Get ready to unlock the secrets of lead generation and customer acquisition with Solomon Thimothy, CEO of OneIMS and creator of ClickX. We'll take you on a journey through his entrepreneurial path, from his initial foray into web design to becoming a leader in the digital marketing space. We'll dig deep into the importance of targeted ads, the power of inbound and outbound marketing, and the difference they can make to your business.
In our chat, Solomon shares his experience building ClickX, a revolutionary tool that supercharged his company's growth and scalability. We'll discuss the challenges marketing agencies face and how positioning your business as a service that aids others can lead to success. Along the way, you'll gain invaluable insights into growing your own business, driven by the impact you can make in your industry.
Finally, we'll underscore the importance of building a strong brand, overcoming sales fears, and embracing the potential of new technologies. It's a world where starting a business has never been more affordable, where AI and chat technologies can perform tasks in the blink of an eye. Join us as we explore the opportunities that lie in the modern era of business, even in challenging times like the COVID-19 pandemic. It's a conversation packed with practical advice, tangible takeaways, and inspiring stories. Don't miss it - let's learn and grow together!
How to Reach Solomon:
Website: https://www.thimothy.com/
Clickx: https://www.clickx.io/
To Reach Jordan:
Email: Jordan@Edwards.Consulting
Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9ejFXH1_BjdnxG4J8u93Zw
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jordan.edwards.7503
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jordanfedwards/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanedwards5/
Hope you find value in this. If so please provide a 5-star and drop a review.
Complimentary Edwards Consulting Session: https://calendly.com/jordan-555/intro-call
Get ready to unlock the secrets of lead generation and customer acquisition with Solomon Thimothy, CEO of OneIMS and creator of ClickX. We'll take you on a journey through his entrepreneurial path, from his initial foray into web design to becoming a leader in the digital marketing space. We'll dig deep into the importance of targeted ads, the power of inbound and outbound marketing, and the difference they can make to your business.
In our chat, Solomon shares his experience building ClickX, a revolutionary tool that supercharged his company's growth and scalability. We'll discuss the challenges marketing agencies face and how positioning your business as a service that aids others can lead to success. Along the way, you'll gain invaluable insights into growing your own business, driven by the impact you can make in your industry.
Finally, we'll underscore the importance of building a strong brand, overcoming sales fears, and embracing the potential of new technologies. It's a world where starting a business has never been more affordable, where AI and chat technologies can perform tasks in the blink of an eye. Join us as we explore the opportunities that lie in the modern era of business, even in challenging times like the COVID-19 pandemic. It's a conversation packed with practical advice, tangible takeaways, and inspiring stories. Don't miss it - let's learn and grow together!
How to Reach Solomon:
Website: https://www.thimothy.com/
Clickx: https://www.clickx.io/
To Reach Jordan:
Email: Jordan@Edwards.Consulting
Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9ejFXH1_BjdnxG4J8u93Zw
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jordan.edwards.7503
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jordanfedwards/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordanedwards5/
Hope you find value in this. If so please provide a 5-star and drop a review.
Complimentary Edwards Consulting Session: https://calendly.com/jordan-555/intro-call
Hey guys, I got a special guest here. We have Solomon Timothy. He's an expert in lead generation and customer acquisition. He's the CEO of OneIMS and has a software called ClickX. Solomon, I want to ask you, why is lead generation retention important for a business?
Speaker 2:Well, first of all, thank you so much, jordan, for having me on this podcast. I feel clocked in, ready to rock and roll here If you're listening in here an entrepreneur, and there's two things that we call it the growth formula. The growth formula is how do you grow a business? That's the literally whatever entrepreneur aspires to do. You wake up in the morning, like me, as fired up as you possibly can be. Your job is how do I grow as much as I can before sunset, right? How do I make as many customers as happy as possible today, because I don't get today back tomorrow?
Speaker 2:If that's the case, then what you really need to grow your sales team or your marketing team, whoever is working in your business, is to generate more leads. That's what you need. See, the challenge a lot of companies have is, when you're trying to grow a business, you're only reaching a tiny, tiny, tiny market, a total addressable market in that sense, for your product or services. The only way to grow the company is how do we hit up more people that have the same problem? If I'm a construction company, I'm just going to make it very easy. I built houses for families that want to grow and build on a beautiful lot in Tampa, stp, wherever you are anywhere.
Speaker 2:All over the US, for instance, people are going to go and custom build. Well, you're an amazing custom-building company. Whatever custom builder. We work with those guys. They make a lot of money because it's an average $2 million, $5 million, whatever the houses average in your town, wherever your town is, that's the average. When you build custom, you expect to pay more. It's higher profit margin.
Speaker 2:A builder only does three houses, or two or nine or whatever a year. In order to do 12 or 25, they need to find more people that are exactly in the same need of wanting to get out of the house that they're in currently and they have extra cash to go build something that they're going to call it their forever home. In order to do that, you need to get out of the regular old lead generation that you're doing with going to a networking event and shaking hands of the leaders in your town, which there's nothing wrong with that, because they're going to give you the okay to building permits and all of that stuff. Maybe you need to be friends with those people, but the real need is in the hearts of those people that are not happy with their homes right now. You have to get out of the whatever marketing, sending more email isn't going to get them, because this is a consumer who doesn't even know you exist.
Speaker 2:Our job is to get the growth formula back to that is acquisition. Less retention equals growth. Acquisition is getting in front of people that need what you do and expanding that small reach that you have right now. Then how do I do that at scale? How do I do that across Facebook and YouTube and any other platforms that they might be searching for? How do I show up on a podcast where moms are listening for people with problems with their real estate, homes or whatever? It is like inspirational content, right? How do I get an influencer who likes to travel a lot or makes content about homes and the usability of their home? How do I get that person to talk about? Hey, if you're looking for a custom builder and they're in that area, I mentioned my company so I can reach a bigger target audience. That's why this is so critical, hopefully that was a good answer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it's detailed. The thing is, what a lot of people don't realize is that it might feel like, oh, this person just crossed my desk, or Jordan's a friend. You don't even feel as if there's a sale going on. They came across my screen. I didn't even know what happened. That's when it's really flawless, because a lot of people are consumers and they're just oh, this deal crossed my desk, I didn't even know. That's the way to make it really happen. When we focus so much, it's tough creating that all in the back end, because you got to get the people. You got to talk to the right people. As you talked about earlier, it's not randomly shaking hands with people. It's finding who your target customer is, speaking with them, sharing with them and them starting to find you as a solution, or see you as a solution, or your company. Solomon, where did your journey start? Where did this all begin for you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can tell you, when I was 20 years old, I wasn't talking about the growth formula and getting on podcasts and telling the world that acquisition plus retention equals growth. It's so easy Put on a whiteboard, let's measure how many leads you're generating and from where. That is not how I started. The way I started was a college kid that was going to become an entrepreneur. There was just no way to put me in a box. Let's be honest. There are some kids that just color outside the lines, and you might be one of them, edrys Jordan. You might be one of them, but what?
Speaker 2:I'm saying is that I couldn't contain myself and my passion and I was just doing all kinds of stuff For a kid. I was doing Photoshop and Illustrator. At this time there was one Mac available for the whole school. This was not the days of iPads in every kid's hands. Right At that time I was pretty good at tech. I started building websites as a freelancer. That's how I got into the game. I learned that I could make more money doing that than I could do anything else. Whatever you consider a job, what year was this this?
Speaker 2:is 2004,. 2005 because I created a corporation in 2006.
Speaker 1:How did you get exposure to even these ideas of the computer? I always find it super interesting when people are like, yeah, there was a wave and then people thought it was a fake and then it was a fraud. The way the computer how did you think about going through that and being like this is actually really interesting and this might be my future.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I thought about this two days ago. The way I ever put a page on the internet was that my brother was a computer science major and he doesn't use his degree. For all of you guys that do not use your degree, my brother is one of them. He went to an HTML class and he learned how to upload a file to FTP File Transfer Protocol. If you don't know what that is, people don't even need it anymore. He's just drag and drop.
Speaker 2:He's like Salome if I make this HTML file and I drop it into it, and at this time, our school university lets you have a webpage like a folder on their entire domain name, like you get your little sub folder, and he uploaded it into his sub folder. His name is Sam, and so it's like something edu slash, stymathy slash, whatever the name of the pages. I was like for real, is that even possible that you just throw this file in there and it just loads up on the worldwide web? Oh my gosh, this is Netscape and whatever else at the time. Yeah, so yeah, I'm a pretty old dude.
Speaker 1:Well, no, it wasn't to age, it was just more for you to be it's more for the audience to understand why you're so proactive and ahead of the time, because I find that if you can learn from that, then you can carry these skills going forward in the future where it's like, hey, you might need this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so today, what I was doing that day is what chat GPT is today, literally yes. And so I was using chat GPT today and I was just thinking about it in terms of, like, what is hot today? Well, that's the internet, right, like at the time, it was the internet and that was me uploading a file. I wasn't in Silicon Valley or anywhere, I was not around tech people, I did not know what a startup even meant, but that was good for me. And then I started to look at software that I can buy and Microsoft makes up. At the time, microsoft was one of the bigger windows and all that good stuff, right. So they had a front page which was a drag and drop. It was literally looked like Microsoft Word. I'm like I can do this and you're going to they roll up all these files and upload it.
Speaker 2:And then it was working that I kind of self taught how to build a website that is like a fully functioning website, just using a couple of tools. Like, literally, I'm 20 years old, I didn't even have a bank account. I'm telling you guys, right now, this is not like somebody funded this business. So, anyway, I did that and then I realized that, hey man, like people actually need this thing and I was very much into buying domain names at the time. All of them I got rid of because you know it started to get expensive right at the end of the day. So so I was just helping everybody buying their companycom and then building them a website. And then I put a corporation together and I hired my brother because you know who needs a corporate job, like he was working at a very amazing, I don't know fortune 50 company. That's like do you don't need that? We're gonna go do this. And he believed me. Believe it or not, it's crazy.
Speaker 1:And he quit job. At that point, how much were you guys bringing in for someone to quit their job?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's a great question, so you know I would have to. Well, we did well when I had more resources. Right, this goes into hiring people and things like that.
Speaker 2:It was alone and the reason why I were used that example with my brother is it's literally proximity, so I can reach my arm and and get my brother to do something that I'm like well, hey, do you want to do this with me? And you know, eventually he said yes, but it was. It was, you know, probably more than I could handle by myself, maybe like 10 grand a month or something like that, because at that point I'm just for websites. I actually was doing like $1,500 a website until we start charge like 20. I mean, look, this is I don't even know what website should be, which would be 30,000, right? So long story short, it was. It was a couple websites and it was beyond me.
Speaker 1:I could, I just couldn't do it and I'm not counting no, I get it. There's a lot of work to it and people. That's a major transition that a lot of people struggle with when they're going from themselves To hiring their first employee and they're like yeah how do I even think about this?
Speaker 1:Wait, I thought I was just getting a high, because a lot of people don't realize is when they're an entrepreneur, you start working and then you get a higher paying job and it's like this isn't like you're not the business owner, you're just a higher paying job doing the same thing you were doing before it a little bit different capacity.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, like I said, and and I have so much love for folks that actually should do a job right Like there's. There's yes, this is not, this is not for everybody is what I say. Most people can stomach the stress and the anxiety that comes with growing a company, which is kind of where we started the leads. And you know, if a builder didn't have any houses to build, that's a pretty bad situation. Does that make sense? What happens to his contractors or whoever else? Right? So yeah, and and and, like I said, every entrepreneur wakes up with that fire in their belly that, hey, I got to go do something, because it's kind of like very old caveman, I got a hunt and kill if I want to eat. That's entrepreneurship. It's literally entrepreneurship, and not everybody's cut out for it, and those that are cut out for it, like I said, has this fire to go and create content like you're doing, we're doing, and get your word out there. Does that make sense? And so, long story short, we, we. The way we to answer your question on the journey is that we immediately found out that what people were Needing this is where part market fit, and all that comes in.
Speaker 2:When you're a startup trying to figure out what you, what you want to do. You know they wanted to grow their business. They didn't just want a website. I thought the website was the solution. The website was not the solution. The website is like a car, right, like the. But they were. What they really want is to get to wherever they're going, and my car didn't move. It was just like a car. It's a really nice car, it was, it's probably the best car I can build. But it didn't do anything for them other than, like, nobody even knew that they had a website. Like what are they gonna do? Right, like tell all their friends like, hey, I have a website, go check it out. There was nothing.
Speaker 1:I think that's a really valuable point, because a lot of people don't realize and I just say this for the audience's understanding is like there's a lot of services that don't like they might save time, they might save ideas, but in reality, solomon's talking about a business wants to solve the solution longer term, which is, yeah, I want customers, right clients, I want people who are willing to pay for the services that I'm trying to offer. I and and they're there with that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the thing you have to understand is that they do exist. Don't think, don't give up. That can client find clients because of the poor marketing efficiency Makes sense that there aren't any people that are interested in super high-end I don't know yachts or whatever it might be. So. So we knew that these guys were, you know, growing businesses. So we've learned a hard way to start doing ads. That was our first sort of thing into it, and then I'm a self-taught SEO, so I started to learn dabble with Google and Google ads. I mean, at the time you just had to put a bunch of keywords and Make the background and the text the same color and you ranked on the first page of Google because Google didn't know any better If it had yeah, chicago, you know what I mean landscaping 15 times. It was good, it was pretty good.
Speaker 1:So, solomon, this is. This might seem very simple for you, but like what is the Google ads words? And I know 2006, 2007, like that was when it was just coming out, and that was the problem, wasn't it?
Speaker 2:Yes, correct Google.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Gary Vee says he was buying, I was listening to your story and I'm like, wait, your story aligns a lot with like Gary Vee's, like what he's doing, and yeah, 100%.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, long story short, it wasn't expensive, but that was the fastest way to do it and the only people that knew how to get Google ads up and running Was the yellow pages, because yellow pages were such big company and that I can million sales people going door-to-door and collecting everybody's money, and then they would pull in and they would buy ads on behalf of these businesses. They would just buy ads to their website and then you have to go to yellow pages to then Google Inside their yellow pages to find the plumber. It was years later that they would actually run ads for the plumber. It was so stupid. You're like you were paying for their ad spend. He's like here's $100 of my hard earned money so you can go buy Google ads with it for yellow pagecom. It sounds like a great Ponzi scheme, right.
Speaker 1:People, people would pay for. The business owners would pay for these ads to try to get the word out there on, like, what their businesses were, what they were trying to sell, and it's. It's always ads are always. It's a marketing thing where you learn and you're like, maybe that works, I work, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yes is wild. Why would people and you, only an digital marketer, would know that you're just paying for their ads? Yeah, they would tell people to go to yellow pagescom to find a business, and then, eventually, yellow pages went out of business and Google was the yellow pages right To this day.
Speaker 2:Yeah 100% so long. So we we didn't do that. We didn't send traffic to our website so they can go find the business. We just helped them get their website found as fast as humanly possible and at the time people were spending $500 a month and getting tremendous results, and I'm talking about local businesses.
Speaker 1:Well, what tremendous results be for a business just to give it a go.
Speaker 2:They were getting their phones ringing. That's what I measure, right? So their phones were ringing, so we start to start tracking calls. They would get calls every day. Again, like you said, a couple of bucks a click is unheard of today, but today would be like 20 and $30 a click. Plumbers will be paying 50 bucks a click today. That's the world that we live in. That's Google's question.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and just for the audience understand. So basically, google, you put your thing up as the plumber. You look up Tampa plumbers, bill comes up. They call bill that costs money every time they click on that. That costs money and then, they have to pay for that. Pay to click yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm on the Google side. That makes Google money. That's what? And if Google's making money, then every you know what I mean. That's how they. That's 90, some percentage of their business. I want to say 95, but Monster short. All these small businesses are investing their money Into something like I said. That's.
Speaker 2:The other side of SEO is like you could pay to Google, pay to play, and when your money runs out which is a hundred dollars a day or 500 dollars a day or whatever you put in then your ads Just stop showing Google's like hey, sorry, you're right out of money. So whoever's got more coins right in their slot machine like I'll take that guys money, now You're done for the day. So it's a managing of that expectation of what they're spending and what they're getting. On the opposite side is the search engine optimization, which you don't pay to Google. You work really hard on your website, making your website more and more and more efficient and better, better loading, better looking, better user experience, more content. It's really really hard and competitive. But then they you don't pay anything, because you could pay 5,000 to an SEO company and get a whole bunch of traffic, or you can pay 5,000 and get, like I said maybe a hundred visitors and that's it.
Speaker 2:Whether they buy or don't buy, google couldn't care less and I again I'm a marketer, so I get Google's perspective and I also get the business owners perspective right. So SEO is a long-term thing. That's what people don't want to do, that they want the instant gratification because they haven't really built a brand for themselves, so nobody really knows them. So they have their desperate kind of like that builder to get more customers. So they go wherever they can get fast results. So we like a hybrid approach. If you really want to spend money and you have $15,000 to spend, I might put seventy five hundred dollars on Google and $2,500 on Facebook and five grand on SEO. So I'm actually helping you out long term rather than such a short term. Only do Google and take all $15,000 and have a crappy website and you literally are living paycheck to paycheck.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean what ends up happening. So, like you, the audience might be sitting there wondering like, why would a plumber pay for this $100? Because they can have the hundred dollars of ad spend they can get to clients, they can go out, they can do two plumbing jobs, make eight hundred dollars off that hundred. So now you're sitting there and you're like, okay, the ads are working, we can make money. But, like Solomon saying, which is a very good point if you don't build a good brand or build something where people are willing to come back or they want to come back, then we are in the pay for customers, in which case you're constantly just running the customer, running the customer, running the customer. So it's we pay $50, we get a hundred dollars from the customer.
Speaker 1:Two to one, yeah, and this is a very, very in-depth and a lot of business owners they don't talk about it too much but like it's super, super important because you'll just be, ads work, no matter what. They always work and it's how efficient can you get those ads? And then, how much can you make your business around those ads to make them work? And that's one of the reasons I want to have Solomon on is because this is a confusing subject. It's an important one, but it can be a little bit confusing.
Speaker 2:And, if you know, let's take back to the very, very beginning topic of growth formula acquisition, post retention. We'll use this plumber as an example. That is, if that plumber does spend 15,000 or 10,500 or whatever it is, and they acquire that customer, if all they made was that $800 in our world they lost. What they should do is keep that customer coming back when the shower is now broken and they're coming back because the kids Toilet is exploded, because they decided to flush the ducky down the toilet, right, like whatever that is, if they can stay top of mind of that plumber and get that customer back, that's the retention component. So you're not always looking to spend $100 to get 800. You're spending 800 once and making 8 Thousand. Yeah, now you're playing a very good game.
Speaker 2:Imagine that you did that on Facebook and you did that on Google and then you did that on SEO. You want to invest in marketing, which is what most people don't understand. They're kind of like, hey, marketing is an expense, let's cut it because, again, that's, they don't know any better and it's okay. It's like lots of marketing has gone wrong. Right, like, I get it.
Speaker 2:Lots of people don't know how to get it right and it's also not easy to get it right. It took me years and years to help one kind of client right but they were patient because it takes it takes a lot of trial and error to figure out what's the right message and what's the right offering, what's the right keyword and so on. But if you can really figure out that acquisition engine and you can also figure out the retention engine, then you really have a again going back to a super high growth business in a hyper competitive market with high inflation and low you know everything right like we got problems with employees and Labor shortages and all kinds of challenges. Yet you figured out a business that you can put a dollar in and get two dollars back. That's amazing.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I've actually this year I started getting into Facebook ads and it's been mind-boggling. It's, it's crazy, because you sit there and you're like, okay, I have people who are interested. I love that. Let's talk to them, let's find these interested people and like Instead of and it's just the paid ads approach, which is just a different approach, and it definitely can be super beneficial.
Speaker 2:Yep, and for those of you that basically this is inbound versus outbound, right, it's, a lot of people do door knocking and door-to-door and all that kind of like those yellow pages sales people I talked about. There's value in that, but you had to knock on 99 doors to get one person to say yes to even a meeting, like that's it. They're not even saying I'm gonna work with you and it's a very inefficient. Basically it's very inefficient. Exactly the opposite is Jordan runs ads, then the only people that reach out to him are interested person. So you're only talking to the people that one person, and the next week is the other one person, or the next day, or whatever it is. So it's a very efficient model and so we like that and our customers like that.
Speaker 2:You always want to talk to people, are interested and can't afford and they're qualified, rather than talking to people and kind of pushing them Something that they may not even know that they need or they genuinely want. Does that make sense? It's, it's. It's really a painful process. To grow your company by knocking on door doesn't work Absolutely it works. We do outbound prospecting, but it's very strategic and super hyper targeted. I just don't try to reach out to every business and said you need marketing because they don't even know what. That is Right.
Speaker 2:Most people don't know and they don't know what you can do for them, but go ahead absolutely and for you.
Speaker 1:so so how do you target the exact like? What do you think the capability of the ads are? Just for an understanding of anyone like, can it say like, hey, I'm looking for a 60 year old who makes this much money and does that like?
Speaker 2:how Think about that, yeah, you can do quite a lot if you don't fall into certain categories like mortgage and finance and you know Any kind of products where those are protected and so on. So, like housing, for instance, you can't go do certain things like that. But for the most part, if you're a B2B company, a B2C company, you're trying to target homeowners, you can do quite a lot of targeting, including age, if that makes sense. Now again, it's their job to not give you all these, because Facebook does not want you to just target the people and save as much money as possible on the ad Then then then they're they're gonna lose out, right, like they want to keep it baked. They would actually.
Speaker 2:They're all working towards not letting you do anything and they say the AI will figure it out. In other words, gave us, give us, give us your budget and let us go do our magic and not tell you anything, because if we did, then all of a sudden you just turn off everything else and keep the thing that works. I mean because there's no marketers, unlike the platforms. We're here to serve our clients, so we're gonna help them save money and they don't want us to do that. To be honest, if, if they have a hundred thousand dollars to spend before the end of the year. Facebook wants that and more. Facebook doesn't want us to make it only 50 and still give them the same results. Yeah, it's.
Speaker 1:I enjoy how you are able to distinguish all the different perspectives Instead of it being the one place where it's like oh, it's a business owner, you want to do this. So, essentially, what Tom saying is like If you have a more efficient marketing firm or if you get a more efficient marketing skill, then your ads will do better than if you're just a novice. It's like with anything, you get better with time and it's that investment and that learning process that takes time, so it's super important. So tell us, solomon, what's going on with ClickX and how did that happen?
Speaker 2:That's a great question. So I'm going to go be a carpenter for a minute, like all I did was build this agency, right? I built this company that helps, obviously, my brother and all the amazing people that we got working here. So, long story short, that's all I know. I know how to acquire clients. I know how to retain them. I know how to build.
Speaker 2:We built a system, we built a software called ClickX that enabled us to grow and scale the company, which is really impossible to go and scale a service-based company. And, long story short, a lot of companies that had to reach marketing companies were reaching out to me to have them do some of the work. We were doing what we call white label fulfillment, because we were pretty good operation and so it's really hard to do this. I'm being completely frank with you. It's kind of like that builder, like try building 12 houses all at the same time, like it's really challenging, right? So that led me to understand that there's a whole lot of marketing agencies out there that are equally struggling, if I may, to grow and scale because they don't have leads, they don't have sales. You know sales systems, sales process, sales people, sales, everything, just like we shared, and they don't have really good fulfillment capability to grow. So we built a completely end-to-end fulfillment systems.
Speaker 2:Agencies can come and hire these contractors. We literally have all the leads that they can possibly reach out to for their own sales. And we do sales training. Every single week we have a sales trainer. So all we're doing is taking what we've done, taking that formula, if I may, in that framework and then letting new agency owners people want to start an agency, people want to scale what they have, use our framework we call it the scale program to grow their company. Why? Because we are very passionate about that small business owner and I can't serve every small business owner, and you know this. Right, I can only serve who I can with my 40 hours or 48 hours or 400 hours. Right, that's it. I'm one human, but we are able to serve these agencies who then can go and serve those small business owners small and medium-sized business owners, that's. I think we're going to be one to one to many. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2:Yes, we can empower them, and they can go and empower hundreds of businesses and they win. The small business wins so they can take care of their family, their friends and their employees and everything else. The agency that we're serving works and then we are just literally taking all our years of knowledge. So that experience, I think, is the most expensive way of learning. So these guys don't have to learn the hard way because, like I said, I didn't have a master plan and I wasn't talking about the growth formula when I was 20 years old and I didn't write a book and I didn't do any of that Because I didn't know right. It took me a long time to do that, and if I can do that in 17 months for these guys, then, man, we've done a great job and I'm a very impact driven person, and so we look at the value of that versus what we could make in a client transaction and I think that goes a long way. That's why we're here.
Speaker 1:It's super important to realize this, that it can apply to the audience, Like this concept, what Solomon just described, where he views his.
Speaker 1:He's a marketing agency and he's helping other people who they beam competition this is super important, that he's rising them up because he believes in collaboration and then they can go help their own customer base. And that's the way you want to view things, not that one's right or one's wrong, but it's that there's not a competition, there's enough business for everyone. It's a collaboration. And the reason I say this is because I think Solomon did a great job articulating, understanding what his purpose is. No other marketing agency says hey man, I'm here to help the small business owner. Like most people don't think about that, like they understand what they're doing. But I'm saying like, as the audience, they can apply any of this to what they're doing. Like if you work at a store, you might help people sell bags or you might you could be the trash person. You can help people take out their trash and alleviate their stress. And when you view your job or your business as a real service to people, making humanity better, like that's incredible.
Speaker 1:And that's the major lesson is there.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and that's what I was passionate about when I was 20 years old, trying to help people build a website when they didn't have it. It was all about that person who's very good at what they do but then very bad at making themselves look good online. They just didn't know how to do it and, as you know, we as consumers, we make buying decisions by how somebody's website looks. That's literally how we do it. Oh, they have a cool video.
Speaker 1:Even at this day, let's buy it. You know, literally that's how we do it. Even in this day and age, it's literally. You go to a restaurant and everyone's like oh, did you see their Instagram? Did you see their TikTok? Did you see their that? Oh, they're not online. Are they broken? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Are they broken? Does the restaurant?
Speaker 1:exist.
Speaker 2:At this moment I see an Instagram story and I'm running to that bakery to get their sourdough bread. That's how sad it is. So I'm like hey, I saw your stories. Is this still there? Absolutely, they're like we have two left.
Speaker 1:But that's the understanding. Like I think that brings up a really good point because it raises the awareness of all the customers, and like you might be doing these activities unknowingly, but like this is what it takes to run a business. The business has to look good. So the top of mind you're like oh, I really like that place down the street and they just got the food, and like we have to go now. Or this is going to be the best lunch spot, or this is like whatever it is that's brand and this is one of the best ways to do it. It's to build online, because that's where everyone's attention is.
Speaker 2:Take that money right, that you have to invest in marketing long term, build a brand so you don't actually have to rely on Google to do it, because what you want ultimately is, when you think about running shoes, you think of Nike, that's, you know what I mean. When you think about I don't know whatever it is water bottles, you think of Yeti or whatever it is the brand that comes to your mind and when you get to that level Google ads or affiliate marketing or anything that you might have heard it's like this percentage of your sale because this Black Friday would just pass. People that build brand. We all went and bought stuff because we're like hey, that was, that was the pots and pans I've been waiting on or looking for, and now it's on sale. Those people build their brand before Black Friday.
Speaker 2:You can't build a brand on Black Friday and say, well, I'm going to run a bunch of ads and then get a bunch of sales. There was a lot of people who bought stuff sort of by the moment right, like just like, hey, I saw something, so I'm going to buy, but those were not the real. True, you know emotional sort of purchases. People bought mattresses, I bet, because they were waiting on it to go sale. So building the brand is the ultimate game and building your personal brand. I mean, look, if you have a podcast, that's a personal brand you're building and that's the ultimate, ultimate, ultimate game.
Speaker 2:However, you got to build a business, you got to make money. The business needs to build a brand, like all of us have a brand and all the companies have a brand. Like it's so important that we don't forget about that, because we'll spend way less in getting another customer that's going to be sold and you can get a customer that acquisition like basically, if you're going to acquire a client for $0 because of your brand equity and you can retain them for next to $0. It's like amazing, right? I mean, a lot of companies do that. A lot of companies do that 100%.
Speaker 1:But it's that awareness of what you're building, because a lot of people sit here and I have this conversation a lot where they're like Jordan Podcast, 150 episodes, like how much money we make and what are we doing, like where's this? And people don't understand that. It's the network effect. It's that ability to have these people come into my circle, like and build connection with people, and I use the podcast more as an intro call than anything. It's literally my way of being okay now Solomon to my network.
Speaker 1:If I want to talk to Solomon later, I can reach out over and like that's that's the thing, though it's so important because people want to view these podcasts is like how many views is it getting, how many downloads, how many this? And it's like you have to change the parameters in your head to realize it's a long goal. It's like running a marathon. You're not just going to be like yo. So how is that 26 miles? It's like Do they're in 19 or 20 or 21 or 20? Like I, it took me six months to just get to this point that I got here and like it's not just the end and like that's why the long game so much more fun 100%.
Speaker 2:So all of you that are listening, right, you gotta figure out what that, what that long game is, whether it's growing the company that you have or Starting a business. I can only speak from a marketing agency perspective. We have hundreds of people that fill out our form every single day, even successful business owners. We have guys that are like, very successful, they have multiple businesses, they're doing very well, but they want to build a marketing agency Because they realize that the secret to growing all of their businesses is by figuring out the thing that they really haven't figured out yet yet. They're still very successful, right, most, most entrepreneurs that we talk about, the grand card owns of the Gary V's and the whoever you name it they have a marketing Business. They may not sell it to other customers. They literally have an agency inside of their business that is responsible for all of their massive growth. They don't outsource their work. Does that make sense? That's how big it is to them. They wouldn't want somebody else to know that. They want to manage the content, the content production, the scheduling, the planning, the strategy and what they're doing versus what the competition is, how far behind they are, the analytics of how well they're growing and figuring out. You know the, basically the signal from the noise of all this. All the noise is being created about everything. What do they want to take away from that? How do they want to grow it?
Speaker 2:That is all marketing agencies do for customers. We just do it for payment, because they don't do it in house. But we have a lot of clients that, like, we're basically an extension of their team. They don't have an analytics person, so we do that for them. They don't have a marketing automation person, so we do that. They don't have somebody looking after their CRM, so we do that. But like they don't do digital PR, so we do that. Like there's a lot of companies who's like, hey, we got a lot of this figure, we got a lot of this figured out internally. That's where you ultimately want to be. I'm not going to lie, that's, that's the best.
Speaker 1:Well, because then you have control. The whole game of entrepreneurship is having control of your life and what you want to do and to do that. And it might be funny, but like, when you think about it, when you're driving on the highway and there's signs for all this stuff, that's, that's ads. When people have a big sign, like, people don't realize that paying for a Facebook ad is the same thing as paying for that ad, as paying is for the Super.
Speaker 2:They're all ads, they're all radio ads, yeah, like the cheapest. And the cheapest is inside your phone because, yes, like I said, that's that's. You can't buy a billboard ads for less than five grand anywhere. This is a terrible place, I do.
Speaker 1:I do want to give this little. I'll give a little shout out here. There is, in February of this year there is this thing I got to look it up but it's basically a Times Square ad where you get 15 seconds every year, 15 seconds every hour and I want to say it's like 200 bucks or something, but you're in Times Square, which is incredible, like it's, it's the best, and I'll drop that in the show notes just because the audience, like that is a very unique experience. But if you look at like the real guys advertising in Times Square, thousands and thousands and that right, it's also for one day, like one day it's not. It's not like you're not going to move the needle that much on one day, but like when you have. Like, if you look at a lot of the movies, they're running for months on end and it's the same loop because you're getting different people every time.
Speaker 2:Right. What I was saying is that a billboard is like five grand, but you can start ads on Facebook for five dollars a day. Ten dollars a day, right? Yes?
Speaker 1:I do want to add my input. There is because originally, like beginning of this year, I was like you know, facebook ads make no sense. They're just money. Like you're just throwing away money because I didn't know the parameters of what it is and Solomon's so right where it's. Hey, you can go as little as five dollars a day. You can go up to probably ten thousand dollars a day, if not more, like whatever they'll let you do. But it is important to realize that you can start it, you can set the dates, you can do a lot of different things because it doesn't have the cost as much as you think it does. Like five dollars a day over two weeks span, that's fourteen times that's ninety bucks. Like what are we talking about?
Speaker 2:Like no, there's no reason for you to not do it, and they're also actually seventy bucks actually seventy dollars.
Speaker 2:So easy, right, they're making it so easy that business owners can go in and try to do it. Now you might be doing it wrong, but until you make enough money to pay somebody else to do it and have an agency that costs twenty five hundred dollars or more per month to do it for you, that's kind of where you want to be. You don't want to go and shell that out if you don't have that yet. So work up to it. Where it's like, hey, this is becoming a burden, I don't want to do it, I'm going to pay somebody else to manage it for me. And here's two or three or whatever many thousand dollars to manage this Facebook ads thing for me, please, and they'll do a way better job. I'm not going to lie. I mean agencies, do they deserve every penny that they will? That they will be, because when you think about it.
Speaker 1:Think about anything right. You develop skills by getting reps. If the agency, all they do is run ads, they would sit there and go. That makes sense. That makes sense. That makes sense Like you start to see other trends because they're not just getting you for the first time in learning, they've been doing all of these other people and then they're up and they're like OK, let's see what it is Now. I do want to say also it's a good skill to learn, like like Solomon saying like, get started for five, ten dollars, and like you can learn so that you can check the agency and make sure that they're doing it right. There's just many different approaches to these things. It's not always as easy as you should do this or you should do this. I think it's the entrepreneurial journey like Solomon's talking about, is a continual learning. How do you stay so open to learning? Because I feel like there's so many things going on and you can get overwhelmed and, yeah, this is an important, but how do you think about that?
Speaker 2:Oh, man, personal development. This is one of my favorite topics. I think it's an investment, number one. It's not an expense. So I spent a pretty significant amount of money because, like I said, I was getting coached.
Speaker 2:About a year into the business I had an executive coach. Then I realized that that executive coach was trying to make me into a two hundred thousand dollar CEO and I was not ready for that. I needed business, like how do I grow a business? Because you know, he was kind of dealing with higher level entrepreneurs than I was at the time. So I want to sign up with a company called E-Mith, which is one of the best books ever, and I've gotten to know Michael E Gerber very personal because I'm like a huge fan of building systems and process. Then I went and signed up for the scale up, which is again Wern, which is again you probably don't know. Scaling up is another kind of a system. Then we signed up for EOS, which is the book that's called traction.
Speaker 2:I mean endless, endless, endless amount of coaching programs that I can sign up. Now I'm in like four or five of them. Like literally I cannot handle it. I couldn't even watch their videos there. If there is a coaching I can purchase. I will purchase it if I feel like I need to improve in that area. I have a sales trainer since 2018 and that sales trainer even teaches all my account managers how to talk and how to get customers. So, and to this day, I'm investing in so many different things because I know that I don't know everything.
Speaker 2:Hundreds of people that their agency wouldn't come to me if they don't have that concept in their mind, because they're like pretty much. They're like I know how to grow a company. Then go ahead and grow it right, like nobody's stopping you. It's a free world, you know, so go do it. But there are so many hungry entrepreneurs that literally says like I don't know. I don't know what I need to do, I don't know how to close. One of my next book is going to be how to get a 10 K retainer. A lot of people are scared to ask for $10,000 as a retainer. They're just scared because they don't. They don't believe that they're worth 10 K. Let's just be honest. It's not that they are. The value of what they do is that they don't believe that they can ask that price.
Speaker 1:Well and that's what a lot of people are missing that it's very difficult when you go from trying to get a 10 K retainer from a $50,000 your business Now you got to move the needle a good amount. Then a 10,000 retainer from like a $10,000 you're you really got to move the needle, okay, but then we'll scale up, we'll go to a million dollar your business. $10,000 is not that hard to like, that is like 0.01. Like you can do this 10,000 on 10 million.
Speaker 1:Even less 10,000 on 100 million. They might not even take you seriously because it's so small and like that's the realization there, that you sit there and you go. I don't believe I can do this. Yeah, of course you're not gonna 40% someone's business.
Speaker 1:Like you can, but that's a ridiculous ask. I'd rather you try to get something where it's hey, let's move it. 1%, 1%, we can do. 1%, we can do. 1% is like taking a cold, doing a cold plunge before your day to get started. Like 10, 1% is going to bed at 9 PM and waking up at 5. Like 1% can happen. Yeah, and that's where and that's what. I think one of the biggest things is who is your target customer? Not just what are we selling, but like how do we hone in on who the customer you want is? Cause, if you don't have a customer, then okay. If we're gonna sell it to everyone, $10,000 retainer is gonna get a lot of whoa, whoa, whoa.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that is the challenge. You're probably 100% right about asking the wrong person for that investment. It's not a qualified lead. I wouldn't talk to that lead until I know that they can afford it. But the reason why we're even writing the book is to teach our sales process. Does that make sense? We have a five-year sales process, so once you understand the sales process it wouldn't be hard for them to ask for the 10K. But the title of the book is still being developed in my head as we speak is to attract the person who wants to grow their company right, like an agency owner, a consultant, whatever. They'd never sold a 10K before. I'm gonna teach to them. But if I tell them I'm gonna teach you my sales process, they're like I don't wanna learn sales process because I don't know.
Speaker 1:Cause they want the solution. I love that. Yeah, they don't know why do they need to learn the sales process?
Speaker 2:It's the dream, but I'm gonna tell them that you need to learn the sales process to close bigger deals. So if you're not closing 10K retainers and once you know how to do this, you'll probably never wanna close a 2K retainer because your name makes no sense. You can, honestly. You can work the same amount of energy to get a $10,000 a month client as it is to get a $2,000 a client. Why would you ever spend your time trying to get a $2,000 client?
Speaker 1:right. The funny thing is it can be even more.
Speaker 2:It can be more.
Speaker 1:No, no. I'm saying that $2,000 a month person could be pestering you going. Solomon, solomon, tell me this, tell me this, tell me this. That's okay, they can learn. But I'm saying like someone who's gonna dish that out, they don't even tell me the information. I wanna learn.
Speaker 2:It's a quality over quantity kind of conversation. But we wanna teach our sales process, which is what we're really proud of. It's a scale sales system and every letter of the scale is actually. There's a deep meaning behind it and it's basically psychological kind of like, how you sell rather than hey, I have this product, do you wanna buy it? And then all you do is give discount, discount, discount, discount, discount until they buy. That's sales process for most people and I'm not generalizing this industry as a whole. There's not anybody trying to teach, to make people better. We're kind of like hey, you just talk more and then you sell more. There's all of these misbelief about sales. Right, like nobody wants to talk to a sales person. People don't wanna go into the sales industry. It's terrible. Like I don't even have social media marketing. I get 25 interns requesting a day sales, not one.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Nobody wants to go into it, which is like, my goodness, what's gonna happen to our future, right? Like so long story short? We wanna change that. We wanna make sales fun and exciting in an industry where people want to go into. Because it's the ultimate industry that you wanna be in, do you?
Speaker 1:know how to sell, yeah.
Speaker 2:I love you will be okay.
Speaker 1:I love how you expand everything from, like this little idea that might be in your company and it's not a little idea, but it's like, hey, we wanna help people with sales, and then it becomes this much larger thing of like. There is a generation of people who do not want sales and we gotta show them that sales are cool. And I love how you do that because yeah, and it's true. It's true it moves the needle, because there's a lot of people who are scared to even talk to people nowadays, let alone rejection. Fear of failure is one of the biggest things in the world. Fear of rejection is the second, if those are the two biggest things. That is exactly what sales is.
Speaker 2:So you're gonna get Exactly what entrepreneurship 100%.
Speaker 1:That's why it's so challenging. You're facing your fears every day and you gotta overcome those. And that's why there's these resources, like Solomon's saying, like books he has and a lot of stuff out there and a lot of it's free nowadays.
Speaker 2:Well, how do you do it YouTube? It's what I usually say.
Speaker 1:It's podcast. It's podcast, yeah, podcast. Youtube video podcast.
Speaker 2:It's pretty neat, but this is exciting. Like I said, the cost of starting a business has never been lower. The cost of failing is less and less right, Thanks to chat. Gpt will just work. It'll do six people's work, apparently for $20.
Speaker 1:Like what did you work? I'll give you a little tidbit here. So the whole AI thing, even production of the podcast, has gotten simplified exponentially. People don't realize it because you always sit there and you'll say it's that, like that, chat GPT does the work of six people. What does that even mean? So you start diving in and I use a hosting platform called Buzzsprout to put my podcast. So I download it from Zoom and I put it on Buzzsprout.
Speaker 1:Now the cool thing about Buzzsprout it added a $20 feature. So it's $20 extra a month and they do a description for me, the entire podcast. They take our audio and they write out the entire description for me. My descriptions were never as good as this. That saves at least three hours. Two, they started writing me a blog. So now I copy this blog and I put it out on my website and I linked the website to it and the blog goes to my email list. I never had an email list because I'm like what am I gonna send out? I'm not the best writer. The Buzzsprout writes the words for me. Good, thank you. And it's this understanding of $20.
Speaker 1:Does all of this? That's insane, like the frictionlessness of the podcast, like even the podcast in general. I didn't start until 2020 because there was some stuff that I was like I don't really know. And then I started to realize everyone's at home for COVID. Let's take advantage of this, let's capitalize on this, and it's just getting easier and easier and easier. But it's not easier if you're not in it. It's not easier if you don't realize what's going on. So this is kind of a call to the audience to like get started, go out there and figure out what you wanna do and start working towards it, because it's always gonna be the hardest in the beginning. And then there's technology coming out each and every day to make everything a lot easier and easier and easier 100%.
Speaker 2:I couldn't agree with you more.
Speaker 1:And it's only gonna get cheaper. It's cheaper and easier. Solomon, you're the man. Where can people find you and hear more about ClickX and all of that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so ClickX is easy as ClickXio and my handle is sTimothy and my website is timothycom. That's T-H-I-M-O-T-H-Y. I have an H in my last name. I'll thank my parents for that, timothycom.
Speaker 1:Awesome, thank you.
Speaker 2:My pleasure. Thanks for having me.