when you get the account you have the sense of satisfaction knowing that they're not going to email you 30 days from now saying why are the phones off why are we not making sales online and as you know i don't think there's anything that stresses me out more than unhappy customers and to avoid having unhappy customers because a success rate is very important with everything that we do to avoid that we just work with the same type of businesses offer them the same exact things and do the same service over and over again right and those services are website design website management local seo google ads website chat so when you uh so let's talk about you know how you well first of all in the um in the qualification phase what size of companies is a qualifier or a disqualifier is that something you're using as a criteria so like uh maybe like a solo plumber may not be appropriate for a company that has many locations and has many plumbers so what you know where do you go from there yeah so believe it or not um we we take on everybody okay and the reason why we do that is because we tell them look this is going to have to be done now or later i mean you have to do this you have to be online and so getting started now is going to have a more of a benefit for you than getting started in a year from now just because you're a solo plumber and we set the expectation with them this is the most important part look you're not roto-rooter right you're not you're not going to get thousands of leads from the web your first year in business that's not going to happen but the fact that you're already licensed the fact that you know how to do the job you're going to get leads you just are there's millions of people searching for plumbers every single day and so our qualification process really is is this person an actual business or are they a marketing person trying to figure out what development does under the hood so they can steal it and use it for their agency we get that a lot because of youtube and then also is this person trying to build a directory those are always just really bad leads unless it's like an association that has money and they're credible branding really comes into play here how long somebody's been in business those types of things are really important um and then the last one is just like uh do they have the money to pay for it you know it's like for us i don't care if you just started your business how we see it our perception of it it might not work the best for you in your first 90 180 a year but you're still further than you were when you started and so if a customer is not further than when they were when they started with develop that's when we know we've done a disjusting to that customer and they should not be working with us and we'll kind of release them or give them some money back or however we handle that um and so for qualification process in our verticals are they okay with us taking over the website are they okay with low expectations starting out are they okay with the minimum ad spend those are generally the ones that we're looking for because service works for everybody if you're working with a new business and it's a new dentist i mean yeah of course like they're a dentist they're gonna be around um it's better for them to get started now but if you're working with somebody that's a college student and they're saying they want to build a directory and they're they're into digital marketing we don't talk to those people yeah okay that's good to know so you you mentioned ad spend so is it a requirement with every client that they do allocate a certain amount of capital to ad spend because i know there's a lot of agencies that require that because of how long seo can take you know we we want to try to drive leads initially while the seo builds up so is that what you guys do as well yeah i mean so um and i'll be really honest with you um google ads is uh it's one of those things where you have to do it it's like the lead quality you know uh it helps the it it helps the seo i don't know the myth on that uh but you know those are some of the things that we look at but also um in terms of google ads we build a client for the ad spend and most people don't do that most people actually just have the client pay for the ad spend the reason why we build the client for the ad spend is it gives us a performance based approach on doing things and what i mean by that is we tell them we're taking a percentage not build them to directly we're going to take a percentage from their budget and so this way they're not seeing their budget they're getting leads they're not questioning where the google ads money is being spent and we're making money on google ads without them seeing a fee for google ads management um and so we make that very clear with them many times they're okay with it but generally google ads is a three month or four month contract that we sign with customers because once the site goes live and we turn on google ads their phone's off the hook right okay because the budget for google ads will do is a thousand to three thousand for most local service-based companies okay so when you're so let's talk about kind of how your proposal process works so you are you is it always personalized or is it pretty standardized on that front too it's standardized because we sell the same thing every time right but even even so even if the competition is much higher so let's say let's say you have a uh electrician versus a personal injury lawyer yeah where do we where do the differences come in that's a great question and and that really comes into um uh the packages so we have three packages i i will i will say that we do have three packages we have a starter package which is a website 10 new pages transfer your pages new design we have a competitor package which is usually the middle population these are cities like um you know these are like medium-sized cities this is a website a lot more pages a lot more faq content a lot more backlinks stuff like that and then we have a market leader package which is like you want to rank in dallas you have to buy this you want to rank in miami you have to buy this so um you know those those that packages usually large amounts of pages on the website large amounts of link bait large amounts of links a beautiful user experience we fly out a photographer those social media management because that helps the seo too so we have packages to determine the marketplace but the services that we sell in those packages are the same the quantity of what they're getting is more in different packages um and so when you do that when you lay them out and you say hey because you're in miami this is the package that makes the most sense for you usually you have a shorter sales cycle yeah that's smart yeah that's that's the way that we've always done is that tiered tiered type of packaging and the thing that's nice is you really just change the quantities so you know the amount of content volume the amount of link volume you just really can elevate so give me a hypothetical situation so it's uh let's say it's a chicago personal injury lawyer what what ranges are we looking at for that what's your anchor price what's your low price and your middle yeah so our our our lowest price would be uh 3 500 bucks up front for the site and the seo optimization of it one time we call this we call this a um not one-time optimization we call this pre-launch optimization and then on a monthly management fee that would be like a thousand a month plus ads um our middle package is uh usually it's like 4 500 bucks up front 1500 bucks a month our largest package is 6 500 bucks up front 3 000 per month okay that package i mean if we sell those uh you know i'm very happy of course um yeah okay that's good yeah it's just it's important for people to see like i one mistake that i've seen very often is people will build out these custom proposals and they'll send out one price okay just one one opportunity for this client to sign up and we both know that's problematic because no matter what when you see a price on its own it's always going to look bigger so it doesn't matter how big it is even if it's a thousand dollars a month it's still going to look big because it's on its own you haven't anchored them in any way so there always needs to be at least one other pricing option you're doing it the right way i believe because there's a lot of data to prove this but the tiered three pricing options it works it really does work because it's building out that anchor everything else looks smaller in comparison so that that's great so let's talk about um have you raised your prices um you know it's it's interesting because i i we've thought about it and unfortunately we are in a such a competitive marketplace where we've actually thought about decreasing our prices and focusing more on volume the the beautiful thing about getting websites from people and and and i don't really mean make it sound like that but you know beautiful thing about doing clients websites is you start to build up a massive portfolio like developmark.com is going through redesign right now but if you go on our site it's like several sites we've done recently and so just the volume gets us more leads of work that we've done so we like that and to do more volume we have to decrease our price i don't think we're at the position to where we're we're the desired consultant to handle this stuff for these types of businesses yet generally people think of like reach local haibu scorpion those types of different companies and those companies can ultimately raise their price because they have so much volume and they don't care about acquisition i mean i'm sure they do but to acquisition to me means more than acquisition to them because they have hundreds of millions in revenue and so to me getting a new customer is very important and so we've thought about decreasing our prices because of that more people will say yes if we lower our price we're not going to make as much money but we are going to acquire more when we acquire more we have more conversations we get to know more people we get more referrals we get more sites in our portfolio we get more experience and so that makes me really happy so we have thought about increasing our prices because the margins of my business right now are like 20 so out of 100k we'll win that 20 000 you know uh 20 000 gets spent right away and other things that we're investing in like a reporting platform and a website platform so um is that after after your salary after all salaries yep that's after all salaries so it's pretty good i mean i can't complain um but now we're going to invest in our own web editor that you can't access on the public market and that will really make us a competitive advantage and then when employees leave us they can't just take our web or with them right and so it makes people want to work at developmark but it also makes clients want to work with belmar because we're solving their industry specific problems with our web technology okay um kind of like marketing 360. they have a platform that works really well right um and at that rate you really have a unique selling proposition and then you can raise your prices but right now we're focused more on the acquisition i'd love to raise my prices but right now we're kind of like hey do we charge 2500 instead of 3500 and just get more customers how much is that of that as a factor and we're doing more research on that but generally we're lowering our prices yeah let's talk about that let's talk about pricing because that's it's interesting that you're trying to go that route because um the common philosophy is that you should always raise your prices because otherwise you know it's a race to the bottom right so eventually uh you'll be viewed and this is in theory this is not you know just theory yeah you'll be viewed as a commodity right and you're you're you're constantly competing on price so you know what what rationale do you have to go the other route that this most people would claim is not the right path because um you know price is perception right i mean just price alone like look at anything like you you think a rolls royce is much better than a toyota i mean one of the biggest factors is the price it is it's huge it's a huge factor and it it has huge influence on how people perceive things so if you're the cheapest guy in the block what's the perception that you guys have to handle to to overcome that yeah it's a good question i think like also it's it's how the customer found us also determines price a lot too right um i've noticed that with google leads the customers are more hesitant than somebody that has been watching me on youtube or got referred to us and so price truly is a perception and look by no means is this something where we're going to announce a message and say hey everybody service is going down a thousand a month our entrance like the barrier to work with us i think we need to decrease and maybe it's not financial maybe it's something else because in your customers mind they think that what you do is extremely time consuming consuming on their end and they're taking this huge risk just by working with you so to us it's like how do we leverage either financial rewards or something along those lines to lower the risk and commitment that they have their perception of working with us now in terms of increasing our prices um we have to deliver more value at that point and so right now the value that we deliver is consistent leads coming to your phone all day and you know it's not the website it's not the seo it's not the ppc it's not any of that it's for the business that we're trying to target it's more of a consistent it's more of a value rather than a commodity type of thing unfortunately though we get the customers that are like you're a commodity and i don't want to pay this much for this service and at that time we're so interested in the acquisition of the customer well we'll say no problem we have a backup pricing plan for you it's very similar to if you were to call verizon right now and say i want to leave your service they're going to half your monthly rate which you know that's great right because they're trying to keep you but you see it as a commodity you want to leave because there's better pricing but they've got to do what they do so at times i try to not get emotional when customers call us a commodity and i kind of just like put put it in their shoes and then i just go we want this guy's website he knows other business people we want to put it on portfolio we want more experience at that point we kind of go that route this also depends on the type of seo that you're working on like if you're working with a brand that has really severe seo issues and you know there's a lot of thought expertise going into there's a lot of hours going into it i mean look your price you you should charge a ridiculous amount at the end of the day nathan i'm trying to create something to where we are a product and a service and it's not so much consulting and at that point we can lower our prices because i'm not investing my time so if my profit margin stays at 20 percent and we're growing revenue and we're lowering prices i don't really it doesn't make an impact to my profit margin now if that profit margin starts to go down then obviously there's something that i have to look into and and do that that won't happen as long as we make our technology better and faster to use i got on the phone with it's funny you say this i got on the phone with one of our competitors and they wanted like 1500 bucks up front for a site and this this is a very reputable company very extremely rapid the most popular and they wanted 1500 bucks a month for a fight for the site and they wanted 500 bucks a month for seo management and at that point is when i was like wow like i need to rethink how i do this i need to do more margin less work lower price because if i can do that your acquisition is going to go through the roof your margin is not going to be affected and you're just going to gain more and more and more revenue now if i'm doing a six hour consultation with somebody i can't charge 500 bucks i just can't that's gotta be six thousand dollars right and at that point you can raise your prices because now you're eating away at your own time so um it's definitely something interesting to think about yeah those those are all good points so it makes me think about the fact that you're you're talking about this um the difference between growth and scale okay because i think a lot of people get those things a little mixed up so because in an agency the only way to grow is you need more people because people have to do the work right so and that that's the key difference between an agency and a course or any type of information product because information product has unlimited scale because there's unlimited people that can consume it at any given time i don't need to hire 10 more people for people to to use my product right so for you you know your revenue and your expenses are pretty much going to climb at the same same rate unless you want to stop unless you you know you're fine at a certain level but for you to keep going you got to keep growing you got to keep investing in people and your team so let's go back who was the first person you brought on your team the first person brought on my team was this guy named tom okay who's no longer with us okay uh he started his own consulting business and we're supporting him in every way that we can by sending him leads um so that's good so he moved on you know it wasn't he was kind of like you know i want to do my own thing and i was like no problem um i'm going to tell you why the employees is a secret weapon and it's because we build things internal that you're just never going to figure out unless you have this many employees working at one thing at a time like right now we every time we get an account we have an analytics platform built for us it's not for anybody else and our employees worked for over a year on this and so this is an analytics platform that's going to do a lot of things that we don't have to pay for like website chat call tracking text tracking review generation those things are all included with the site and so for me it's i want more employees i want the revenue and the expenses to keep going up because the reality of it is um we have a business right now where cash flow's not necessarily the issue um the issue is acquisition and so um we just need a lot more acquisitions but nathan to your point when you start getting more employees to work for your business you start to create what's called a trade secret and trade secrets are valuable business intelligence things that you learn just by being in your business and that employees cannot share or it's illegal and so when we have six people on our design team and they're creating design templates for our company now our product gets easier to deliver our margins go up our time investment goes down we have to hire less employees and things just become faster and because of that that's a trade secret they can't take that design with them if they were to leave making develo mark a more unique selling proposition oriented type of company and so the employees they help me build processes they build templates they build systems i'm not doing any of that i'm focusing on the acquisition that's the value of the employees the con in the employees is these are real people with real complaints with real issues with real needs and trying to manage all of that while trying to manage complaining customers upset customers keyword rankings going down no leads coming in over the last 30 days and then trying to deal with department of labor claims irs and all that stuff becomes a nightmare and um as long as the employees are happy i've found everything is okay employees and customers as long as they're happy all that other stuff legal irs all of that other stuff is just kind of like you know it happens right right well you just yeah there's a lot i want to get into there so um what gave you the courage to bring on your first team member and you said he's not with you anymore but like what you know what gave you the courage to bring someone on because that's something that a lot of people struggle with because that transition from being the guy to having someone else help you which we know is a necessity you cannot go to the next level without bringing people on to help you so you know how did you get over that kind of resistance to not be the guy anymore and have other people support you and support the goals that you're going for yeah i mean it's it's one of those things where um i was definitely scared and you know now that i really think about it i was paying this guy you know minimum wage and like now like i was so stressed at that time about that though like i was making 3 000 a month and i was paying him like 1400 a month whatever the minimum wage was and now i'm like my payroll expense is 60 000 a month and i'm like not as stressed about it it's really weird but what i what i am stressed about is just making sure everything's okay because there's so much stuff moving and i don't know so um really like the resistance causes the growth and the the more you stretch something as uncomfortable as it's going to be nature the universe naturally as long as you're willing and accepting and you don't quit we'll make sure that you stretch with it and it will make sure you grow with it but recently like we just hired somebody for 60k a year and she starts uh monday right um and hopefully other employees don't hear this but um you know 60k a year you know that's 5 000 a month you know like a lot of people would be really stressed about that right but to me it's like i just need six seven thousand dollars more in business and this employee i won't even feel it we'll get more production she's bringing her trade secrets she's bringing her information we hire people from other agencies who are getting better because of this and so you've really just got to make sure that if this is the type of business that you're going to do and you stretch you know that rubber band and you start to feel that resistance it's not going to break as long as you're willing and you really follow through with it um so at the time i was not ready i was scared and i just kind of like just did it and look it was the worst investment i've ever made for like the first six twelve months because he was not good at all he knew nothing he was a friend of mine that was a huge mistake of mine but it turned out for the better because he's a great guy right yeah that's i just can't express how important is what you just said like i don't know why it happens but when you finally break through and you do something that you perceive as a risk and you finally do it you you just you just find a way to to come up with things to support it so like perfect from a personal example like when when my wife and i were deciding to finally get a house like we get our house and the mortgage payment is going to be 2 700 a month i was making plenty of money to support that but for some reason that 2700 a month i was like ah man i just don't know if i can do this like i just like because i've never paid a mortgage in my entire life and it's just like you know the commitment of that like the the fear of like oh my gosh i got to make that commitment every single month they're like what's gonna happen but then one day i was like 2700 is nothing and like i just made that decision we didn't we bought our house and like i've never thought about it again and i always bring that analogy up when it comes to hiring employees because that's how it is too you bring on an employee it's always scary you're like oh man i don't know how to be able to afford this guy like i have payroll taxes i have benefits i have you know you start to you start to uh come up with every excuse to not do it right um but then when you actually do it and you actually like it becomes a reality and that person comes onto your team nothing really changes except you just grow like i've seen direct correlations when i bring someone new on my team revenue growth it happens every time you go and look at the quarterly growth when you bring someone else new one i guarantee for you you've probably seen growth it's because you are at least this is my opinion maybe maybe you feel the same but you are freeing up your your mind to focus on what matters when you bring someone else on so it's not necessarily that they're gonna be so incredibly skilled that they're gonna just you know blow your company up and like you know you're gonna generate a ton more revenue but it's more the fact that like now they're handling something that you used to handle and now that allows you to focus on the things that really matter and the more you do that now this way how big is your team now you're muted there we go yeah okay um right now we're at 15. 15. okay so so yeah so every time you expand your team you're able to probably do more and more so i'm sure at the beginning you were probably doing everything you were probably doing the seo you're probably doing the ads you're probably doing the design and how stressful was that like it's like you don't want to go back there right i'm sure you don't i was overweight you know like i was literally seen in my videos like i was not healthy yeah because i was waking up waking up at 4 00 a.m like sending out reports starting new projects and like i couldn't do it for much longer um and you're right you're absolutely right yeah so how do you how do you decide in the beginning like should you focus on building systems or should you bring someone on as fast as possible and build the systems while they're basically getting integrated what do you think is the best path there i mean i would say beyond as soon as possible if you're really at the demand um to where you're gonna be i used to get really scared about business and like uh anxious and i would have like anxiety like hey is this gonna work like are we gonna be in business now i've kind of gotten to the point where nothing really can scare me other than um you know somebody murdering me uh because anything can happen like you you know anything can happen but i would say to to the point where you can hire an employee and have them kind of do what's taking up most of your time so you can focus on the standard operating procedures because you can't just hire an employee and tell them to make you a process like that's not going to work like you as the creator of the job that you're making you have to create this stuff and your first employee it's gonna be really awkward they're not gonna have all this perfect training they're not gonna have all these perfect things they're gonna have to learn side by side with you unless they have a lot of experience which if you first hire they probably don't have a lot of experience because you can't afford somebody that's requesting 80k to do seo you just can't and so um i would say just take the risk get them to work with you um see if they're reasonable with the wage you know let them know that you're a startup and here's what you can afford to pay you know check the legalities of your state's employment uh laws and then from there have them kind of do your 80 you still do the 20 of the client work whatever it is to just make sure that you're busy stop taking on so many accounts just kind of like let it ride for a little bit unless it's a perfect account during that time work on your processes work on your your service and start to do some of those different things but i've seen situations where we've gotten a new employee i said perfect i'm gonna redesign the development website all of a sudden i sign five accounts that week it was hectic they needed my help i needed to be on calls nothing got done with the development website so i would say um there are it's okay to take a dry streak it's okay it's okay to say i have enough monthly recurring revenue my clients are satisfied to only take the best of the best leads because when i get desperate i take whatever lead we can but only the best of the best leads keep the staff busy keep them fulfilled and work on the next meaningful project that's going to get me to go to kind of the next stair step right that's that's great yeah so is there a certain uh when you're thinking about hiring is there a certain revenue number that you like to hit before you bring on someone new is there is there a process in place for when it's time to hire um usually i will hear this demand at this point from our employees that's usually when i'll know when to hire people um we do weekly meetings with all our staff like one-on-ones so i'll physically talk to a lot of these team members one-on-one in the beginning now that's going to be impossible as i grow because you know you just can't once you once i have 50 people 100 people i'm not going to do that but you know it's very interesting topic vince mcmahon right owner of wwe do you know you know vince mcmahon yeah okay um you know in an interview he was talking about how he used to do one-on-ones with every wrestler too and then as the wwe started growing and they started getting thousands of wrestlers like ric flair you know the rock they wouldn't talk to a manager they would still talk to vince mcmahon and it's because even though he was this billionaire with this gigantic company those are the people that started with him he's still in contact with them you know personally and so um really the goal of it is is to listen to your customers listen to your wife or your girlfriend or your boyfriend that'll usually tell you it's time to hire somebody you're working way too hard um listen to your employees if you have them listen to consulting advice i don't think there's a number that gets me to think about it's time to hire somebody it's usually a demand for work but once you get paid it's the pain right it's the people you gotta notice it because like if you're seeing that your reports are being sent out late hmm probably a good time to hire somebody to do your reporting if you get customers emailing you and saying hey i reached out about this last week and my ppc campaign still isn't up probably a good time to hire an ads person so listen to the market listen to your employees listen to your people listen to your friends and get get advice um but i would say in terms of revenue i'm known for hiring people even though we can't afford them and then figuring it out later which is not a good strategy to do uh i'm definitely not the best person with finances and give financial advice um but i would say be smart make sure that you have the monthly recurring revenue to assume that person before you hire them right but to your point nathan it's always worked for me so well i mean yeah look where you've gotten so you but that's because you pushed out of those those comfort zones every time and it probably every time you bring an employee i guarantee you probably still calculate the numbers you're like oh man i don't know like that that thought well probably still runs through your mind does it i mean every time every every time yeah you just it just it's it's human nature right yeah i mean being status quo is human nature so you're constantly having to break through that and take that risk it's not easy and it's that's uh you know just starting a business alone is a risk but then all of everything we have to deal with on a daily basis to grow and hit the next level those are also risks too so when you're working with clients um how how are you operationally handling those clients so i know in a lot of larger agencies they'll split that work based on revenue so you know uh 30k revenue will be one team or one pod you know that type of that type of split how do you personally do it well you know it's a really good question and i think like right now we have two teams so we have um we call them team magenta and team black and um these two teams uh kind of just you know there's there's an onboarding manager for each team there's a designer for each team there's a content person but they all communicate together too because you know it's not like hey you versus them it's more like hey these are just like the set of points for these new accounts that come in um ideally i'd like to have we we found out that one seo in our company can handle 100 accounts and so we still have one seo in our company which is awesome no he doesn't no he doesn't no he doesn't but he's a very happy guy he loves his job right he paid well um but we've just found that when you take the website and you do all this upfront seo work and then it goes to marketing blogging social media um yext those things which we call marketing it's not seo anymore the results come in and so it's like for him the work that he's doing is just optimizing websites at before they go live and then making sure that they they're consistently updated with stuff like that um now in terms of design you know usually it's very hard to have one designer design a website so design is probably our content's our most demanding department design you usually need like three designers to really crush a website so it's hard to do that when you start when you start growing you need somebody to do the wire framing you need somebody to do the icons you need somebody to do the branding you need somebody to do templated pages and each of each our designers have different roles um but i would say as long as you figure out one product or service you'll know that sweet spot of when it's time to focus on creating another team for additional set of clients once you start to see operational uh uh falls happening in the business right okay so as far as in-house versus outsourcing and working with vendors what do you do you still work with vendors as far as fulfilling some work or is it purely 100 in-house for everything well so we have vendors for software stuff like that when you say in-house there's a lot of technology that we're building that's going to kind of allow us to not pay some of these vendors um but a lot of our you know content writing even though we have four content managers in our company full time a lot of our content for you know various topics are just offshore to a company called verblio websites are all internal seo is all internal links are all internal and then everything else is software so i would say the only thing that we offshore is text content for a topic we just don't have time to research and urblio does a really good job at this where they kind of just like hey here's an article from real person you get a white label link customer approves it they they publish the post so um a lot of it is in-house and there's a there's cons to that um like you pay a lot more in taxes i'll tell you that um you don't have the flexibility of um you know dropping a subcontractor and you know focusing on your cash flow and doing some things yourself you have a consistent payroll which is scary at times but then there's the pros of it clients feel comfortable signing up with you because you're a real legitimate business uh clients feel comfortable because they know somebody that you've hired you get that a lot like hey i know you hired this person i want to work with you guys um and then also you have a team and you build a culture and you build trade secrets and you do all the stuff that's well worth the 11 payroll you're gonna pay at the end of the year to employ these people right so what about the link building side of things though so you guys are handling that in-house what and i know you guys don't do like a ton of huge link building campaigns because a lot of it's local you don't really not really a necessity but like how how are you handling link acquisition so it's very interesting and i think you're going to find my answer very interesting um every client that we do monthly seo for we do blogging for so like if you were to go to google right now and type it in what does mold smell like our client shows up number one and feature snippet of a mold company so our content team creates a list of blog topics for our clients and they get them approved by the customer we publish them on a consistent schedule we order all of it at once from verbio and then we set it up consistent scheduling in our platform and every time one of these posts go live if one of them starts ranking higher towards the top search results or we find in analytics that it's a trending article we run ppc towards it and so the ppc clicks are two cents because it's a blog topic nobody's bidding for what does mold smell like i can guarantee you that um and so because of that a lot of times of people that are searching this stuff maybe five or ten out of a thousand of them are writing an article and they'll reference our article that's one way that we're doing it um the the obviously the next way that we're doing a really good way of doing it is every time we publish a site we do a press release and it kind of just says this company partners with developmark for their growth 2020. we send it out to 150 articles and all of them linked back to our site some are no index some are due index and then consistent press releases for our customers that usually gets us to getting the natural links that are going google search the press releases obviously we do all the citations and yex and stuff like that um but then there's also the the the recommendations that we have get on expertise.com get on the chamber get on the better business bureau um here's some links that your competitors have um that you can acquire but we don't do any black cat links because we can't afford to lose our reputation like that and so um there's really a methodical approach of going about it if you just write blogs those blogs rank and you run google ads to those blogs people are going to mention them if you just do press releases because your customers have news whether you think it or not they've hired a new doctor they've hired a new employee they've done this they've got a new office they're doing a new service all of that is applicable for a press release right yeah that i like that you're doing a content-centric approach that's that's the best you know really the best way to do it and although like ranking for those topics probably not going to drive a whole lot of leads it's still going to help build that topical relevance on the site um and really you know the best way to acquire links is through informational content not that transaction no one's going to link to a home page of a plumber so it just it's just not a natural way to do things um so you guys really aren't doing any like editorial outreach based link building link insertions things like that you're not really engaging in that well so what's interesting is um as we become more technically sound um we're we're looking into web applications more than we are outreach for links um uh and one day we will have somebody that just does outreach for links but like if you go to one of our bail bonds websites you know we develop a calculator for how much it's going to cost you on a monthly basis to post bail and this calculator is only for this website and because of that getting those links are going to become a lot easier if that client were to engage in link building so we're looking at these different web applications to uh enhance the functionality of the site which ultimately is going to attract more links yep that's that's the way to do it yep that's the number one link beta is some sort of tool or software or calculator those are those are really the money the money link bait um assets so that's smart that you're doing that all right so i'll start to wrap this up here i'll ask you a couple more questions um let's see so let's just talk about like what's your what's your big goal what's your big vision of you know where you want to who who do you want to be you know in in three or three to five to ten years well i'd really like to be i'd really like to be a company like scorpion uh i think that their business model um their work culture their product uh their customers all resonate with something that i want to do but we're a little uh different than scorpion in our approach but ultimately as a company they really wow me um those companies like companies like haibu definitely want to steer away from i don't want to be that's like the to the bottom like you're going straight for the bottom 200 bucks a month you get it all you know pay a year up front and it's worth it's 500 bucks for the year don't want to do that but i do want to be like the scorpion of uh certain verticals now um in terms of like personal growth like i want to be doing a million a month by 30 which is just 10xing my business right so that means i've got to get 10x more employees 10x more accounts and i've got to operate 10x more efficiently and so at that rate i'll be at 100 employees and i'll have a million month coming in and then at that rate it's like how do i get to 100 million a month and then that's obviously an insane scale um but you know that's billion dollar company and digital marketing agencies typically don't make it to the billion dollar mark because it just it's so new this business model is so new you know 20 years old this business model is that like a lot of these billion dollar companies aren't around yet but they will be if you look at scorpions projections you look at a lot of these different companies projections they're going to hit a billion they just are um and so that's that's kind of the the goals that i have and really that starts with our our platform and our unique selling proposition is like why would a customer choose me over nathan gotch why would a customer choose developmark's website over wix why would a customer use us for seo other than the millions of feed one fiverr why would a customer run ads with us that's where technology is what's gonna gets us from a hundred thousand a month to a million a month yep that's that's that those are good goals and uh honestly accenture which is a public company they're you know billion dollar company and they so it is it is certainly possible oglavi another one who's just outrageously big but of course you know they're getting the big fish so you know that's yo so so with that goal what is the biggest sticking point to get you there so let's talk about you going right now from where you are at 100 000 a month to that million dollars a month what what right now and of course you may not know what it is but just based on your experience what's going to be the hardest thing to do to get there you know i think it's you know i want to say me i really do but i don't think it is um i think it's going to be creating a unique selling proposition and a marketing strategy that gets us the customers that we want so i've already identified what we need to do to get there um now it's hey we need a marketing strategy that fills our calendars every single day with high quality people that want these services and that will choose development we'll pay the money up front um and pay the money on a monthly basis and to do that is very hard because it's very noisy out there and we're so focused on our technology and our product right now that we haven't done a marketing strategy development's entire website's being redesigned that's a huge flaw for us right now um but i think it's going to be acquisition of customers is definitely what's holding us back we could be a million a month right now i can hire people and sell the same thing over and over it's not hard we have it ready we just need the customers right so what about retention though because retention is really what's going to matter the most so how how much are you trying to balance that that equation between retention and acquisition well retention we've got down because we have um things in place that keep the customer happy and those things are tracking of leads reporting dashboard account management a one account management company can manage 100 accounts um uh and then obviously a team that's doing the work on a monthly basis just making sure it gets done right you know clients they leave because of results but they also leave because they feel like they're being disrespected by you and you're just stealing their money and so if you can avoid people from feeling that way they understand the whole business is not from you they understand that their entire business can't succeed because of you and so when they don't hear responses back we have a 15 minute response time in our company um if it breaks that we send you a a notification saying hey i know you missed this message um here's a best practice to just make sure everybody gets responded to even if it's just i saw this message i respond to as soon as possible right we have a marketing assistant that responds to our account management's team right away if they know they're on a call those are the little things that we've noticed clients leave as response time so in terms of retention as long as we can keep response time up as long as we can keep our services performing as long as the client knows what they're getting and what they're paying for every month with our dashboard our retention is on board acquisition is really what our problem is um and so our retention rates are pretty high um clients leave us because they you know for whatever reasons people leave um you know and they can um but ultimately it's going to be that acquisition for us right developing a really systemized way to acquire new leads right so um so you have your you have your long-term goals so what's your goal by the end of this year my goal by the end of this year is to fully introduce our analytics and reporting dashboard called developdash which will be a internal life internal neighbor internal city for our customers that are using our services to see their billing to see their accounts management to see our tasks that were completed an activity log on their website rankings moving up and down call calls inside of their chats that are the leads inside of there all this amazing stuff in one place and it's gonna be something that we can't i was going to release to the market and then i realized how valuable it was and i was like no no let's just keep it to fellow mark and my developer was like dude if you want to sell this to agencies it's going to take a lot longer and so i was like just keep it for development for now um so that's my goal by the end of the year um and and see like that has nothing to do with acquisition and um i don't have an acquisition goal yet because we got to get our website up so um right now it's making sure that i have because one of our biggest issues right now is reporting so once i can i can kind of move along from that that that problem we're going to start on our website editor which is going to be a developer website editor other companies cannot get access to it and then it's going to be how do we acquire as many customers as possible nice yeah i think it's i think it's a really good idea you're adding these kind of proprietary elements to your business because it's hard to differentiate yourself in in the seo space so a lot of a lot of the bigger companies do have those internal processes that can't really be replicated so i think that's super smart you're doing that so uh last question so what would be your advice for other members of you know our new traffic 2x community if they they're new to client work or they're in that 10 to 20 000 per month range like what would you say that the one to three things that they need to do today or at least you know things they need to be thinking about to really take their you know companies to the next level and even and also just not to interrupt you but also even if they're just running their own business and they're not an agency like what are just some core principles that really make a difference for you i would say um i would say some of the core principles that you've really got to look into is um one be seen and be heard yeah like nobody knows your name that's an initial issue the reason why you're successful nathan is because people know your name you know they know your blog they've seen you on youtube they know you so if you're not being seen right now first of all get people to know your name that's gonna be the first thing any growth for any type of business right if we didn't know apple existed but we but it's such a great product though you know and it could help us a lot but we don't know they exist that's a problem a lot of clients a lot of you know my business is like i get upset that we don't have as many customers as we should have but then my team's like dude but like nobody knows us that's the problem and it's true just nobody knows us i'm sure there's a lot of people we can help but get your name out there create a blog create youtube videos get out there start knowing people that's that would be probably the first thing that i would say um the second thing that i would say is have a direction you know what what is your direction where is it that you want to be and stick to that because the bouncing around thing gets old really fast and it gets very very um you know it gets very nerve wracking and you get a lot of anxiety because you don't know what you're doing just stick to one thing be decisive and go after it every single day it's going to make life you can give you so much more clarity you're going to be able to focus and you're not going to do work to just undo that work that that was happening to me a lot i was doing things and then i was like i'm not going to do this with the rest of my life and i just wasted all that time that's the next thing and part of that was like you know becoming this youtube celebrity and also you know investing in these like different things that i was spending money on and i was just like that's not even what i want to do and so i had to have a real conversation with myself and say what is it that i actually want to do and do that every single day um and and and then the third thing you know is you don't need to know that much to get started and just keep moving you know you may not have all the answers to everything um like i don't have the answers for everything uh you know there's a lot of things that i'm dealing with right now that i did not know were there and a lot of these are you know things that you i can't avoid i have to take care of them but i would never know if i never got started and although there's a consequence now of doing some of these things and you know they're not like malicious things but they're like hey department of labor we need 20 grand you know and some of these things like you just don't know until you get started but now as i grow my business i have this experience and i feel confident and keep moving forward because i know stuff like you mentioned accenture right accenture is a gigantic consulting firm well they would not be that consulting firm if they didn't hire people that went through all these life traumas and issues in business so like see your your issues and your problems and your your temporary defeats is what napoleon hill calls them from thinking you're rich these are not failures these are just temporary defeats meaning time will heal everything that you're doing inside of your business take it as learning experience don't do it again that's the key you do it again you're an idiot if you don't do it again you're going to succeed so my first thing was get your name out there um you know my my second thing is uh i forgot what the second thing was but the third thing is is just like you don't know everything and that's okay keep moving yeah and i was gonna say just on that last point you know one thing that you do exceptionally well is you are very humble in seeking out information from and getting help and that's one and that is honestly man that like that's that's a really good quality to have because uh there are a lot of people who tend to have um egos okay and it's it's very difficult for them to break out of that egotistical nature to actually call someone up and say hey man like i just need help like can you just help me like it's like and that's that's not an easy thing to do it takes a lot of humility to do that and even in the beginning of in 2018 you called me up you called me up like that's that is a humble move and that i do believe that just that behavior talking to me talking to neil talk probably you probably talked to many different people that that behavior is the difference because you don't believe that you know everything and as long as you maintain that even at the stages you're at now if you continue in that same mindsets continue to seek out that information from other people who have um you know already been in your position and have gone beyond it man that's that's the difference and i think that's that's a quality that you have that i i would hope that every member would try to aspire to have so yeah certainly definitely i mean they do because they're here right they are yes and look i'll like and that's a really good point because i'll even like buy competitors services you know like i need to know everything and if i don't know everything i'm doing just justice to my customer and that's an expertise route that's not like you don't know anything about business because nobody knows everything about business but um you know like like buy things uh inspect how nathan selling his course if you want to sell courses like just spend the money and expect it and you'll learn more doing that than you ever would creeping on your page you know um and so even like even in our business we used to you know ask customers questions about their services now we're just saying we're just gonna pay for their service and we're gonna learn everything we need to know about it from there um and we don't have to talk to the customer and so those are little things that we're investigating right now because you putting yourself as the customer in the shoes of whatever it is you're trying to sell even if it's your own agency even if you have to buy a developmark website for your fake business to learn what you're doing then uh then you're you know you'll be you'll be good to go yeah and how did you how did you get over the the feeling that you don't want to make an investment in training or things like that like what why is it so easy for you to do that like what how do you rationalize that because a lot of people you know they see they see a big investment to to learn from someone like myself and they get hesitant right because they think of it as a cost not of an investment so how did you overcome that because i know you do a lot of investing in in personal development and various training so how did you get to that point because that's that's not also not an easy thing to do as well yeah i mean i think i think for me is um you know it's very exciting to know that you learn something new that can help your clients and you're just more confident when you know more things and like there's gonna be a question that a customer asks within the sales process and because you took the time to learn things your you can confidently answer and clients sense you're confident you know like wolf sense blood i mean they just they just know if you're confident or not they know if you know what you're talking about the more educational information that you have the more prepared you are everybody's biggest fear is to be on a sales call where they have no idea what they're talking about right client's gonna say no it's gonna be very awkward um so for me it's really being the most prepared that i can be in an extremely competitive marketplace and look if i gotta pay a thousand bucks to do that and i have a thousand bucks coming in i'll pay it you know but but a lot of people are different a lot of people see money differently and to me money's not real and it just comes back as long as you keep doing the right thing so i'm not scared to make the investment because i understand there's a lot of money out there to get right yeah that's that's the right mentality thank you so much man i i appreciate you coming on and uh it's it's been a while we need we need to get uh you know back on and do this again but uh it's just it's fun to just see where you started where you are now it's just it's so exciting and it's just i'm super super happy for you i'm super excited for um you know where you're gonna go because i know you're i know you're definitely gonna continue to continue to grow because you got the mindset man you got it so um so i'm i'm just i'm just happy for you that's it of course man all right well we'll talk again soon and once again thank you so much you got it have a wonderful day again all right man talk to you later thank you bye

Channel: Nathan Gotch

Views: 4,194

Keywords: ruan marinho, seo, seo 2021, seo agency

Id: EGYge4JeVDg

Length: 73min 49sec (4429 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021