Summary How To Grow A Marketing Agency To $1M/Month - Agency Founders 2023 Full Speech By Eddie Maalouf (Youtube) www.youtube.com
15,154 words - YouTube video - View YouTube video
Eddie Maalouf Alright. I got a very, very, very long presentation, but I'm gonna I'm gonna shoot it straight to you guys. So I'm gonna cover a 192 slides in 60 minutes. K? I need you guys focused.
Eddie Maalouf I don't you don't need to take notes. Again, we're giving you all these slides. We're giving you all the notes at the end. Something I noticed walking around the room. I see a lot of people answering clients on Slack.
Eddie Maalouf I see a lot of people writing on Google Docs for clients, not notes that they're taking for the event. I would be kind of understanding if it was a Friday. It's a fucking Saturday, guys. And if you're still working on client stuff today, you're being selfish because you are not giving that time towards your business. You've already flown out here.
Eddie Maalouf You've paid the money to be in this room just like everyone else. And I don't want you to let that go to waste just so you can answer a few emails, and get some things out the way on a Saturday. Be present. The 2 speakers that just spoke I mean, Nick told you his numbers. Dee didn't.
Eddie Maalouf But Dee was doing over $1,000,000 a month 2 years ago. Imagine where he is now. And I see a lot of you guys sitting there not really giving it your full attention. It takes 1 thing to leave this room and to absolutely change everything in your business. And so I want you guys to treat it that way.
Eddie Maalouf Okay. So today we're gonna be talking about how to play bigger. First First half of the presentation, I'm gonna cover some sales stuff. So I wanted you guys know from seeing me speak in the past, I like to talk about hiring systems, Building teams, that's what I'm all about. That's what I've been the last 2 years.
Eddie Maalouf I've been a CEO. But after talking to a lot a lot of you guys, they're like I'm like, what do you guys want? They're like, dude, We see the names that you close. How do you close them? So the closing part of this is not gonna be some Tangible, strategic stuff.
Eddie Maalouf It's gonna be psychological stuff. Okay? It's gonna be power, how to be powerful inside of the sales process, how humans think and how big players like to think and be sold. Okay? You can use this to manipulate people negatively, or you can use it to manipulate them positively.
Eddie Maalouf Okay? The choice is yours. Second half, I'm gonna be covering team structure. I'm gonna show you exactly how we plan on building the next 2, 3 years and how how we plan on going from a 100 employees to 380 employees over the next 36 months and doing so efficiently. I know it's been a big topic, so Let's get started.
Eddie Maalouf So look back in time. I'm gonna walk you through to show you that it is tangible. What what you see up here, the team that you see, the business that you see, was nothing 2 and a half years ago. It was literally nothing in existence. I'll show you exactly why, and what it looked like.
Eddie Maalouf Because, you know, a lot of times you see these people up here. You see Dee. You see Nick. And you're like, man, these people are special. These people are different.
Eddie Maalouf I can't do that. You know? I'd like to get close. I'm here to show you today that you can do everything that these people are doing and and show you a look in the past. Then I'm gonna show you the game itself from an overview.
Eddie Maalouf How this game works. I'm gonna simplify it for you guys so that you can look at it a lot simpler instead of complicating things. I'm gonna show you how we get big fish. Just for reference, we started a new department in July last year. That department did $580,000 in December.
Eddie Maalouf New department from scratch, 0 revenue, July. I'm gonna show you how we got the people to do that. How we put those systems in place and step by step, all the mistakes we've done, how to do it with as little to no waste as possible, how to price for scale, and what we're planning over the next 2 years. So let's get going. Look back.
Eddie Maalouf August 2019. This is me. There's a bed on the left of this. I'm in my bedroom. This is where we're taking clients.
Eddie Maalouf I remember Fredo and I were working together solo. We were doing 30 k a day in ad spend for some really shady info products, selling 4x courses. But that being said, This is 2019 in August, guys. This is literally, what, like, 3 and a half years ago. No employees, no team members, nothing.
Eddie Maalouf Fredo was an intern. He's my business partner. He was getting paid $0 a month for a 2 year period, before he was able to earn equity in our business. 2020. We are still in my parents' house.
Eddie Maalouf We elevated from bedroom status to base basement status. We got me, Gabe over there. That's my beautiful wife, Terry, who helped us put this event together. And then Fredo's on the right. So there's 4 of us at this point.
Eddie Maalouf We have 1 VA overseas. January 2020. 2020. Where's, Josh? Where you at?
Eddie Maalouf Shout out Josh. Josh used to work for Welling Media at the time. I called Chandler, who was the CEO. I said, listen, dude. You know, I wanna know how you guys are building out content departments, how your business is growing.
Eddie Maalouf I wanna come visit. How much is it how much is it gonna cost? He said, I don't know. I've never done this before. I said, how's 5 k sound?
Eddie Maalouf He said, deal. We drove up to Nashville. 1st time here in the city. We went to their office. We took a look at their operation, And we said we need to get an office.
Eddie Maalouf We need to take this seriously, and we need to start growing. At the time, it was just 4 of us sitting at that table. That was the entire business. This is July 24th. On the right, you can see the time stamp, July 28th.
Eddie Maalouf This is why I tell you action is important. July 24th, we drove from Nashville Back to Georgia, we looked at 2 office spaces. July 28th, we looked at our 6th or 7th space at this point. July 29th, we signed a lease for an office. We don't fuck around.
Eddie Maalouf We take action. 2020, October, November, this is what our office looked like. We had 3 desks, A television sitting on the stand. 6 chairs. This is where you see people like Andrew Deitch, Julian, our CFO, Natalia, our head of higher property, this is when they entered the business.
Eddie Maalouf Okay. We finally had something tangible to allow these people to see the vision of where we were going. This is a very key thing to bring on 8 players, and I'll show you guys that in a bit. On the right, you see our professional content team, Eddie Malouf, in our living room. At the time, we hired a few content people.
Eddie Maalouf They dropped the ball on a project. I learned how to use a camera overnight, literally overnight on YouTube. Terry set this up for me the next day. We did some shoots for these people. They came back for 4 shoots later, ended up spending about $60 with us as a because of this reshoot right here.
Eddie Maalouf Just to show you, like, not everything is this professional whole thing that you see. A lot of it can be done in situations like this behind the scenes. All that matters is the output that's on the other end of it. 2021, we grew. We took it seriously.
Eddie Maalouf We started inspiring people. We started speaking on stages. We launched a podcast. We started creating more content. We started building company culture.
Eddie Maalouf We started having holiday office parties, costume competitions. Everything that you see in these larger companies that you aspire to be 1 day, we implemented that in 2021. Later on in 2021, we didn't have enough space for our local side. Obviously, we still had a lot of people remote, and we don't need more for that. Locally, we negotiated the lease next door.
Eddie Maalouf We built out a second half of our office and we tore down the wall, doubled the size of the Office. 2022 progress report. There's a lot of bad stuff that happened last year. Don't get me wrong. It's 4 steps forward, 3 steps back.
Eddie Maalouf That's how it is. But here's the good. We doubled as a company last year. We hired 68 people total since January. We optimized our hiring process so much that we developed another company called Hire Properly because we couldn't hire fast enough.
Eddie Maalouf We successfully merged with 2 new agencies. Shout out Tommy. I think he's outside right now. Tommy, last year, Came up here. He spoke about mergers and acquisitions.
Eddie Maalouf Triggered something in our head. March, we did our 1st acquisition. May, we did our 2nd acquisition. Both those people that we acquired came up to me last week in the office, shook my hand, looked me in the eye, and said, this was the best decision I've ever made in my life. This is a problem that you guys have.
Eddie Maalouf We still have ongoing. We loaded up our sales team. We tried to offset as much sales from Eddie Malouf to 4 Media sales team as possible. I'll get into that in a bit. Now our team is speaking on the biggest stages.
Eddie Maalouf We grew when most companies shrunk. You see all the layoffs all the way up to Tesla, Coinbase, Amazon, everyone's laying off tens of thousands of people. Obviously, we're not at that size, but what this does tell you is we projected from the beginning of the year. We budgeted. We had a game plan from January, and we executed that game plan as close as possible.
Eddie Maalouf Obviously, we missed some marks, but we had the road map in front of us, and that's the important part of growing here. And last bit, you know, we got health benefits and became an S corp. For you guys that have not done this yet, this is a very, very expensive thing to do for your business. In health benefits and in employee taxes, every single month, we pay about $67,000 extra that we didn't pay before because we had everyone as contractors, we didn't have health benefits. That is a massive expense to take on in your business.
Eddie Maalouf And if you are not in a profitable position to do so, it is Physically impossible. But this is what it takes to elevate, to become a real business, to start attracting real talent, and take people other businesses that are offering these things and be able to compete. So let's simplify this game. I look at the agency game as a game of offense and defense. It's very simple.
Eddie Maalouf It's like football. Right? You you zoom out of football. It's just scoring more points than the other team scores on you. That's all it is.
Eddie Maalouf Once you get into it, obviously, it's play by play. Every play matters. The way that we execute certain things, everything that Dee was talking about, all those things matter. But on a macro scale, what is it? It's offense versus defense.
Eddie Maalouf We score more than we lose. We win the game and we move on, and that is the game simplified. So how much do you actually need to acquire to grow your agency. I'm gonna give you a few examples right here. So I have $50,000 a month in revenue, 10% churn, 15% churn, 20% churn.
Eddie Maalouf Here's how much business you're losing, meaning this is the bare minimum that your team needs to sell in recurring revenue to flatline. Not to grow, not to shrink, just to float. Okay? Give you another perspective. 150 k a month, 15 k, 23 k, 30 k, 300 k a month.
Eddie Maalouf You need 30 k, 45 k, 60 k, depending on your churn. I'm showing these to you because you need to understand how important sales is. You have to outdo these numbers as you grow. It is easier to Offset churn with sales when you're at 50 k. But when you're at 300 k, when you're at 900 k, it is a completely different ballgame.
Eddie Maalouf And I see a lot of people saying, oh, it's not about sales. It's about optimizing the internal. Of course, it is. And I'll explain why that is not my primary focus at all times. But this is the number that really matters.
Eddie Maalouf 15% is the average churn rate across agencies. It is a good KPI to be below, but 15% is kind of what you should expect. So just understand, as you grow, it's not just about retaining these clients. It's about protecting your team and your business and your cash flow by always having the next person ready to go. Okay?
Eddie Maalouf I'm gonna show you how we close these big deals. So this is how much you have to sell and do business not to grow, not to shrink, just literally to stay where you are. You carry insane risk when you grow at the speed that we're growing. Because what happens is 1 month, you know, you're gonna miss on churn. You're gonna hit 20% churn.
Eddie Maalouf Your sales team's gonna flatline. They're not gonna have a good month. And all of a sudden, all these people that you've hired to keep up with the growth that you have are hired. Your expenses are up. All your sales are down.
Eddie Maalouf Your revenue's down. All of a sudden you go from a profitable business to a business that's losing money in a 30 day period. This is kind of what the chart would look like. So you can see here total revenue. This is kind of how things go sometimes.
Eddie Maalouf And this is actually our charts, just kind of all the business that we have combined combined into this chart. And you can see orange is basically how we're hiring. So February to April, you can see here the change in direction that we had. We're like, dude, this is it. We've cracked ads.
Eddie Maalouf We've cracked sales. We're turning away more people than taking on. It's time to hire. So you can see it takes a little bit of time to start catching up the hiring process to that. Right?
Eddie Maalouf You gotta Interview a ton of people. You gotta vet these people. You gotta make sure you're hiring the right people on board. It takes time. You can see from March to June the trajectory of our hiring process.
Eddie Maalouf But here's what happened. We churned. Sales team missed. I stepped out of office. I had our beautiful daughter, Milana, stepped out of office.
Eddie Maalouf I was a big part of the sales team. Sales team didn't stick to where they were supposed to stick on their OKRs and their KPIs. Boom. Massive drop in revenue. Massive drop in expenses.
Eddie Maalouf We went from an extremely profitable business to practically break even in a matter of 30 days because of that risk. So I'm here to kind of help you understand how to navigate that risk And avoid these situations, and always put yourself in a position to generate more revenue, no matter what happens in that case. So Couple examples here so you can understand it numerically. Let's say you have 300 k a month in revenue. Total expense is 2.20.
Eddie Maalouf You're looking at about, another 60 k a month, 20% churn. You're down to, plus another 30% in net sales. Let's say sales team does a decent job. You have 50% net margin. You also hired 6 new hires because you're planning on growing based on the pace you're Those cost you 30 k a month.
Eddie Maalouf You're down to 20 k net margin. Look all the way back at the top. 300 minus 220. You actually started the month at 80 k Profit margin. About $1,000,000 a year run rate in profit.
Eddie Maalouf In a matter of 30 days, literally from the 1st to 30th, this is exactly what happens. And now you're looking at a completely different business. You're scared. Do I let people go? How do I navigate this?
Eddie Maalouf And the actual answer is always sales. And I'll tell you why. Churn is never gone. It is always above 0. Does anyone know what a horizontal asymptote is?
Eddie Maalouf The mathematicians in the room. No 1. What is it? Nice. Perfect.
Eddie Maalouf So it's a line that always gets closer to a certain number but never attains it. And that's what churn actually looks like. If you think about it conceptually, You will never be able to get your turn to 0. This is just the industry. It's how it is.
Eddie Maalouf It's a never ending game of us approaching this Imaginary line of 0. You can always optimize. You can always do things. But what we're doing is you we're chipping away downward. But if you think about it, If you already know that 0 is the maximum function, that is our ceiling.
Eddie Maalouf I will never no matter what I'll do, I can chip a percentage point, a half here, a quarter here, eventually get it down. I will never be able to get past 0. Why is it as a CEO that you're focusing so much time on this thing when you got into business in the 1st place to not have a ceiling. Okay. You're you got into business because you didn't want a ceiling ahead.
Eddie Maalouf Yet churn. I'm not saying don't focus on it. I'm just telling you there is a ceiling on it at all times. You will never get below 0. You will never get to 0.
Eddie Maalouf And that is why you should always be focusing on offense. Your operations team should be focusing on the defense, and it is your responsibility as a CEO and as founder to be focusing on the offense. So where there is no ceiling except your operations. So I'll show you at the end. I'm gonna show you exactly how I psychologically get these bigger deals, what kind of offers we're running, what kind of creatives we're running.
Eddie Maalouf But at the end, I'm gonna show you how to break that operational and why we've spent the last 3 to 4 months building out what our 3 year game plan is down to every single job role, every single, You know, payment that we have to make to every individual, how much it's gonna cost, how many team members they're gonna run. And I will help you guys restructure your pricing to avoid the mistakes that we made the last 2 years. So sales is your invincibility to the market fluctuating, but not just more deals. Here's a problem. I remember, last year, the year before, I would close crazy deals.
Eddie Maalouf I'd close, you know, 30 k a month, 25 k a month, whatever. And I was like, yo, dude, I killed it. We're closing the biggest deals ever. This is 5 x r retainer, 6 So retainer. But what I actually did was I increased scope so much to be able to get this deal that was 25, 30 k.
Eddie Maalouf And when it was all said and done, We would have rather taken, you know, 3, 4, 5, 4 k deals. It would have been more profitable for our business because we had so many expectations from the client to deliver on that 25 k because how we sold it. So it's not just about the money that you guys are bringing in. It's about the quality of people that you're bringing in. You need to sell better clients.
Eddie Maalouf This will automatically reduce churn on the back end. If you notice, the main thing in Nick's, presentation wasn't how they're running their systems, wasn't all these things on the back And it was how do they set expectations on the front end to reduce the churn on the back end? It starts with the dude who's selling. Okay. It doesn't start with the onboarding call.
Eddie Maalouf It doesn't start with, you know, the 1st month of strategy. It starts with why did they process the payment and what are their expectations going into it. Meaning it's not just about more clients, it's about better clients. Okay. So we looked at our data across the board.
Eddie Maalouf Last year, CFO sat me down. We went through everything. Average client lifetime with us in e commerce was less than 100 This was an alarmingly low number. And what we started doing was we started taking a look at all the clients we've worked with last year. And we said to ourselves, okay, which 1 of these clients were deemed unqualified within the 1st month of working together by our team?
Eddie Maalouf Right? Like, onboarding call. You know, Christian, head of client success, comes to sales team. He's like, why don't we close this guy? There's this problem, this problem, this problem, this problem.
Eddie Maalouf I don't think we're gonna be able to overcome it because he has so many problems in his own business that aren't relative to our marketing strategy or the growth of the business itself. So once we actually removed all those outliers that were deemed unqualified, not like months into working together. I'm talking, like, After they were onboarded, we knew that it was gonna be a harder journey than what was supposed to be. Client lifetime value went up to over 350 days. So just removing the bad clients that were deemed bad from the sales process, not from us working together per month.
Eddie Maalouf We're able to 2.5x the LTV of those clients. So again, I wanna drill this point. It's not just about quantity. You know, I'm in all these agency groups. I see people closing deals every single day.
Eddie Maalouf I got another 1. I got another 1. I got another 1. That is not the answer. Okay.
Eddie Maalouf I would rather have 1 amazing client then that's paying me as much as 10 other clients than having 10 other clients that I have to spread myself thin and have too high of expectations. Okay? And this is a shift we've started making in our business. I would rather have quality over quantity. And that is why we have multiple clients paying 6 figures a month now, whereas in the past that was never a possibility for our business.
Eddie Maalouf Right? So the key's not just closing more clients because that will put you on a treadmill. You get the point. Close more, you still churn more. You need better clients at the end of the day.
Eddie Maalouf So 4 parts of getting the sale. This is pretty obvious. Aubrey's buy this for you guys. But obviously, 1 is prospecting. 2, you get people to show on the intros.
Eddie Maalouf 3, you get people to show on the demos, which is the 2nd call. And then 4, you actually close on the demo. I'm not gonna focus too much on 1, 2, 3 here because we don't have a whole day to go through this. I'm gonna show you the psychology that goes into me closing. I don't have a specific framework that I've written for my I just do this.
Eddie Maalouf It's been how it is. I close the deals that make us 6 figures a month. I close them on 2 calls every single time. It's always smooth. My closing rate's over 95%, and these are with some heavy hitters.
Eddie Maalouf ClickFunnels, to call close. I'm not gonna go down the list, but you get the point here. My team was like, Please just tell us how you do it. So I tried to structure this into a few frameworks for you guys so that you can understand how I think on these sales calls. Because this other sales strategy and stuff you guys have heard elsewhere, you can find it on YouTube.
Eddie Maalouf There's sales programs everywhere. I think what makes me unique is how I approach a situation. It's a lot of Psychological power, between how humans interact. So all these come down to 1 thing prior to the demo call, and that's your content offer. Okay?
Eddie Maalouf Yesterday, I was sitting, talking to a few people and 1 guy came up to me and he said dude, I get it. You're running ads. Like, is that where all your clients are coming from? We said, yep, that's pretty much where we scale. That's where all our sales team get our leads.
Eddie Maalouf We don't do any outbound. Everyone comes inbound through ads. And he said that's cool and all, but I can't compete with the offers that you're running. I said why not? He said, well, you're doing, if you do email with us right now, then we'll do your ads for free.
Eddie Maalouf I can't afford to do that. And I was like, that's kind of weird that you're thinking that way. What if I gave you 4,000 what if I said give me $4,000 a month, and I will give you 4 clients every single month? Would you take that? And he said, oh, yeah, for sure.
Eddie Maalouf I said, great. So go go hire someone who knows how to do emails for $4,000 a month and run the same fucking offer I'm running. It's not that hard. But a lot of times, you guys put these objections in front of your face, and you say, oh, I can't run this offer because it's too hard. Figure that out later.
Eddie Maalouf I would rather run an offer and know, damn, everyone's biting on this, we can sign up tons of clients and then figure out how I'm gonna hire all these people rather than sitting here prepping, hiring all these people, running an offer. It falls flat. Now I have all this payroll sitting here. Okay? And how I like to think about our offers, and this is why we do so well, again, like, we're we've been talking about it.
Eddie Maalouf ClickFunnels came through an ad. It was an offer that was on an ad. That's why they applied. Even these high level brands still want good offers. You guys are business owners in this You're all a sucker for a good deal.
Eddie Maalouf If the deal makes sense, you wanna learn more. I know, Lindsey, you're laughing. It's true. It's it's how we are. That's why we own the business.
Eddie Maalouf Right? And so It's important how we structure the offers. What I do internally is I look at our LTV numbers for services. I say, for example, email, Google, Amazon, these are the services where people stay with us the longest. Okay?
Eddie Maalouf Facebook ads has the highest churn compared to those, so let's not focus on those. So what I do Is I incentivize the free things that people want. For example, Facebook, meta ads. This is what they think they need. Okay.
Eddie Maalouf I incentivize those for free with paying us for the thing that I know they will stick around forever even if they churn on Facebook. So if we bring in a client for email right now, you know, at $6,000 a month, and we give them free Facebook to get them in the door. And 90 days later, whatever reason, they leave on Facebook. Great. It was a free service.
Eddie Maalouf I still am sticking a client for $6,000 a month on a service that has a 500 day LTV in our company. And all I had to do was just give them something else for free to get them in the door. Okay. The psychology changes here. And I think a lot of times, especially when we're small, we think about cost.
Eddie Maalouf Oh, my gosh. How am I gonna do this? How am I gonna do emails? How am I gonna do ads? How's this gonna matter?
Eddie Maalouf What I need you guys to start focusing on is, like, how can I give them something they absolutely can't say no to to get them in the door? And if you guys believe in your business, you believe in the product that you're giving, you should have no problem making these kinds of offers to be able to generate these kind of clients. Okay? Something really cool from the ad side of things, and this is what Andrew was talking about, the halo effect of content. This is why I challenge you guys to make more content as much as possible.
Eddie Maalouf 3 fourths of our closes come from website forms, not ads. So all our ads lead to landing pages. Those people fill out forms on those landing pages. They go to the sales team. That's not where most our money is coming from.
Eddie Maalouf Okay? Most of our money is coming from People who are going to our website and here's the exact path that they take. They see an ad with an offer. They go to the landing page. They take a look around.
Eddie Maalouf They say, you know what? I don't wanna put in my information. This is just a landing page kind of sketch. They go back. They click on the profile on the ad.
Eddie Maalouf They go through our stuff. They say, okay. This is kind of interesting. Then they go to our website. From that, they do research onto Our content, they read through our website, they see the people that we've worked with, and then they fill out a form on our website.
Eddie Maalouf This person at this point has spent 5 to 10 minutes doing their own discovery call on us as a business. When website forms come in, which we probably get, I don't know, maybe, like, 3 to 5 a day at Those people are, like, the hottest people for the sales team because they already know. They don't need to explain who 4 Media is. They don't need to explain what the offer is, whatever it is. The last 2 people that we closed, I think today and yesterday, came in through an offer.
Eddie Maalouf They spent so much time going through landing page, Instagram, website that they forgot there was an offer that got them in in the 1st place. All of them signed up without the offer. They just took full price and signed on those services because it didn't matter anymore. The offer was just saying, oh, that sounds pretty good. I'm interested in that.
Eddie Maalouf Let me click. And the rest of it is where the money is made. Does that make sense? Does that make sense? Yeah.
Eddie Maalouf Okay. Okay. Great. So 4 parts of closing bigger and better clients. This is a psychology factor again.
Eddie Maalouf Some things are gonna be tangible. Some things are gonna be frameworks for you to think and understand when you're in the closing process. Number 1 is trust. Number 2 is authority. These are not the same thing, and I'll explain why.
Eddie Maalouf Number 3 is collaboration. Number 4 is value. Okay. Let's start with trust. So let's define trust.
Eddie Maalouf What is trust? Trust is their belief that you have their best interests And you are mutually aligned. This is very important. Every single person you talk to has been burned by a dozen agencies. You all hear the same story.
Eddie Maalouf I'm hesitant. I've been burned. I've tried 4 other people. I've tried this. I've tried that.
Eddie Maalouf You have to understand their trust is broken. This is, you know, a spouse, someone you're dating, and they've been cheated on by the last 15 people they dated. Like, obviously, they're gonna assume that you're gonna cheat on them. Okay. It's just how it works.
Eddie Maalouf So you need to earn this trust before anything. So first way that we earn trust, pretty obvious, but a lot of you guys don't do it because everyone is so hungry for that next deal. You're not willing to take it this far. We disqualify people at all costs. We, as a sales team, operate to find every possible reason we We don't wanna work together.
Eddie Maalouf And you know what that tells the client? That says not only are they saving my time here and respecting that, But it shows that you aren't just trying to take my money. You are trying to make sure that we are a good fit. And And the purpose of this isn't just to generate revenue, collect my money, and run off with it. Okay?
Eddie Maalouf Signing the right fit is the correct thing. And that builds so much trust with the client. Not only that, but it makes them feel like they're entering something that's exclusive. Okay. I want to be a part of this.
Eddie Maalouf This guy doesn't need me. He doesn't he's not just jumping into the sale. He wants to make sure we're good. And so I feel safe and secure in this transaction process. This alone is what allows me to take someone from thinking they want to do 1 service for 4 or $5,000 a month to doing 3, 4 services for 15 20 k a month.
Eddie Maalouf This this is it. It is the fact that I have disqualified them all the way through, and I don't let them tell me what they wanna do. I tell them what I think they should do, and that is the game plan. I draw the line there. So something important from a physical standpoint.
Eddie Maalouf Does anyone know who, like, Gary, Breck is? Like, the 10 x health guy. I'm sure you guys have seen him. Cool. So he was talking about this concept, which is, like, your body radiates vibrations even over Zoom calls and Google Meet calls and things like that.
Eddie Maalouf People can can can feel that. Right? And so the the strongest, radiation that your body can do is actually the feeling of authenticity. Okay. It is the strongest frequency that it releases and is 4 x more powerful than love itself.
Eddie Maalouf Here's why it's important. Someone on the other side of that call, Especially someone who owns a very profitable and strong business will smell your bullshit from a mile away. It's not about you being technical. It's not about Cool. It's not about all these other things.
Eddie Maalouf They will smell that you do not have the confidence in what you're saying, that you only want to take their money, and that you are not aligned in trying to find the best fit for both of you. They will smell that. And so the more authentic you are, as simple and as dumb as it sounds guys, the more confident you will become and the more that will apply to the other person. So question yourself. If you do not feel this on your sales calls, if you're hesitant, if you're shaking, if you don't have that kind of confidence, Is it something in your product that needs to be improved?
Eddie Maalouf Is there something that you don't believe in your business that this is actually the best thing for this person? That's a whole different problem that you need to solve. 1 cool way that we do it for our sales team, because the sales team doesn't get to be in operations. Right. They don't get to see all the things that we're doing, is we have a Dubs I'm sure you guys have seen me post it somewhere.
Eddie Maalouf We do dubs every single month. And so our team screenshots wins, and they put in the reason why things We increased this person's email revenue by a 100% the last 30 days. Here's why. Here's everything we did. Boom, boom, boom, boom.
Eddie Maalouf What this does is it builds belief in the sales team that we're not just trying to sell people on a service and taking money in return. We are genuinely looking at someone's business and changing it. And when the sales team knows that 100% inside of their heart, the authenticity of that feeling radiates to the other person and it becomes a much smoother sales process. Another thing I do always, and I see a lot of people do this differently, we get on the sales call, it's someone totally cold. I've never met them before.
Eddie Maalouf A lot of people are like, okay, cool. Tell me about your business. I'll tell you about mine. I always volunteer to go first. This creates a sense of reciprocity, in the relationship.
Eddie Maalouf And, while this seems super surface level, you guys aren't doing this, and you're not doing it correctly. And this is what lays the rest of the call for me every single time. This is a dude I don't know. I'm another male. We're both alphas.
Eddie Maalouf We're on this call. He's going into this. I wanna get the lowest price, and I don't want this guy Tell me. And I'm going into it on the other spectrum saying I wanna get the highest price, and I wanna sell this guy. There's friction already.
Eddie Maalouf So how do you break that friction and that tension and earn that trust. It's by always going first. If you have asked your intro, if you're not vulnerable, if you make your company sound perfect When you're explaining it, they automatically step back a bit and say, okay. I'm gonna make my stuff sound perfect too. This is gonna this is gonna be a toe to toe kind of call.
Eddie Maalouf But when you're vulnerable, when you tell them, yeah. Here's our company. Here's things that we've struggled with honestly. Here's where we're really good. Here's where we're not so good.
Eddie Maalouf Here's what we're working on. Here's our past. I go in and I say, tell me about you. Like, tell me about your brand. Tell me about where you guys came from.
Eddie Maalouf All of a sudden, they open up. They're not tense about it. They're not trying to hide their numbers. I've opened the book. I've lifted up my skirt, and I've said it's up to you to do the same.
Eddie Maalouf Okay? So, no, seriously, this is, like, this is very important. And it sets the tone for the rest of the call. It says, you know, I trust you, and I'm willing to go, you know, down these rabbit holes of conversations of vulnerability in our call. When other salespeople are competing with you guys and they're not doing this shit, you're the dude on the personal level with these people that they want to work with.
Eddie Maalouf They want to be able to openly have these conversations as owners of their brands as opposed to sitting behind the wall, not sharing things with you, and not allowing you to receive the information you need to make the best decision for them. So you going 1st also allows you to extend the discovery. When you go 1st and they go 2nd, in their head, they might think I'm gonna give them a 30 second response. I'm gonna give them a minute response. But when you're already off the table, your turn's done, it's only their turn, you can turn that 32nd response into a 10, 15, 20 minute response just by asking questions.
Eddie Maalouf They started talking. Oh, okay. Wait 1 second. Tell me more about that. Like, what happened there?
Eddie Maalouf And then they go down that tangent, and then they go back to the story and they go down that And all of a sudden, because I've gone first, I've already reciprocated that. I've given that value first. Hey. I'm vulnerable. Here's everything that we have.
Eddie Maalouf Here's us as a company. They're so willing to answer those questions. And what they thought was gonna be just a 32nd, you know, short intro of their business or of themselves Turns into a 10, 15, 20 minute portion of the call where I'm just asking questions, and they're giving me everything. What are your problems? Oh, what happened with this?
Eddie Maalouf Did you hire someone here? Oh, you didn't. Did you try an agency? Did you try something in house? And they start giving me everything.
Eddie Maalouf And by the end of those 20 minutes, I know more about their business than anyone else and any other salesperson because it's not just about the 15 to 20 minutes. It's about the level of information and depth that they're going in that time. And, someone was talking about this earlier. Dee, keep the client a priority. It's the same in the sales process.
Eddie Maalouf You gotta keep the prospect a priority. You gotta listen, ask more, and solve. Do not oversell. This is the number 1 indicator that you will lose a deal. I promise you.
Eddie Maalouf If you make it sound like you guys are perfect, There's gonna be no problems. You will take them over the moon to Jupiter, Saturn, wherever the fuck you want to go. They will not work with you. At least a logical business owner will not work with you because they understand that that is not the real situation. When you don't oversell And you tell them the bad, and you tell them what to expect if things go wrong, and that things might go wrong, and it's not gonna be perfect.
Eddie Maalouf And we might not see results till 60 or 90 days in because of x y z. You've not only set the expectations for your team to not have them hounding them from week 1. Why aren't we making more money? Why aren't we making more money? But you've earned that trust with that individual because they've been in business for a while too.
Eddie Maalouf They know they have the game plan perfect. They go to execute and things go wrong. It's just part of the process. So overselling and not Making it sound like you guys have problems is the wrong thing to do. And I watch so many other people's sales calls, and you all do it.
Eddie Maalouf You all make your system sound perfect. You all make everything sounds glorious. But if you tell the bad news first, I promise you, They will they will put that to the side, and they will start focusing on the good news. Think of it as a movie. Right?
Eddie Maalouf You guys go to the movie. Beginning of the movie sucks. You're like, oh, this is kind of dry. Picks up, last hour, bomb, crazy ending. You're like, holy fuck, what a movie.
Eddie Maalouf You post it everywhere. You tell your friends. On the other hand, if the movie Is is good at the beginning and the ending sucks. You guys hate the movie. What a waste.
Eddie Maalouf Don't watch it. Blah blah blah blah blah. That's how people So deliver the bad news first. That earns trust. Then I take them to the good news.
Eddie Maalouf But here's all the things we've done. Here's what I'm thinking we do. Here's the opportunity that we have to create. It's the same in sports. It's the same in life.
Eddie Maalouf It's the same in sales. Okay? Everything works this way. You give the bad first, then you give the good second, and you've earned that trust, and now they're more open to receiving the good feedback. Last thing, do not pressure sell.
Eddie Maalouf It creates pressure. You want to create pressure without creating pressure. I don't tell people buy today. I find other ways to do it. For example, this holiday is coming up, and if we want to get in Time for this holiday to benefit from this sale.
Eddie Maalouf We're gonna need to start in the next 5 to 7 days if we're gonna be able to make that happen. That's pressure, Because that is opportunity cost to a business owner. Because if they're selling something that's a great fit for Valentine's Day well, dude, guess what? If you're gonna sign up a week before Valentine's Day, we're not gonna be able to take advantage of it. We need to sign up today or in the next 4 to 5 days.
Eddie Maalouf I have a spot next Tuesday open for an onboarding call where we can actually get ahead and maximize that thing that there is. So Try to find ways to create pressure without actually creating pressure on that call. Does that make sense? It's a very small thing, guys. I promise you it goes a long way.
Eddie Maalouf I tell my CFO exactly when people are gonna close. I say, oh, he'll close exactly in 2 days. He'll send the money. Because I've created that pressure without creating Pressure. And in the back of his head, he's thinking, damn, if we don't get started by by this day, we're not gonna be able to take advantage of Valentine's Day, and we're not gonna be able to generate revenue.
Eddie Maalouf So important things. I don't close people on the spot. Again, if you're lower ticket, this is a completely different conversation. If you're selling people 1500 a 2,000 a month. You know, our automotive department, that's what we do.
Eddie Maalouf We sell people about 18.97 a month is is what the average retainer is. I sell them on the spot. I don't let them get off that call. But if I'm I'm telling you guys how to get the big guys, the big guys don't wanna be pressure sold. They don't wanna make these decisions by themself.
Eddie Maalouf They wanna go talk their finance team. They want to talk to their legal team. There's so many pieces in there. But if you have the trust with that person, They will fight their CFO to get this deal done. Does that make sense?
Eddie Maalouf Yes? Okay. Cool. And last thing, stay in business for more time. That's That's really what it is.
Eddie Maalouf When you start telling someone, oh, yeah, we've been in business for 4 years, then you tell someone 5 years, then 6 years, then 7 years, how are you gonna compete with me when you guys are in business for 6 months? Like, if if you're in business for 6 months, I'm in business for 6 years, and we're fighting for the same client, I'm I'm gonna win. It's just how it is. So I know this is pretty simple, but there's a lot of psychology of these things, and I need you guys to understand them because this is actually how I close people. It's not specific closing phrases.
Eddie Maalouf It is the psychology behind the trust and the authority. So authority is Closing phrases. It is the psychology behind the trust and the authority. So authority isn't trust. Do they perceive you as someone of status?
Eddie Maalouf This is completely different than trust. Okay? Do they do you make them feel like they are more important to you than they are that you are more important to them than they are to you. Okay? This is a very important thing.
Eddie Maalouf And, it it goes back to dating, which I'll get into in a second. But basically, at the end of the day, if that person on the other side of the call feels like you need their business more than their business This needs your marketing agency. They will not sign up with you. And they will pull teeth, and they will negotiate their way all the way down until they can. But if you don't and you position yourself in a form of authority, which I'll show you how, you can take the conversation the way that you want So last thing, sorry, next thing.
Eddie Maalouf Talk about other opportunities. Talk about other clients. Talk about other things that you guys are working on. People like it when things are active. Showed an example of the restaurant with a huge line outside and the restaurant that's empty.
Eddie Maalouf No 1 wants to go to the empty restaurant. Okay. And when you're on these sales calls and you're not talking about other things and other opportunities and other projects you guys going on. It makes it sound like you guys don't have anything to do except them. And so this gives them leverage to be able to negotiate with you guys, You know, drag out the sales process and not sign up when you guys need them to.
Eddie Maalouf You must embody being bigger and better to get there. You have to have this new that you are more important than them to their business than they are to your business. Even if it's not, guys. I remember when I was driving my Altima, fucking, I don't know, 6 years ago. And I was I was I was closing a client deal, and it was my biggest deal at the time.
Eddie Maalouf And I was driving, and the dude was like, yeah, send over the contract. I just made the payment. Let me know what else I need to do. I was like, yeah, dude. I gotcha.
Eddie Maalouf I'll have the team get on it. Don't worry about it. I was the Fucking team, dude. That was me and a Nissan Altima broken down on the side of the road, and I was like, I'll make sure the team gets that. Drove my ass to my parents' house, sent them the contract, and dish it that way.
Eddie Maalouf But again, this is psychology of the authority behind it, guys. Like, this isn't this isn't manipulating people in a bad way. I believe 100% that I'm the best decision that they can make for their business, and I am doing whatever it takes to be able to break that barrier of trust get them in the door to show them that that is correct. That client still works with me to this day, has not missed a single payment. I've made them 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 of dollars, and it's all because of this positioning of authority.
Eddie Maalouf Okay. It goes a very long way. People don't like to be the only people working with you. It's like, again, it's like when you're dating a girl or a guy, you know, if they know you have no other options on the table, now you have to Give them more than they are giving you. You need to outearn them because they are in a position of authority with you.
Eddie Maalouf It's this is just basic human psychology. And I don't think we talk about it enough in the sales process because that is how business owners think. The more status you have, the less you have to give for the same amount in return. The higher your status and authority, the less you have to explain yourself, the less that you have to negotiate, the less that you have to give in scope of work. The better your deals become, the less your team has to do to make more money.
Eddie Maalouf It all starts with the sales process. Okay? You create this through content, results, and relationships. That's how you earn status in this game. Okay?
Eddie Maalouf People go to us. Like I said, they go through our content. They've watched dozens of minutes of time before they even get on to a sales call. My salesperson has status. He doesn't even need to be known.
Eddie Maalouf He's the salesperson at For Media Marketing. And therefore, he has status because of the content, because of the results that we have, because of the relationships that we drive. There is no Better deal that I get than when someone emails or texts an intro and the dude he intro ed me to already knows me. Oh, Eddie. What's up, bro?
Eddie Maalouf Well, so I already know, Eddie. Don't worry. We'll just hop on a call. That's the best because of the relationships that you develop. That's a position of authority.
Eddie Maalouf Prior to that email, I'm just an equal friend. Oh, Eddie, Eric, what's up? How are you guys? Then this guy comes in. He goes, dude, I have the best guy ever.
Eddie Maalouf Hypes me up, intros me to the dude I already know. Now I elevate to a position of authority. Now this person goes from, oh, I know Eddie does marketing to, dude, I didn't know you did this. I need to talk to you a little bit and we need to work together. So authority is very important.
Eddie Maalouf If they're big enough, and they have you dealing with their assistant, this is some this is some funny shit that I do, but, I would highly recommend big people, again, busy people, this is how it is. They have assistance. Don't take it disrespectfully. I used to be like, oh, my god. He put me with his assistant.
Eddie Maalouf He doesn't respect my time, all this shit. I used to get bothered by it internally. Okay? Busy people have assistants, and it's okay to talk to their assistant. But when you get passed off as a CEO owner to assistant to deal with them.
Eddie Maalouf You lose authority in a way psychologically. Okay? Now it's like, okay, great. I'm busy, but you can deal with Assistant, she'll stay she'll still take care of it. Don't take that offensively.
Eddie Maalouf What I do is I speak through my assistant, and if I don't have 1 this is some shady shit here, but It works. It works. Make a fake email. EA, executive assistant at company name, and make it a general neutral name like Jordan. Jordan's a good 1.
Eddie Maalouf There's a few general neutral names. And respond from that email as your assistant to this person. I I swear, guys, this is some I know that you're, like, what the fuck is this Obsidian shit? I'm telling you it works. It's authority.
Eddie Maalouf It's like, oh, he is an assistant too. Oh, that's cool. He's an assistant too. Who who fucking cares, dude? As long as you get the deal done and it's a morally good deal and you're actually providing A service to these people, and you're living up to what you promised them, who fucking cares if you faked an assistant email and no 1 ever found out?
Eddie Maalouf Okay. It's authority. Big fish respect expectations and boundaries. Okay? What they don't want to work with is a yes, man.
Eddie Maalouf Oh, yeah. We'll definitely get that done for Oh, are you guys also gonna do this? Oh, yeah. We'll definitely get that done for you. What about this?
Eddie Maalouf Oh, yeah. We're definitely gonna get that done for you. Dude, people people listen to my sales calls sometimes, And, like, I almost, like, lose a sale because I set expectations and boundaries so tight. You know what I mean? They're like, oh, how how how often are you gonna be working with you, Eddie?
Eddie Maalouf You won't be working with me directly, but I will be involved with a team of strategies. If you need me, you can reach me. But I will not be on most calls. You might never see me on a single call. And this is just how it is.
Eddie Maalouf My team is who you're hiring. This is the expectations we have. We've agreed to the things that we're gonna do, and we're not go outside these lanes. If you agree to this, please sign the contract and pay. If you don't, please do not work with us because this is exactly how it's gonna work.
Eddie Maalouf Okay. Once you set the expectations with people who run companies want their own team to set similar expectations with the people they're working with, they will respect that even more. A lot of us are too shy, and we want to give too much to get these bigger people. We we view them in a higher lens. Oh, my gosh.
Eddie Maalouf This massive brand, this massive company, it's gonna make our it's gonna make us so much money. It's gonna change the way we do business. And so you guys get a little desperate with it. But when you sit there and you lay those standards down from the beginning, these people of high authority expect you more for it. And they wanna work with you because now they view you as an equal who's able to set those expectations.
Eddie Maalouf People people who are novice aren't able to do that. They choke up. They're not confident enough, and they're not willing to lose a sale to make sure that it's within the right boundaries of expectations. Okay? I had $0 in my name, and I was still doing this shit.
Eddie Maalouf I was, like, yeah, if you don't wanna do it this way, we don't wanna work with you. No money whatsoever. But, yeah, again, we're a team, and we need you guys to pull weight when we do. Mina, where you at? How long is our onboarding document?
Eddie Maalouf I showed you yesterday. 35 pages. I have these people fill out 35 pages to work with us. This is post sale. And I tell them, this is the onboarding doc.
Eddie Maalouf Here's the sections I need you to fill. If you don't want to fill them, do not bother signing up. Steven? Where's Steven? Is he in the room?
Eddie Maalouf Here. Law by Mike. Last person we onboarded in that category. How onboarding Dude, 35 pages this man filled out. I showed Mina yesterday.
Eddie Maalouf He's like, what the fuck? Yes. Because that's what it takes to work with us. And when you set those expectations on the sales call, and you're willing to say, listen, don't even don't give me this exuberant amount of money that we're talking about, Unless you're willing to do this, it sets that tone from the beginning. Not only does your team have more success with them, but these guys want to work with you even more.
Eddie Maalouf Okay. And this is a very simple thing I need you guys to break past. I watch your sales calls, and they don't go this way. Be willing to lose the sale to set the right expectations, and you will work again with better people. I'm not telling you you'll close more deals.
Eddie Maalouf I'm telling you you will work with people that will leave you much less frequently. Okay? Next thing's collaboration. Very simple concept, but at a higher level, this is all they want to see. This is you and them on opposite sides of the table.
Eddie Maalouf You're green. They're orange. You just need to work your way to sitting next to each other and looking at something from the same perspective rather than sitting on other sides of the table. So High people want to feel like someone will think with them, but also for them. So what I do here is instead of, for example, jumping into conclusions and just people people get on a sales call, we need, Facebook ads.
Eddie Maalouf I say no, we don't know that yet. That's what you think you need. And quite frankly, you might not know what you need because you've been in your business for along. And you still haven't solved these problems. So in order for us to work together, let me look at your business from the inside.
Eddie Maalouf I'll do an audit. I'll take a look at everything. And then I will come back to you with a game plan and a strategy based on what you're telling me. So now it becomes more collaborative. Now we're shooting ideas back and forth.
Eddie Maalouf You know, we're we're pointing out opportunities that we have instead of just rushing into the sale. This is very important. But, again, I also always point out possible possible bumps in the path. This is the reality. And if I don't give them the bad news, then they will never trust the good news.
Eddie Maalouf But if I give them all the bad news first, listen, I don't think there's opportunities here. I know I told you this is where we wanted to go. I looked at all the keyword volumes. It's not it's not realistic that we even take this channel. I'm not gonna take your money I think this is where we need to go.
Eddie Maalouf The trust is so high there because I just told them, no, don't give me $5,000, but let's work on this, that they don't even hesitate anymore, and they start asking me for else can we work on together? Okay? A players want a players is obviously very simple, but you have to be sensitive. These are business owners. The the the dogs, like, these are dudes 1,000,000 of dollars a month.
Eddie Maalouf And they are alpha. And they sometimes might be sensitive to feedback of any sort. Right? So I always frame my suggestions a certain way. I always say, have you ever tried or considered?
Eddie Maalouf Rather than being like, you should do this, like Mina was saying, I say, Have you ever tried or considered this? And just the way of asking that question is very important because it allows them to come up with all the reasons why that would work or not work. And then they see it from their lens rather than mine, and it starts becoming collaborative. Rather than me saying, you should do this. You should do this.
Eddie Maalouf I say, have you ever tried this? Oh, no, man. Maybe we could do like this. And then all of a sudden, my seat moves from the other side of the table to sitting next to each other, looking at it from that lens and being like, oh, what what what what about here. Have have we ever tried this before?
Eddie Maalouf And then I start using the word we instead of you. And then all of a sudden, slowly, slowly, slowly, now we're sitting next to each other at the table when every other salesperson is sitting across from them. So when they go home, they evaluate these deals. They look at all the deals on the table, and mine's the most expensive. It doesn't matter.
Eddie Maalouf Because they feel like they're getting someone who's into their business, who's thinking with them, thinking for them, and collaborating ideas back and forth. And the last is value. So price objection. This is where I'm the most logical. I don't get emotional on these closes.
Eddie Maalouf I'm a very, very, very logical person. Sometimes it's bad. Sometimes it's good. But this is my favorite 1. I know a lot of you guys get this objection, so I'm gonna tell you how every single time I close it.
Eddie Maalouf Someone else is doing this for less. So I literally sit down with them, and I do the math together. I say, great. We're charging $5,000. How much are they charging?
Eddie Maalouf He says, $1500. I'd say great, $1500. So, if we had to pay an average team member, what would you say an Average team member is he says 5 k. Great. 5 k.
Eddie Maalouf If we had to put a team of people here, and let's say we took 10 of them, how many accounts do you Okay. K. How many accounts at 1500 a month does that team need to handle for it to be profitable for the business. And then he starts running through it. He's a man.
Eddie Maalouf They probably need, like, 45, 50 accounts. Great. Perfect. We're on the same page. So if that team needs 45 and 50 accounts to have people being being paid 5 k a month.
Eddie Maalouf How in the world do you think they're gonna do a better job for your 1500 than our 5 dollars. Wouldn't you rather work with a team that's working with 10 clients instead of 30 clients? 40 clients? It's up to you as a business owner. And I'll tell you the high level people understand Once you numerically make it make sense because to them, they don't understand.
Eddie Maalouf They've just been told agencies have ridiculous margins. They take so much money home. We overcharge for our services. It's just this awesome Internet game where everyone's just printing money and taking it home. That's what they've been told, and they've been screwed by the ones in the past.
Eddie Maalouf But once you make the numbers make sense, I literally Put it on a calculator. I share my calculator and say, let's do the math, bro. How many clients does it take for this team if they're getting paid this much to actually make a on the business. And I run I was like, great. So based on that, either they're having way too many clients or they're paying a bunch of people $1,000 a month to do the job for What do you want?
Eddie Maalouf Is your business a cheap business that is is worth having someone $1,000 a month running it or 1 hour a week because that's the only time they have? Or do you want someone actually dedicated to your business to take it to that next level? Because that's why we're here. We're talking to grow. We're not talking to maintain.
Eddie Maalouf We're not talking to do some busy work. We're talking because you want to take your business to the next level. You make that choice, and you tell me what you think. I swear every single time they close. Every single time It is not an objection.
Eddie Maalouf It's literally logically impossible as a business owner to justify that expense. So another 1. This is pretty cool. A lot of people are like, oh, I don't know if I'm gonna This money up front, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which is the way that I frame a lot of my objections, which is the same I did yesterday when the guy was like, you know, I can't run the same offers you run. You know, I can't give free Facebook with email.
Eddie Maalouf Well, dude, if I give you if you give me 4 k and I give you 4 clients back, would you take it? Oh, a 100%. Well, that's that's the same logic here. I tell them, okay, great. They're like, oh, it's gonna be 20 k a month.
Eddie Maalouf Man, that's a lot. I go, okay, great. Well, let's look at it this way. If I told you give me 60 k now, so 3 months of 20 k. If I told you give me 60 k now, and in return, current.
Eddie Maalouf I'll give you an extra 40 k a month in 90 days. Would you take it? Every single time. Oh, yeah. No.
Eddie Maalouf Of course. Great. What are we working on? I'm not even asking you for 60. I'm asking you for 20.
Eddie Maalouf So it'll take 90 days for you to pay me the 60. Don't you think based on everything we're talking about that I can add an extra 40 k a month to your business. You have to logically make sense for these people. It's dollars in and dollars out. Okay?
Eddie Maalouf You need to make it clear this is the best use of their money. Another thing I think a lot of people get wrong is negotiating. Negotiating is not about crushing the other person, screwing them, getting the best deal, whatever it is. The best negotiators find the best deal for both sides. Okay?
Eddie Maalouf This is, something we've been taught incorrectly our whole life. Who can negotiate the best? Who can drive down the dollars the best? Blah blah blah blah blah. The best negotiators make it make work, make it make sense for both sides.
Eddie Maalouf These, These 6 figure a month deals that I'm telling you guys about that are paying us 6 6 figures a month, they are coming to us and saying, Hey. Our 6 months together are over. How can we extend for 2 years, 3 years? How can we lock in this contract for 2 to 3 years together paying you 6 figures a month. You know why?
Eddie Maalouf Because it's a win win setup. It's not I'm charging them 150 k to do some services other people can do. I have structure these contracts in ways where the only way that I'm gonna make that kind of money is if I make them 4 or 5 x that kind of money. So finding ways to negotiate and make it a win win for both sides. It's very important.
Eddie Maalouf But at the same time, you lose authority if someone asks you to reduce a price And you say yes without them giving up something as well. You need to make it very clear that it's a 2 way street. Okay. I see it all the time. My team still does it.
Eddie Maalouf Yeah. This dude said he'll do it for 1500 a month Instead of 18/97, what do you think, Eddie? Can we do it? I say, yeah, we can do it, but without doing this. Or we can do it if he does this.
Eddie Maalouf And so it's a give and take. The moment you give without them giving back, now they don't know where the line gets drawn. They say, okay. How much more can How much more can I ask? And they devalue you, and it shows that you don't have that value for yourself.
Eddie Maalouf So if you're not turning away enough people, You're not charging enough. Okay? So question lies, Eddie, what should I price it at? The Most difficult question of this space, I'd say. And we've kind of looked at the number.
Eddie Maalouf We've broken it down, and we've kind of run up with a few scenarios. This is the best 1 for us so far. So You want to be at about 2.5 x payroll of that group. And I'm gonna explain. There's gonna be some math here.
Eddie Maalouf Just bear with me. But by the end of this, you will all increase your prices, and you will thank me year from now. You need to assume 65% efficiency, meaning that that team you know, we it's like real estate. Right? You go into it, you're like, I'm gonna buy this apartment complex, and if all the rooms are filled up, we're gonna make so much money.
Eddie Maalouf You need to operate that at a 90% assumption or an 85% occupancy assumption. It's the same with your team. Your teams are not gonna be full at all times. You need to hire people in order to take on the client for that. Right?
Eddie Maalouf So we assume everything at a 65% efficiency. For that. Right? So we assume everything at a 65% efficiency, meaning 2 thirds of the capacity of the team is full, and they have another 3rd to go. So example number 1, if If it takes you 10 team members at an average of 5 k a month to run 1 team, stay with me here, that's 50 k a month in payroll.
Eddie Maalouf Okay? At 2.5x payroll, that means we need to generate a 125 k a month in revenue. Are are are you with me? Yes? Can I get a yes?
Eddie Maalouf Okay. Cool. So 125 k a month in payroll, in revenue. That's where we need to be. That means the team can handle 30 clients.
Eddie Maalouf Okay? At 65% efficiency, we need we're gonna be at 20 clients. So in order for me to be at the 2.5x payroll of 125 with 20 clients. We need to charge $6,250 per client. Does that make sense?
Eddie Maalouf Yes? No? Yes. Okay, I'm gonna give another 2 examples so you guys can understand, but we're gonna change different factors. So let's say we change efficiency to 80%.
Eddie Maalouf If it's 5 k team mem 5 k team member, 10 team members, 50 k payroll. We need 125 k, again, 2.5, the payroll, to be able to be efficient as a company. That team can handle 30 clients at 80% efficiency. That's 24 clients. We dropped our retainer down $1,000.
Eddie Maalouf Okay? Last scenario. If you have 10 team members and you wanna pay them more, which is very important if you wanna hire a players. I wanna pay my team members 100 k a year instead of 5 k a month. That's 80 k a month in payroll.
Eddie Maalouf That means they need to manage 200 k a month in revenue on this team. At a 65% efficiency, it's 20 clients. I need to charge $10,000 a client to have kind of business. A lot of the times, we price our business and our services kind of like whatever we want to fucking price it at. We're like, oh, a lot of people are buying This price, bump it up a little bit.
Eddie Maalouf But the reality of the situation is we never reverse engineer it from a Team perspective. I want a players. I want people who wanna make a 100 k a year. I don't want people who wanna make 40 k a year. I want people who want make a 100 k a year.
Eddie Maalouf In order to have those people in my business, how much do I need to charge a client to be able to provide a service at that high level to be able to pay people that amount of money. If you look at our average retainer, we're looking at it. Every single year, it goes up by a few $1,000. Listen to what Nick was saying. What did you say 12?
Eddie Maalouf What was your average last year? 12, and you're going to 27? 12 to 27. Okay. And I promise you a part of it is I need to pay my people more.
Eddie Maalouf And if I wanna pay my people more and have better people on my team, I have to charge more. What does that number look like? And the reason that we pick 2.5x is because you have a lot of operating expenses. You have sales and marketing costs on the back end. And, like Dee was saying, our businesses, Our inventory, our product is people.
Eddie Maalouf So this is our biggest expense. So if we can just get 2.5x that as a whole, we'll be a very profitable So does this make sense? Are we all on the same page? Yes. Cool.
Eddie Maalouf Before I show you how our teams are structured, I want to show you how our businesses so you understand. I told you guys we did 2 acquisitions, last year. Both of those businesses will probably do multiple 6 figures a month by the end of this year. And and here's kind of how we structured it. So we have, left side, which is info side, middle side, which is e commerce.
Eddie Maalouf So we have Atlanta, London and Denver. And I'm gonna give you kind of the strategy of why I acquired these 2. London, shout out Luke, Nicola, the whole team there. So this was a very strategic acquisition. And the reason we did it was because, like I just showed you, If I wanna have people that are getting paid 8 k a month, I need to charge a minimum of 10 k retainer.
Eddie Maalouf If I'm running all these ads, how many people am I get that cannot 4 to 10 k retainer. An exuberant amount of people. Okay? What if instead of just wasting these people or selling them on a course, which It's not as simple as it sounds. Okay?
Eddie Maalouf What if I went and acquired an agency overseas who was delivering an awesome service, who was getting success with their clients and had payroll overseas so that I could price according to the payroll, just like my 8 k a month. What if theirs is 1500 2 k a month. How much less could I charge and take on more clients? And so the strategy was everyone that doesn't qualify for this for this 10 k a month. We can pass them down to London.
Eddie Maalouf And now I mean, dude, these guys are getting clients probably every, like, 3 to 4 days at this point into their business. This this is revenue that we would have missed out on. And by the end of the year, it'll probably be a couple $1,000,000 that we would have missed out on had we not made the strategic acquisition. Denver, Amazon department, shout out my piece back there. This was also strategic.
Eddie Maalouf Right? This was This this wasn't like we wanna add a whole new service and all this stuff. We said, dude, we're already spending money on all this marketing to get these e commerce people into the door. How else, like Ashland was saying, flywheel effect. Can we provide them a service?
Eddie Maalouf That's good. We went and shopped agencies. We looked at the ones with the best results. I don't care if they can sell. That's not the point.
Eddie Maalouf I can sell for them. I can hire for them. I can run their numbers. I wanted results. And we went and found someone who could do the job, and we could help build the system and the team around them, and we acquired them.
Eddie Maalouf So that's our econ department. And on the right side, local, Cool. Still still standing strong all the way back from 20 I remember COVID. COVID hit. We lost, like, 28 clients on the local side.
Eddie Maalouf We looked at the business, and we're like, okay, which ones are still open? And it was auto shops. And we're like, we're pretty good at them. Let's let's see what we can do. And we scaled that up, that year from, like, 3 shops to, like, I think the highest point in 2020 was, like, 88, auto shops.
Eddie Maalouf And to this day, that department still runs. So I just wanna give you a perspective of the overview of our company as I dive into the org charts. It's gonna be pretty tense. And I just want you guys to understand kind of on a higher level what it looks like. So after trying a dozen, dozen different team structures, this is kind of what we landed at, thanks to mister Nick Shackelford again.
Eddie Maalouf Gave that information last year, just like Tommy gave the acquisition information last year. We took that. We ran with it. And we kind of developed, our own unique sense of a pod structure. So it's 1 thing as a business to understand what you look like now.
Eddie Maalouf It's another thing to project What you look like in 2 to 3 years. Okay. It's very difficult. And we don't even think about it as business owners because we're so focused on now. We're like, dude, making money.
Eddie Maalouf It's all good. We'll just hire more people. You'll eventually be a manager, all these things. But you have to understand from the perspective of a team member who's working in your company, they don't know what their future looks like. They don't know where they're gonna be in this organization in the future.
Eddie Maalouf You know, and all you're thinking about is don't worry. I got you. I got you. We're gonna grow. You're gonna grow too.
Eddie Maalouf Like, this is how we did it for years. And so we finally sat down the last few months, and we broke down what does it look like in the future. So right now, every single department that I showed you as pods. Some of them have 2. Some of them have 3.
Eddie Maalouf Some of them have 1, because that's the capacity that we're at for that team right now. But as we grow, 4 pods will go into a district. So this would be like, for example, the Amazon district, right, would have 4 different teams inside of them. And then The next level would be a region. So a region has 4 districts, and a district has 4 pods.
Eddie Maalouf And we started mapping it upwards. And I'm showing you all this because I'm about to go deep into it and kind of show you what it looks like on an overview. But here's what our pod structure looks like. So each 1 of these Handles about 12 to 15 clients depending on the capacity of the clients. The variables that change here are the media buyers.
Eddie Maalouf So Sometimes we need to add a junior buyer, as well. So you see, like, Facebook media buyer. Sometimes you'll see Facebook senior, Facebook junior. Same for the Google. You'll see Google Senior, Google Junior.
Eddie Maalouf But we've tried everything, guys. We've tried every team structure. We've tried, I mean, fuck, everything in the book. We've squeezed, like, we squeezed, like, 10 years of business in the 2 years. And this is what we finally concluded works.
Eddie Maalouf Now the key here is not just what's on this chart. And here's how we organize our team, and here's Everyone lays out. The key here is you guys taking the time to go back and give a very clear job description, roles and responsibilities for there's a lot of gray. There's a lot of blur. And eventually, you start realizing that 2, 3, 4 people are doing the same job, and they're just not even realizing it.
Eddie Maalouf And so what you need to do is draw the strict black and white lines left and right and draw every single position. Here's exactly what you do, and here's what you do not do. That is this person's job. Because over time, they start getting curious too. They start want to do more things.
Eddie Maalouf And what happens is it creates so much bloat in your business and then eventually creates Unhappy team members because they're doing 2 people's job instead of 1. And so I know this sounds super simple, but I know for a fact, most of you in the room, if not all, have not sat down and give a clear job description, roles and responsibilities of dos and do nots for every single person in your organization, not by name, but by title. As an account manager, this is exactly what you need to do and not do. Not John. Here's what John does.
Eddie Maalouf It's all title. Account manager, project manager, strategist. You need to break them down and be very clear about the expectations. Otherwise, you will have trouble And the key to making this work is people. So big topic, hire for experience.
Eddie Maalouf Do not hire for potential. Biggest lesson learned, over this last year. We were just talking about it yesterday on the podcast. Our average age of, our team member, in 2021, was 24 years of age. Our average age of team member, is just above 30 right now.
Eddie Maalouf That is a 7 year of experience difference that we've added to our team in the last year. We have happier employees. I've never received more gratitude messages on a weekly basis. At least 3 to 5 times a week. Someone on my team types me out a paragraph of how grateful they are to be in this company and how amazing it is and all the things that they love about it.
Eddie Maalouf And don't get me wrong. We we all have problems in our businesses. No business is perfect. But the level of experience and maturity change has allowed us to be less Stressed as a team to get more things done in less time, to have less revisions on everything across the board. It's because we hired for experience.
Eddie Maalouf I always thought if we just have the best training programs, if we have the best assets, I can train anyone who's motivated. This guy's a killer. I can tell, but he's no shit about marketing. I'm a teach him everything. I got this.
Eddie Maalouf But but like Tommy was saying, like, that's practically a job. Like, I'm going back and having to teach this person hold their hand, make All these mistakes. Loose clients. I'm like, it's okay. Don't worry.
Eddie Maalouf I'll get you another 1. Going back and forth. It's over now. We don't have time for that. Hire for experience, not potential.
Eddie Maalouf And the question Nick asked, if you're new, you don't have money. How do you hire on potential? I mean, how do you hire on experience, if you don't have that money to give these people? So I I broke it down yesterday. I thought to myself, how could I quantify this?
Eddie Maalouf I gave it 3 v's. These are the 3 v's that you need to acquire a level Okay? 1st one's vision. This is very, very, very, very important. I told you guys I paid 5 k to go to the day with Josh and Chandler, and we spent literally the 1st 5 hours talking about core values, mission, vision, all this shit.
Eddie Maalouf And I was, like, yawning. I was like, bro, like, can we just get to, like, how you guys sign up clients and, Like, do their shit. Because that's what I'm here for. But the reality is vision is what gets us there. All the people that are still on our team from 2 plus years back when I showed you guys the office with nothing but a few chairs, it was all vision.
Eddie Maalouf I couldn't pay them what these big companies are gonna But I could help them see where we're going. And if you're a part of this, you're gonna have your own autonomy. You're gonna be able to make your own decisions. We're gonna trust you to help us build this thing together, and we're gonna be at the top of this whole thing as we build. Here's where we're going.
Eddie Maalouf This is a very clear direction. If you see it, jump on board. If you don't, Okay. 8 players wanna win, and they wanna build. Okay?
Eddie Maalouf And if you can't cast that vision, you can't get these experienced people at the end of the day because you the money to. Number 2 is values. Raise your hand if you actually have core values in your business. Keep them up. Okay.
Eddie Maalouf Put your hand down if you don't read Okay. Put your hand down if you don't read them to your team every Monday. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 6 people in this room read their core values to their team every week. It's on On Friday?
Eddie Maalouf 7 people in this room. 7 people in this room read this. Guys, you need to And we drill this. We drill this down on it. Like, I started meeting core values.
Eddie Maalouf Let's go. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Because this is how We wanna operate as a business. So these are our 5 core values. Don't copy them.
Eddie Maalouf Everyone has different styles of it. Some people use 1 word. Some people use sentences. It doesn't matter. These are the rules and the frameworks that we operate in.
Eddie Maalouf If you get fired, you got fired because you didn't abide by 1 of these things. If you get written up, we have a clear we give you the reason why you didn't get written and the core value that that thing doesn't align with at the end of the day in the business. And I'll tell you this. Repetition is the only way to to get this down. It is the only way you need to it's like talking not that I'm saying our team is children or like that.
Eddie Maalouf But it's like back in school. You gotta keep telling them every single week, every single day the same thing over and over and over and over again. I told my team last July, Massive inefficiency in the company, meeting times. We do too many meetings. I need you guys to dismiss yourselves from meetings when you're not involved.
Eddie Maalouf I need you guys to cut meetings short. I need every meeting to have Description of every single person in there, what their job is, what the objective of the meeting. This is the only way you're running a meeting. Okay? It took us 6 months to get to the point of drilling this down every single week, beginning of every single month on company wide calls to get to the point where I saw other people just dismissing themselves from calls, dismissing other peoples from And all of a sudden, after drilling that in every single week, every single month, over a 6 month period of time, my team started embodying it.
Eddie Maalouf You started seeing it like Dee was saying, the nodes. Right? You started seeing the bottom of a people abiding by it, the people above them. And so that's the time that it You're not just gonna write 5 of these things, and then everyone's just gonna follow them. Every single morning meeting in department seems to be led by this.
Eddie Maalouf Every single monthly meeting needs to be led by We do our boardroom meetings. They're all led by this. We go over our core values. And if someone doesn't know it, that's a massive problem because these are the frameworks that you operate by. And I'll tell you this, we never hire an employee without making sure we're very clear about how we abide in the company.
Eddie Maalouf Are we aligned here? If we're not, Totally cool, bro. I don't think this is a good place for you. But if this all makes sense for you and you're on the same page, then then let's work together. Okay?
Eddie Maalouf This is how you get a players. And then the third 1 is velocity. Where are we going? And how fast are we getting there? No 1 wants to build this thing that's gonna take us 15 to 20 years to get there.
Eddie Maalouf Okay. What is the 2 year plan? What is the 1 year plan? What is the 3 year plan in our company? So I was trying to show you guys, you know, that little piece of the org chart, the pods.
Eddie Maalouf That arrow is pointing to that section right there, those 4 little blue dots right over it. This is what we expect our org chart to look like 3 years down the road with about 380 team members. Okay? We are casting what that looks like forward. We're understanding each department's structure and where it needs to be.
Eddie Maalouf And you can bet next year, I'm gonna show you this, and it's gonna look a little different than it is today. That's just how it is. But we understand the velocity that we want to go. We want to get to this point in 3 years. And based on that, we need to hire this many people a week.
Eddie Maalouf We need to acquire this many clients, and we need to fix these inefficiencies to be able to get there. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yes?