How To Scale To A Million Dollars In 2026 With A Smaller Team

Speaker 0: Feel like I'm like sitting in the back of the bus and the bus is a rocket ship. Woke up and realized, you know, I've got basically 20 c players Mhmm. On my team. The problem is all these idiots around me. Not me.

Speaker 1: It's everyone else at this company. Yes. But not the person that hired them.

Speaker: People in the company cannot treat the clients of the company better than they themselves are true. We routinely, like, several times a week find tens of thousands of dollars of wasted ad spent in PPC campaigns. It's amazing the the level of negligence that we find sometimes in some of these campaigns. I had gotten, like, a 120 leads Yeah. From people who would listen to this podcast and decided they wanna do this marketing channel.

We went from from, like, three people probably when when I went on your podcast to 35 now about five years later.

Speaker: Welcome, and thank you for joining us for today's episode of disruptors where millionaires are made. Today, we have Brandon Bateman with Bateman Collective and Brandon Floyd from Salt Lake to talk about how to scale your business to 7 figures or more in 2026 with a smaller team. Guys, I'm on a mission to create, millionaires information on this show alone. It's enough to help become a millionaire in the next five to seven years if you'll take consistent action. You'll become one.

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Speaker: I'm ready.

Speaker: Alright. So we've had several episodes, but for every episode, I think, is compelling because you're bringing a lot of data, you're bringing a lot of information. Right? And we're gonna be talking about how to get even more right now for your marketing without having to go crazy with, hiring a big team and so on. But before we do all that, as you're well aware, I've modified my business quite a bit.

Right? And I think they're you know, our audience is we got a pretty healthy mix. There are some that are like, hey. How do I do my first deal? We got some like, hey.

I'm doing deals. What are the next steps? And then we have other operators like, I got a team, but, like, running this team is driving me a little bit crazy.

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: So, we've talked about, you know, how you got into PPC, but we never really talked about what it's like to actually build a business. Kinda like, with E Myth. Right? Like, I'm in the I love baking pies, but once you open up your kitchen, you're not in the pie baking business. Or you're in the business baking pies, you're not baking pies.

Speaker: Of course. Yeah. It's almost it's almost as if if you had a pie business, it'd be better if you didn't know how to bake a pie. If if your real goal is to to have a pie business, but that's never how people get into that business.

Speaker: Exactly. Exactly. So I wanna hear, like, from your side. Right? I mean, you launched Payment Collective.

You're doing deal, you're doing you you got clients. You partner with Cody. I imagine partnering with Cody, coming on this podcast, going all the different masterminds, you kinda had this big rise that maybe you grew a little bit faster than you're perhaps ready for.

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: Is that accurate at

Speaker: all? Yes. That is that is absolutely accurate. I remember so I I came on this podcast on what was it? 2020?

Speaker: Around there.

Speaker: Oh, it was around there sometime. And at this time, I had, like it was me and, like, a few members of of my team. And we had I wanna say it was, like, I remember the weekend after I went on your podcast because it was kind of a surprise that we even got on the podcast. I think it happened, like, last minute or or something like that.

Speaker: Cody was very demanding.

Speaker: That's funny. So so, like, oh, yeah. We it was within a week, I had gotten, like, a 120 leads Yeah. From people who would listen to this podcast and decided they wanna do this marketing channel. Right.

And so so I thought I was being, like, really reasonable. And I said, well, you know what? As a company, we're gonna onboard at maximum six clients per week. Mhmm. So we just got this big old waiting list of, you know, you have to wait, like, months to to onboard with us.

And and I thought I was doing, like, the responsible thing. But I didn't realize that that's still fun. Like, realistically, it was a ton for what we had Yeah. At that time.

Speaker: And Six six a week. Yeah. Six a week for us right now. I think five a week for us is what we can come from manage with our company as it stands today.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: If we onboard eight in a week, like, I got angry team players team members. Yeah. Yeah. So

Speaker: It's it's hard to to to onboard too many. And then once they're onboarded to to manage them and all that kind of stuff. So so, yeah, I kinda changed from because up up to that point, I've been running my business for three, three, four years, something like that. And it was all about like, I'm Brandon, I'm the PPC guy. I can help you.

I know how to do this, this stuff. And then it changes to, well, now I have to succeed, but it has to be more than just me. Mhmm. And not only does it have to be more than just me, I have to succeed, like, not just in spite of the people that I work with, but I have to succeed not just with the people that I work with, but I have to succeed through those people Mhmm. That I work with.

And that that's a that was a really hard a really hard journey for me. I think the the advice that I got at first was that you have to hire people from a little closer. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Yeah.

There we go. So the advice that I got at first was, well, you have to hire people to work in the business so that you can work on the business.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: So you hire people to work in the business. And then at some point you realize, well, working on the business is actually far more than a full time job. Everybody, I always laugh every time I talk to her like laugh in like a really endearing way and not at all, not not at all negative towards these people because I was exactly that person in that phase at some point where you're like, you hire the person for acquisitions, you hire the person for dispo, and then you're like, well, now there's nothing left for me to do because these people do the whole business. Yeah. And what happens the second that there's a problem or the second that one of those people quits or the second that you need to become better as a company at anything that you do, or you need to innovate or you need to change literally anything, or those people need to be like managed or led or recruited.

Now you're back in. And, you know, how often do those things happen literally all the time? Nonstop. Yeah. Nonstop.

So so that yeah. Those and when I think about it, those are kind of the phases. There was it was, well, you have to hire people to work in the business so you can work on the business. And then, well, now you have to hire people to work on the business. Mhmm.

And your whole job is leading and managing and finding those people. And then you hire people to lead and manage those people. And, you know, at that point, you've got people to work in the business, people to work on the business, people to lead those people who are working in and on the business, and people to hire and attract those people who are working in and on and in the in in and on the business and leading the people who are working in on the business. And then you're like, what the heck do I do? Mhmm.

Now that's that's basically what the, you know, what the journey was. So, yeah, it's it's a it's a crazy it's a it's a crazy journey. So that that's basically what happened to me is I I slowly started building the team. So we we went from from, like, three people probably when when I went on your podcast to 35 now about five years later.

Speaker: 10 times the body count. Eleven, twelve times the body count.

Speaker: Yes. A lot a lot more people on the team. And it's yeah. It's wild how much, you know, the dynamic changes over those times. And, you know, eventually, I got to this point where I show up to work and I look at my schedule, and I'm like, there's there's literally nothing on my schedule for today.

Mhmm. Like, what the heck am I supposed to do? Right. And then you kind of learn, you know, learn learn different things from there. I I was reading have you read the it's called the road less stupid.

I can't remember who who wrote that.

Speaker: Keith Cunningham.

Speaker: Keith Cunningham. So he has a he has a chapter in there called the ceo must never delegate..dot. And it has, like, seven things that you can't delegate as a CEO. I think the seven are kind of redundant a little bit. Mhmm.

But there's there's really three big ones. Yeah. The three big ones are you allocate resources, you provide clarity around point a and point B and you build the culture of the company. And it just so happened. Like I was just reading that, like right when my schedule just really opened up and I started just trying to do those things and, and, yeah, that's, that's what I do.

That's what I do every day now. But it's, it's wild because I was, I was trying to explain to someone. I have, like, this person that I that I mentor a little bit who's, like, in the agency world, like like I am. And I was trying to explain to him, like, how to make this, like, transition in in the business. And it's it's it's like there's a thousand steps in between there and here.

Mhmm. And it's so hard to figure out what those steps are in hindsight. Like, you know you know when you've you you know when you've achieved that a little bit because all the symptoms of it start to appear. But while I was in it, it just kinda felt like I was just fighting to try to figure this out for, like, literally three years Mhmm. Until suddenly one day, I was like, I I think I actually accomplished that thing.

For now? For now.

Speaker: Yes. Like, at this next

Speaker: yeah. At this at this particular stage. Right? Because you're never, like, you're never done with that by any means. But at some point, it's it's almost like a ball that you get rolling.

Mhmm. And, you know, at first, you're kind of, like, this big boulder. Like, you're pushing in and it's really hard. And then at some point, you're like, oh, the boulder is, like, sort of continuing to roll. Even if I don't push it, that feels great.

And then it starts to feel like the boulder is going faster and faster, and it's out of control. And you'll never, like, no matter how much you push, it won't make a difference anymore. Like this boulder's going down this hill and like, that's kind of how the business, like, like I feel like once upon a time I was like, right. I was driving the bus and like trying to get people on it. And then now I feel like I'm like sitting in the back of the bus and the bus is a rocket ship.

And it's like going faster than I thought it would. And I'm just kind of like riding the coattails of, of so many great people in my team who are making that possible. So, so when I say like achieving like this, whatever this is, like, it just feels like there's a point that you get to where you are no longer the business, and the business itself now has intrinsic value and intrinsic ability to actually improve by itself without your input. And it's a wild feeling.

Speaker: So let's talk about and this might sound like, you know, people might hear, like, first world problems or whatever. Right? Mhmm. But we've all had these moments where we've had too many leads.

Speaker: Too many what? Leads. Oh, yeah. Right.

Speaker: Because that was

Speaker: That was me.

Speaker: Yeah. That was you. So you said, alright. We're gonna put these people at what it sounds like. Right?

If you can onboard six a week and you had a 120 leads, you basically had a twenty month wait list. So talk about, like or not twenty week wait list.

Speaker: Yeah. Assuming they all actually wanted to sign up, which, you know, there's they converted it astonishingly high, but not quite that high.

Speaker: Yeah. But So let's talk about, like, how did you handle that? Right? Because you had to shift very quickly to adapt to the lead volume.

Speaker: Yes. Yeah. You do have to shift very quickly, but, honestly, I I think I I think I kinda failed. That's that's my that's my opinion, like, looking back. So so realistically, like, we we grew a lot as a company over the course of that, you know, that next year or so as we start to onboard all these clients.

And, and but the the problem was I did not have the foundation in place. Mhmm. So a growth too quick can be it can be a really bad thing because, you know, at some point I I, you know, woke up and realized, you know, I've got basically 20 C players on my team. 20? 20.

Yes. And I know that kind of sounds ridiculous. Like you think like, wouldn't you notice before then? But the the thing is when you're just fighting to survive another

Speaker: day When you're drowning.

Speaker: Every single day, stuff stacks up really, really quick. And and I I wasn't I don't think I was mature enough to to deny some of the opportunity either. And maybe that wasn't even maybe I did the right thing from a business standpoint. Mhmm. But I ended up feeling like, you know, we like, I thought we could do it, but now we're not actually delivering on the level that I want to.

Mhmm. And, you know, it I started to feel like the problem is all these idiots around me. Not me.

Speaker: It's everyone else at this company. Yes. But not the person that hired them.

Speaker: Yeah. Because when I say I was, like, surrounded by by 20 c players, some of those people are still with the company. I have many employees who have been with me for, like, five years, and I would call them a players. But I just mentioned that, you know, they were c players because so much of what makes a person an a or a c is what is the environment that they're in? Mhmm.

How are they led? And, you know, can you actually pull, like, the most out of them? And are the expectations clear? What you need from them? And when you go from, like, three to 20 employees in a year, it's just really, really hard to figure all that stuff out, especially because we had no existing leadership in the company.

I didn't have anybody that, like, knew how to manage people. Yeah. So what happened, are you familiar, Steve, with the with the metric employee net promoter score? You ever measured that?

Speaker: Have we measured it? I don't know if we measured it. If we did, it was not it's definitely not a consistent thing.

Speaker: Yeah. If, yeah, if anyone's listening to this and you want a good takeaway from this podcast, I would say absolutely start measuring employee net promoter score. Measure every quarter from now until the end of time. Mhmm. It's for us, it's like one of the key metrics of the business.

Like, what's our revenue? What's our profitability? What's our employee net promoter score? Like, it's one of the it's one of the really key things. Because as every business grows, you take on different types of debt.

Mhmm. And one of those is culture debt. And employee net promoter score is kind of like it's like how much debt do you have to the bank of the culture of your company is kind of how how you measure that. So for some context for everybody is, you know, Net Promoter Score, the way it works is you ask people, how likely are you to recommend working at Bateman Collective, for example, to a friend? And they answer on a scale of one to 10.

If they answer a 10 or a nine, those are what we call promoters. Mhmm. If they answer a seven or eight, we call those people neutral. If they answer up to six, we call them detractors. Yeah.

And you're basically taking all the promoters and the detractors off each detractor can offset one promoter. So let's just say you have the same number of detractors as you as you did promoters. You would end up with a net promoter score of zero. If you had a 100% promoters, you would be a 100. If you had a 100% detractors, you would be negative 100.

So it's it scales from negative 100 up to a 100. And zero is considered, like, okay.

Speaker: And not thriving.

Speaker: Not, not necessarily thriving. 30 is considered like really good. If you can hit like 50, it's considered world class when it comes to employee net promoter score. You always have like some people who enjoy working there more, some people that enjoy working there less. So so this metric, when I had that really small team, it was like 40.

After this quick scale, we got we started bouncing between, I think at our lowest negative fifty seven and zero. We would go, like, negative fifty, zero. Negative forty, zero. Like, that's how we were bouncing, like, quarter to quarter. And and, honestly, the the reason I think everybody needs to measure this metric is because I didn't know it was quite that bad.

Because when you talk to people, what do they say to you? They say, oh yeah, everything's fine. It's probably just this or whatever the case is. They're a lot nicer to you to your face when you send out a completely anonymous survey and they know it's 100% anonymous and you urge people to answer it really truthfully. You start to get really interesting feedback that you don't actually get when you talk to people.

And you realize that everybody's telling you one story to your face, and then they're actually talking different things Mhmm. Amongst each other, behind your back Right. As as a leader in the company. So that was, yeah, that was that was basically the when I realized that things were, like, really bad. Mhmm.

And and I think the company's responsibility is to take care of their people. Mhmm. The people are responsible for taking care of the clients. Yeah. If the company starts to do a bad job of taking care of the people, then the people will do a bad job of taking care of the clients.

Right.

Speaker: Like, that

Speaker: that's what will naturally happen. Right? So and I was trying to fix it by trying to do a better job of taking the clients. So I was looking at the things like, oh, why do we why do we do this instead of that? Mhmm.

Not how am I building an environment and attracting the right kind of people so that we have a culture where people are empowered to make their own decisions? Mhmm. So so, anyways, that was, I don't even know how many years ago that was now. I know that, you know, we tried to improve things, and and now we've been, like, three years of of bouncing between, like, fifty and eighty when it comes to the the net promoter score.

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Speaker: sounds like

Speaker: you're tracking it though from the beginning.

Speaker: I tracked it before it got bad. Tract it through it being bad, and then tracked it right back up to, like, significantly better than it started in the beginning.

Speaker: So I understand the principle of getting the score. Mhmm. But what do you do with that data? Like, okay. I got a six.

For me, engineering mine Mhmm. Right, was a six. How do I turn that six to a 10? If it's anonymous, I can't figure out exactly how to take it from a six Yeah. To a 10.

So how do you what do you do with this data?

Speaker: What do you do? Well, yeah, I mean, you have to find the root of the problem. Right? I think I I think I we talked about it once how as entrepreneurs, we're great problem solvers. Mhmm.

And my my belief is that the average entrepreneur does not actually solve their problems though because they solve problems, but they don't actually solve the right problem that's actually at the root of the issue that they're seeing. Sure. So, yeah, I tried to do a whole bunch of, like, the surface level stuff to try to figure it out. You try to figure things out with individual employees, but, like, if if culture is your problem and you're trying to individually address employee level things to solve the problem, that that doesn't actually get you where you want to go. Right?

So it takes a lot of it takes a lot of, like, self reflection, I think, is probably the the right word. There's a there's a quote from, I wanna say, it's Stephen Covey that that I like where he says, the the way that you're looking at the problem is the problem. Mhmm. And it that's exactly what was Yeah. Was happening to me.

Because I was looking at it as, like, a bunch of little problems when really it was one big cultural problem. Mhmm. And in hindsight, the single thing that actually made the biggest difference for us, I think it came down to how do I how do I describe this? We we needed to get the right people working the right way together. And there there were a few different things.

So if you look at, like, why is our net promoter score so high right now? The number one thing referenced is the quality of leadership and management. Mhmm. People feel incredibly challenged. I think you just had Cameron Held on your podcast a few, you know, a few weeks ago or months or something like that.

Yeah. And he said I don't remember. It's there at CG that he said, like, a players like to be challenged. Mhmm. It's a really, really important thing for them.

So they feel really, really challenged, and they feel supported Mhmm. By leadership. That's that's kinda what the general what the general consensus says there. We did not have great leadership, and I didn't know what a great leader looked like to be able to hire those people. I hired this one guy.

His name was Colby. And, you know, spoiler, Colby was with us for six months. And he made a huge impact on how we actually led as a company because this guy came in and, like, redid a lot of our leadership structures, changed the way that we were interacting with employees, and just helped us be, like, significantly better leaders. And that, like, we have a lot of existing, like when, when we go back to the time that E NPS was really bad, people were saying leadership is the reason.

Speaker: So they do say why?

Speaker: Yeah. It it it. Yeah. Cause they, we, we ask them, well, what's the number and then why, why do we feel that way? And a lot of the things that they were citing was leadership.

Got it. And now it's really high. What are they citing leadership And those leaders, a lot of them are the same people, the same leaders that we actually had in the beginning. And a lot of them are different too. A lot of people are different.

Yeah. But but we needed to, like, mature from a leadership standpoint as as a company. And I didn't realize, like, how like, it's almost like the the axis for being a good leader is like a log scale. Nerdy reference, but there's like, you know, it it's, it's, it's in tranches. Like you can be, there is such thing as being a 10 times be a better leader than what you are.

You have to be 10 times better to get like 20% better results. And then you have to then be a 100 times better to get like, you know, another 10% better results. Right. But, but it's there. So, so it was leadership.

And then one other thing that I think was a really core thing for us was recruiting. We did not have great recruiting. So what happens when you don't have great recruiting and you are taking on six clients a week? Well, now I just have to hire the best people that I can. And, and you convince yourself, these are really good people because you don't really know yet.

Right. You haven't gone full circle. Right. So you bring on these people that are like, okay, generally. I'm making huge, huge average averages here, but they're like generally okay.

And out of the people you interviewed, they felt pretty dang good. Well, what happens then? You start to create, because the company's growing quickly, you start to create indispensable C players. What do I mean by indispensable C players? Somebody who themselves is nothing special, but because of the position that you put them on in the company and because of the weight that they bear on their shoulders, they are absolutely a linchpin for your company.

You cannot survive without them. So then what happens? Well, now I have all these C players that are in these key seats that I can not afford to lose these people and the people themselves aren't even that great in terms of how they're performing in the company because I've got no one to replace them with. And so then what happens? We keep, we start keeping C players around longer than we need to keep them around.

Speaker: Or longer than you like to keep them around

Speaker: longer than we'd like to keep them around because we don't have a way to replace those C players with anybody that's better. And you start adding like good recruiting into here. What happens? Like the level of quality of person that you're bringing into the equation in the first place, that person is better. So the likelihood of them becoming an indispensable c player is lower.

It's it's much more likely they're gonna be an a or they're gonna be a b. And when you have quality leadership, it's even much more likely that they're gonna become an a or they're gonna become a b. Mhmm. And then when you have C players and you're in a situation where you can easily attract and recruit really quality people, you can just fire them. Yeah.

And you replace them with people who are A's or B's. And, you know, that's, that's our process now is like every quarter, if someone's a C, next quarter, they're either going to not be here or they're gonna be an A or B. There's no option where they are a C two quarters in a row. That's how we do, you know, it's a performance improvement plan. If somebody is, is, is a C player and we know that on demand, we can replace them with, with somebody who is, is likely going to be a better fit.

And also with the fact that we're doing better recruiting, that's less necessary, less often. So we kind of have this like spiral of like, we, you know, we can't, we can't get the right kind of talent in the company and we can't lead and manage them properly. And that that it's like the spiral went completely the other direction, and recruiting made it, like, such a massive difference for us.

Speaker: How many recruiters do you have in your company now?

Speaker: I just have one. Just one? Yeah. And and, really, she's like, she's so she started as my executive assistant. She started taking on some, like, HR responsibilities, and now she's kind of like my assistant and HR and recruiting.

Mhmm. So this is not like a full time recruiter by any means, but she's she's incredible. We just hired someone, awesome. A few weeks ago and when I was talking to them after they came on, like what made you decide to come here? They said, I've never seen an HR leader still bought into the vision of a company before.

That's why I wanted to work here. Cause I can see the culture like outside. And that's what we noticed is like, once you get culture really good, like, we had, like, our leader over client services now. This guy, if we open up a job, he just calls the next day. He says, I'm I'm only applying this one place.

Mhmm. Basically, like, if you guys are hiring, I'm interested. I'm not doing anything else. I've decided to leave my, my current job. I've been there for ten years.

He was there from like, when they were small, grew them to big responsible for, for like massive improvements there. This guy's like one of the, you know, 20 references could say he's one of the best people he ever worked with. And like, when you have the right culture, you have people like that calling you saying, yeah, I heard you might have an opening for this kind of thing. And you have a really good reputation as an employer. So, so the, yeah, having like the, the right culture makes a massive difference for that.

But, but going back to the, the recruiter, yeah, it it really comes down to just having somebody who's focused on recruiting in the company, and she does a great job of of finding like, screening people for culture and getting a lot of the best kind of people in.

Speaker: What is she doing to screen people for culture?

Speaker: It's, so we have a lot of questions that are designed it's it's basically like a series of questions that are designed to see if someone match our core values or not. So for each core value, we have several different questions.

Speaker: Alright. So not gonna, hopefully, not put you on on the spot here.

Speaker: Yeah. Core values. So the core values are own your impact. Mhmm. It's like the concept of ownership.

Choose to care. Mhmm. Humble and hungry, and be curious. So each one of those values has specific questions associated with it. Like, an example is for humble and hungry, we ask people about their first job.

Mhmm. We try to see, like, how hungry were you for your first job? We or, like, ownership, especially when we're hiring leaders, we talk about, like, tell me a time that you had to fire somebody, and how did you know for sure that they knew what their expectations were in their job? Mhmm. We see what's that gap between what they felt.

For for, Humble and Hungry, another one that we do is is, like, tell me about something that inspired you recently or something you learned that was new. You know, there's there's all kinds of different questions that you can ask. And sometimes, like, sometimes people start checking the boxes before you even, like, ask the questions, and it's just so overwhelmingly obvious. Mhmm. A big one is, like, what's your past like, for humility, we look at, like, what's your past job?

Tell me about, like, what your accomplishments were, and are they talking about the things that they did, or are they talking about the things that the company did that they got to be a part of? And are they citing themselves as the reason, or are they citing the people they worked with as being the reason for those successes? Like, that's a huge piece of humility. Or if something failed, are they putting it on themselves, or are they putting it on other people?

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: And these are all things where it's like, you would think like so it's just it's just a natural conversation between you and the candidate where they're just saying things, but we're literally checking boxes. Like, oh, they talked about a failed thing. Was it because of them, or was it because of someone else? Mhmm. Like, those are boxes that that we're checking that tell us something about this person.

Right. So, yeah, that's a lot of the culture screening has to do with, like, those those types of things. Yeah. The other thing that's a big game changer here is, like, my eyes were a little closed to the level of talent that exists. And I started to generate this belief that, like, there's just not that great of people out there.

Mhmm. And I was absolutely wrong. They just don't wanna work for me. That's basically what what ended up being true until I turned into the kind of person that is able to attract those kinds of people that are really good. But the, yeah, the big thing for us is we spend a lot of time on the sourcing of candidates.

So because it's really easy with recruiting. I think if it kinda like dispositions, like, a dispo manager can just sell a deal. The jobs have to sell the deal. The job's to sell the deal for top dollar. Right?

Right. Just because you made a $20 wholesale fee isn't success if you could have had a $30 wholesale fee if you did a good enough job sourcing enough buyers to get the offer that's then higher so that you can actually sell it. Yeah. And recruiting is exactly the same way. It's not just like getting the person hired.

It's can you get the person hired, but they have to be like the best person that you could hire. And that comes down to bringing a ton of candidates into the pipeline. And And it happens all the time where we interview some of the initial ones and it's like, I think this could be the person. And then, you know, later on, that person looks like nothing compared to this other person we found, you know? And you meet someone that expands your mind for, like, what does good look like for this position?

And it's kind of like, like I tell people with PPC, you can, these deals can be bought deeper. The fact that they can be bought deeper doesn't mean that you're going to buy them deeper Because if you're not going into them with that mindset, you're gonna buy them just as deep as you buy your other deals. Because Right. If you could buy a deal at $3.20, you can also buy it at $3.50, and you can also buy it at 400. Mhmm.

Right? When it comes to, when it comes to talent, there's a little bit of a shift happening too where the job market's just really not that good right now. Mhmm. And we're finding just a a level of quality of talent that I just did not think we could find Mhmm. As a company.

Like, I'm surprised that these people exist. Like, I don't know where they were in my whole life. Yeah. And you're finding them, like, like, open to working. Mhmm.

And and for the same comp right now, you can get someone at a significantly higher quality than you were able to get several years ago. If you're looking hard enough, if you're just checking the box for recruiting, you're saying I'm looking for somebody that matches my quality standard, you'll find them. But if you're raising your quality standards, you'll also find those people that just barely check the box. So that's that's been, you know, a big part of it recently too, is there's just so much talent out there. Like, if you have a company that's thriving in today's market where many companies are not Mhmm.

There's there are people out there that are that are exceptional.

Speaker: Where are you finding these people right now? So if you say, you know, if you're if you're marketing enough to find these people, right, what are you guys doing to find these people?

Speaker: So we do a lot of well, it depends on the job. Right? So there are some jobs where I think you can just post the job a whole bunch of different places. We have some platforms that will like boost it on others where we won't like indeed you get like infinity candidates when you, when you boost it on there and like, you still never hire any of those people because they suck LinkedIn. We get a lot of good people from, you know, so we'll pay some, we'll put some money behind LinkedIn.

So that's that's, like, path number one. Path number two, which we use a lot for senior level people or especially for leaders is the headhunting route. Mhmm. And it comes down to just you using LinkedIn recruiter. And your recruiter basically functions like an SDR in in that circumstance where you're, you know, you're targeting which exact people you want and you're, you know because a lot of the best people, they're not looking for jobs.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: And you're trying to engage with them. We we kinda have, like, we call it a hook call where we get the leader on with that person at the beginning because we noticed we lose a lot of them if we're like, go fill out this application and do this personality assessment. And they're like, you came to me. Like, I'm not looking for a job right now. So you kinda have to, like, like, message is yeah.

It's a sales process. We're literally running a sales process. Yeah. And that's what the recruiter is doing. That's why having someone like Leslie, I'm so grateful to have her because she's so bought in on, like, the company, what we're doing Mhmm.

As a company and the culture of the company. So she'll just old call these people out of LinkedIn and just really sell them on the vision of what we're trying to do as a company and try to, like, feed them into the funnel as much as as much as possible. And we find we find really good people that way because there's there's a specific criteria. Right? We look for people that we think what's the background that someone would have.

That would mean that there's no doubt that they could slay it in this position for us. Gotcha. And what that often looks like is, well, they were in a similar position at another company. They were in it for a really long time with that company, and they got promoted several times during that. And that company is one that we know has world class talent for that thing.

If we check all those boxes, it's kind of hard to find somebody who worked at a company that's world class at whatever job position worked there for ten years, got promoted four times during those ten years. And you talked to other coworkers that said that they were the best performing on the team. It's really dang hard for that person to not be, like, a really killer recruit.

Speaker: But you kinda have, like, a kind of, like, a sniper approach. Like, you're Yeah. You're, like, here's what I want. Mhmm. Right?

And then if you pass these filters, you're probably the person for the role.

Speaker: Yeah. They're very it's very strict. And, honestly, even sometimes when we're building out the the job description and everything, we're thinking, does this person even exist? Yeah. And we've been shocked time and time again.

Mhmm. It's like you just imagine the unicorn you're looking for and, like, they're out there. Mhmm. There's so many people doing so many things. You just don't talk to them.

You just don't know where they are, but they're there if you can find the right way to get in front of them. So yeah. And if you do that, if if you picture bringing those kinds of people in that level up your company every single time you bring one of those people in, it's that's that's what's been really cool. It it almost feels like like when it was negative, it felt like it was like, I I told you the analogy of the boulder that's rolling down the hill. It felt like that was our culture.

Mhmm. As a company, it's like this boulder cannot be stopped. But when when it's positive, it kinda feels the same way. Like, I feel like I could show up to work like a horrible person tomorrow and like this culture cannot be stopped. And, you know, of course that kind of thing prolonged over a long period of time.

Of course, that's how you stop it. But, but that's the really cool thing is culture holds so much momentum. And if you can figure that out, then, then those people who are making massive impacts in so many companies, they, they want to do that for you because they wanna work in that environment. And we find that's like a key thing when we find someone really high level, They they ask the culture questions really early in the interview process because they care so much about that compared to everything else. Like, they wanna make sure this is a culture that's good for them.

Speaker: So you're saying a players are selective

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: In the culture? Yeah.

Speaker: You can tell by the kind of questions they ask. Mhmm. They're basically trying to figure out is this is this the company that has a really good culture or not.

Speaker: Ian at our company, you know, one of the things he said is, like, if they have no questions, it's a no. Like, he's never we've never hired anyone who had no questions and it's worked out. And I'm not saying, like, great question. I'm just saying no questions.

Speaker: Yeah. Right?

Speaker: It's like, okay. Like, they're they're here clearly just for the money.

Speaker: Yeah. No. I I agree. Like, good good quality questions that show that they care about the right things. They're thinking about the right things.

Like, you can see so much someone do that.

Speaker: Yeah. So we're talking about it's not rocket science where it's like, hey. You wanna have a great company? I have great people. Like, not rocket science.

But clearly, you guys have implemented practices and so on to really sift, sort of filter, and make sure the right people are coming through. Mhmm. Which is a very profound answer given my question was just really how do you deal with, like, being overload overloaded with leads?

Speaker: Yeah. That was, that was kind of a journey, wasn't it?

Speaker: Yeah. Okay. So it sounds like then, really, instead of fixing, like, here's a symptom, you just went straight to, like, deep down into the root cause. And and resolving the root cause, you were able to solve this problem. But solving this major problem is a multiyear process.

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: Right? It wasn't like, alright. Next month, culture is gonna get fixed.

Speaker: No. You yeah. You can't. It's so slow. Yeah.

It's so slow to turn it around.

Speaker: Right. Like, that's the battleship. Right? Mhmm. But you have to have some speedboat solutions too.

So, I mean, I guess you went and hired a bunch of salespeople, but that was not the right answer.

Speaker: Yeah. It's it's it's really hard. I mean, the way I think about this kind of stuff, I mentioned to you one of the three jobs of a CEO is resource allocation. Mhmm. So what does resource allocation mean?

What are the resources we have as a company? There's there's your time, you have money, and you have people. Mhmm. And the crazy thing about all of those is every single one of those things can be used like an asset or like a crutch. Like, I think, do you know do you know any entrepreneurs that are busy?

Like all of them. Maybe a little too busy. Right? And what does that mean? It means when you face problems as a company, you throw your time at the problem first.

Right? And I guarantee you, at least half the people listening to this, this is exactly how I was. When you face a problem, what's your what's your go to? It's like, I'm just gonna spend my time trying to solve that problem. Mhmm.

Right. You just used your time as a crutch instead of using it intentionally as an asset. The same happens with money. Like, what happens to the entrepreneur that throws money at every problem they have? Well, their problems might start to go away, but now they have this new problem of having no money.

Right. Right. And the same could be true with people. Like when I talk about those indispensable C players, we're talking about people use as a crutch, not necessarily as an asset in the business. So that's kinda how I think about resource allocation is every one of those things can be really powerful if you use it the right way.

It can be really damaging to you if you use it the wrong way. So if you wanna be the entrepreneur that has time freedom, that has money freedom, and doesn't have these linchpin people in your company, you have to use all three of those things like an asset. And what did I do to make it through that? I did the exact opposite of what I just said. I used my time to plug every single hole that I could.

I used money to solve the problems when I could. My bias was using time instead of money because I always feared running out of money. Mhmm. So I would just work every hour that I could possibly work in the day to to make it happen. Yeah.

And I and I largely did that. And I think it's it's hard because, like, we know every business when it when it grows, it's going to take on some type of debt. Mhmm. Right? In my case, I I was able to solve the problem by doing that.

But what did I do? I just created this massive culture debt that later I had to actually figure out how to get rid of that and how to, how to improve as a company. If I like raised funding instead, for example, I would have had all this money. I could have used all that money to maybe solve those problems different ways. And And maybe I wouldn't have had a culture debt who knows.

But now what do I have is, well, now I have these investors because I, cause I borrowed from the money. Right. So it's, it's kind of like in those periods of growth, you sort of, you have to sacrifice something. I think a lot of the times what I sacrificed was basically my time and the culture of my company. Yeah.

And I just like, it was, like, every day is survival. We're gonna find some way to make it through this.

Speaker: So give me a specific example. Right? So turning money from, a liability into an asset or burning your time. Right? And, like, so you got, like, we got a fire right now.

Right? Like, podcast is done. Jump on your phones.

Speaker: Like Yeah.

Speaker: We have a major fire.

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: How would you, instead of using time as burning the time, how would you use the time?

Speaker: As an asset. Yeah. So when I think of using time as an asset versus a crutch there, a crutch says, we've got a fire. I need to fix this. Mhmm.

How do I use my time as an asset instead? While I use my time, I can build the value of the company. What is the value of the company? It's the value of the people within the company. So it means instead of solving that problem, solving that problem through someone else in my team and in the process, providing growth for them.

So instead of solving the problem, I would So it's

Speaker: like Brandon solving the problem. Yeah.

Speaker: Instead of me solving the problem, I would get someone else to solve the problem is basically what that looks like, which is such a hard thing to do. Like and I and I'm not perfect at this. I've I've done some problem solving myself. Like, we all like to put on our firefighter hats sometimes and and, you know, fight the fires. And and I think that's okay sometimes.

But the problem is every time you do that, what does it do? It builds your skill and it diminishes the people that are around you. Yeah. So the when I think of how do I how do I actually use all the resources, like assets, it's it's that I want the person on my team to be the kind of person who's already fought this fire for me so that next time they can do it again. And I've got to as much as, like, I think I might be able to do it better, I've got to let them do it and sometimes let them fail doing it so that they can become the kind of person who can solve that problem.

That's

Speaker: the hardest part.

Speaker: Yes. Knowing that they're going to fail. Yes.

Speaker: Or knowing that not that they're going to fail, they're probably going to fail.

Speaker: They're probably going to fail. Yeah. And it thankfully, like, I got to a point now where it's, like, I do so genuinely feel about so many of the people in my company that if I touched anything that they did, I would just mess it up because they're so much better at what they do than I am at what they do today. Today. Yes.

But that's really hard, like, when you don't have the right people in the way.

Speaker: When you don't have the track record and you don't have all the right people

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Like, where I've seen a lot of business owners, like, because I've coached so many business owners in the past, is when something goes wrong, they go and, like, chew out that team member.

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: Which only means next time that problem arises or a similar problem arises, they're not gonna go solve that problem, and they're gonna bring it back to you. And now you're stuck in this loop, this cycle that you can't get out of.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. I I firmly I firmly agree with that. I mean, I saw that. I I lived I lived that, like Yeah.

So so clearly. And it's it's really only after I actually fixed the problem that I realized how bad it was in the first place.

Speaker: Mhmm. Fix the culture problem or fix that problem?

Speaker: I I think they're the same, to be completely honest with you. I think I think there's, I mean, culture includes more than just that, but that was a big piece of the culture. Mhmm. Because, you know, nobody likes to not be empowered to solve problems. Mhmm.

Like, if if your employees have to bring you the problems, they're not happy about that. Mhmm. And, also, you're not happy about that because then you're stuck solving all the problems. Like Right.

Speaker: It's one

Speaker: of those things where if you can figure it out, it's better for everybody.

Speaker: Yeah. So I wanna pivot a little bit here. So there's an element, I guess, for your business, you've always had to figure out the churn problem.

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: For me, when I was wholesaling, right, the only churn I had to worry about was turnover of salespeople. Really? It was the only churn I had to worry about. Right?

Speaker: Which can be a lot. Yeah. But Exactly. Not like a marketing company. Yeah.

Totally different.

Speaker: But then, when I got when I added coaching and training to it, we had some churn, but it was like whatever. It wasn't a big deal. Mhmm. Right? Like, if they didn't show up to the calls, if they didn't get values anymore, like Mhmm.

Sales is this thing where, like, after six months, it's like, alright. I got it all figured out, which we know that's not true, but, like, that's the kinda attitude you have.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Right? I was like, okay. Like, they train in six months. Okay. Fine.

That's just the way it is. Mhmm. Right? Which is not true, but that's the way I treat it. It's like, that's just the way it is.

Yeah. Right? Now I have a software company.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Churn is like

Speaker: It's life

Speaker: the most important metric. Right? Like, we care about, because, like, I'm you know, I'm talking to I've talked about this on the podcast. I'm talking to, like, PE firms and this and that. Like, hey.

Like, what has to be true, right, for you to, like, value this company? And they're like, it's, what percentage of people are still with you after twelve months?

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: Right? Not what's who's still with you after six months, which is all, like, man, in in on the sales training side, like, after six months? Okay. That's that's where we wanna be. Right?

And I think, like, we're on average. When we're doing just a sales training, I think eight months was the average of all the hundreds of people that came through. It's about average.

Speaker: Mhmm. Which

Speaker: I would say is pretty good. But in software, if eight months is your average, like

Speaker: No. Yeah.

Speaker: You are a horrific company.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. You need, like, 70% year over year.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. And so so we hired our very first customer success person, Paul Pereman. Right? The very first person we hired.

He started, we hired him, I wanna say, end of November. So, like, maybe beginning of December was, like, his first, like, actually talking to customers. And, he said his mission here, his goal in the customer success role was I want to have it provide the same experience to the customers that I had when I was working with Bateman Collective, not as an employee, but as a client. Right? So he's talking about, like, as a client, every month, when he was in when he was, working in wholesaling, every month, they have a call with an account rep, account I don't know what you call them.

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: But, like, that person actually reviewed the account for the last thirty days and had a report beginning the call. Right? It's like and the feeling he has, like, this person cares about my business. He's like, that's that's what I wanna deliver. So I want to talk to you about, like, what you do, what you've done, what you're doing now in regards to churn.

Speaker: Oh, yeah. It's it's it's really interesting, and and that's cool to hear what what Paul was doing. I I I do remember that we, I didn't know he worked for you now, but I do remember that he was a client of ours Yeah. In Texas. So what do we do for for churn?

Mhmm. It's at the beginning. The the easiest way that I could describe the shift that we went through is at the beginning when I'm onboarding six clients a week, and I don't know what the heck I'm doing, trying to build a team, trying to go from three to 22 team members over twelve months. Mhmm. What are we?

The I think the easiest word to describe what we are is reactive Mhmm. At that point. What do we look like now? A lot more proactive. So we want it to be true that by the time our client of ours thinks something, we're already on top of that particular thing.

So, you know, Paul might mention things like, yeah, we we can prepare prepared to the monthly meetings and stuff. But even outside of that, like, when the metrics moved significantly during the month or anything like that, he probably got communication from us, like, along the way Mhmm. Saying, yeah. I noticed that we had a longer than normal stretch here where we don't get leads. Just so you know, we're on top of it.

This is what we're seeing. This is what I think we need to adjust accordingly. Like, that kind of that kind of proactivity. Something that that I I don't, this is like a horrible tagline, but the thing going through my mind is like, we basically made proactivity reactive in the sense that our team has requirements of how proactive they are, and they have to reactively respond to those requirements to end up being super proactive. Right.

Meaning, there's certain minimum standards. We have something we call, it's the five nonnegotiables of account management. And there's, you know, there's a whole bunch of them. I couldn't even name them all right now because this is, like, not exactly, like, my zone of the business, but but our Corey McEwen, our our VP client services is his whole brainchild. And and for every single member of the team, they have to report every single day that I do my five non negotiables down to the individual things.

It includes things like we've gotta be doing prep before we're gonna meet with clients. And we have to send them an agenda before we actually have a meeting with them about what we're gonna talk about to make sure it's a useful meeting. And you have to show up to the call. And then after the call, you've got to make sure that when we you know, if we agreed on something that was gonna get done, we have to put that in writing and make sure all sides know exactly who's gonna do what. Mhmm.

It includes things like we we have expectations that we're gonna be in accounts doing certain levels of optimizations on on different levels of frequency. And and once a quarter, we're gonna be doing, like, deeper strategy work. It includes, like, communications, like, throughout the month and stuff like that. So we basically create this culture of minimum standards, and that's kind of how I like to to manage really, most of our employees if you look at what they have. We don't so we call them minimums.

Mhmm. Now what makes them what's the difference between a minimum and then everything? A minimum is truly a minimum. This is the minimum for you to be doing your job, but it should be true that someone can do their minimums and that takes like ten hours a week. And then they've got thirty hours a week additional to do their maximums and their job.

That's like the going above and beyond for clients, in ways that they didn't expect us to. And in those kinds of things are like, you know, solving actual time to be reactive with whatever problem popped up or whatever the case is. Mhmm. But that's kind of like how how we do the management of people things is we, we set that minimum standard and we hold that floor really tight. Like if you don't do your minimums, you will be fired.

That's how it works. And the minimums are not the everythings. There's plenty of room for them to do their job, their own way to be themselves. So we say, like, here's the standard. You have to at least succeed.

And if you just do this, you're not succeeding. You have to go far, far beyond this, but this is exactly to the letter what it looks like to hit the floor.

Speaker: So there's two things here. I feel like I gotta connect Victor on my team. Was it Corey?

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Oh my goodness. If you can talk to Corey, it's a it's a blessing.

Speaker: Yeah. So I'll have Victor and

Speaker: my team. Ride his coattails. I basically feel like I'm just I'm just along for the ride. Like, this guy's this guy's running the show.

Speaker: Alright. Cool. So I'll have Victor and my team talk to Corey because Victor runs the customer success team. So we'll do that. Second thing as you're talking about this, I can't help but think of office space.

Right? Where it's like I

Speaker: haven't seen it. I've I've heard I need to though.

Speaker: The flares. Right? It's like, well, you know, you're wearing the minimum number of flares. Right? It's like, yeah.

This is the minimum. It's like, but over here

Speaker: right?

Speaker: It's like, do do you wanna be known for doing the minimum? Right? It's like that that whole line

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: From that movie. But, and the third thing too, you were talking about, like, it feels silly. You're saying that you're reactive to be proactive, but it's reactive to the company data. Mhmm. Proactive to the client.

Speaker: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And that's that's the key thing is we yeah. And and we we hear from our clients all the time. They've just never they've never quite had that the entirety of that experience with any vendor they've worked with on anything.

Yeah. Quite on the level that we deliver. And I I do attribute that to Corey. He's the one who's built out all this, you know, all these these things. And because before he did this, he worked for ten years building out the client experience and enterprise marketing agency Yeah.

Where they literally had, like, like, one person manages, like, three clients. Wow. And he built, like, that level of That's right. That level of service. And, of course, we had to water it down from that a little bit, you know, for

Speaker: Third to one is nuts.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Although we're actually six to one in employees to clients. Really? Which, yeah, is is like we I mean, we have, like, team members per client compared to our competitors.

We have, like, three times as many team members. Yeah. A lot of people don't realize that, like, we deliver way more, and it turns out it's actually harder to do that. Like, you do need you do need more. Like, we're we're the most expensive in the industry for a reason.

Speaker: Yeah. Well, I've looked at my, monthly overhead, and I've made this comment a handful of times, like, customer success has exceeded every other department in overhead. Yeah. It's like, we spend more on customer success now than we do in marketing. And Yeah.

And that I didn't expect that when we made this pivot.

Speaker: Yeah. I can tell you, agencies, that's crazy normal. I mean, your customer success exceeds marketing by, like, five times. Yeah. In in the agency world, I think SaaS, you know, is a little different.

Sometimes a lot of SaaS companies, they don't invest a ton into customer success. But, yeah, there's a but agencies are a good thing to model after if you're looking for, like, a customer success centric business Right. Because it's everything they have.

Speaker: Yeah. The gap between wholesalers who are winning right now and the ones who aren't is growing, and it's getting worse every single day. And you're not gonna like the reason why. It all comes down to how they're actually using AI. Because the information alone is not the problem.

It's the time to figure it out that actually is, and we solve that. Three days in Dallas, September 19 through the twenty first with myself, Stephanie Butters, and Jordan Fleming, we're gonna show you exactly how we built AI into our businesses and how you can do the same thing in yours. You come in unsure exactly where to start or what to do next, and you walk out with AI actually running inside your business and all the confidence to keep it going. And we don't just tell you how. We will be sitting next to you, building it with you live and in the room.

And we got an amazing keynote speaker, the author of Second Command and Vivid Vision, Cameron Harrelson himself, who's built $300,000,000 companies like one eight hundred Gaijang. And on top of that, we got Facebook, Slack, and Salesforce, and they're gonna be sharing what they only talk about in their private meetings. So if you wanna find out more, comment REI tech, and we'll get you signed up for a live event. So there was something else I was gonna say there. But yeah.

So it's it's just really fascinating. It's interesting to see. So now we're talking about how to scale right now, what PPC looks like today.

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: Right? And then, you know, we've had this message of, with the advent of I mean, the way AI is involved today, the old way of doing business and not to say, like, it's dead, but, like, the traditional way of doing business has been historically get spend whatever you have to do Mhmm. To get the best lead possible. Right? Because you only have so many salespeople on your team, and you don't wanna waste their time on low quality leads.

And I think that's been true historically, and I say historically, last five years maybe. Right? But what we're seeing right now on our client base is that we're seeing more of, like, more I think PMax is the term. Right? Get

Speaker: Okay.

Speaker: Cheaper leads

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: Right, at volume and have AI do the sifting and sorting.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: And then you're not wasting your salespeople's time

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: But you're getting your cost per contract down. Are you seeing anything like that, or am I just completely crazy? Because that's that's my client base. Right?

Speaker: Yeah. I mean, we're we're we're kind of we're doing a few different things. Yeah. We we have a lot of different strategies that are floating out there. And if I were to describe where we are today compared to where we were in the past, I'd say it's a lot more balanced in terms of strategy for our clients is is probably the best word, I would say.

Yeah. And what that comes down to is us just having more ways to succeed Mhmm.

Speaker: For our

Speaker: clients so they can try more things with us that are actually likely to work as opposed to just scratching it and go, like, launch with another agency and Yeah. From scratch. So I'll let let me start. I'll I'll describe where we were in the past. Mhmm.

And then we'll talk about some of the things that are shifting a little bit. Sure. So where we were in the past, and and we've if if anybody wants to dig into this, we've got all kinds of, like, you and I what was it? Two years ago that we did,

Speaker: X-seven videos. It was a lot of videos.

Speaker: It was like, I was here for like five hours talking to you. Like, whatever it is. I don't know how many videos we made out of it, but it was like five hours where we broke down so much of what we do as a company. Because the number one feedback that we get from people is PBC is a black box. I don't know how it works.

And my message for people is, well, if you're willing to listen to me, I won't be a black box anymore, but you might have to invest, like, a good bit of time kinda, you know, understanding the box. And a

Speaker: lot of coffee.

Speaker: Yeah. A lot of coffee, but you can you can get there. But the one of the things that we talked about is keyword strategies. Mhmm. So with PPC, keywords are so important.

It's it's what is somebody searching into Google, for for us to, for us to actually show up for our ad. And, obviously, if you have the completely the wrong keywords, then you're gonna get completely the wrong leads. Yeah. And the the strategies have kinda shifted over time. You always have to have some type of minimum threshold of what you say is good enough Mhmm.

For you in terms of a lead. Like, an example of this is somebody who is searching for like, what is my house worth? Mhmm. Could they be a motivated seller that's gonna click on your ad? They're gonna fill out your form.

You're gonna talk to them, qualify them, buy their house for a discount. Absolutely. But how many of those is it gonna take? It's gonna take just a massive number of those people to to actually do a deal. Someone searching for we baggedly houses, totally different.

Right? They're they're gonna be really qualified, usually. So you have to cut the you have to draw the line somewhere. Right? So we would we would kinda draw the line sort of in the middle and include lots of stuff, you know, some stuff that's a little bit more of a what I call a periphery keyword, where it's not exactly what we want, but it's pretty close.

And then we would tier the bidding for those things according to quality. So what we would make sure is if if we're getting leads from the things that aren't quite as good, well, we know that it's it's gonna convert a little bit lower. So, therefore, we have to pay less Mhmm. For that lead. And the ones that are gonna convert higher, we pay more for that lead.

Yeah. And, you know, therefore, we have about the same cost per contract on the stuff that's good, the stuff that's bad, and we have all this volume at our disposal. And that that's kind of, like, the the old Bateman Collective way, I guess, you could say. That that's how we did it. And and that strategy is still, I'd say, a dominant strategy across our clients.

The reason it's a dominant strategy and it works really well is that it gives you a lot of the scope of what's available. And because of that, it tends to increase the scalability of the campaigns. So you can spend just a lot more money on them in in your market and scale your revenue really high. And it also allows you because you have a wider scope of what you're targeting, it allows you to bring down your bids and not be quite as aggressive. Almost like you're lowballing Google, just looking for, like, the cheaper clicks available from from certain terms.

So that's that's kind of the the strategy that we had before. There's a really important piece of that strategy called lead quality feedback. Mhmm. Because when we get those leads, because there's a huge scope of what we're targeting, we have to do a really good job of feeding to the algorithm in Google. Are these leads good or are these leads bad?

This is the reason a lot of agencies can't really pull off this particular strategy because you have to connect all the dots to be able to give Google this data, and you also need a massive amount of data to give Google, which we do with aggregating our client portfolio, and we feed it all to Google. So Google's algorithm starts to learn what's good and what's bad. So that's that's kinda like the old strategies. We we target a little more broadly, but we do a really good job of communicating to Google what we want. Yeah.

And it tends to get us what we want. The problem is sometimes that goes a little bit sideways. So Google's algorithm is is not perfect. Sometimes you're doing a really good job of of targeting what you think is a lot of the right things. You're doing a good job of giving it the feedback that you want, and you start to see that it gets kinda weird.

Even from, like, the same keywords, it starts to now like, our cost per clicks going down. Our conversion rate's going down. The lead quality is getting a little bit less. The sales team starts to say these leads aren't quite as qualified as they were before. ROI starts to tick down.

This happened to us. We had a client that we worked with for, eight years Yeah. With fantastic results throughout the eight years. And then suddenly, year eight, no significant change on our part, but the lead quality just gets significantly worse. Mhmm.

And we just we're just trying to figure out what's going on. We're trying to figure out how to solve this problem. And, you know, we always have these problems to some extent where we see that, like, sometimes Google's algorithm just gets in this kind of weird rut where it's just not generating the right kind of leads. So we decided to approach it a different way and and see if we can solve that problem where instead of kind of feeding all the data to Google and everything, we try to be just a lot more targeted with what we're going after. So the way that we approach that is we we took all we have this really cool database.

We basically have every single thing that anyone has ever searched in Google and then clicked on one of the ads for our clients. Okay. And with that, we have the individual search, the individual click. Did that person become a lead or not? Did that person become an opportunity or not?

Did they become a contract or not? Did they close into a deal or not? And what was the revenue Yeah. From the deal? And so so just imagine you got this list of 40,000 different things that these people searched to click an ad for one of our clients.

And, yeah, a lot of us can't even think of, like, can you think of 40,000 different things that someone was searching Google to find No. To find a wholesaler? But they're it's there. And they're all, like the 40,000 is the list that's, like, relevant. There's other things that we, like, excluded in the past that that weren't good.

Yeah. Like, there's 40,000. Like, a lot of people don't realize that not all motivated sellers search the same things in Google. Right. So so we have that whole list.

And what's really cool about having that data, this this is like if if we're talking about data as a moat in a business, it's really fascinating because nobody else has this data. Because a lot of our competitors, including the ones, by the way, that say that they do offline conversion tracking, which is what I'm talking about, they don't do it. They say they do it. They don't actually do it. Nobody knows how to verify that they do it.

Mhmm. So they don't actually have this data because it turns out these search terms or these people actually search in Google, there's literally no way to connect your your data of what happened in your CRM to those people in your CRM. Sometimes what they'll do is they'll push the keyword in your CRM so you can see, oh, they came from this keyword. But keywords and search terms are different because the keywords is what you told Google you wanted, which we might have a 100 of. Mhmm.

The search term is what did the person actually type into Google? And we have 40,000 Yeah. Of those. And a lot of them, like the keywords we buy ugly houses, the search term is houses for sale in Houston. Mhmm.

It's like, how did Google connect these things together? Yeah. Like, nobody knows how Google connected them. So so anyways, what we did is basically take the whole database, and we are approaching it from the standpoint of let's find a way to generate a keyword structure that generates a lot of the right kinds of leads. Because the other feedback that we were getting from clients is that the market's changed a little bit.

And A lot. Yeah. A lot. And what what people are seeing is this gap between an okay lead and a great lead Mhmm. Is just getting a little bit bigger than it was before.

Gotcha. And those leads that, like, maybe we were kinda making them work, you know, it's like they, you know, they weren't great, but, like, we tried to novate them, try to create a finance them. They don't have equity, like, whatever. Those ones are just getting a little bit harder, and distress is becoming more valuable than it was in years past. This is the general feedback that we're getting clients.

So where that gap between a good lead and a great lead is getting just a little bit wider Mhmm. Those great leads become really, really important if we can find a way to get our hands on, like, those traditional, just really good wholesale leads of just really distressed people that wanna sell their house. Not the ones that, like, we can probably convert. Right. So, so that's the feedback that we're getting from people.

So we decided to set up this was like the, like the, the groundbreaking part of what we did, or like the, the, you know, the paradigm shift for us was what if we set up a system where we understand all all of the things that people have searched and how they ended up converting? Now we can back test to figure out what is the keyword structure that's actually gonna yield us the best results. Yeah. So you take those 40,000 and and you basically well, it's it's 40,000, but it's, like, you know, millions and millions of clicks. Mhmm.

Right? So you take those clicks, and you separate them out into training data and validation data. Like, I don't know how much you know about machine learning algorithms.

Speaker: Like What you're talking about well, it sounds like you're talking about regression testing.

Speaker: Kind of, except it's more than just, like, statistical regression testing. Yeah. It's it's like, you know, we we looked at a all regression was one of the one of the methods that was used.

Speaker: Yeah. Well, then but the reason why I'm saying regression is, like, you you got this data

Speaker: Mhmm. And you're

Speaker: seeing how would it fit the campaign. And if this was the campaign, how would it perform if this was the campaign that was structured this way before?

Speaker: Yes. Yeah. So we we basically yeah. So so what we would do is we'll take two The reason

Speaker: why I'm bringing this up is this is what Ray Dalio talks about in principles.

Speaker: Oh, really?

Speaker: The reason why he has the most successful hedge fund of all time

Speaker: Mhmm. Was

Speaker: because he would constantly test the theory and take this theory. Okay. If we apply this theory looking back

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: What we've had because, like, you have the data. Right? And it'll give you a new theory

Speaker: Yep.

Speaker: After the fact. If we apply this theory and we went backwards, how would it have done the last ten years, last twenty years, last seventy years?

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: Right? Okay. If this would have been true and it's been more productive the last seventy years, then we should have this theory moving forward.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: And they were constantly regression testing, and it's like, okay. And that's how he created, again, the most successful hedge fund

Speaker: all the time. And how many good ideas do people have Yeah. That just don't hold up when you actually test what it would have done Right. From the beginning of time until now. Like, I I'm 100% with you.

So so that's where because we were hypothesizing, like, different ways to do these keyword structures. And then we're like, you know what? We could just test the dainting thing. Yeah. So we so we basically create the the test and and we built all kinds of different ways to build keyword structures.

And the and then we we train the structure on two thirds of the data. We validate it against the one third of the data that's remaining, and then we do, like, a 100 different splits of the validation versus training data and and, you know, smooth out a lot of the irregularities. So so that Sorry

Speaker: if you guys are listening. It sounds really nerdy. You got two nerds here talking about

Speaker: Yes, Steve. I knew I knew you'd be, like, more interested in this than you might wanna be or than than you probably should be. So so that's what we did. And, basically, what we realized this, by the way, is really similar to how, like, AI data companies work.

Speaker: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Machine learning.

Speaker: They they and similar. Yeah. So Yeah. The but the idea is, you know, they're trying to predict, like, who's gonna sell their house. We're trying to predict, well, what is the likelihood that this person's gonna sell their house to us if they search this thing on Google?

Mhmm. And you can always narrow in on quality, but the problem with narrowing in on quality is, well, now we've just excluded 95% of what's out there Mhmm. To get the 5% that's the highest quality, And that's not enough. Or our cost gets astronomically expensive if we were to just bid on this because we have to bid through the roof because we have to win the auction every time because there's no other way that we're gonna actually get enough volume to do the number of deals that we need to do. So that's the problem with going too high in quality.

But if you go too high in volume, it's like, well, now we just gotta bring every lead under the sun into our CRM so that we can do deals.

Speaker: Versus quantity.

Speaker: Yeah. Quality versus quantity. Right? And you can kind of, like so we so we put a we made a graph of what percentage of past contracts that our clients got would have been covered by this keyword set versus at what leads per contract would we have gotten those. Mhmm.

And what we found is for a given like, we so we tested thousands. Mhmm. Thousands of different methods of making keyword structures and all that stuff. And if you picture this graph, there's all these dots everywhere, but there's kind of like a barrier that the dots just never make it past. It's like a diagonal that represents sort of the best coverage of contracts that you're able to get given a certain level of quality threshold or the best quality that you can get given a certain level of, contracts coverage threshold.

Yeah. And that from there has created a line. Basically, the line that represents the, you know, the optimal keyword structure. An optimal keyword structure is one that is on the line. One that is off of the line is therefore not optimal.

Mhmm. And then there's several on the line. Like, you could be more narrow. You can be lighter. So so that's what we basically turned into here is, like, well, so now before it was, like, well, we kinda have this one point on the line that we're trying to optimize for.

And now we've got sort of our more broad type approach. We've got something kind of in the middle, and then we've got, like, the more narrow types of approaches that we can do. But, yeah, what what we've been doing that's really popular is it we call it 1825. It that was just like the name of that particular model. It was just one dot of the thousands on the chart, and it represented, we are testing the statistical likelihood that this particular keyword uses search terms that are going to perform at or less than 18 leads per contract Mhmm.

In order to be included or at or worse than 25 leads per contract in order to be excluded. Mhmm. And, that one that one killed it compared to the other ones. And what we're finding is for for our clients that we're implementing this for. So if you look at our average cost per contract right now, it's it's down by about 15% year over year.

If you look at the cost per contract of this new structure compared to the old one, it's actually it's actually a little bit less compared to the old one right now. But what's really happening is so many of our clients that weren't we weren't quite able to get the results we wanted with the old one. This new structure just gives them a completely different shot. Mhmm. So they're working with the same agency that they were before, but they're taking just a wildly different strategic approach that has just, like, like, a completely different likelihood of working.

Sometimes we're testing, like, both of these at the same time for clients. We're giving them kind of, like, the feeling as if they're, you know, as if they're working with multiple PPC agencies with very different strategies at the same time. And yet they're just working with one agency that can kinda understand the data between the different strategies and and try to optimize between them. But we're taking, like, you know, lifeless marketing campaigns and actually turning them around with this new strategy, which is so interesting. Despite, like, the average result being pretty similar, it's just it's working where the other one did not.

Speaker: Right. Well, I think for someone who's listening, if this is either overwhelming or sounds, like, really nerdy or boring, this is the kind of stuff you have to figure out and understand in, like, pay per click. Like, the reason why I couldn't do it today, but the reason why my pay per click I was doing my mom before Mhmm.

Speaker: Was because

Speaker: I have an engineering background, and I can, like, look at the data. I can compile the data. It's, like, review the data. It's the data part. This is not the sexy part of wholesaling.

Right?

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: But this is the part where, like, are you gonna make get a a good ROI on your on your PPC marketing or not?

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. And and the other the other thing about this that you'll notice is, like, you can't do it without the data. So that's the key thing is, like, I don't even mind. Every time I go on your podcast and I tell about something we're doing, like, we we, like, invariably see all our competitors start to, like, try to do the same thing.

It's like they they got, like, someone listening to these ones trying to figure this stuff out. But the thing about this one is nobody has the dataset.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: You need the dataset in order to build the keyword structures. But it's so cool because I can even simulate. Like, we have people that come in for audits with us, and I can simulate, like because we have our thousands of different structures that we back tested, and you can put whatever structure they're already using on that graph and see where it is. And it's it's funny because, like, neither none of theirs nor the structure we were using before is truly on the line. Mhmm.

So there's always a little improvement. Like, we haven't found a way to get past the line. That's why the line is there. But Yeah. It's, yeah.

It's it's really it's really fascinating. And, yeah, like I said, it's it's it's we have clients that that just we could not get results for. We, once upon a time, were able to get results and then they fell off, or this has made a big difference. Gotcha.

Speaker: And then we're talking about multiple lines on on that chart. Is it so that you can figure out an optimal, budget for their account?

Speaker: Well, the the thing about that is there's just it's it's like imagine running a niche, direct mail campaign Mhmm. For example, versus running one where you're sending, like, a big a big amount of volume. Yeah. They're just very different strategies. Like, are you going after the stacked list versus Mhmm.

Versus, like, the the wider one? That's kinda how it is with PPC. So we know like, I can tell you this new strategy, surprisingly. The cost per click is double, literally double what we were paying for the the other campaign structures we had. But they convert into leads a little bit higher.

The leads convert into opportunities higher. The opportunities convert into contracts higher. The deals are bigger when they close. So everything's just a little better down the funnel because the because the like, is a higher quality one in the beginning. So we'll it's not necessarily budget based if we do if we do one versus the other.

It's just sort of there's there's that trade off between them. So what we're doing right now is we're kind of we've learned to recognize the signs that Google is just doing something a little bit funky, and we're implementing, like, the different structure accordingly to see that well, we gave it we gave it the the right direction, but it's just kind of going a weird direction with this. So we have to give it something different that's gonna narrow it in on what exactly we want. Because there's like like, to give you an example of the kind of stuff we see. Like, I've got one marketer now.

We had a client just crushing it, like like 10 x plus returns over significant volume. Mhmm. And we had another client in the market, horrible lead quality. Same budget, same market. We made sure that the campaigns were managed.

Dane similarly. Like, no there's no, like, priority in Google of, like, this one was there first or, like like, we control for literally everything you can control for. Yeah. And then because Google's just an AI system that just sometimes like, the machine learning algorithms, they just work a little differently one time versus the other. It's you can get wildly different outcomes even when we control for everything else.

Mhmm. So this was our solution to trying to figure out how to solve those problems. Because a lot of people assume, like, if I don't get good results, it's because my agency didn't do a good job. Or if I do get good results, it's because they did a great job. It's like sometimes, you know, a blind squirrel makes a PPC campaign.

It just takes off because it just, it just happened to work that way. And sometimes you don't, but I think the best marketers are those that are most capable of adapting when something doesn't go to plan because it it eventually, it won't.

Speaker: Yeah. Let's keep an eye on the campaign at all times.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Speaker: Yeah. Is there anything else as far as, like, the newer stuff in 2026?

Speaker: So the other thing that I would extend so so I was talking about, like, that's how we're getting, like, really niche. Mhmm. The other thing that's that's really fascinating, if there's any PPC nerds that are familiar with broad match keywords Yeah. Those have been really interesting recently. So the broad match keywords, if if you're not familiar, I know you are, Steve, but everybody else.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: There's there's different types of keywords. Exact match keywords are when you're telling Google, I want this, but it has to be really dang close to this. Mhmm. Phrase match is, like, it could be a little further away. Broad match is, like, I tell you, I tell you I want apple, and then if somebody searches for, like, broccoli, yeah.

It's like, you know, it grows, you know, it's, it's a plant like, you know, we're, we're fine. Right. So, so broad match keywords are like, if, if anybody here manages their own PPC or something, it might, like, scare you, the idea of broad match keywords. Because if you've ever implemented them, you've probably seen it just go atrociously horrible because Google starts to target all kinds of results. And this is, like, the antithesis of the strategy I just told you about.

Right. But so so we've been tracking. We've been trying to figure out broad match keywords for years. And we've been tracking our leads per contract on it. And it was hovering between twenty five and thirty five for years.

And then finally, q three of twenty twenty five, suddenly 11. 11 leads per contract on broad match keywords. Q four went up a little bit, 15. Still pretty dang good. It has stayed around there since q four of last year all the way through now.

So broad match keywords historically performed really poorly in the industry. They or us at least, they started to perform really well, and we have, at this point, about nine months of performance really suggesting that they've been performing really well. So there's a way there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. Mhmm. But if you implement them the right way, what it does is it gets you on all of those queries that your competitors just aren't getting because they they just very rarely happen.

There's because if you're using phrasal exact match match keywords, you're targeting this list of things that everybody knows about. Right. If you're using broad match keywords, there's gonna be somebody that search somebody searches tomorrow that has never been searched in the history of mankind on Google. Mhmm. And it's gonna be matched to your keyword, and Google's gonna try to see if the intent's similar.

And it's not gonna be absolutely perfect. But if but like I said, we're getting we're getting really good leads per contract numbers on that. And you just opened up 30% more volume, usually, is what we get with broad match keywords. So now you can spend 30% more budget or you can actually get a lower cost per contract within the same budget. So broad match keywords, if you implement them properly, are are working really well right now, and that's that's kind of, like, the the full, you know, the full scope of so so when you're asking how we've changed, like, we've actually kind of broadened in that way.

Mhmm. And we've also we're doing more of the niche type campaigns.

Speaker: Yeah. And

Speaker: we're just experimenting with those different things to see what's working for our clients for each individual account.

Speaker: Well, Broad Match historically has been horrific.

Speaker: Oh, very horrific.

Speaker: But at the same time, Google didn't know everything about you. Yeah. Now Google knows everything about you.

Speaker: Yeah. And that's that's truly the value of that, like, wider approach. Like, if you if you really open up the funnel like that is because Google has more than 10,000 data points per user.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: And what they search right now is literally one of those data points. So if we go with the more niche type strategy that I was telling you about before, that's that's what happens when we're really saying we really wanna focus on what people are searching.

Speaker: Yeah. As whether what's what's going into the search bar.

Speaker: Yeah. That's what we're targeting. Right. Yeah. Versus when you go for stuff like broad match, like, yeah.

It's looking at what they search, and, also, we have to be feeding the algorithm with all the lead feedback data, and it has to be looking at everything else that's true about that person. And it's doing a good job of finding the right kind of people otherwise.

Speaker: And their Gmail is saying, like, your foreclosure payments or your bank your mortgage statement is late.

Speaker: I didn't even think about that one. Yeah. That's, I mean, that's examples of data that Google has

Speaker: That we don't.

Speaker: That we don't. That is really powerful, and that's why you can't, like, you can't manually optimize your way to everything. Yeah. So, yeah, those those those strategies

Speaker: There's emails of, like, your mortgage balance is late or payments late. There's YouTube videos like, hey. I wanna do a loan mod. Like, what's involved in that? Google has that data that we just don't have.

Speaker: Yeah. Absolutely. And that's that's why, like, I've always been a big proponent of, you know, give Google a pretty long leash Mhmm. And tell it exactly what you want. Mhmm.

And and, yeah, that's that's kinda how we're running things right now is, like, yes. Give Google a long leash. Yes. Tell it what you want. And when you notice that it's just running in the complete wrong direction, try this.

Yeah. This different strategy to

Speaker: kind of bring it to them. Too is, like, for me, was that with a broad match, I felt okay with a broad match so long as I had a really good negative keyword list.

Speaker: Yeah. You have to be you have to be really on top of your negatives. And and, honestly, when I see people come to us with, like, they they had, you know, they're they're not getting the success that they want with with PPC. Oftentimes, broad match is one of the biggest problems that we're seeing in accounts. So I'm here saying, like, oh, it's great, but it is

Speaker: Under a couple different circumstances.

Speaker: Yes. Many circumstances. And we don't even, like it's not like we do broad match of all of our different keywords. We do we do a few selective broad match keywords. We set them up in, like, their own silo Mhmm.

Where they have limited budget and special control bids of what's going towards them. Like, there's there's a very there's a very specific way to do this that I

Speaker: have to do.

Speaker: What'd you say?

Speaker: You got guardrails and guardrails and guardrails.

Speaker: So many guardrails. Yeah. And if you do that right, broad match, I think, could be really good. But I think if the average person listening to this just says, oh, broad match works, Great. I'm gonna go do it.

I don't think it would actually work for them. You you wanna make sure it's it's it's gotta be tightly controlled.

Speaker: Yeah. And then one other things, is, trending right now is you're seeing a lot of AI. I'm screaming about AI on the mountain top. I'm talking about AI nonstop. Right?

Speaker: Of course.

Speaker: The intro every podcast episode. Right? I get people saying, like, you know, shut up. Stop talking about AI so much. Right?

But this is here. This is the future. Right?

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: So, like, are you getting people, like, bombarding or maybe, like, overly loud about AI in a marketing side?

Speaker: Well, what's interesting is I feel like what we do has not changed too much with AI, except, you know, something in in some podcast in the past that we talked about is actually, it did change a lot with AI, but it was, like, five years before all this other AI stuff popped up. The, yeah, the interesting topic right now that people are talking about when it comes to AI and Google search is Google itself has to change quite a bit. Like, Google has the AI overviews now, and there's risk of other companies like Chaz JBT is the, you know, the biggest one right now for this Those are just stealing AI. They're stealing search volume from Google in theory. Now what we've seen is, yes, there are people who are using stuff like ChatGPT instead of Google, but we're not seeing it really impact the Google organic search results right now.

So because the the biggest topic here is, like, SEO. Mhmm. And we do SEO for our clients. We're actually doing it for twice as many clients as we were last time I came on your podcast. Yeah.

We're we're doing a lot of SEO these days. And and I know I talk about PPC so much, but SEO is, you know, it's almost like PPC is what people want. SEO is what they need. Mhmm. SEO is an awesome channel.

And what we're still finding is the number of motivated sellers that are finding our clients through AI is increasing actually very rapidly. However, it is still minuscule compared to the number that are finding them through traditional Google search. So there's a lot of people out there right now talking about, well, you have to be doing this. It's called AIO or GEO, like, these, you know, generative engine optimization type campaigns, like, in place of SEO. And I think that's a lot bigger in a lot of industries that have a a younger demographic and that are very informational Mhmm.

Where people are, you know, like a HubSpot, for example, where they're selling to, like, tech people, and most of their blogs are about information. Like, they're getting slaughtered by the move to AI. People are just going to chat GPT to find the answers instead of HubSpot's log that they would find in Google. Right? Right.

In in this industry, because the queries are very commercial, because the demographics are older, that's happening a lot less. And it's one of those situations where it's like, where's where is the ball versus where is the ball going? It's definitely going that direction. Like, I think I think AI is gonna be feeding, feeding this a lot more than than than, just traditional search engines long into the future. Uh-huh.

But, you know, we're still in an industry where the outside of PPC, the biggest channels are cable TV and direct mail. Yeah. And how many times have people said that those were dead? Yeah. So many times.

Because it's an older demographic, and it just takes a really long time to to change and move. So the way that we're approaching that for our clients, like, the the the shortest way I could describe it is we we do have clients succeed none of those things. Like, I've I was just talking to a client the other day that has, they're about $500,000 in their first year of SEO. Mhmm. And 250 from that is from from AI search results, believe it or not.

So there's, like, examples of that that are popping up that are really interesting. Mhmm. But overwhelmingly, for the most part, SEO is, like, a better cost versus return investment than the AI optimization stuff, just because there's so many more people going to Google right now in the industry. However, I do expect that to be changing. So we're spending a lot of time studying how that's shifting.

And we're spending a lot of time optimizing kind of in the in between because the ChatcheBT, for example, and Google, they leverage a lot of the same strength signals to understand what content they're they're actually going to organically promote. Mhmm. So there are, like, I'd say most things that you can do from an SEO standpoint to get better rankings in Google are also going to help you in places like chat GPT.

Speaker: Yeah. Well, I think the other thing too is, like, you hear the success stories. I got a deal from a from, AI. Mhmm. Right?

But it's like, having a conversation with someone, and they're like, I I don't wanna buy a Tesla because these things catch fire. Right? But then you look at the statistics, and Yeah. They're way lower compared to gasoline cars. But every time a Tesla catches fire, it's front page news.

Yeah. But when a Nissan catches fire, it's like, yeah, whatever.

Speaker: It's a car. It has a combustion engine. Like, what what did you expect?

Speaker: Exactly. So, like, on average, Teslas catch fire less than every other gas car. But

Speaker: I would not have guessed that, actually. I because I was I was equally influenced by what you're talking about. I assume they just caught on fire way more often.

Speaker: Yeah. So, like, statistically but if you get a deal sold from AI

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: You gotta let everyone know. Like, hey. You know, they found me at Chatt GPT.

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: But if I bought a house from Google PPC, I would never post about it on Facebook.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. I, I yeah. And I don't wanna be like the the AI naysayer or anything like that because I'm actually like, as far as, for example, the stuff that you're doing Yeah. AI is 100% changing the industry in a ton of different ways.

Yeah. It's just as far as search goes, it's a little bit of a different game. And I actually think it's 100% changing. Yeah. I just think it has so far to go before because you have to think, this this is a resource allocation decision.

Right? Yeah. And to think, where does it make sense for me to spend my money? Does it make sense for me to spend all my money, like, getting this ranking that will get me a couple of leads a month, or does it make sense for me to spend all my money getting this ranking that'll get me dozens of leads per month? Yeah.

It just does not you know, the cost benefit isn't quite there yet for, like, the AI specific stuff. But I do think I do think there's so many like, a lot of our clients started getting really great rankings in language models before we even did anything Mhmm. When they just had really strong SEO presences. Like, that shows how strong

Speaker: Well, it's like your

Speaker: presence is.

Speaker: I think, I was like, listen to Tom Crowell speak one time. Right? And one of the things that surprised me when we were speaking here, he's like, he puts four percent of his money in the crypto. And his thing was like, it's not that crypto is the future, but, you know, just in case. Right?

Yeah. And so it's like, we're not saying don't put money in AI. It's just like put majority of your money Mhmm. Into something else. Put put resources in AI.

Speaker: Of course. Yeah. You wanna be on top of it. There's chips. You wanna be there.

Speaker: Half of your money in the AI.

Speaker: Of of course. That's exactly how I would say it and and recognize that there's there's ways that you could play both sides at the same time. I don't think of them as, like, completely different things. Yeah. There's there's a number of things that are a little bit different, of course, between them.

But a lot of the things that are different are kind of also fleeting things. Mhmm. So it's the because the core truth is still there. All of these different platforms, Google, all the AI, they wanna give the most relevant, authoritative information to whoever's searching for particular information. Yeah.

And your job is to be that and to show that you are that. Right. And all the, like, algorithmic stuff is just the way that they got there. But this is where SEOs have been getting things wrong from the beginning of time is, well, the algorithms like likes this, do a bunch of this. Mhmm.

And then, you know, Google shifts their algorithm, and then everybody, like, who did that, their rankings tank because Google realized that you doing that and you actually being relevant and authoritative are two different things. Mhmm. So the game is and always has been to just be who Google wants you to be and be who the language models want you to be in order to to actually get recommended a lot and prove that you are that. And then as you do that, then as the whole world changes, it changes in your favor. Mhmm.

And it starts hurting your competitors that are just the spammy ones that are trying to chase the algorithm change. And I've always believed that. And our clients have always, I think, gotten a little bit slower SEO results because of that, because we focus on just those really good foundational things, like very white hat SEO campaigns. But when algorithm changes happen, it's more likely that it actually favors our clients Yeah. Than it takes them down.

Everybody talks about algorithm changes like, oh, and everybody gets their rankings dropping when the algorithm changes. Like, no. They don't. For everybody who has a ranking drop, there has to be someone else who has a ranking increase. Yeah.

So why not just be the guy who has the ranking increase when the algorithm changes instead of just, like, always dropping and trying to find a new way to manipulate the algorithm?

Speaker: Very different way of looking at

Speaker: it. Yeah.

Speaker: So we talked about the changes, and you mentioned there's a master class, a resource where where can someone find out more. If if you didn't if you're still listening and you want, like, more information, like, where can they get more information about UPC?

Speaker: Yes. You can so this is if you're looking for, like, the informational content. Yeah. You can go to batemancollective.com/horse. Mhmm.

On that link, and we'll put it in the in the show notes too, there is a a master class. I wanna say it's 10 episodes in the series. Mhmm. This is something that we did, like, at the end of q four last year, and it was in response to a lot of people telling us this this feeling that they had that PPC is a black box. Yeah.

And we actually wanted to add more value to our clients too, so we invited all our clients to this for free. And we said, you know what? We're just gonna we're just gonna tell you a bunch of the stuff that we know. We're gonna lay it out. Like, this is, like, whiteboard style.

Mhmm. We're just kind of talking to these toms through these concepts. It's very much a training, not like an SOP. We're not like, go press this button in Google. It's more like, this is how you have to understand this.

Speaker: How you have to think about it.

Speaker: Yeah. How you have to think about it because it's the level of stuff. Like, even if you don't wanna do your own PPC, this is the level of understanding that really helps you as a business owner. And I'll give just one simple example of this. I just interviewed, it's just top of mind because it was two days ago on my podcast.

I just interviewed one of our clients. He's been with us for several years. He was you actually see him in that masterclass because he's one of the most, like, active, engaged Mhmm. People in in the masterclass. And I I hadn't even I hadn't talked to him since just seeing him on the master class.

And, you know, he pops up on our podcast list, comes out. I'm talking to him about what happened. He's like, actually, that master class really changed my business. So this guy, he's a solo operator. He's gonna do he's he's on track to do 7 figures in revenue as a solo operator this year with one marketing channel, his PPC.

And you know what? Last year you'll see him in the masterclass. Like he was doing pretty well. He was, he was at a five X return on his PPC. Now he's nearing like I mean, guys spending, like, 10,000 a month and and doing 7 figures in revenue in a year.

Like, that's, you know, close to 10 x returns. Yeah. So what happened was, you know, we had been working with him. We've been trying to figure out how to make the PPC work really well for him. But the thing is a lot of the strategy components and specifically location strategy was the big one for him Mhmm.

Where it's like, it's really hard for us to make those decisions on behalf of a client because so much of it depends on their business and how it operates. Mhmm. So he came to the master class, and through the master class, he learned about how a lot of those things work, and then it kind of unlocked his mind. Wait. This strategy might actually work better for me, for my locations.

He implemented it at the beginning of the year. Since then, he's doing his first six figure months. He's on track to do seven figures this year. Mhmm. So it's that that's the kind of value that if you really understand this stuff, because otherwise, you're it's like you kind of understand your business, but you don't know anything about the marketing channel.

The marketing people understand the marketing channel, but don't know anything about your business. And both sides try to understand the other a little bit. You're not gonna get to the same place as if you were actually on the same side of the table and had as much context as you possibly could. So I recommend the the masterclass for that. Like, it's it's designed for business owners that wanna understand their their stuff better.

Yeah. I mean, most of the people there were our clients Mhmm. And they pay us to do their PPC anyways. Right. But they're just they're just there because they wanna learn.

So it's batemancollective.com/course if you wanna take a look at that. Like, what what he said when he was on the podcast is, like, you guys could've charged, like, tens of thousands of dollars for that. Mhmm. Because it's it's, like, truly more in-depth than the PPC courses in the industry that you could pay tens of thousands of dollars for. But we don't have any interest in making money from courses.

Like, we're just here to we're here to show you what PPC done right looks like. And then you're gonna look around, you're gonna realize there's nowhere else to get it done right. Right. Than working with Bateman Collective, and you'll work with us anyways.

Speaker: Perfect. And then you're gonna be at RITech Unlocked.

Speaker: Yes. Well, as a company, we will be there. I have no idea if I'm gonna be there or not.

Speaker: But Baitland Collective will be there.

Speaker: Yes. And you will get to talk to somebody who knows what they're talking about.

Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. So, why should someone go to REITEC unlocked?

Speaker: I mean, you you know better than I do, Steve. I've I've heard it seems like a really cool event that you guys are pulling together, like, the first really technology focused Yeah. Event in in the industry. And, you know, the ability to actually interact with the vendors and really understand what they're talking about, not just, like, get pitched, like, actually use the technology.

Speaker: Yeah. Well, the reason why because for us, the reason why we're having it is is, like and we're just as guilty of this. Right? It's, like, hey. You wanna find out more about the product?

Alright. You gotta jump and talk jump on a call, talk to a salesperson. Right?

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker: There will be no, like, talk to a salesperson. Like, you're gonna actually have, like, a full demo. Right? Yeah. You can see, like, you can see the back end.

If I'm logged in, I'm on an account, or if I'm a of a client, what what does everything look like? So basically, every vendor is gonna be showing up with a computer. Like, here's what the back end looks like. It's not a sales pitch. Like, let me just show you

Speaker: Mhmm.

Speaker: What this looks like. So I'm excited that so I appreciate that you you guys are gonna, be represented as well. So, any last thoughts you wanna leave all the listeners with?

Speaker: Yeah. The so, yeah, the the one final thing I spent a little bit of time thinking about before this this episode is what is my advice for somebody that is looking for an agency in in this space? And I'm gonna give you an opportunity to to book with our team if you if you feel like that that could be right for you. And I can tell you, knowing what I know now, I would have said something different in the past. I'll probably say something different now next year.

Like, we're all changing. We're all growing people. I would look for two things. I think you'll find them here. Number one, what is the culture of the company?

Because the culture of the company dictates how the people in the company are treated. Mhmm. And the people in the company cannot treat the clients of the company better than they themselves are treated. Yeah. I think you could look you could try to judge.

Like, look, I could be here and I could just be like some snake oil salesman just trying to so, like, here's all the the the, you know, PPC strategies that we have that are working for us. And, like, anybody can say that. But if if I'm a genius, is that what's gonna make your results good? You care about my team. Right?

You need the kind of company that grows their people, that has really qualified people, working in the right environment that gets the most out of those people. That's how you actually get the most out of out of your campaigns. So so number one, I would say look into the culture of the company. EMPS, great metric for that. Like, the average pay in the company is another really interesting thing.

Like, you know, sometimes people think, well, you guys are so much more expensive. Oh, yeah. We pay our people so much more. Would you rather work with the company that underpays their people? Yeah.

Or would you rather work with the one that that pays their people well? So so that's number one. Number two, how many employees do they have per client? Or how many clients per employee, I guess, is the better way to put it. Like I mentioned, we're at 5.7 right now.

You talk to most of our competitors, it's gonna be a lot worse. And that's in 5.7, that's, like, total employees. It's not necessarily, like, per account manager. Mhmm. But different companies have a different ways.

Like, we have a lot of support around the account managers. Yeah. Like, the like, all the different teams that are actually executing a lot of the work. And, you know, that's what it's required, I think, to to actually provide a world class PPC service. You can't have one guy managing 50 clients.

Mhmm. You're crossing you're crossing your fingers that he's not gonna miss something on your account. Yeah. That's that's a big problem. So so those are the two things I would ask.

If if you ask us, you're gonna find the culture is fantastic. You're gonna find that there's we we we're properly staffed to be able to provide an actual good experience for our clients and actually good results. If that sounds interesting to anybody who's listening, you can go to batemancollective.com/book. That's a link that you can use to book something directly with our team. There's two things you can do with that.

One, you just talk to us about what is it, you know, what is it gonna look like to work with you and and, you know, what do what do you know about my market? All those kinds of standard questions. You can absolutely do that. Number two, if you're running a PPC campaign right now and it's not performing the way that you want it to perform, we routinely, like, several times a week find tens of thousands of dollars of wasted ad spent in PPC campaigns. And we're always more than happy to to do that kind of exercise for you.

We can have someone qualified from the team. They'll actually dig through your data themselves. And, you know, it's the burden's on them to convince you of what's actually happening in there. Like, they should be able to back up whatever they're gonna say with data. And sometimes we do say, like, everything looks right here.

You know? You don't need to hire us. Like, that actually happens sometimes. But oftentimes, what happens is you'll share what's actually going wrong. Mhmm.

Like, we had someone just the other day. They're like, I keep on getting these leads from people looking for a property management company. I can't figure out what's there. We just look in the search terms and it's like all property management company searches. It's like, well, there it is.

We connected the dots of what's wrong with your PDC campaign. It was like, it's amazing.

Speaker: Didn't that require genius?

Speaker: It's amazing. The, the level of negligence that we find sometimes in some of these campaigns. So so, anyways, I encourage you. It's batemancollective.com/book. If you want us to look at what you're doing, if you want to explore running a new campaign with us, we're happy to talk to you.

Speaker: Awesome. Perfect. So thank you Mhmm. So much. Oh, yeah.

We talked about how to connect with you. So thanks so much.

Speaker: Yep. Thank you, Steve. Appreciate it.

Speaker: Thank you guys for watching. See you guys next time.

Speaker: Shout out to Steve Train. Jump on the Steve Train. Disrupt us.