Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:08 Welcome to the rogue startups podcast. We're two startup founders are sharing lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid in their online businesses. And now here's Dave and Craig. All right, welcome back to another episode,
Speaker 1 00:20 the rogue startups this week have a guest on Jake Jorg oven. Jake, how's it going? Doing pretty well. How are yourself do and good doing good, thanks. So Jake can I have been chatting in the kind of productized service world for several years now and uh, yeah, excited to have you on the show to kind of talk productized services, talk about sales a little bit and talk about almost selling the business. And maybe we'll leave that one for last. But uh, Jake, for folks like who don't know you and kind of what you're up to, you want to give a bit of an intro to, to kind of you and what you're up to.
Speaker 2 00:51 Yeah. So basically I, my name's Jake <inaudible> and I have two primary businesses. First one is lead cookie or a done for you LinkedIn lead generation service. And we're actually doing, I'm full, I need to get better at my one-liner pitch here cause we now actually are doing full outreach across email and phone as well. So basically a full kind of lead gen agency there. And then our second, my second business is content allies where we turned consultants <inaudible> two thought leaders through content marketing. So that's kind of a, another business there. And then I do a lot of publishing on my personal brand, my website. I've got my own podcast blog every week and stuff like that as well. So that's a bit about me.
Speaker 1 01:29 So I uh, this is a really interesting thing I'd love to talk about is you publish all of your, I'll see business-related content on your personal blog. Right. Does, does lead cookie have a blog itself or does it all go on your blog?
Speaker 2 01:41 A Lee cookie does have one, but it is, um, we, we like we had a content push for about a quarter or we dove into and we did create a bunch of content. It was more video. We actually, Luca, he's probably got a larger YouTube following just cause we've done a lot of LinkedIn tutorials. Okay. But majority of the writing has gone out on my own personal brand and we've only just put out a little bit on the lead cookie. We're actually ramping up our lead cookie podcast this upcoming quarter. But we have not done too much logging or written content with lead cookie. It's mostly gone through my personal brand.
Speaker 1 02:13 Gotcha. And that's fared well, I guess. I mean, I know lead cook is a big successful business, so I guess that worked out okay.
Speaker 2 02:19 Yeah, it's been, um, it's been interesting and I've like, I've talked to written on this, but it's like at one point I've found that like my personal brand is driving about 68% of lead cookies revenue.
Speaker 1 02:31 Hmm.
Speaker 2 02:32 So in some capacity of my articles, my podcasts, the relationships and networks that I make through kind of having my personal brand out there is driving pretty large majority of the revenue. And so that was just this interesting thing that I discovered because I had been building my personal brand for seven or eight years. Um, and lead cookies only about two and a half years old. So it was this interesting thing that I found, I guess when I launched the lead cookie is like aye had been building this brand with really, I was pointing it toward my own like freelance consulting and everything before then. And then I started the business and I was like, Oh cool. I guess I'll just point all of that toward lead cookie and that works really well. And then um, it's kinda work okay with content allies. We have, there's some overlap. A lot of my audience is not as I deal with it, but the, we still have had some great customers for content allies even come from my audience as well. But it's just been this interesting thing where I always look at like your personal brand is, it's an investment you can't really go wrong with, cause it just kind of follows you wherever you go. And you can just point it at the different offers you have in your entrepreneurial career at that time.
Speaker 1 03:36 Yeah, yeah. No, I agree. I mean I think Dave and I look at this podcast as it's about the only content I create on a regular basis. I don't, I'm not really active on social media. I don't blog on my personal site that much, but we, you know, this are 205th episode I think. And so like we put out a fair amount of, of content here and yeah, you go to conferences and people know you and you know, you get introduced to folks, you know, like yourself. And I think a lot of people know us from, from the podcast and yeah, I think it's great and it keeps it flexible to where yeah, you start something new, say, Hey, I'm up to this new thing and you have a whole bunch of people that you know, kind of know and trust and like you, hopefully they'd go check out that new thing. So I agree. It's, it's good investment. I'd love to talk just kind of generally about product I services. Can you give folks an idea of kind of how big lead fuse or lead cookie is? I'm sorry, how big lead cookie is just from a team perspective or I don't know if you share revenue or anything like that. Like just an idea of the size of the business.
Speaker 2 04:30 Yeah, that's fine. It a good laugh. I like, cause I'm friends with Damien over at lead fuse. So good guy. Yes. The lead cookie, we're at roughly a around, I'd say we are ranging between about 22 to 25 people on the team. Some are kind of flex team members. Okay. Uh, ah on the kind of higher end of that. So a large portion of that is kind of based in the Philippines. And then we've got kind of all of our account management in our, like a comp strategists are all U S or Canadian based. So that's kind of the team that we have in place cause we do everything by hand. There's a lot of these um, lead gen companies that just software automate everything, which is against LinkedIn's terms of service and can get you into some bad trouble. And tends to lead to a poor quality service. So we do everything for hand and really aim to be the high kind of quality provider in the space. So it's kind of what we look like on the team side of things. Did you have more questions? Was there more components to that?
Speaker 1 05:24 No, that's cool. I mean I think that's a good, you know, there's a lot of ways to talk about the size of our business and I think that's a, that's a really good one. Maybe 2025 people's a lot, you know, as a podcast motor, I'd say we're probably up to 20 ish now. It's in similar kind of thing. Like we have a, you know, we talk about like the, you know, the, the management and customer facing stuff. Uh, and then we have the fulfillment end kind of on our side, which sounds like the same kind of breakdown that you have. And we're, we're something like 75% fulfillment, you know, if we broke the team down and then 25% sales and admin and project management and stuff like that. Is that, is that kind of similar to what you're talking about?
Speaker 2 06:01 Yeah, I'd say that's, that's probably a pretty, pretty similar, I definitely, in terms of number of people, I'd say the, the interesting thing is that the, um, cost-wise it's a close split just because, um, again, like all the sales and the strategy, like those are the most expensive team members that are all kind of North American based. So it's, it's always interesting from a cost breakdown where, um, but yeah, it's definitely from the team member size probably about the same.
Speaker 1 06:29 Yeah. We've, uh, we've just recently started to having pretty good success with, uh, with sales, uh, at podcast motor. And we'd love to talk about kind of how you guys run your sales process. Because for years it's been like just inbound sales, just me getting on the phone with anybody who wants to talk and all this kind of crap. And now we have a person who's dedicated to it. It's the only thing he thinks about every day. And it's totally transformed the business. I mean like I, I don't really share our numbers really, but suffice it to say this person is well worth what we've invested in them and they're loving it too, cause they're making a ton of money. Talk about like how you guys do sales at lead cookie.
Speaker 2 07:10 Yeah. So basically at the point whenever I was like ready to hand off sales, um, I, I basically just kinda looking around and like there's an interesting thing with, um, I think this is the case for a lot of productized services, but there's definitely, definitely the case for like lead cookie is that, you know, we get so many leads that we can't help. Like if someone comes to us and like is like, Hey, I run a software development company and we work with enterprise and startups or like I or you know, do we do SEO and PPC marketing for small businesses. Like we can't do lead gen for that. Cause like there's just a horrible value proposition and that there's no niche, there's just nothing unique about it. And like we get tons and tons of these bad leads in.
Speaker 1 07:53 Mm.
Speaker 2 07:54 And so we're not badly, not all bad, but like just like we're, we're not going to be able to run a successful campaign. So the interesting thing for us is like our sales is more or less like the first line of um, consultations I guess. And so really what I ended up doing whenever I hired sales is I actually, I found these two guys as like Marsh and Jeff dolor who were doing, basically they had their own kind of cold email and outreach agency and they were, you know, running five clients at a time and just the two of them. And they had this, you know, good little business, but they were, they were not like they were loving the entrepreneurial side. They were loving the implementing and the craft of doing the work. But they, the whole like, Oh God, I have to like think about running a business and growing a business and like all these like aspects.
Speaker 2 08:41 Like they weren't loving that. Yeah. So I ended up bringing them both on board and basically Isaac became my head of sales and almost, what am I going to say is like one of the first like real, the kind of like the strategists, like the lead strategists there where he's like the first person having that conversation, validating the campaign. And then we, and I, a Jeff dolor came on board as the second strategist to kind of create redundancy within the company cause we previously only had one other strategists in the company. So there's an interesting thing, I guess like the angle that I took, it was basically a hiring a consultant in the field into the sales role, which Isaac would have never caught. Like we never would have called themselves a salesperson. Actually, I recently interviewed him on my podcast just so we could like talk about this, but he's like, I don't think he ever like thought he would end up in sales. And they actually, I had Jeff, the other team member who joined, they had him running sales before and he's like not very good at it. Uh, so it was this interesting thing where like, uh, brought them in and it worked out really well. But that, that angle of hiring a consultant I think is a, uh, a unique one. I think that can work well for
Speaker 1 09:46 productized services. At what point did you bring them on? Like a, did they both come on full time?
Speaker 2 09:51 Uh, yeah. Yeah. So we, we started, it was probably about a three month ramp to getting them full time. Okay. What we did is, and this was the beginning of 2019, so they came on in January of 2019. And what we did is we actually had them work in all of the other roles of the company first. Partially just cause it was like, Oh well like that's going to actually, then we're like, you know, monetizing them right away, even if it's not at a great rate. Like they're getting experience in every single role. They're doing the work, they're seeing what it's like to operate. And then over the course of three months, slowly ramp them into the strategist roles and then Isaac into the sales role took probably about three to four months in total to get that entire hand off complete.
Speaker 1 10:32 Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I think we've seen something similar for four months I would say. And we were not as smart about transferring like this subject matter expertise from my head to Chris's head. Chris, Chris is our sales guy. Chris post. I think that that's a like a complicated thing to do in any sales role. I mean I used to sell like enterprise level medical equipment and I mean we're engineers. I've lived, I've a biomedical engineering degree. Uh, and so like I would have to go in and talk to the doctors about the engineering stuff and to the procurement people about buying and they administrators and CFO about the finance stuff. And like there's just a shit ton of knowledge that you have to, that you have to be able to talk to. And, and I think the, this is to a lesser degree but, but even, you know, for us it's like people come in and talk about podcasting and this and that and the other and RSS feeds and hosting and strategy and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 11:24 And I think for people to expect a salesperson to come in on the first day and hit the ground running is crazy. And unfortunately I think this is the thing that keeps people from hiring salespeople because like if you were guaranteed like on for you and I like on the fulfillment level, you're guaranteed that when you bring someone in to run like your LinkedIn outreach stuff, they're going to add this value than that you can charge for. And for us, the same thing. We were bringing an audio editor, we're charging $75 an episode for them to, to edit this audio. I pay them some percentage of that. We keep the rest. It's all upside for us. Then like for the first four months, a salesperson is a sunk cost while to, to, uh, for us at least to you, at least they, they added some value. So I, I really liked that. And I think the facilitating the transfer of knowledge is great cause that's the hugest barrier that we found.
Speaker 2 12:16 Yeah. And I can share kind of just some of, I guess the, the ways I guess that we handled that transition is, I guess the first thing is like I aimed to I think one of the big mistakes, and I've got like written on this, it's like, cause I failed actually to the first time I tried to hand off sales. Like it went horrible. Um, our sales dropped and I had to lay off six people. So like that happened two years ago. It was awful feeling. And uh, what are the worst business experiences of my life? So like that was, I was like pretty burned by that. And so I really wanted to get it right the second time. And so what I like really got down to was like to just build and refine and just like get that sales process to the point where it was just clockwork and repetitive.
Speaker 2 12:58 And like I had it dialed in, I had the script, I had the frameworks, I had the whole flow optimized. So there was just like, like literally I was just showing up to fill a role is kind of where it was. And so I aim to get it to there before I ever started handing it over. And then I documented like everything I possibly could and this, this huge outline, this huge sales playbook like FAQ is, I just like went overboard trying to get everything documented so that when I started training Isaac on there, um, he was like, you know, had all this to go on. He was stable to jump into this system. And then basically we did kind of, you know, him shadowing me for about a month. I shadowed him for for about a month and then started kind of letting him go off on some of his own and stuff.
Speaker 2 13:42 But that shadowing him was also super helpful just to be there on those no curve ball questions, all the things like that. Um, but that was kind of like the, the flow and the process of actually, of handing that off. Um, and it worked out really well in that sense. So he's been running it and he's actually now optimized it. It took him some time to get comfortable, but he, like, we've restructured our pricing and it's like a complete improvement yeah. In all aspects and that, but you know, and it just took them a little time to get to that point of, I guess being comfortable. Well, and realizing the system I built yeah. Still had room to be improved upon.
Speaker 1 14:15 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, I love it. I, so we did, I'll add one thing to that that we did. It's funny, I don't do a lot of things right, but this was right as I recorded when I knew we were going to hire a salesperson. Like I get it in my head, like we're going to hire someone else here in the next couple of months and I've already got it in my head and it's kind of ruminating and and festering and I know, you know, getting an idea of what this person's going to look like and what their role is going to be. So I knew middle of last year in spring, maybe of last year, we're going to have our salesperson, Chris eventually came on in like September. So like in that time I recorded all of my sales calls. And so when Chris came on he had like 20 or 30 calls listen to.
Speaker 1 14:52 And so this was just like, and you know, I mean anybody who is a consultant or runs a productized service, 90% of the sales call is exactly the same. And so like he was able to hear those same questions and the responses I gave, which are exactly the same over and over and over and that cut our working time, like live real time work together to where we, he shadowed me for about two weeks. I shadowed him back. Like you're saying, I was just on the call with him for about a week and then, and then he went and I think, you know, he wasn't super successful in his first month and he sold stuff to people that he shouldn't have sold to. They're just like bad fit, bad value customers like you're talking about before. And, but man since then like yeah, same thing. He's, he's like refined some of the things we're offering.
Speaker 1 15:39 And definitely as a process, I wish we were better at documenting process just cause it's not like, it's not my thing, you know, like I'm just not a type a organized person. And so like I have to do it to enable him to be successful and for like our project managers to be successful, it's like I have to give them the tools they need so they can go be successful and not be nag and meal at a time. And everybody's so much happier. I just have to get that through my thick head. But on that point, I'd love to hear kind of a little bit of like how you guys work, like tools and how do you document stuff and how do you keep it updated and actually like work from it. You know, I'd love to hear a bit about that.
Speaker 2 16:15 Yeah. Yeah. Um, I've one question on your point real quick before I dive into that. Do you ever have customers push back on me recording sales calls are finding that awkward no problem at all? Never. No. Okay. Nope.
Speaker 1 16:28 And I just told him, I said, Hey, we're in the process of hiring a salesperson. I'd like to record our calls so that, you know, we can use it for training purposes. Is that okay? I don't remember anybody saying no.
Speaker 2 16:39 All right. That is good to know. I will, uh, I need to start doing that then cause I'm hiring content knowledge person soon. So that'll be, you've just given me some tips. Look at that. I'm getting some value out of this. So. Awesome. Um, so your question was I guess then on how we, how we work, um, at lead cookie and just kind of how we operate and everything.
Speaker 1 16:57 Yeah. Just kinda, you know, tech stack and how you document and then like how you document and then work from the document. Cause that's, that's the big, it's a lot of, we have a lot of documents to just sit around and collect us.
Speaker 2 17:06 Yeah. So basically what we do is we use a air table for a lot of stuff. That's kind of how we just organize all of our customers and keep like everything organized there. And that's even how we actually organize all of our outreach campaigns is through air table. But basically like when a customer comes on, they onboard with an account strategist and that account strategist, um, kind of learns their business, understands the strategy, what's, you know, the goal, who they're trying to target, the kind of messaging and everything. And they create a Google doc, which includes, um, essentially the targeting of who we're going to reach out to. And like the campaign plan as well as all of the scripts. And from there we have basically a kind of like a R U S team of like managers they oversee. And then what we do to just like keep quality control really high because you know, we have team members in the Philippines who are sending messages on behalf of our customers.
Speaker 2 18:00 What we found works really well is we have our us team kind of the document that the strategists build and then they copy the scripts over and they copy the targeting and they basically drop that into the systems we've built so that the Philippines teams can work from to where it's almost like it's almost error proof unless a U S team makes a mistake because the Philippine team is basically um, like where they work, they're getting access. Like we're giving them the access of saying, Hey, here's your search queue, here's your messages. This is what you need to do and send. And so we build these like kind of custom process documents for each role or to those search pieces. We use air table to organize it and link it. But yeah, we use air table as kind of our core organization of almost everything like air table and Google docs.
Speaker 2 18:49 Um, those two things actually we use, we use Trello a little bit and I tried to, I tried to graduate us out of this and like are minimized tools, but my ops team would just like already love and Trello a bit. So they use Trello a little bit too. So there's, there's a number of tools but they all work together in this like flow that is just rocking and working really well in that sense. So, um, but our goal is basically to try to just have the U S team do all of like the <inaudible> like pointing the direction of what needs to be done. And then Philippines team kind of comes and operates that, run the processes, gives the updates, stuff like that as well.
Speaker 1 19:23 Gotcha, gotcha. And like communication with clients, I guess that's like the U S team that manages that and you guys run it through like HelpScout or something like that or
Speaker 2 19:30 so we actually looked at help scout and we just never, I just, we just never saw the value of going toward that. Um, so we basically though the way we structure it is like we still just have team members emailing directly and we actually do have our Philippines team email directly with customers. That was actually like a big mental barrier I had for awhile of like, Oh man, it's like they're getting emails from some of the Philippines, like they're going to be triggered by that. But like no one really is. Their account strategy is all in the U S though like they have two points of contact, an account strategist and then they have their, a account manager and their account manager is in the Philippines and it has not been an issue at all to have those uh, offshore team members emailing like the daily updates on a regular basis. Like they're never hopping on calls with them. They're never discussing strategy. If they get anything like that, they just kind of loop in the account strategist. But yeah, we, we just have those kind of two points to email that are CC'd on everything and it's been working quite well.
Speaker 1 20:24 That's cool. That's cool. Yeah, we use help scout for just kind of keeping everything in one place and we ask our customers, please just send everything to this email address. All of us are in there all the time. We'll figure out who needs to kind of take care of your message. And that's been fine. I think, you know like one of the things we tried very hard across both businesses to avoid is like siloing. So like direct messages and Slack, you know, emails like one-on-one that's not in an inbox that everybody can get access to, all this kind of stuff. And so for that reason we try really hard, you know, all messages go to hello@podgusmotor.com and we'll figure it out from there. The thing that like from a a workflow perspective I feel like we don't quite have worked out is like when we're onboarding a new customer and starting a new show for them.
Speaker 1 21:09 Cause like for us starting like taking it over existing podcasts again you say you came to us and say Hey can you guys start editing my podcast? Yup, no problem. <inaudible> literally like no extra work for us. But we have served as these extra services where it's like Hey we're going to, we're going to help you launch your podcast or into create the image and submit it to iTunes and all this kind of stuff. Gotten the first like 90% of that really nailed down and it's all run by a gal in the Philippines actually, which is really great because she just totally gets it. And I feel like the last part that we don't quite have it is a little bit what you're talking about, which is like there's a consultative kind of thing that comes back right when we're about to launch the podcast and it's like the really value added part and to hand that back.
Speaker 1 21:52 Like to me seems weird. It seems like taking authority away from her. She's been running the whole whole thing, coordinating, submitting to iTunes, all this kind of stuff. And then for me to get back and say, okay, we're here, here's all the stuff, here's some strategy about how to launch just seems weird. And so I think like talking about, you know, this mental barrier, I just have, I don't know, I have something I need to get over there or we need to do it a different way. Cause it's just something doesn't seem quite right. And I feel like we're not quite delivering the bad-ass value that I feel like we should be in some way there. I don't know. It's weird.
Speaker 2 22:24 Yeah, I can see that it's, and I'm like, ah, I'll say there's like, there's no right or wrong kind of on that stuff, but it's just maybe like an experiment of trying to, you know, like I, I, cause I, I've even tried at times to like, you know, she'd be like, all right, I'm going to try to let this person own it. And then you're like, ah, it didn't work. Uh, and yeah. And so, you know, or it's maybe just like how can the process kind of flow a little different or something. But it's interesting though, those are the, the challenge is that sometimes you just gotta kinda like step back and rethink everything through a bit from the get go. I'm, I'm trying to do a lot in the customer success and this is <inaudible> couple logistic many times to try to think through that whole customer onboarding experience over and over. Or there's just like every time you come back around and do that, I feel like there's always something like that last 10% that can end up making a huge difference there.
Speaker 1 23:12 Yeah. Oh man, you'll get, you'll get a crack out of this. So I had, when, when this gal came on with us at the same time, our sales guy came on because he was starting to sell these packages that are really intense and I was doing all the work before, which is why I hated it. Cause it's like I don't have the mental space to do all this work. Uh, and so I said, okay, I'm going to create a document that lays out everything that we do here and you take it and run with it. Everything that you think sucks, put in this document and he'll do the same thing. And so we put this stuff in this document and I just looked at it over the weekend, it was two and a half pages long and like three months it's down to like three lines that we still have to implement.
Speaker 1 23:50 And I'm like, this is great. Just writing it down. I hadn't looked in the document in like two weeks, but I think just looking at looking at like writing it down, looking at it like once or twice. I kept it open for a couple of weeks. Like you just, it's there and it's like again, like it's festering in your mind, you know, like okay we have a new customer coming into the process. We have to nail this part of it now. You know, that part of it. And that's, you know, one thing off the list and I yeah, patting myself on the back virtually here. Cause it's great when you can do that stuff in there. Like you don't have to think about it again. Like it's the process. She runs the process, customers are happier. It's cool. But what I look at when we don't do that and customers are not happy and we have good team members in place, I look at me and say you suck or your process sucks because like they're good people. Right. And our customers are reasonable. Like it has to be you in the process you put together, like you're saying that kept them from being successful, kept our customer. Are our team members from being successful.
Speaker 2 24:44 Yeah, no that's totally true. And that's the interesting thing cause it's like Mmm. And it's a helpful thing cause like, and especially if you can get a process and while you still own it, um, that's again, like a thing like with handing off sales, it's like I knew that the sales process worked and I just needed someone to deliver it. And that helps you know that you know, if the process is failing or if the person is failing. That first time I handed over sales, it wasn't cause that guy wasn't good. Actually, he's still one of our account strategists who I had run at that time. He's Rick on our team is awesome and he's one of our account strategists. But first of all, I probably shouldn't have put them in the sales role. And second of all, I just did not set them up for success. And so that's the interesting thing about just like iterating or finding those processes. It's like
Speaker 1 25:26 you can
Speaker 2 25:27 aye. I feel like those are like the mistakes I made a bunch early. Every once in a while they still kind of do it again. I do a little less and I catch myself quicker. But like you just hire, you try to put someone in a role and you just don't have it defined enough. I feel like it's one of the, just the worst entrepreneurial mistakes and then it's just horrible all around because they're failing. But it's like on you and it's, it's not enough
Speaker 1 25:47 all your fault. Exactly. No, it's terrible. It's terrible. If you're comfortable, I'd love to talk about how you compensate your salespeople.
Speaker 2 25:57 Yeah. So interesting thing is, um, so like where I got my, a lot of my sales model from, there's an interview I did with um, Dobbin buck on my podcast, which is like all working without pants. Um, and uh, I did this with him and he runs get you wired, which is the, I think they are the number one infusion soft agency in the world. And so it was really interesting cause I actually got a lot of stuff from that like him, like first of all they like structure their team in pods, um, to like organize how they do their ops and then they have like shared resources. And then one of the things that on that interview that he shared, which was just like so good was he's like, I don't put my salespeople on commission cause I ultimately like they're consultants and I don't want them incentivized to sell bad fit.
Speaker 2 26:43 And like I really want our service to have integrity. So like I want them two be incentivized by the overall growth of the company, but not tied in any way to any individual sales. So that way, like they're always making the decision that's going to be on the best of the company because otherwise, you know, they can just sell a, you know, a crappy 90 day launch package or something, get someone in the door, make a little bit of money and then like they're going to turn off and it's, they made some money but the business is in a worse spot for it. And so that was just really interesting to hear his perspective on that. So basically, I have for the first year had Isaac, um, basically just on a flat kind of just retainer salary with us. And that was kinda how we did the first year and over time as I really wanted to, I guess align incentives and like figure out a way to make this improve that, um, and also step away from the company.
Speaker 2 27:38 Um, I actually started tying as compensation to a percentage of overall company revenue. So, again, it's very much incentivized to assigned people that are going to be best for the company longterm and not try to, you know, just, you know, quick hits a cache or something. Um, but that is kind of how I've structured it now. So it's not in any way tied to an individual sale. And so that's kind of how it's structured or adjusted it over, um, the past year. Um, and where we've kind of landed on right now and it, it's, it's been a good shift I guess since making that cause I feel like it's just actually took him and I took another ops, um, team member and to kind of put them on that same model where they had that ability. And it's just, I think tying people's compensation like that gives them a whole lot of ownership and motivation to figure out like, and just think in many ways on like how to grow the business first, but being all on your shoulder as the entrepreneur. So it's been a really interesting shift to see that to where like I don't feel like I'm the only one pushing things forward anymore. If that makes sense.
Speaker 1 28:36 Yeah, a hundred percent a hundred percent I talked about, I think on our last episode with Dave is that that bringing on sales person is the first time that someone else has been moving the business forward in five years. You know, like, and it's totally liberating cause it's a whole part of yeah. The, the business that I don't think about, you know, I don't think about it until he lands a client that we have to go do something for. And then to make sure there's a process and the, you know, people are in place to do it and that's cool. And I pay him once a month and I pay him a lot more every month than I did the month before. That's great. And you know, so, so we pay them. So we pay a, a flat percentage of the first month of revenue, which I think is probably the poorest way I could align it with the longterm value of clients.
Speaker 1 29:22 But it's the simplest, aside from a flat salary. And I talk about that like difference there a little bit. Like I look like I was a sales person before and we had some crazy fucked up commission structures, games and clawbacks and all this kind of stuff. And I thought about that for a while. One of our mutual friends has kind of getting into the world of sales with somebody, one of his team members and is like incentivizing them on churn or like total client retention. And I liked that a lot because I think that kind of gets at like the, the revenue model that you're talking about. But for me that's just super complicated and like you gotta track it and you gotta track every customer. And then like, you know, the salesperson could have like negative commission one month and that would really be shitty.
Speaker 1 30:06 And like, so I don't know. So we pay a flat amount of first month sales being a recurring subscription thing then that's cool. So we, you know, we lose a lot of our profit margin in that first month, but then the rest of the months are great. Yeah. So, and I think that the continuum or like the decision they're like that everybody has to make is like that type of person you get into do sales when you're more of a consultative roll like you're talking about or this infusion soft. It's actually the kind of person I had in mind when I put the job posting out of like inside sales role. I want this person to be like a podcast consultant basically to go sell and then be like a super helpful person to our customers. And that's, that's cool. And that's not who we hired just by happenstance.
Speaker 1 30:54 Uh, and this person is like a total bulldog in the sales arena. And so he's selling stuff and wanting to create new products that we can totally do. It's not that hard. And the cool thing about it I think is when you, when you find the person that wants to work for commission for a larger percent of their compensation to be commission, then you find somebody who <inaudible> is going to go out and, and really push things forward. And so for us, like we're a smaller company and we're probably don't have the processes and stuff like that, so he's just got to go figure all this stuff out to a bigger extent probably then like you could hire a larger range of people and maybe pay them less to, to fill a sales role like you have that's more structured and they have more kind of resources around it. I know that's how I look at it at least.
Speaker 2 31:40 Yeah, there's, it's always interesting hearing like the different ways people approach it. And I I totally get where you're coming from on that. Just like the simplicity of it. I uh, I uh, I did referral commissions. Um, actually we still do them at lead cookie. It's like 10% of revenue and it's a pain. It's trout. Uh, and I'm just like, and so like, yeah, whenever I did continental as I was like, all right, I'm doing a flat fee. Cause like tracking percentages is of like retention is, it's painful. Uh, so, um, yeah, I totally get that kind of thing. And just like, that's the thing is like, or our companies are not big enough to have complex sales incentive systems. Like you don't want to have to maintain that. So just keep it simple is like, and you know, it may not be perfect, but it gets them there and it gets the motivation that are close enough aligned. I think that's as good as you can make it.
Speaker 1 32:27 Yeah. And the sales, the salespeople don't want to think that you're trying to screw him either. And that's what complicated sales commission structures are, is a way for the company to say, if I'm not getting exactly what I want, you're getting fucked. You know,
Speaker 2 32:41 nobody like, you know, whatever. Nobody likes that. Yeah. Interesting. I'd love to hear a bit about, you know, you had a, a near miss selling a lead cookie, uh, last year. I would love to hear a bit about that. Yeah. So I kind of um, went through the process basically. Um, I kinda just got turned on to the idea of like, Oh, like you can sell your company. And you know, it was working with business advisor who very like, fortunately he like got me in a level up that mindset. Um, and Alex McClafferty who actually I think we, we both work with as well. Yep. And he, he kinda like taught a lot on the mindset of just like what makes a company acquirable. And it was useful. And, and then I learned a ton and I'm probably in retrospect, I probably shouldn't have tried to sell, but anyway, I had the company I had handed off sales and was like, this is awesome.
Speaker 2 33:26 Like all I do now is marketing, which is one of the points I'll just quickly say is that just handing off sales doesn't mean anything. You still strive leads. Uh, so that's been another important lesson. But, um, basically I got out of the sales seat to the point where I really was able to not work much on lead cook at all, and I still don't much to date here. And I was like, all right, I'm gonna try to sell this. Like why not? We're at a good spots. Like it's a interesting thing. And I knew that they're like lead cookie. Like we've got platform risk, like we're heavily built around LinkedIn. We're in the outbound area, which you cold email has been heavily disrupted. LinkedIn could be disrupted. And so like there's just a lot of platform risk and volatility in our market. And I've always was kind of like hesitant to sell or just be, I was honestly for a long time I was like, no one's going to ever buy this company.
Speaker 2 34:13 Like this is like, why? Like it's such a volatile industry. And ultimately that was pretty well correct. But like I just decided to like go have a conversation and talk to some brokers as I was like getting stuff ready. And what I've learned in retrospect is that brokers will tell you anything to get you to sign with them because their commissions are insane on these deals. Uh, and even if you sign with them and they don't sell, like they like instance like for basically for making an introduction and like preparing a report, that broker's going to make like minimum, like 30 grand to like upwards to like up to like a hundred K on like your deal <inaudible> for like not a lot of work. So like what I learned, like they just, it's just like a lie to you and we'll tell you like whatever the hell you want to hear.
Speaker 2 35:00 Um, is like honestly what it felt like. And like they were like, Oh no, the platform risk. Like don't worry about that. That's not going to be an issue. Like people understand. Like I said, it's not going to be huge. Like every, every person I talked to. So there's platform risk. Uh, this is like, this is kind of a concern. And then like I get an email later, Oh, he's out, there's too much platform risk. And I'm like, these are all the things that <inaudible> and like, maybe they just like told me, they're like, no, no, no. We've got so many buyers. Like, it won't be an issue. So like that was like this big thing where I just like realize these brokers. Like I just, I just felt like so misled by them and, and ultimately like I didn't spend any money with them. I spent a little bit in it like advising and accounting fees to other people to get ready for the acquisition.
Speaker 2 35:41 But it wasn't a huge financial loss. But the biggest thing with like the massive distraction and like mental overhead, uh, of that whole process was horrible, uh, to like think you're going to sell it. Cause like we actually got up to the point where we had a letter of intent, um, and we signed a letter of intent. We got into due diligence and then it was like even more messed up cause like the broker had been, they also used cash accounting to basically run our finances and then stop updating our finances right after we had a really good month where we just had like, it was just a happenstance month where like a bunch of people prepaid, uh, for like three months. We have one guy who prepaid for six months of service. So it just like looked like we were on this massive uphill trajectory.
Speaker 2 36:27 And then when you actually actually we'll put that on a cruel, like we're just kind of flat and normal, like almost steady and like they, so like we go through this whole like back and forth getting this letter of intent signed and they go to due diligence, they open up the books and they're like, what the hell? Like you're not actually on this massive uphill trajectory that we've just like negotiated all these terms around. And then the whole deal died within like 48 hours. And so it was just like this awfully, uh, annoying and frustrating experience that I learned a ton through. Like I learned so much that like, whenever the day comes, when I do want to sell my businesses in the future, like I am, I am so ready to like, and I know what to expect now. But it was, um, it was just a wild experience and just I am grateful and I learned a ton through it.
Speaker 2 37:14 But the, that was just kind of some of the experience of what happened there. Yeah. Yeah. And now kind of after the fact, how do you kind of feel about the business and your kind of position in and everything? Honestly it feels great. Like cause like it just like it was like this, it was like roughly about like six to seven months of like, I don't know if I'm going to own this business next year and it's really hard to like think longterm when you're like, okay, longterm a I have the business longterm. B I don't like really hard to just like have a clarity on your future. There's two diversion paths. And so like, like literally like the day like it didn't go through. I just like, ah, like breath of fresh air. I was like, cool, I'm not even pissed. Like all right, onward and, and it just felt great.
Speaker 2 37:58 And like I'm at this point now where I'm just like, I'm excited, I'm reinvigorated. I'm just like doing like marketing stuff and I'm just like, Oh this is so cool. Cause like now I'm just going to do marketing things all day, which is what I love to do. Like my unique ability is I love to create things. So I'm just like, I'm just going to create marketing things that drive leads all day and that's what I'm going to put my time toward the business toward, which is what I drives me and gives me energy. And then I just know that doing all these fun things, creating content, you know, appearing on podcasts, the things that I enjoy, these are going to somehow lead to like my increasing my bottom line and stuff. So it's like really cool cause I just get to do the things that are fun to me now
Speaker 1 38:35 because I did I guess over that year
Speaker 1 38:37 build the business where it doesn't need me for really anything other than marketing and lead driving essentially. Yeah. It's funny, I was a, I was similarly close to selling a business last year and yeah. <inaudible> makes you really appreciate what you have after the fact. Cause you're like, this is the best business I know I don't have to do anything. And it makes whatever decent money, like the, the opposite I think is yes, sell the business and then you have a bunch of money and you're just going to sit there and say like, well what do I do now? And you're just going to go do it again. Right. So like that's how I feel about it is like I, I've always, always, always, I've talked about it a very openly on the show here. I've always wanted to sell a business and just make a bunch of money.
Speaker 1 39:24 But I think what I realize now is like, unless and until I can sell for the amount to, where I can never have a half to get on the computer again and can just like buy a sailboat and go around the world, I'm going to keep doing this because this is fun. It's the best way to earn a living and like create value and stuff. And if I sold a business for $500,000 or $2 million or whatever, I can't retire. So I'd have to go do it again, which is a hell of a lot harder than just keeping doing it, uh, for the next few years and getting the value out of the business and the dividends and the earnings that I can make in that time. So yeah, I think selling is selling on the low end is really overrated. I think up to 5 million bucks that you can bring home.
Speaker 1 40:13 If I could bring them 5 million bucks, that's a different story. Well up until then, I don't know if you like what you're doing I guess. Yeah, I guess that's true. There's like um, there's a a startup exit. I'm going to find the name of this podcast cause this is like a really interest <inaudible> well I can't remember the exact name. It was like startup chat or startup stories or some show, but it was like how 250 K exit is life changing. And I think like the interesting thing that like to look at, it's like, I guess to like counter that point a bit is like, I guess from my perspective was like part of the, one of the reasons I wanted to sell it. It's just cause like the volatility of the lead gen industry and just totally not industry. I want to keep building in and like one of the things I just like brought up on that show is just like, and like for if you're like a young first time entrepreneur and like you know you don't have a ton of cash in the bank, like 10 50 K's enough to like wipe your debt clean from anything to like by your house.
Speaker 1 41:09 Like you can literally make a huge step forward and like you're just like kind of removed from like scarcity and so even like a small sale like that, like it's almost just like they kind of like describe it as like a checkpoint and then like cause like reality. Like if I were to like go back and it's like, Oh what's business am I going to start like Oh business. And the lead gen industry, probably not like a lot of like longterm
Speaker 2 41:34 flaws and that's in that industry. I'm like, I just like one of the reasons that I built the content company was like I'm just looking at this and I'm just like, okay, so GDPR is like happening in Europe and I like I saw this like two years ago, I was like it's only a matter of time before it comes to America. Like Canada has already got a version of it and then now California is introducing this privacy act, which is not a, not a huge deal but like I'm just like you know this outbound it's just going to die. Like it's just, it's going to die over the next 10 years or get like really, really hard. And so I, those are all the things where like I think where you can look at an exit, it's like there's times where I think it does make sense where like you can just check point, get out and then like go build something fresh with all of like the new lessons you've learned and build something that is like longterm stable, which is like when I built the content company and like content ally is like, I was just like thought through that meticulously to be like what is a model that is going to still be relevant 20 years from now?
Speaker 2 42:32 Because that's what I want is a company that's going to be awesome 20 years from now still. Yup. That's kind of the mindset I went to and it's harder and it's slower to build, but I know it's like at once I build it, I'm just gonna like be a static for the rest of my life and be, have this amazing asset kind of thing. So yeah, it's another kind of just kind of perspective on that as well. No, for sure. I mean, I think the risk mitigation is, is a huge one. Yeah. I mean if you have platform risk, which I think is what I would call, you know, <inaudible> the Legion industry or, or like industry risk, which I think we have with podcasting a little bit like podcasting is really popular right now in one day it might not be and that's the risk we have I think, but the, you know, the value we have is whatever, not going away as long as the, the basis behind it is stays.
Speaker 2 43:19 Um, but yeah, I I think about that it's like there is risk in every business even, you know, blog content or whatever. It's not super high. But yeah, if you have, if you're an industry with like platform risk or industry risk, getting out and taking those chips off the table is really reasonable. I agree. Yeah. Nice. Well man, this is a lot of fun. I was thinking about when we sat down, I was like this is like the best or it is like sitting down and talking with another like especially productized service business owner about just like how they run their business is like the best hour I can spend. So thank you very much. No problem. Thanks for having me on here. This was awesome and hopefully got some, some good pieces of value. I know I got some stuff from you out of this.
Speaker 2 43:59 So recording sales calls. So that's like big takeaway. Cool. So Jake, for folks who want to kind of catch up and learn more about you and what you're up to, where's the best place? Uh, yeah, so the main thing if they want to see any of my content, my podcast or blog can go to Jake dash jog-a-thon dot com. Um, that's my personal site. Um, just try to type my name somewhat into Google cause I know it's a hard one to spell. Uh, no, probably get there. Um, and then also lead cookie.com is a LinkedIn lead gen business as well. So, uh, those are the two main places to find me, so yeah. Awesome. Awesome. There's a lot of fun. Thanks, Jake. Thanks for me on here. Correct.
Speaker 0 44:38 Thanks for listening to another episode of rogue startups. If you haven't already, head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review for the show for show notes from each episode and a few extra resources to help you along your journey. Head over to rogue startups.com to learn more. <inaudible>.
