#250 Eric Siu - How to Build a $10M Brand From 0

Watch This NEXT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlK2P76_ZZs


How do you build a brand that actually lasts?

Eric Siu did it—and he’s revealing exactly how on today’s episode of Kickoff Sessions.

Eric, the mastermind behind Single Grain and the host of “Leveling Up,” dives into the high-impact strategies that have taken his digital brand to new heights. With nearly two decades of experience in digital marketing, Eric lays out the framework for building a powerful brand and scaling it strategically—all while staying true to his vision.

In this episode, Eric breaks down the essentials of mastering digital marketing, creating content that resonates, and building authority that lasts. Eric shares actionable steps for anyone looking to elevate their brand, grow their reach, and make a real impact in their industry.

You’ll also learn how to avoid the shiny object syndrome that trips up so many entrepreneurs, why consistency is the secret weapon for growth, and the art of balancing short-term wins with long-term vision.

Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more episodes like this!


Connect with Eric
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericosiu/

My Socials:
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/darrenlee.ks
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/darren-lee1


(00:00) Preview and Intro
(02:35) Balancing Growth with Quality
(04:43) Evolution of Content Creation
(07:21) The Shiny Object Syndrome
(10:43) How to Leverage Partnerships and Acquisitions
(12:38) How to Craft Winning Content Ideas
(16:27) The Role of Storytelling in Content
(22:10) The Rule of Three Years in Business
(27:44) Lessons for Young Entrepreneurs
(32:06) The Importance of Continuous Learning 
(38:43) Building The Right Company Culture
(42:31) Eric’s Siu’s Hiring Strategies
(46:40) Tips for Selling an Agency
(47:31) Building Sellable Businesses
(50:42) Navigating Scaling Challenges
(53:49) Building Client Relationships
(56:29) Focus vs. Diversification in Business Models
(58:04) Lessons from the Facebook and Yahoo Deal
(01:01:19) The Power of Being Part of a Great Team
(01:06:38) How to Build an Authentic Brand
(01:12:10) Authenticity in Business
(01:14:14) Structuring Mastermind Events
(01:20:59) The Value of Work Life Balance
(01:25:26) Lead Generation Strategies 
(01:28:39) Balancing Business and Relationships

Chapters

• 0:00 Scaling Hiring Strategies for Success
• 3:06 Navigating Entrepreneurial Evolution and Focus
• 9:22 Packaging and Storytelling in Content
• 16:37 Podcast Ad Evolution and Sponsorships
• 24:56 Long-Term Business Growth Strategies
• 33:45 Understanding Personality Tests for Team Building
• 38:39 Leadership Lessons in Team Management
• 45:19 Building and Selling Successful Agencies
• 51:39 Scaling and Focus in Business Growth
• 58:17 Navigating Friendship and Entrepreneurial Growth
• 1:08:28 Finding Purpose Beyond Material Possessions
• 1:12:24 Mastermind Events and Hot Seat Coaching
• 1:21:28 Hiring High Standards and Cultural Fit
• 1:25:34 The Value of Nurturing Relationships
• 1:28:50 Maintaining Individuality in Relationships

Transcript

Eric Siu: 0:00

80% of the time you're hiring people that have been there done that. If you're starting out, you might not be able to afford these people, but as you're scaling, you're going to need these people, because Steve Jobs likes to say, like we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do, not so we can tell them what to do. The more people brag about the number of businesses they have, it's actually a negative signal. No-transcript own thing. You know, I did that and things went like straight down here.

Darren Lee: 0:33

Before we start this video, I have one small favor to ask of you If you the subscribe button down below, so we can help more people every single week. Thank you, I see a lot of your content's focused on, like the lessons you teach around, your experience in business, which is like so valuable because you've nearly been at it two decades. But you always specify hiring, which is really important, and something that I've been good at and bad at and I'm learning at. You know. But how do you do that more at scale with bringing in more people into your ecosystem to support the business, your content and everything?

Eric Siu: 1:07

If you need to hire at scale, the way to think about it is how do you hire programmatically? So let's say you need to hire 100 people or 1,000 people. A lot of these big agencies what they do is and even tech companies, they hire in cohorts. So you hire in cohorts and you put them in a class, You're teaching them and maybe every week there's some type of curriculum that they're going through, right, it's almost like you're going through university.

Eric Siu: 1:27

I remember doing that when I was like 18 years old. I was like tech support and then they put us into these cohorts. That's the way to do it. If it's like super scale and you're getting a lot of leads, because the problem with, let's say, we get like a thousand leads tomorrow, whatever we actually can't fulfill on those, because if we try to fulfill on those, the quality of the work goes on a lot, which affects our current clients, which affects our, our team as well, cause they stress out about it. So you got to balance it out For us right now.

Eric Siu: 1:57

Like we get a lot of leads and there's there's a publicly traded company that's about to say, hey, like we're, we're down to it, in, in. We want them to drip feed it to us instead of trying to take them on all at once. So, um, to answer your question directly, you know if you're looking to hire crazy scale, it's programmatically but ideally. What I tell my team right now is we want to be slow and methodical about it and we want to have an unreasonably high talent bar, because the thing I tell them every week is look, look, in the next decade or so we can only afford to hire the top 5% of people, because the top 5% of people will understand how to handle 10,000 agents, or 100,000 AI agents.

Eric Siu: 2:35

I hate using the word AI, by the way, because I think it's so played out with marketers we like to pollute things. It's been so polluted In what way? Because everything is AI. Everything has an AI label on it, right? You look at all the talks, all the webinars I'm going to show you how to do this AI thing and at the end of the day, it's just like generative AI. Maybe they're using some prompts with chat, gpt or some mid-journey stuff. It's nothing too sophisticated, right? So maybe in the beginning that was novel, but you got to keep innovating, and so now I think it's cooler to remove the AI from it and just talk about use cases that are awesome.

Darren Lee: 3:06

Well, I think it's the counter trend. Right, with every trend there's an equal and opposite force. So in the beginning, ai was like, oh, it's new and novel and you have to scare mongering, which is like, oh, it's going to take all agencies away, all regular jobs away. But then now, when there's a label on AI, you almost look down on it on some degree. Right, it's a negative signal. Now, ai sales, any ai content, right, and you can. You can basically look at it. Anything on linkedin, you interviewed greg right, greg eisenberg I'll never forget. He had a post recently which said that, um, he saw a linkedin post that was so badly written that he was so happy to see it because it wasn't written with ai and he actually liked the post as a result. Because it's what we need, right, it's like authentic, but it's imperfect. Right, and therefore it's not perfect, but it's on the right path, yep.

Eric Siu: 3:51

Yeah, I think, uh, look who knows where all this stuff is going to go in the next five, 10 years. You know we talk about artificial general intelligence and everything. I I'm very optimistic about it. Um, but I think we're kind of putting the cart before the horse right now.

Darren Lee: 4:02

Yeah Well, especially for what we do, and this is why your content's been so interesting. How many episodes have you recorded? Well, over a thousand.

Eric Siu: 4:08

For which one. That's what I mean, right, so? You have so marketing school is over 3,000,. But keep in mind those are only like five to 10 minute episodes and then for leveling up.

Darren Lee: 4:24

I think it shows your values. It almost says exactly everything about you already and about what you're interested in, whereas if people are just using ai for their content, it's almost like a flash in the pan. They're not going to stick with it, and when did you start that podcast?

Eric Siu: 4:36

so it's the first one leveling up, that was in 2013. Yeah, dude, it's been 11 years okay.

Darren Lee: 4:43

So maybe 2012, your content has changed a lot recently. Yeah, I think on youtube, yeah. So when our first podcast was out, I think you were probably like 40k. Now you're like well over 150 now. It's like 160 or something like that, yeah what made you, what forced you to kind of level up and change?

Eric Siu: 4:59

well, I'm always trying to adapt. I would just say in the very beginning it was called growth everywhere, the podcast. I'll just say step one was I was just interviewing entrepreneurs that those interview podcasts had a marketing spin to it and that was unique at the time that I started that podcast, before Tim Ferriss even started it, and, um, at the time I remember I would post to YouTube and some of these would get like thousands of views. Like I know, this was when YouTube was super easy and they just needed a lot more content and I didn't stay consistent with it, right, but I would just say then the evolution was okay. I started interviewing, you know, I started making more videos around marketing in general, they're more direct to camera.

Eric Siu: 5:34

And then, you know, after COVID I moved back into interviews like this, for example, and I would interview people around like dating or finance or whatever, and those would get a lot of views at the end of the day. But then I realized, as I was doing those, I'm like you know what? One, I'm not too interested in these conversations. Two, this isn't exactly helping my business. And three, I just like talking about business and marketing at the end of the day, maybe some personal growth stuff, you know, with health, because it relates to business, and so I'm like you know what I'm going to go back and recently I've switched back into talking about what I want to talk about, and if I'm going to interview someone, it better be someone. Like you know, in a couple of weeks I'm going to have Anthony Pompliano, right, you know he's he's you know, in Bitcoin space he's got a couple of businesses.

Eric Siu: 6:14

Seth Godin right Like I'm interested in those conversations, you know, funny enough, like I did a dating one recently, right, and we just released it today, but we're no longer going in that direction. Um, that guy's got a lot of views. That video will get a lot of views. The last one he did got like 300k long form views. But I'm like who cares at the end of the day is if it isn't related to you know, directly related to who I'm trying to target long term and the quality of the audience.

Darren Lee: 6:36

So a big area that I focus on with, like all our clients and whatnot, is are we getting the wrong views? Yeah, so we've had some podcasts that are, like, I'd say, payroll, like as dry as you can imagine. It would be more worrying to see 100,000 views on a payroll video than 1,000 executives that are based in the UK with an average salary of 200K plus, right. So there's like that positive and negative reaction, whereas from my show, as you mentioned earlier, it's like what do we talk about? We're more focused on sales, marketing, online business building yeah, but it's much more natural to me, right. And when I go outside of that, yeah, you kind of you break your own rules by understanding what the rules are initially right and then leaning into what you want, so like that's a good way for you to be able to do 10 years, yeah, of experimentation.

Eric Siu: 7:21

And you know, I heard a phrase recently, um called the shiny knowledge syndrome. So that's just shiny object syndrome. So, and you know, I heard a phrase recently called the shiny knowledge syndrome. So that's just shiny object syndrome. So entrepreneurs, get you know the entrepreneurial ADD. We do too many things, we try all these different things, and especially in the online space, you hear these people that have 10 different businesses. Right, I've learned, you know, now that I'm in my 30s, like late 30s, right, it's just like the more people brag about the number of businesses they have, it's actually a negative signal. It's a red flag that they don't actually have a big business on any of those, right, and so shiny knowledge syndrome is you're consuming too many podcasts, you're consuming too many books and you're taking any bit of knowledge and you're implementing without a filter, right, and so it's actually worse than shiny object syndrome, because shiny object syndrome, you actually have to start, you have to stand a new business up.

Eric Siu: 8:02

It takes a lot of time. Shiny knowledge knowledge syndrome can go on forever and that actually ends up hurting your business. If you have no direction, you have no goals.

Darren Lee: 8:09

That's like the guys that go into every single program. They go program to program to program, mastermind to mastermind, yes, and they're getting all the best information, but everything works. It's just about which do you want to disseminate, disseminate and move towards I?

Eric Siu: 8:22

remember, you move towards.

Darren Lee: 8:24

I remember seeing an old Sam Oven's video which is like if you have, what did he say? He's like famous for just like extreme focus to the point where it almost sounds like irrational. But he mentioned like, basically, if you have two businesses, it's an indicator that you're broke. Now, that's obviously not the reality, but it's a good point though right, it's a good point.

Darren Lee: 8:42

He did it with consultantcom, he's doing it now with school. What have you observed from even yourself with this? Because if I look at your ecosystem, you have multiple different podcasts, single brain, you have the new networking events, which is crazy, and then you have the book. Now I would look at that, thinking that's all part of the ecosystem. But what do you think within there pulls you away from the goal, or does it all connect?

Eric Siu: 9:08

Totally yeah. So I remember maybe like four or five years ago it was, you know, we had a software going on, we had the book launch coming out, we had an education product as well, and then we acquired two agencies at the same time and then we had, like you know, probably a couple other things going on. I would say the book's unrelated. The book was just a passion project of mine and that was launched three, four years ago.

Darren Lee: 9:29

Really, why wouldn't that?

Eric Siu: 9:30

set into Because that book is like a personal growth book. It's really designed for my 15-year-old self because I played a lot of video games. That's how I look at life. It's like a video game to me. That's for anybody that plays a lot of games that has no confidence, right, like the teenager version of me. That doesn't really relate to marketing much at all. Maybe there's a chapter on it, but I would say the main thing I focus on right now is single grain like by far it's the most focused I've ever been, probably in the last couple years. And then the podcast that I do, marketing School definitely relates to it and we get a bunch of clips from it too. It helps with views at the end of the day. And the other one, now that Leveling Up is focused back on business and marketing. That I would say is part of the ecosystem. And then the agency group that Neil and I have my podcast co-hosts. Our intention there is to build a vibrant community, but also to see who we can partner up with or who to potentially acquire.

Darren Lee: 10:25

So it does help single brain as well yeah, man, so I'm in a, an agency group like that as well. It's basically taking like six to seven figure agencies to eight figures and the guy that owns it like absolutely one place either to partner with or to acquire. Yeah, in that regard, yeah, and that's what even type of integration is that? Is that vertical integration?

Eric Siu: 10:43

No, yeah, I mean it can be both yeah.

Darren Lee: 10:45

Yeah, what's the group called Agency 8X?

Eric Siu: 10:48

So it's.

Darren Lee: 10:49

Genflow's. You know Genflow? No, they basically partner with it. Used to be influencers, so like your big fitness creators, content creators, but now like Ali Abdaal and stuff oh he's in there.

Darren Lee: 11:02

No, they've partnered with those companies. Okay, yeah, and they build the products on the back end. So they do the socials and they also do the product on the back end. They're working with Lara Costa at the moment in particular. They're moving more into LinkedIn and they're going to be working on building the info products and stuff on the back end. Oh, interesting, yeah, but their approach is with Iman Gadzi and whatnot. So they probably get paid on the retainer and they get paid on the performance on the other side, which you know.

Darren Lee: 11:26

I think we've taken the leaf out of their book too, in the podcast space specifically. But I want to just focus specifically on the content. So, if I look at your YouTube, your thumbnails have gone crazy recently, like the quality, the way you're running the episodes. Do you think that that approach to basically follow like the best trends and the thumbnails and the design and the copy is at odds to the quality of the content? And like this, like we just sat down here, like getting to know each other and chilling, do you think it's kind of at odds to it?

Eric Siu: 11:59

yeah, so I would say no, because it, the way we looked at it before, was incorrect. And we actually have a guy that's helping us right now, josh, and so he works with a YouTuber named George Gammon. He talks about macroeconomics, and then Ken McElroy he owns like $3 billion in real estate and these guys are super busy, right. But when he comes in, like, for example, when we're doing a podcast, like he was just mentioning earlier this week, he's like dude, like if you're gonna do a podcast, like, make sure that the first question you ask that is the hook, it better be a banger, otherwise the episode's gonna suck because your 30 second retention is just gonna drop off. That's really important. Um, so I'm like the idea is more important than anything. I think that's something we can all get behind.

Eric Siu: 12:38

Um, oftentimes, you know, in the past I used to just kind of jump into things that start recording whatever's on my mind, but the packaging is what matters at the end of the day. Everyone talks about the packaging, which is the thumbnail, the headline, also the first 30 second retention. I do think it's important. I think if I had to hone it down to anything, it would just to simplify it for everyone and probably just be the idea, because when we have a really good idea for example, let's just say we did an episode with your rich BFF, vivian too right, the hook with that one is like you know her, her secret plan to wealth, plan to generate $25 million Right, and she's always got like she's got an she's a little sassy right, she's got an attitude Right, and so, like she's got, she's like clips all day, right.

Eric Siu: 13:25

And then you know, it was like, um, modern relationships are doomed right, that's the headline. And then the thumbnail was like ken and barbie like like fighting each other and um, you know, I think it's just like um, something about like I think that, oh, this is super controversial. It's like are women ruining relationships? Right, you just have people fighting each other in the comments. But those are two examples of good ideas. Would I do those videos again? Probably not, because I'm more focused on business and marketing, but it just goes to show you the packaging, the packaging, the packaging.

Darren Lee: 13:51

And you mentioned about the topics being controversial. It's funny the relationship space, because I have a lot of relationship podcasts too that have boomed for whatever reason, and I think it's probably because people sit in their own camps, right. It's kind of like in the business world you have like organic versus ads agencies versus solo businesses. These things have just boomed out of and no one knows why they have those beliefs, which is when we get into the relationship space, the fitness space, the food space, super controversial, right. But for you then, with your content, specifically because you still wanted to be, you know, helping single grain and showing that it's real, it's not like a clickbait, and I think running that conversation flow from good intro into the actual episodes really, really strong. Yeah, how come those episodes sometimes have boomed to 400, 500, 000 views as a result?

Eric Siu: 14:37

yeah, I think. Well, one the idea tam matters a lot. So, idea, total addressable market. So if you have, you know, finance or dating, it's obviously going to be a lot bigger versus like us talking addressable market. So if you have, you know, finance or dating, it's obviously going to be a lot bigger versus like us talking about marketing, for example. That time's way smaller. So, like you know, um, I like Matt diggity stuff on SEO on on YouTube. He's getting like probably 10, 20, 30,000 views per video, which is great for SEO, like those are really high quality views and so so one, you have a very large idea, tam.

Eric Siu: 15:02

Going back to finance and dating, and then to your point, you have people fighting in the comments all the time. So we had a Vivian short that we just kind of relaunched recently like a short form, and that one got 6.6 million views because you have the men and women fighting each other and it's almost like religion and politics. Everybody thinks they're right and you cannot win at that right, just let them fight in the comments. It's fantastic. So, yeah, but, like, also, you're just not getting the right people at the end of the day, Exactly Right.

Darren Lee: 15:26

Like our day is turning into leads, and we'll talk about deep platforming in a while too. If you don't mind, I want to ask you some controversial to me which is can I, can I just back up a second?

Eric Siu: 15:35

And like there is, there are short forms where, like Neil and I were recording marketing school, where they just rip right. One got like three million views and it was one where I was talking about how you can go to um florence and there's a laurel piana outlet there and it's really expensive clothes and you can get it for 70 off, and we're talking these are like typically thousands and thousands of dollars, and that one did well because I was educating but I was telling a story at the same time, and from that one I got a couple of texts. One one was a cmo of like a multi-billion dollar crypto company and he's like dude, I really liked that Right. And even yesterday I was at a, at a dinner, and then my friend's wife was there. She's like dude, I saw your Florence thing on Laurel Piana, dah, dah, dah, right, um. And so those to me are like those are higher quality views. You know what I mean. A perfect one, but people buy the story not the product right.

Darren Lee: 16:27

Yes, that storytelling component is uh, it's everything right, because we could talk about the same shit, the same funnel, the same ad, the same seo, but the way that you frame it it's going to be so important. I want to ask you about ads yep, specifically around podcast ads. Do you have much experience with that? What did you mean? So my, like, evolution of understanding podcast ads specifically has been on audio. Initially, they people did shout outs and whatnot. Then it evolved into you could advertise your podcast on buzzsprout, anchor and so on. Yeah, which was weird, because, well, actually it wasn't weird.

Darren Lee: 17:02

What I found out about that was people were people were getting a download by sending a push notification, so it's a kickoff sessions. On your phone. You would swipe it away and it would say download. Yeah, it's kind of artificial. And then move now into youtube ads. So now you can promote a youtube video and get 50, 100, 400, 000 views for like 400 dollars. Yeah, and then bring in a bunch of subscribers. But if you look at the YouTube analytics, the retention rate is like two seconds on the video. How do you think about that? Have you considered that in your ecosystem?

Eric Siu: 17:38

I'll just say what we've done with podcast ads in terms of selling ads, and then how we run ads for ourselves, ads versus sponsorships now though I can speak to just our experiences there and then how we run ads for ourselves, ads versus sponsorships no doubt I can speak to just our experiences there. So there'll probably be some gaps in what you're looking for. So I would just say for us selling sponsorships in the past, so we had a hosting company that's actually nearby here called DreamHost, and they were paying us about 60 grand a month or so and that was like a three, four year deal and it was just a 30 second ad. We never had to refresh it, they never asked us for analytics, they never asked us for how, like it was the best deal ever, right. I think that's harder to replicate because they really were fans of Neil and myself, and so you are able to sometimes get those sweetheart deals.

Eric Siu: 18:20

I will say right now we are talking to a like a Martech company where you know we're close to getting a deal done where it would be like potentially a hundred grand a month or so. But that is also on brand affinity as well. So I would just say, like you know the the no like and trust factor. That matters quite a bit. Who knows if the deal will get done deal gets done or not but they reached out to us so we'll see if that happens. Those are few and far between because we try to get it done with other people. We try to go with like iHeartRadio, and they were great, I mean, but at the end of the day we just had a lot of like random, like you know, therapy ads and things like that just didn't quite make sense to our audience. So that's like us selling sponsorships, I would say us having sponsorships on our podcast in terms of our own products.

Eric Siu: 19:03

So this is kind of maybe going around your question a little bit, but still hopefully helpful. No, of course, but we're promoting our agency owners association in the pod and that's grown that community to a five-figure MRR right now. Right, monthly recurring revenue, and we're not even fully. I think we'll end up selling it for a lot higher, like probably like an annual program. But the fact that it's already doing five figures right now is kind of amazing, right, and it's just like hey, you know, blah, blah, blah. Here's this community. Go to marketing schoolio slash agency to learn more about it to grow your agency. That's actually worked pretty well for us because the people that come through that page that page we run it on school um, that page converts at about 2.53 percent or so what?

Darren Lee: 19:46

yeah, well, it's an authority frame. Yeah, right, you and neil, specifically, you've done the work. You've built the agencies. Yeah, it's this nine figure agency owner giving people advice to go zero to one or whatnot, right. What I was kind of focused on was more about actually ads, as in, you run the ad button to promote your own videos, yep, and you know, I've seen those kind of pop up and kind of go randomly, whereas, in contrast, we've run sponsors, we will, we do sponsorships, we do the deals on the backend, yep, but our agency, so your AG one, your eight, sleep all these kinds of companies, um, and it's the what? The numbers are absolutely wild.

Eric Siu: 20:18

Like they're literally this with um. There's a handful of companies. We've done this actually. So we, we did a, we did a podcast sponsorship swap with my first million cool. So with my first million hubspot network. We also did this with marketing against the grain. So we do do these collaborations.

Eric Siu: 20:34

And where we got this from was um jordan harbinger. I think that's still his name, right? Um, art of charm is still his podcast. No, actually, no, it's a jordan harbinger show, yeah, so, so, um, he likes, he, I think he spends seven figures a year running ads on other podcasts and he'll sponsor them, right, I was like, oh, interesting, maybe we don't necessarily want to spend, but, like with my first million, it's, it's a well known podcast and so what we do there is we use a.

Eric Siu: 20:58

We were using chartable, and chartable allows us to kind of share podcast data with each other so we can see how many people are converting over, which is, how many people are actually clicking through to see when they run an ad, how many people click through, and vice versa. They're doing the same thing. So we do that. We don't necessarily pay for podcast ads and we'll do swaps too, and that's worked out pretty well for us, and then from that that actually leads to collaborations, like we're doing one with HubSpot's Marketing Against the Grain podcast on Friday. And you know, in addition to doing the swaps like that, we do these podcast collaborations where we kind of get to, you know, take advantage of each person's audiences. So that's the experience share I can give you there, but in terms of the other stuff you're talking about, probably not as much.

Darren Lee: 21:41

No, it's just's interesting because, again, it's the early stages of that, but you're so much further on the sponsorship side I didn't realize that was charitable. That's really interesting. Yeah, because we don't. There's another um platform called mike mcgillan mcgillan. I've heard of it. They basically do uh analytics for this stuff as well magellan yeah, yeah, that's it yeah, um, they're a good platform for that as well, and you can see basically where the money's flowing.

Eric Siu: 22:04

And basically, who's running the ads? Who's running the ads Exactly?

Darren Lee: 22:07

Tell me about the um, the rule of three years.

Eric Siu: 22:10

Yeah. So the rule of three years is, if you want to build anything amazing, whether it's a business or an audience, it will take you always three years. The first year is going to be hell right. Second year, you're still slogging it through, and then, through the third year, you're really going to start to see some traction. So let's say you want to build a seven figure business Not going to happen Usually doesn't happen the first year, unless you strike lightning in a bottle.

Eric Siu: 22:30

Um, because you, there's a lot of patterns that you have to pick up. It's, it's business is just about pattern recognition. At the end of the day, and even with the growth everywhere podcast, when I first started, it only nine downloads a day. After the first year, second year, only 30 downloads a day, and then the third year, that's when it started to get moving. That's when we started getting like maybe a thousand or like 1500 downloads a day.

Eric Siu: 22:51

And the thing that is going to keep you going is one are you learning? And then two if you're creating content, you know, are people leaving comments every now, and then this is these are unsolicited responses, right? It's like oh my God, how come this isn't getting more views? Um, this is criminal that this isn't getting more views right. That's when you know you're moving in the right direction, and you have to stay consistent, because most people just end up giving up too early because they're vain, and what I mean by that is they're so self-conscious about the views, they're so conscious about what self-conscious about what other people think about them, that they're not focused on their own learnings.

Darren Lee: 23:23

that's why that's why podcasts are so difficult to grow and that's why instagram is so easy to stay with, because it's just the likes. Right, people just flash your abs, flash their ass. They're going to get likes, yeah, and it's. It's short. Well, it's obviously like extreme validation in the short term, but no one's willing to build. And that's why it's funny, because, like the businesses that you've had, reasons why I admire your work is because you've just played the game at a high level for a very long time. Thank you, you know. And if you compare that to your 22 year old on twitter, who has a eight-figure agency, yeah, you can just see the levels of of game right, and you can see when they're talking in their videos direct to camera.

Eric Siu: 24:01

There there are elements that are missing, that they're that they're conveniently leaving out because they have to foster this image. Right, because they have to foster that image to, to sell masterminds courses and things like that, right. Did you ask why, yeah, why, yeah, so why, why did they have to fake it?

Darren Lee: 24:17

yeah, almost like a at a there's. Obviously the technical level of their business isn't growing, but almost at a subconscious level too, yeah so one thing is they have to fake it, because this is interesting.

Eric Siu: 24:28

I'm not going to name any names, right, but it's like oh, like, I sold my, my eight figure agency and now I'm selling courses. Wait, how does that make any sense? Sure, you make amazing videos and you're getting millions and millions of views. Um, again, I'm not going to name these about business. There isn't a lot of substance, and when you're looking at the videos, it's super well, well produced. But what are you showing? Oh, you're showing a Lamborghini. Oh, you're showing that you're traveling to Dubai. You're showing all these things. Where's the actual substance? Where's the actual like?

Eric Siu: 24:56

When you hear someone like my friend, Ken McElroy, who lives in Scottsdale, he's like yeah, I'm $1.2 billion in debt right now. Well, why? And well, the banks don't want you to know this. This is what you got to know, this is what you need to know about infinite banking. Like, they're going deep, right, when it feels very surface level, it probably is. And when they're showing you other things to compensate, it's because, again, they don't have that depth. And then courses are great. I think masterminds are great. It's just that the majority of people that sell that stuff, they're looking to make a buck, and this is why, when you go to a lot of masterminds I'm sure you've been a lot of masterminds there are ones where all they care about is just making money, and those are just not for me, right? Because the ones, the people that are long-term, the people that are long-term because they're not focused on the next thing, they're focused on building for 30 years.

Darren Lee: 25:44

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Darren Lee: 26:40

It's interesting because I've heard you mention about it's not just always about the financial side, the money side, and that's why I think these offers to get you to 10K a month and stuff they just don't have. They're not of substance, whereas, like you've built an actual business I've been building a business for a long time you do what you say, you do what you do and you say what you do For us as well. We've been trying to show it at such a high level and that's why, like, the ultimate social proof, I think, is yourself yeah, in the beginning, yeah, and then. Yeah, you can show in under case studies and testimonials, but you have to do it for yourself.

Darren Lee: 27:11

If you're selling, if you're selling like a fitness package, you have to be shredded. If you're selling yes, ken malkroy's service you have to know about finance and debt financing and investment banking and all these different things that you can't just skip that part. But but why is that like? So the online space right now you're, you're in a nice area online space, which is much more like. It's much more of a mature market. I think you know yourself neil tim stoddard, um charles miller like you guys are much more further on the journey, but for younger guys in their mid-20s it's a shit show. Yeah.

Eric Siu: 27:44

Yeah, I think for the younger people maybe this is me speaking to my 20 year old self it's, you know, as long as you stick with it, not, it's not a one year thing, it's definitely not a five year thing, it's not a 10 year thing, but it's 20, 30 years, you'll be fine. And I had, I had dinner with a client, um, a single green client, the other day and you know he does a hundred million a year in in revenue and it's bootstrapped and it's he owns a hundred percent of the equity. I believe Um, and the guy's in his sixties and he's like dude man, like it's not like I'm really smart or anything. I just worked on one business, cause I can only focus on one thing, and it's been 30 years. And then, um, similarly enough, um, there is a billionaire heiress and she told one of my friends that, hey, you know, um, I got some advice for you. Um, you know my family, everyone around me, my grandfather, my father, my brothers. They built multi-billion dollar companies and the way they've done it is they've just done it for 30 plus years and they focused on one thing.

Eric Siu: 28:35

And the problem in your twenties is again well, it's good that you're experimenting, but once you find something, stick with it. A lot of people it's like, oh yeah, you. But once you find something, stick with it. A lot of people it's like, oh yeah, I'm not even talking about that. The one guy was just mentioning oh, I shut down my eight figure agencies. There are multiple people where they stopped at eight figures. It's like, well, why did you stop at eight figures? It's because the boss that was facing you. You weren't ready to beat that boss right and you gave up and decided to start on something else. We lose faith, or at least talking to myself at 20, it's like I didn't have the confidence to go to the next level. But had I just stuck with it, it would have been fine.

Darren Lee: 29:09

Do you think there's merit to having just one business but multiple offers inside?

Eric Siu: 29:13

the business, totally, yeah. So when I say one business, it's everything you do inside of the business is tied to that, that one thing. So, for example, single grain right, it's where we help people drive more customers. We want to be the most innovative marketing company that drives customers right, so anything that can serve that for our clients. I think that the challenge I had in the past was you know, oh, I have a senior living website that's definitely not tied to Single Grain right, yeah a senior living affiliate website, right.

Eric Siu: 29:40

Or I had like a quiz, saas right. That has nothing to do with single brain. And then I had like the book which is a passion project of mine but like that took a lot of time and effort. So it's like those are distractions from the main thing. But now all my distractions, if you can channel it into one thing, like my two podcasts, the distractions are channeled towards single brain. My distraction with agency owners association that is channeled towards single brain as well.

Darren Lee: 30:01

Because that was a problem that I had.

Darren Lee: 30:03

So I was doing the sam ovens approach, which is like bang your head off the table until I get the a figures here yeah which worked like uh, I'll be completely transparent, the agency to done for you podcast side, yeah, it's probably at around 50 to 60 000 a month, but it's very team focused. Yeah, operationally heavy, yeah. So then, and that was done for you, but it's high ticket. Well, high ticket is all relative, but it's like 5k a month, yeah. So then we left 99 of the market out because most people can't afford that. Yeah, so that's when we developed the incubator, which is more of a coaching program.

Darren Lee: 30:35

So then in my head I spent six months being like is it, is it good, is it bad? Is it good, is it bad? And I was like let's just do it. Yeah, funny enough, what's happened is, when I run an offer for the done for you service, I get more people in the incubator and vice versa. People are like I don't want to do it myself, yeah, or do it with you, I want it done for you. So it's something that I realized. But again, you know you, can you connect the dots backwards?

Eric Siu: 30:56

yeah you know, what's interesting is, uh so, my podcast co-host, neil um. He had a lot of coaching offers, like you, we talked to all the people in the space back in the day and so you know we had all the numbers. He decided to go go all in on it and the the problem with the coaching he found is that the revenue capped out usually caps out around 10 or 20 million, which is great, right. But you know, now he's got multi nine figure agency and you know the goal is to how to? You know it's like, okay, how does it go to a billion in revenue a year? Right, and so like. But that that's completely different, right, it's so. You know it just depends on what you want at the end of the day, but you know it is what it is.

Darren Lee: 31:33

True, there's pros and cons to everything. Right, At the end of the day, like you, you cut your like again. You don't hold the ego to it. Taking the extreme example of politics, you're not in this vote where it's that or this. You have that less of an emotional reaction to it. So, 16, 17 years in business, as you've made these adjustments and you have a lot of lessons from here, what's kept you less focused on the money and more focused on maybe like the impact?

Eric Siu: 32:06

Yeah, Is that kind of fair to say yeah, no. This is interesting because. So, going back to Neil, we have I had him take this personality test called Principles U Y-O-U. It's the best personality test I've ever taken. It's just super accurate, right.

Eric Siu: 32:17

Like we have all new employees or people interviewing to join Single Grain. We have them take a look at it or take it. And there's a section in there where it says intrinsically motivated. So I'm 99% out of 100. So I really don't care about money. And it's funny because when I look at Neil's test, he's 1% intrinsically motivated, which means he's completely driven by money. Right, and we laughed about it because he's like, yeah, when I so I've known him for like 13 years he's like, yeah, I've never at any time felt you're driven by money, I'm just driven by the learnings at the end of the day. So I think maybe that's a way of answering your question around how I think about things. It's just about learning and teaching. But the trouble for me is one thing you have to watch if you're like that is the shiny knowledge syndrome, because you can get really trapped on all these podcast, books and things like that.

Darren Lee: 33:04

Yeah, it makes sense, but you do, I guess, have the drivers towards the business, though you know when you're. Basically, you still have a good idea of like the numbers within your business. Yeah, it's just the fact that you're not spending it on a Rolex. Yeah, that's kind of the difference here.

Eric Siu: 33:15

Yeah, To me. It's again going back to it's all a game, right? So if I can Like oh, I leveled up to be able to do that and that's just a scorekeeper over there, and so I just think it's fun to be able to, it's like well, why do you want to do that? Like it's not like I'm being greedy, it's just like because other humans can do it. And if other humans can do it, then I can do it too.

Darren Lee: 33:37

So why not?

Eric Siu: 33:45

Tell me about that personality test. It's so amazing and they're like oh, my God, I want to take it too, right, I'm like, oh, please, please, take it. And then they take it, but it's about 15 to 20 minutes. It's like any other personality test. You're answering questions like you know how often are you on time, or whatever. Like, for example, it'll tell me how detail-oriented I am, so details aren't my thing. So it's like 6% out of 100. 6%, right, but it shows that I'm actually very dependable. I'm like 82%, 87% dependable, and it's funny, it'll show me that, right, and then it'll show me how practical I am. So I tend to make a lot of decisions very quickly, but I'm also not deliberate, right, so that means I'll move very quickly, um, and usually the decisions will be good. But because I don't think through a lot of things, right, I'll still make mistakes, right? So, like I'll, I'll know.

Eric Siu: 34:36

Like, for example, if you take the test, we have someone on our team that's amazing, but he's very low on practical, like less than 10%. And so when he's, when he starts to say things, sometimes it's like it's clear to me that he hasn't thought through the second and third order consequences, and so it's he's like, yeah, you know, we should just hire all these people, well, okay, well, if a, can we afford these people right now? And like, what are these people going to do? But what about all these other priorities that we need to hire for? Right, and so, with him, because I saw that in the very beginning. I know that's like a weakness to work through and just like people know that when they're working with me, um, they need to give me more of the TLDR, um, I just get to the point Right, and so it's really important to understand your strengths and weaknesses there. And we have someone on our team. She's very she's like a peacekeeper. That's her archetype. Um, she's very low on tough right, but that's hurt her because she withholds feedback which then withholds progress for the company, right. So there's a lot of dynamics there that you just learn to play with strengths and weaknesses.

Darren Lee: 35:32

Well, looking at your example there, if you're someone who's less into detail but you're more persistent, that's going to be good as a CEO, right, but that's not going to be good as an employee, Because the employee needs to get the spreadsheets correct and everything in order.

Eric Siu: 35:45

Yeah, and, by the way, you want to hire people that are detailed around you to cover for your weaknesses, like, for example, neil on the test. He's very detail oriented, he's very tough, right, his empathy is like zero and, like you know, mine's pretty low too, but, like you know, we all have our quirks. Yeah.

Darren Lee: 35:59

And dude, that's something. I'm actually going to do that with my team as well, because, um, obviously, agencies is all about client services, right, and me who's moving out like trying to move at 100 miles an hour.

Darren Lee: 36:11

I was managing client relationships myself, yeah, and it was fine when we had six clients yeah, but when we had 20, 30 clients and customers, it's obviously way more difficult, right, and I noticed because I was less empathetic, I was less able to relate to them not doing something or us being behind and whatnot. So we hired a my friend who's also a relationship manager as a result, and he's the opposite to me. He was a teacher of um, great yeah he's a patient. Exactly, he was a not high school, last night school primary school teacher in the uk yeah.

Darren Lee: 36:42

So the guy like walks through problems with people and so on, so forth, and that was something I realized about myself and I was like, oh okay, I'm still going to try to become more empathetic, yeah, but I'm not. This is going to be more like a lifelong thing than like a 20 minute change does that make sense, yeah so that's why I've kind of hired and that's why I hire.

Darren Lee: 37:01

I'd like to get your thoughts on this actually. So you know, you've seen a big uprising solo business, solo entrepreneurship. You have, you know, people like Justin, justin Welsh, brett Williams all these guys have kind of led the way for solopreneurship. Yeah, would you prefer to have a team or to do what you're doing at a smaller scale, I guess, without a team?

Eric Siu: 37:18

yeah, I think it's. It's going to be a biased answer. No matter what, I would prefer to have a team because there's so much more leverage and having it. And, by the way, I don't I don't poopoo on solopreneurship, but I think it's amazing that they can do have a business. I think Justin says, you know, two or $3 million a year and a lot of it's profit. That's amazing. That's a good life for him, um, but for me, the way again, it's, it's a game, right, want, I do like.

Eric Siu: 37:45

The thing I've learned in the last couple of years is if I were to focus it on on, on. One phrase at least for me is focused involvement, right, so that means focusing on the main business and being involved, right, I? I drink a lot of the Kool-Aid and passwords like, oh yeah, you know you should just, you know, hire a CEO and then let let them do their thing, right, um, and so you, you read about that. That kind of sounds like solopreneurship, right, like, you know, you go off and do your own thing, um, and you know I did that and you know things. Things went like straight downhill, right.

Eric Siu: 38:12

So, but going back to your question, um, I would prefer to have a team because I like the idea of building a high performance sports team. I like the idea of coaching, coaching, high performance, like I really love learning and teaching. Um, so someone that's really high level, I I get a lot when I see the the light bulb moments and I see when they're, when they're producing right, they're coming up with ideas. I get a lot of energy from that. Um, so it's just, it's just what I enjoy at the end of the day, same I'm exact same as you.

Darren Lee: 38:38

Exact same. What like leadership lesson do you have around leading a team?

Eric Siu: 38:43

what would you, yeah, so of you know, people look at culture. It's like, oh, this is like nebulous thing. I think culture is a 60 day moving average and what I mean by that is, um, it's not a culture we've had over the last year, cause it changes very quickly. If you're maintaining a good 60 day moving average, which is like your last 60 days or so, right, and your culture has been amazing, that's all you can really focus on, because you can acquire two other companies. Your culture is like completely different in the next 30 days or so, right. But if you're very intentional about it, then you're, the bar stays very high. And then if you stay involved, you're kind of playing. You know, um, at least in American football, you have a free safety who's kind of sitting in the back and you know making sure that, um, you know kind of the last line of defense, right. So that's where I'm staying involved and I'm jumping in on things where I can and I'm really sprinkling my magic where I can. I'm not trying to micromanage necessarily, but when I show up, it kind of resets the bar each time and I'm realizing that when that's not there, when the founders aren't involved, things just tend to drop a lot because nobody else is incentivized as much as you are as the founder, because you have the lion's share of the equity. And so let's use.

Eric Siu: 39:45

Going back to Neil again, because we talk all the time in his company. He has no direct reports because he's terrible with people and he'll say this himself. We've said this on the podcast right, no direct reports, but he's heavily involved, like he's calling his CFO, like multiple times a day, he's calling his executive multiple times. He's pushing the pace, right. So, going back again, focused involvement and that's the main thing I've learned about leadership, because if you're not there, you're not present, then there's going to be no vision, there's going to be no direction. All that stuff about mission, vision, values it has to come from the founders.

Darren Lee: 40:18

Yeah, they set the pace, yeah, and everything else follows from there. And also you need to, I think. Anyway, you need to keep reiterating that pace.

Eric Siu: 40:25

Oh my God, you have. You're the chief reminder officer.

Darren Lee: 40:27

Yeah, Because otherwise, like people are going to like I don't know why we're doing this, why we're starting this new initiative.

Darren Lee: 40:31

Yeah, you have people who are almost like sulking in the business, whereas you need to be constantly showing up and setting the bar for it. But I think there's also have you I love. Basically, the biggest kind of point he specifies is giving like a circle of safety to everyone so everyone can act their best, right? Hormozy always says that if you have a problem and you hire someone and you tell them to do something the way you did it and then they fuck it up, you can't be mad at that person, right? So you kind of almost have to allow them to go off and do their own thing.

Darren Lee: 41:03

We actually hired a new designer recently and design is I don't know how about you, but I think design is really hard to get right. Get a good designer, yeah, and it took me I would say it took a year to get a new good designer and then when we got him obviously had a rough guidelines but I was like dude, all right, you know, I'm allowing you to be the designer you want to be. Obviously, stay within these guidelines, whatever. And the guy crushes it. Crushes it because he's feels comfortable, he has confidence. Myself and our head of operations will kind of review things and make sure things aren't like crazy. But, um, I think it's a nice position to be in.

Eric Siu: 41:36

And then, for the most part, he says that he's never been happier yeah, I would just say you know, on one end people talk about hiring people that have been there, done that. It certainly works in the agency world. I would say maybe that's 80 percent of the time you're hiring people that have been there, done that. Um, if you're starting out you might not be able to afford these people, but as you're scaling you're going to need these people, because steve jobs likes to say, like we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do, not so we can tell them what to do. But then you have the other 20, which is maybe where you're hiring high potential. You know young people and you're letting them kind of. You know you're guiding them, but then eventually they'll figure out things from because they're younger. They're way hungrier too, right Versus the people that have been there, done that, the more established in their careers they have families and everything. So you want to have a good mix. You want to have a good, healthy tension at the end of the day. And then you know again a little bit, but again focused involvement. I think that's probably the biggest leadership lesson for me, because I going back to shiny knowledge syndrome.

Eric Siu: 42:31

Back in my twenties I read a book called let my people go surfing, right. And I was from the Patagonia founder and I've told this story a couple of times, but it's just like you know the concept behind the book. It's like oh, patagonia, you know, you have these really cool vests. They have really high quality products, right, and they've done really well, they've steadily grown over the years. And he would let his people go surfing during lunch. I was like that sounds really cool. I immediately took it without even thinking about it, okay, so I didn't filter this knowledge, okay, and I just stopped showing up to the office.

Eric Siu: 43:00

And then what happened afterwards? Everything started crumbling. Right, this is the first time everything started to crumble. People would come to the office watching Family Guy or in pajamas. People wouldn't even show up to the office. People would just be eating chips and not working right. And then, you know, I remember someone a couple of years later he's like dude, I just want to tell you, everyone hated you. And I was just like wow, it's because I was the absentee founder. I thought that's what people wanted and I could like that is like the most wrong. And I guess I'll just add on really quick I thought that because I'm like a self-motivated person that I love learning that everyone else like I'm like dude, I didn't do that well in school. I'm like if I can figure it out, anybody can figure it out, right? I'm like this is simple. People are like amazing, right.

Darren Lee: 43:46

But if they're not incentivized, they will never care as much as you will. That's what diversity should be in hiring right Is that you have someone who is. They complete that circle of all the emotions. We need all the skills that we need and you're reinforcing the value you mentioned when buying and selling agencies. What's the average deal size you have when you're buying?

Eric Siu: 44:03

So right now we look for smaller agencies, probably doing anywhere from 500 K to 1.5 million in profit a year, yeah, yeah, and so they these can be like probably top line three, four or $5 million or so, um, and we want things that are additive to us. So you know, for example, we don't do email marketing, we don't do, we don't do um, we don't do, like influencer marketing, for example. We want them to be additive. Or maybe there's a global footprint where we can cross-sell and up-sell into their logos, and so there needs to be multiple synergies and ideally we want to be able to keep the management team on, because agencies are so people-driven. So there's a lot of dynamics in our checklist, but that's generally what we're looking for, so these would be smaller deals.

Darren Lee: 44:44

Yeah, both small, but still not that small because with a company that's doing three or four million a year, they probably have 20 employees, 30 employees.

Eric Siu: 44:53

Perhaps. Yeah, it depends on what. If it's all in Asia, you might have 80 employees or something. Yeah, of course, but if it's the US, you might have 15 or 20.

Darren Lee: 45:01

Have you ever had any issues doing integration?

Eric Siu: 45:06

Yeah, I mean yeah, we, we definitely did. And this goes back to involvement again, because when we did the integrations, um, I wasn't as involved as I should have been. But there's this, you know, not in my stomach, where I'm like I should. This doesn't feel right right now. Always act on your gut, that's one thing I'll say.

Eric Siu: 45:19

Um, what happened was we did two agency acquisitions at basically the same time and then we hired a gm and this person actually, um, ended up stealing from us. She stole um clients, she stole like employees and, um, you know, you know, she said her, her brother was sick, which was true, and we put her on paid leave. We said we love you, we got you go take care of that, um, and then what happened afterwards was she actually told a lot of people that, oh, my god, the company's growing going down. You should, you know, join me or whatever. So she ended up taking a couple of people to this other agency and then she tried to do the same thing to them. She had actually done the same thing to the previous agency before.

Eric Siu: 45:52

So all that to say is like, had I been involved, had I been focused, had I been acting on my the gut, by the way, the gut, is your wisdom right, that's your experience. Trust like it's right like 90 plus percent of the time. But I would say you know, those are kind of the lessons, like had I, had I been involved, I think with those acquisitions they would have worked out better. But the answer to your question with integrations is you got to be all over it and ideally you're doing. You know we got rushed by our broker and, by the way, I'm taking responsibility for all of this. I'm not even going to blame the broker or the GM that we hired. I would just say that you want to do probably four, five, six months of due diligence just to make sure it's a perfect fit. You're talking to their customers, you're talking to their key employees, because that will set you up for a good integration.

Darren Lee: 46:40

What advice would you have for someone selling an agency? Yeah, so in what context?

Eric Siu: 47:01

So someone's building an agency. They're probably at, let's say, the 500K profit a year and they're looking to sell. How do it's a service that's trending upwards. It's like influencers community management. You know everyone wants to do YouTube now, right? So you got to look at is there a good total addressable market for it? And then, ideally, you know you are running on some type of operating system. So a lot of entrepreneurs know of traction, eos. So entrepreneurs operating system. There's also scaling up, um, those are great because it's it's you're having systems and processes within your business and that makes it sellable.

Eric Siu: 47:31

You want to build, build a business to be sellable, not necessarily because you want to sell it, um, but because they know that they can operate it without you. Um, at the end of the day, cause it's just, if it's just a, a shit storm and it's all ran by the founder, well, guess what they. And it's all ran by the founder, well, guess what they're going to be keeping you on for the next couple of years or so. But if you can prove that this thing can run without you, then you are going to. It's going to be an easier earn out for you.

Eric Siu: 47:57

Maybe you can leave earlier, but I would say, like you know, yes, build it to sell, mostly because of the processes and the systems, but ideally, you're not trying to sell the thing. Ideally, you, you're building for the long-term, for your growth, and then eventually someone might come to you because when you least expect it like one of my friends that lives nearby, he tried to sell his company in 2020, nobody wanted to buy and then all of a sudden, like recently, he got an offer, like a really amazing offer. You just don't know what's going to happen and if it seems amazing, then you just take it.

Darren Lee: 48:21

So cash flowing every year from your business as if it's a sale?

Eric Siu: 48:25

Yeah, so you should have an exit every single year. So my friend, syed and I were talking about this. He has like a bunch of WordPress companies and he has he's like why do I need to sell my company? I have an exit every single year and so like let's, let's see your agency is doing, like you know, a million, 2 million, 3 million a year in profit. That's a good chunk of money and you can get it. Get up to 5 million, 10 million a year in profit. That's an exit every single year. Some people don't even see that in their lifetimes, right, a lot of people don't. Um, and then, okay, if you get it to 5 million in profit, then that agency, the multiple, can go up to 10, 15 x or so. So let's say it goes up to 50 million dollars or so, right. Or you get it to 10 x, maybe it goes up to you can sell for 100 or 150 million or so, right, well, it gets crazy.

Darren Lee: 49:04

How. How did those multiples work? Because, like, the common knowledge in agency space is one the multiples are low and then two, just to scale is really tough. So, like, how do you? How do you think about that? Cause you're someone who's actually done it right.

Eric Siu: 49:17

Yeah, so usually with agencies, if you're doing like 500 K in profit, you might be able to sell for like one or two X on profit, right, um. Or if you get it to a million or so, maybe you can sell it for two, three, four X right, which is what you usually hear. But you start to get the scale. Let's say you get it to like a 3 million in profit. You can start to sell it for a higher multiple, seven, x or so because you're actually building a system around it, right. You have the 5 million. You can actually build a platform around it, meaning that you can acquire that business and then buy other agencies and roll it in for multiple arbitrage, which I'm happy to explain in a second. But you get to $5 million.

Eric Siu: 49:51

The reason why people are willing to pay more is because there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of infrastructure built in, there's a lot of talent, there's a strong management team. There's a lot less risk for these private equity shops that are partnered with agencies that are trying to do a deal. When you're $'re 500 K, there's a lot more risk. There's key man risk. Even at a million, it's still a key man risk, um.

Eric Siu: 50:09

And then to your second question why? Why don't most people do it? It's because there's they. They run into problems around, it's a lot of people issues and I just can't deal with it anymore. Oh my God, the headaches right they tap out and, um, yeah, yeah, these start selling courses. They start, but I don't poopoo on this, but they start selling courses. Maybe they, you know, pivot into, like agency coaching or whatever, which is fine, um, but it also means that you know there was a mountain for them to conquer, but they didn't want to summit that mountain, which is fine what do you think about when people say that they close their agency because it was too difficult to sell?

Darren Lee: 50:42

I think it's total bullshit total bullshit.

Eric Siu: 50:45

Yeah, yeah, it's total bullshit. I closed no, it's because you weren't. I think it's total bullshit, total bullshit. Yeah, yeah, it's total bullshit. I close, no, it's because you weren't competent enough to grow it.

Darren Lee: 50:50

Well, you're also not making money, though, because, like I know, uh, you familiar jordan platten no really big sma agency guy in the uk, yeah and uh, he's an education business around sma as well, but he still kept the agency and agency is doing like 115k a month now. It's a huge leadership team and everything and he's focused on other business. But he was telling me about other guys in the space, uh, who are doing different stuff now, but the guys who are really crushing it still have the agency in the portfolio and again they've worked out getting a CEO and stuff involved and they're, like he said to me, completely brutally honest. He was like if you were making 100K a month, why the fuck would you ever close that business if it actually worked?

Darren Lee: 51:32

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Eric Siu: 52:13

Yeah, well, the thing is, they will acquire clients right, and then they'll churn them out. Their churn is just too high, so you can't really scale it, because if you're churning like 5% of your revenue per month, you need to replace 50% of it at the end of the year. Right, it's actually more than 50%, and so that's a big problem. People, especially in the internet marketing, the digital space, people don't think about client retention, they don't think about service, they don't think about churn. Right, that's a big problem Because, if you can, you keep the churn low, and you have, you know, net revenue expansion you can have in SaaS we call this net dollar retention. That can actually be your expansion revenue. Your upsells, cross-sells, actually outpace everything, right, and you're just growing like a weed because you have multiple services that are complimentary. People don't want to churn because you have to. You have so many things built in Right, even though another agency might be better at like one thing. You can do multiple things pretty well, and so does that affect the sale, though? Um, a lot of times, so people might come to us.

Eric Siu: 53:04

For example, we do a lot of SEO work and not a lot of agencies do SEO Right, and so they'll come to us for SEO and that's kind of the gateway drug. And once we start looking at their stuff, we're like, well, let's take a look at your ad account too. What's going on over here, right. And we start to uncover more and more stuff. And then they're like, okay, yeah, you guys sound like you're lot of landing, landing and expanding, so you might work with Coca-Cola Brazil for like $3,000 a month, right. It might not seem like a lot of money, but what happens is you start to do good work. It starts, the account starts to grow more and more in Brazil and they're like, hey, let's give you a shot for like pitching in, you know all of LATAM? Right. And it gets bigger. It's like, okay, let's give you a shot, boom, right. So that's how these accounts become three thousand dollars a month to multi-seven or eight figures a year damn man.

Darren Lee: 53:49

Yeah, because I've noticed that ourselves, that we're trying to get people in the door and then we build offers on the back end and that's where we're making the asymmetrical returns right, because a lot of them are. Some companies are doing four million a year. We'd come in, add a one million a year. Yeah, offer, you know.

Eric Siu: 54:02

And so on, so forth I didn't think about from that perspective though, like geo expansion, yeah yeah, but, by the way, I wanted to back up a second you talked about okay, you have an agency doing 100k a month, 200k a month, like why would you shut it down? Absolutely like stupid, right? So, okay, people that are, you know, creating content are like I shut down my agency and decided to do this. Okay, that's bs. And then the second piece is, um, the people that are hiring ceos. Right, I guarantee you most, most of those companies that have hired CEOs aren't growing as fast as they used to, with the founder involved.

Eric Siu: 54:29

Right Again, going back to focus, involvement, there are a lot of people on Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it, that talk about building a holding company and hiring a CEO and getting out of their way. It does not work like that, right? Like I've tried that, by the way, multiple times, multiple, multiple times Again, who has the most incentive? You, the owner, and if you can create good incentives for the CEO, still, you might give them 5%, 10% in equity, maybe 15%, 20%. They're still not going to care as much as you will. You still need to be. You need to trust but verify. I'm not saying you need to micromanage, but you need to trust but verify.

Darren Lee: 55:07

Who's done that really well in the space. So Alex Lieberman has been trying to do that for quite some time for that portfolio holding company. Greg Eisenberg has been doing it, hunter Hammond.

Eric Siu: 55:15

I would argue that, okay, let's use Neil again as an example with his agency, right? So, and actually a handful, I was at a dinner yesterday. One guy sold his agency for about $160 million, and so I know a handful of agency. Was at a dinner yesterday. One guy sold his agency for about $160 million, and so I know a handful of agency owners that are that are doing, you know, around that range, and they're just focused on that. They're not focused on a holding company or whatever. They might be buying agencies and rolling them in and integrating them, and that's about it. But that's the platform, right?

Eric Siu: 55:44

I would say, the people that you mentioned, I I think, um, they do pretty well, which is fine, right, but they don't do as well as these people that are very focused, right. And when I say well, they're all doing well, personally, I'm just saying like, in terms of like scale for the business, right. So it just depends on what you want. I think it's like okay, um, if you want to build something maybe five, 10, 15, $20 million a year, amazing for yourself, right. But if you want to swing for the fences, you tend to see like tenuity, for example, that's an agency. There's, you know, there's W Promote. They sold for a good chunk of change, right With multi nine figures and then power digital, kind of same, same type of outcome. So you know, those guys were just laser focused on one thing.

Darren Lee: 56:29

With the portfolio company. It seems like you're just learning new business models continuously and just going in different directions. It's going back to the Sam Oven's approach. So just the laser focus versus going out. It just seems very difficult to do any type of scale with that.

Eric Siu: 56:45

I think to me and I've had this problem before I had to get punched in the face a couple of times to learn it, so I'm not immune to this, and I easily find myself gravitating back and like I want to do all these things Right? Um, I'm intellectually promiscuous, right? So, like the shiny object syndrome, shiny knowledge syndrome. Shiny knowledge syndrome leads us to shiny object syndrome and I think you know I have friends on Twitter that make fun of the holding company model. It's like like one guy his name's Matt Paulson. He just runs the email newsletter and they do like $40 million a year. He's like, yep, you know, I'm going to go teach kids next couple of weeks in South Dakota. I'm going to tell them why it doesn't make sense to run a holding company. All he does is make fun of holding companies, right. So again, they're viable. But all of these people that you mentioned, like I'm friends with Greg, I. But all these people that you mentioned like I'm friends with Greg, I'm friends with Alex Lieberman, right, I think they're amazing people.

Eric Siu: 57:36

I think, including for people myself, have we just focused earlier? It would have been better, and I keep. I hated this before when people told me in my 20s, like I read these books, I'd hear from people yeah, you know, you need to focus, focus. Yeah, bill Gates focused. Yeah, warren, it focused. And I'm just like but, but, but, but, like I'm different.

Darren Lee: 57:52

No, you're not different. No, history repeats itself. Right yeah, tell me about the Yahoo and Facebook story.

Eric Siu: 58:04

Yeah, so with Facebook. So Yahoo wanted to acquire Facebook for a billion at the time and they were heavily unprofitable, they weren't making a lot of money. And Peter Thiel, who wrote the book Zero to One, he was one of the main board members, main investors for Facebook, and so they had to. From this offer, they had to have a board meeting, right. So Mark Zuckerberg, you know Peter Teal, um, you know he's in the meeting room and he's talking to the other investors and they're like yeah, we should probably think about taking this deal, right. Um, and so Mark Zuckerberg walks in. And then Peter, she was like we know, I think this would be a quick call, probably 10 minutes or so. We're not going to take the deal.

Eric Siu: 58:34

And Peter's like whoa, whoa, whoa, like dude, you're going to get $250 million from this. And you're like in your early 20s right now and like that's a good outcome. And then we're going to get a good outcome too. You should really think about this. And Mark's like, well, if I were to sell, I'd probably want to go build another social network and I kind of like the one that I have already. So why would I? Why would I sell? Right? And that proved out to be a very prescient decision and I think 99.9% of people would have sold. But he stuck to his values and people respect him for that. And now it's a multi I think they're they're over a trillion, multi-trillion dollar company or close to it, I think they're all very trillion, multi-trillion dollar company or close to it.

Eric Siu: 59:13

What's the lesson there? The lesson there is one you got to stick to your values. And two, if you love what you're doing already, then you wouldn't let outside influences control you. You have your board trying to control you there. You have money people's money, like Yahoo trying to influence you. But when you're so set on what you stand for and what you're trying to do long-term, you can block all the outside influences out. Right, and that matters a lot. Like.

Eric Siu: 59:39

We talked about this on the podcast recently in marketing school. It's like, dude, you take on VC, you take on investors, you give your, maybe your employees have equity. That's all fine, by the way, and there's nothing wrong with that. Just understand that you have other stakeholders and they will influence you. And there's a book I'm reading right now where they talk about pendulums. Right, like, if you drink alcohol, you're part of that community and they'll influence you too. Right, if you go do yoga or whatever, that's a community. Maybe that's a good community, right, but there's outside influences everywhere trying to control you. And the more you can kind of stick true to your values, then you'll probably make better decisions for the long term.

Darren Lee: 1:00:14

Especially as you evolve, I guess as you get older, because your interests have probably evolved but they're your interests though versus the typical co-founder relationship that when they get in their 30s they get married and then the wife wants them to sell the business and then it all crumbles down.

Eric Siu: 1:00:28

The spouse is a major influence as well.

Darren Lee: 1:00:31

Like everything, though that's what's so interesting is the fact that people don't. People aren't playing an infinite game. They're not looking at long off time horizon so that when these things play out, it's a shit show, and that's why sometimes you got to make the better decision to not get involved with those people, whether it's a friend, a partner or whatever looking at over long enough time horizon. When things go south, yeah, that will happen. Question for you on that, like personally so you know you were like the gamer dude when you were a kid and you had maybe a social circle. How has that kind of evolved yourself personally? Like your interests have changed over your 20s and 30s and, yeah, do you have you found yourself to be like? You know you've new set of set of friend group and, yeah, you acting kind of I don't know like I'm trying to say there any kind of negative side to as you've grown the business in terms of who's come into your circle, who's taken stuff from you and lost friends.

Eric Siu: 1:01:19

You know what I will say. So I guess two things that you mentioned a lot the lost friends thing, that that's an interesting one, um, so I would just say the one thing, and I've thought about this recently with gaming, ever since I was like, um, maybe eight or nine years old. The main thing that stuck out to me is like, if you want to do big things, you need to join a team, and not just any team, you need to join an amazing team. So in every game I was always like World of Warcraft, I always made sure I was part of the Uber guild the best guild, right, the best team, cause you got to kill the best dragons, right. And when you had to compete with, like you know, the horde right, you would do hardcore things. Like you know, your guild leader would call you at 3am and wake everybody up like 40, 50 people, just to make sure that the other team couldn't kill a dragon, and we would stomp on them until 6am until they gave up, and then we'd kill the dragon, right, that's like hardcore, right, but you have to do that in business, too. You got to be hardcore. You got to go like the extra mile, and in EverQuest, too, right, like you know it's, I was part of the best guild and like that's how I got like the best loot and everything, right, um. And so even in business, you gotta be a part of the best team. So, um, you know, put the best team together. Or like you gotta be a part of the best community, right, um, for me I'm like, okay, I got to research like who's the best coach I can end of the day, and I think I realized that at an early age, so that's always kind of stuck with me.

Eric Siu: 1:02:34

The thing I'll say about friendship and my mom tells me this too I have, I had some friends from elementary school. I had one one that lives nearby, actually like a block away from here, and I was messaging him for lunch but like we still keep in touch. The reason for that is because he's an entrepreneur. I'm an entrepreneur. We came from like nothing and you know we had good family lives. It's, I think you know, upper middle class, I'd say for both of us. Um, and so there's no judgment there, because he knows what it feels like to almost miss payroll, to almost have to bankrupt your company, to have to go through all the struggle of being an entrepreneur, so there's no judgment from his side. And then you have your other friends, um, who will never judge you right, like they might not be entrepreneurs, but they love you for who you are and they'll always stay in touch with you. Like I have a best friend, he FaceTimes me every day, we FaceTime each other every day, right, and like there's no judgment and we just talk about whatever.

Eric Siu: 1:03:22

But you know, if you end up starting something and like for me, I've always came from like, I was kind of like, you know, hung out with cool people and everything Right, but I was always kind of lower tier you start to rise up the ranks and you start to notice that, oh, you know what? Um, they don't like to hang out with you anymore because your, your habits are changing, you're becoming a different person and you start to hold up a mirror to them. It's like, oh, like you could have done this stuff too, because if Eric can do it like, that guy had nothing going for him before. If Eric can figure it out, like but why can't I do it Right? And so it's, it's no knock.

Eric Siu: 1:03:55

I think it's no knock on anybody in particular. I just think it's human nature and my mom tells me this too. She's like, yep, she saw this, like I had a. I have a rich uncle, so I saw this with your rich uncle everyone there's a lot. Charlie Munger says that it's not greed that drives human beings, it's actually envy, and you just have to be very careful. So it's actually better to be rich and anonymous than rich and famous.

Darren Lee: 1:04:21

But if you think of your scenario. Like you're a nice dude, like you're like super chill and like just a nice guy. It's not like you're online shitting on nine to five people and so on. So if you were that person, you could see how people like would literally hate you as a result, and that reflection like people of course aggravated. They put in the knife and they turn the knife deliberately. But for someone like you, who's just like a nice, chill guy who likes video games, has built these huge businesses.

Darren Lee: 1:04:48

to see someone like have envy and jealousy and I don't know anything more negative, it's just kind of unfortunate.

Eric Siu: 1:04:55

Yeah, it is unfortunate, but I just think it's human nature Cause I certainly felt like when I was younger I was definitely jealous and like how did? How did these people have these things? And I don't right, I think it's just human nature. Um, so, like I, I'm very understanding about it. And then this is also interesting too. I was, I was at a dinner um two YouTubers there. One guy's name is George Gammon and then Mark Moss. They get millions of views per month. I'm like Eric, you should see more polarizing things, like what you actually think about things. I'm like, no, that doesn't make sense. He's like, oh my God, you would get so many more views. I'm like it doesn't make sense because if I actually talk about some things that are polarizing, it's not even clients might churn or whatever. It's more so, it polarizes my employee base and it sows division in that and that makes it very difficult to run a company. That's why it's not worth it to talk about polarizing things, for me, but you also don't need to be so.

Darren Lee: 1:05:44

I'm quite similar to you in that regard. The typical advice to that is create an avatar of who you want. Split the audience, throw stones at everyone who's not in there. Create an avatar of who you want. Split the audience, throw stones at everyone who's not in there. Religion is right.

Darren Lee: 1:05:56

Yeah, yeah, anyone who's not in the religion is outside the religion, yep, and that's what some of the best YouTubers have done. It's what Tate did, and they held up a huge following cult. Effectively, if you read 48 laws of power, it's literally about how to make cult. My argument is if my camp was so good, why don't we just promote my camp and just talk about how great our camp is, and then that's it, you know, and then we'll pull in the right people and we'll leave people outside outside it, but we're not shitting on people outside. It's just a small frame change. Yeah, but that's how you build much more of like um, an elegant brand. Yeah, and I think, like your customers are a reflection of you, so I could probably look at your customer base, the executives that are there, and they probably emulate your values, but they're not like, again, people throwing stones right by the way to your point.

Eric Siu: 1:06:38

I just to give some examples for people I guess you look at, like a gary v, for example, like he, he doesn't have nearly as many views as he used to, but he's still relevant and he's just a very nice, kind person. And he's also like, kind of rough around the edges, like new york jets right, you know, you know, um, and he'll cuss and people don't like that. Right, that might polarize people a little bit. It doesn't polarize me, but, um, he does have people that are they, they love him, for him. You mentioned hormosi same deal, right, like he's just, he's a genuinely good person, um, and so you can build a brand that way. But you, you also, like, I think for both of them they do have a point of view, um, where, like you know, they'll put their foot down, but it's nothing like, oh, you know, talking about, like you know, being Republican or Democrat or anything like that.

Darren Lee: 1:07:17

Yeah, and that's exactly it. So your views can just be your view. It doesn't need to be aggressive, it doesn't need to be violent and, like I actually speak with this, with all of our clients, is that we need to believe what we believe in. Shan Hanna, in um. Shan hannah from gen flow says to me you have to be about it. So let's say, I'm the podcast guy. I truly believe in. Podcasting is a great way to connect to people. It's this anti, like we don't socialize anymore. It's bringing it back to natural. I generally believe that that's true. Yeah, so I talk about that and it's just a strong value and strong point of mine. It doesn't have to be negative on the other side, right, but again, it's almost like a reflection. Um, so I want to ask about so you said you were kind of insecure when you're younger. You know you were more introverted and so on, so forth. And then people like hermosy is more he mentions about who's insecure as well, but where he was growing up, do you think that's like good it's?

Eric Siu: 1:08:05

good when you channel in the right way, I love it. I mean, it's um, so I I've appreciate the. So when you have insecurity combined with ambition, it's a great combo. Yeah, right, um. And so you know, I think Hermosi definitely had that um, you know, and he can speak to it, but he's, he's mentioned it, right, it's like you know, for him, um, well, we won't even talk about him because I just talk about me. I think for me, growing up, um, the ambition piece came from the gaming Um, um, and the ambition also came from, like you know, you see your parents fight about money, sometimes like you don't want to fight about that anymore, and then also you see, like um, insecurity, like you hear from like your friends, oh, like you're not quite at their level, you hear that from your parents, and all that like it is a chip on your shoulder and um, I do believe we're all programmed from our childhoods and so I'm glad I still have that chip, right, I don't think it ever quite goes away, um, and so it it keeps me motivated.

Darren Lee: 1:08:56

yeah, I enjoy it, but you kind of an element of humility too, right, yeah, that I think it's an interesting. Uh, I thought about this quite a lot how I find it quite strange when I see someone make more and more money and become more ego-driven, whereas for me, the more money that I've earned, I've become less ego-driven because realized I don't know anything.

Eric Siu: 1:09:14

Well, yeah, I mean, money's an amplifier of who you actually are at the end of the day. So, like, um, I thought, like if I would make more money, I would want like a lamborghini or like you know all these possessions. And like I actually don't care about those things, right, like I don't wear a really nice watch or anything like that. Right, I might have an aura ring, like, and I don't even like wearing stuff, so apple watch, yeah so, dude, I am, I got, um, what even is, you know jeep, the brand at rubicon.

Darren Lee: 1:09:38

I wanted to buy it, right, it's so stupid and so expensive. And um, my wife, my mother-in-law, said to me she was like, just rent it for a month, and if you rent it and you still love it after you rent it, then you can buy it whatever. And I was like, okay, cool, got it.

Darren Lee: 1:09:55

Seven days later I was like I fucking hate you're over it yeah, I would come out of my, my house, every day, I'd walk past it to my motorbike yeah, which is just like a shitty old motorbike. Yeah, and every single day the car was matte black. Yeah, it would just get dustier and dustier. I walked past the thing. I was like, oh my god, get rid of it. I rang the guy to take it back and he was like dude, I'm not taking it back. He was like you have to live out to 30 days at least, yeah, yeah. I was like, oh my, I genuinely could not look at the thing anymore. I drove it around four more times.

Darren Lee: 1:10:26

After that I hand back the keys and I was like fuck this, because it got to the point where I was like, yeah, I don't even want to bring it out in case I tip it and I mark it. And I handed it back and I was like sometimes you need to experience it and I'm susceptible to everything I'm not talking from a high perspective and I guess because I thought to myself, oh, it's more practical. It's not like a watch right, watches hold a value, whatever, but it's not like a watch. I thought I could use it and I was like I fucking hate this you know what's interesting?

Eric Siu: 1:10:52

I mean, you look at people's instagrams and the people that have purpose aren't posting about um kind of material possessions. And if you like material possessions, like that's fine, but I, I just generally like the pattern that I've seen is if you have a sense of purpose, like you're not posting about that stuff, that stuff falls way below. You're not posting that you're flying on a first class. You know flight. Um, you know you got this, this Lamborghini or whatever, or you like your, your, your popping bottles, that stuff in your twenties. But like you realize later in your life that, um, you know what is it? Family's number one, right? And then you can talk about, like maybe there's business teachings or religious teachings or whatever it is exactly, but purpose to me is just serving other people and, um, you know, when you're posting material things, you're really talking about serving yourself it's also the optics how we want our audience or our customers to perceive us.

Darren Lee: 1:11:36

Yeah, sam ovens is a good example of that. You know skyrise back in the day.

Eric Siu: 1:11:39

Yeah, blue suit and now he's just chilling with long hair. It was never him and he's admitted it. That, like that wasn't me, but he was trying to sell this certain perception to people and he's playing into human psychology.

Darren Lee: 1:11:49

Yeah so that more emotive side, that kind of connecting with your audience or connecting with your people. So, you know, you mentioned gary v and he has the videos about his mom and shit. But then you people like chris chris, though, who chatting with tomorrow, and he does a really nice balance here because he takes what he thinks, he thinks about it, through the lens of internal yeah, it's the internal state, yeah and then you talk to him about gary v tomorrow I will.

Darren Lee: 1:12:10

I watch your clip, I listen to your podcast. We're both together, um, but that's interesting, right, because he's he's done the work internally and then, as a result, that becomes who he's about. Yeah, people love him. He would go to his masterminds and his workshops and so on and so forth, because the energy that you this may seem woo, but it's not, though, it's like the energy that you emit, is the energy you receive.

Eric Siu: 1:12:33

He's a perfect example of someone that understands what he wants to build. He understands his values. He doesn't want to necessarily build a big agency. He's like, okay, I just want to focus on educating. So he did these like workshops right. He came to my mastermind where Sam Ovens was there and we had a speaker's there. He's just telling everyone, like you got to start a mastermind, right, you got to start a mastermind. And that's how, chris, eventually he started his mastermind. Um, but it works out well for him because he loves learning. He loves teaching and he doesn't.

Eric Siu: 1:13:02

He's a type of guy Like he used to do back when clubhouse was a thing Um, he would be in these rooms and he'd host these rooms with thousands of people, right and um, right and um, you know, he'd bring people up and then, as soon as he found someone being insufferable, he's like I can't stand you anymore. He was like mute you or whatever. Right, I'm paraphrasing here, but he's just really direct and um, you know, building a huge team or whatever. That's just not what he wants anymore. He maybe he doesn't want people problems, but he is. You can see he's living within his values and it really comes out.

Darren Lee: 1:13:30

Yeah he's called me out on my shit, sometimes on a podcast, before Can't remember what it was around. It could have been around sales, or actually this was it. I asked him how does someone like build, how does someone kind of build authority and influence if they don't have experience? Are they kind of living through like an optic lens? And I forget what I actually said about my opinion on it, but he was like it not. He's like that's not true and I was like oh, okay, yeah, that's good. Right, it's good to be open and honest because then you respect the person. As a result, yeah, you have much more of a. It's just real and like people just fucking aren't real.

Eric Siu: 1:14:04

Yeah, the word like gary b's authentic christo's authentic right. It's like there's a lot of these people where you can, you can feel it, yeah exactly, and they're also not afraid to be wrong in that regard.

Darren Lee: 1:14:14

How do you run your mastermind events?

Eric Siu: 1:14:17

how do you? Yeah, so I have a mastermind called leveling up this year, where we didn't do it because I'm focused on I'm running the ypo global marketing summit and that's whole ordeal in itself and so, um, but that mastermind, which I've done for a couple years, um, the way that's structured, it's like you. The last one we had in Beverly Hills was maybe, I want to say, 110 people or so, so it's like a decent, decent size, but, um, everyone's doing average is probably eight figures in revenue, and you have business owners from from different areas, not just agency people, but you have, you have agency people, you have product people, you have e-commerce people, um, sas people as well, and, um, you know, for me, it's my way of gathering people together. So I picked the location, I picked the speakers. You know I vet every single person that comes through. I get to decide when it ends. I could decide what the agenda is.

Eric Siu: 1:15:04

I'm an, I'm an extroverted introvert, right, so I'll set it all up. It's it's like my experience, like and um, from that, you know, that's like a two day thing and after that, like, I'm good, right, and um, I, I get my share of learnings, I get my share of networking and, um, that's not an event that we try to necessarily make money on, but everyone's like, oh my God, that's like the best event I've been to, best event I've been to, right, um, and I'm appreciative of that, but, um, I don't want to make it into a business. I can make it into a business, but then I have to. That's another thing I have to worry about. So that's generally how I structure these types of events, and we'll probably do something similar for the agency group, and there's already a lot of them like that, but I'll just follow my format.

Darren Lee: 1:15:42

So yeah, so a hundred entrepreneurs at eight figures pretty wild, yeah.

Eric Siu: 1:15:47

Yep, some some at nine figures, right, some you know multi-billion dollar companies, so yeah, so you've basically found a way to disqualify people underneath.

Darren Lee: 1:15:56

So you don't want to have an inner sphere, but then also bring in the right audience. How do you sell that Like? What's your price of that?

Eric Siu: 1:16:02

Yeah, so that one price is at 25 grand and typically, yeah, it's one event for the year. It used to be more, but I just want to make it simple. We'd get people on phone calls. We used to run podcast ads towards it and we'd send emails to people. It'd be a phone call and if they're down to come, great, if not, then whatever 25K.

Darren Lee: 1:16:27

That seems so reasonable because of who you're actually going to have in the audience. You're going to be able to bring people in. Do you think that there's an opportunity for you to move into the coaching space?

Eric Siu: 1:16:39

I would say for us, no, because for me I'm focused on operating the agency, and so the same thing with Neil. He's focused on doing driving traffic, doing deals. I'm kind of the same way, but I am more operational within the business, and, um, yeah, that's cause. The thing is, if I'm focused on coaching, that's going to take up a lot of my time. Um, that being said, though, with the agency group that we have, neil and I will appear every couple of weeks or so and we will actually do a group coaching session, and then we'll publish that to marketing school Cause those kind of serve as ads as well. People, oh my god, that sounds really good.

Eric Siu: 1:17:12

I want to do so yeah, it's a long vsl right, and we do one once a month and that actually gets a podcast recording session out of the way as well.

Darren Lee: 1:17:19

Well, it's, it's just so easy to do, basically to build that ecosystem, because when you're basically sharing wisdom, that's it, you know.

Darren Lee: 1:17:25

So, yeah, it's easy to do, because you spend 20 years learning the thing, but at the end of the day though, it it's just a weekly call on Wednesday, a Slack chat and that's it. If you compare that to an agency, how difficult an agency is to run right. So it's all about the insight, and I love Chris's approach to that. Where he does I don't know if you're familiar with this, but he does like a hot seat approach. Oh, this is really interesting.

Darren Lee: 1:17:54

We did this in our program today because of I think I'm going to tell chris tomorrow as well. His approach is, instead of just so you have the content, that you're kind of indoctrinating and getting people to go through in a linear way so that they're in your wavelength. But chris's approach is that on his weekly calls, he does like a hot seat. So he'd pick your business or your design business, for instance. You'd come in and say I'm having this problem on client acquisition and delivery and my pricing's off, and he'll go through and whiteboard it and then, as a result, 40, 50, 100 people are in the call or whatever, and then they're also guess what? They have the same problems. So they're learning through that model, and we started just doing that today. Just a bit of a change this morning at 6 am, and people loved it because everyone's problems are the same, right, as long as they're around the same level.

Eric Siu: 1:18:33

The problem with a group like ours is you have to segment out the six-figure people and the seven-figure people and the eight-figure people, because they have different problems. But, yeah, the hot seat model, like in EO or YPO, we call this a forum where there's a presentation. So, for example, today I'm doing a meeting. It's like a seven-hour meeting, seven hours meeting, um. But but, like you know, you might come with like one of your core issues and then we'll all just, you know, we'll hear about it and then we'll experience share, right. That kind of is a hot seat situation, um. So yeah, hot seats work really well as long as people are at the same level, because if you have someone with an eight figure problem and then the group's all six figure people, it's not going to land yeah, yeah, 100, and that's when I think it's interesting to hear that there's a figure people in that, because I would assume that they want one-to-one care because they're at that stage.

Darren Lee: 1:19:14

Right, they're less. How do I get leads? And more, like, my close rate is only at 19 percent and it should be at 40 or something, right, does that make sense? Yeah, it's almost like solving the problem in different ways depending on where someone is in their journey. Tell me more about your setup. So I've seen that you've mentioned before about you know how taking time off work and letting ideas come in, like, how do you balance doing versus thinking?

Eric Siu: 1:19:38

Yeah, so right now, um, you know, for example, I went to Italy this summer and that was like a 12 day thing and I just totally, just, I was like mostly disconnected. I would check Slack every now and then, um, but that gave me a lot of space and it wasn't like I was trying to think through things every day Like I'll just cause there's that space, there's not that pressure. Um, you know, the mind clears up quite a bit. You're not in a day to day, you're not in the trenches, kind of like, you know, fighting through things, right, I think that's really valuable because when you come back, you're super refreshed, um, and you know, I'm like, okay, well, that worked out. Well, I should do more of that.

Eric Siu: 1:20:14

And this is interesting because the founder of LMNT, the salt, um, they, he's been doing this for two, three years I think, and it's uh, it's basically a three week sprint and then one week off per month, and so it's three, one, three, one, three, one. And he just, he just does that, right, and that's not necessarily saying he's going on a vacation, but he might take like three, four days off and he starts to like, look at how the sprints went in the last, you know, three weeks or so and then prepare for the next three weeks, sprints, and, um, that seems like it's working well for him and for me I'm like, okay, how can I do that once a quarter or so, and I think Sam ovens actually does this. You know, naval Ravikant likes to say that you, you, I think you sleep like a lion, right, and you hunt like one.

Darren Lee: 1:20:59

So lions sleep quite a bit right, but when they're on, they're on so yeah, did you ever find yourself getting a bit more anxious from being away from work?

Eric Siu: 1:21:08

because, like things build and they compound right, so problems when the team sucks, yes, when the team's good, like if you want to see how good your team is, go on a vacation. You go on a vacation, you see which fires pop up, you see if they're texting you, calling you or whatever but this past one there were no issues. There were no issues and the team's gotten a lot better. And here, talking about focused involvement, again, the number one thing, in my opinion, to get involved with is hiring. Right, Maybe you're not screening everyone, but maybe you're early in the process. You're meeting the first hundred people or so, because that first hundred people, they set the tone for the company.

Eric Siu: 1:21:45

And if you decide to like I've done this in the past where I would sit at the very end and I would feel bad because they've met so many people already we were hiring just to fill seats and what ended up happening was not a cultural fit and they would pollute the culture, Not saying they were bad people, but they just weren't fits, Right, and so you know they're not a fit.

Eric Siu: 1:21:59

They're realizing they're not a fit, but then then they start to cause problems to that because they're disgruntled, Right. Then they also don't want to leave either, because this is their security, Right and also they're not that good either. So it's hard for them to find another job. And then also, you know the A players are watching them. It's like, oh, we're tolerating these C players Also. They have to do the work for the C players. It's a compounding effect and that's why, again, I go back to that 60 day moving average. It's got to be kept extremely high, unreasonably high, and people on the team are not going to hate you for it. They're going to be annoyed at you, but in the long run they're going to appreciate the fact that you kept the bar unreasonably high.

Darren Lee: 1:22:34

How do you do that, though Specifically? Is that more true calls? Is that more true, leading with examples?

Eric Siu: 1:22:40

Yeah, so a couple of things. I mean, let's say, I'm showing up to the, you know, second or third interview. I'm I'm trying to figure out, you know, like, what have they done that's exemplary, Right. And so, you know, tell me something that made you stand out as a teenager, right, like, for example, for me, I sold, like you know, in-game armor and helmets for three thousand dollars in eighth grade. Right, like, that's something that's remarkable. How did you do that? I played poker, you know, like 14, 15 hours a day in college, right, like, ok, tell me more about that. Like it relates to this role, right.

Eric Siu: 1:23:07

And then you start to really peel the onion. It's like, okay, so you said you built this thing over here. Oh, it turns out they're part of a team. Okay, tell me about that team. Oh, you're actually, like, you know, a mid-level person on that team. Oh, so you actually didn't really build that thing, right? Um, it starts to unravel very quickly. And then you're just trying to see. You know, for us it's like is this person improving, obsessed? Is this person improved and obsessed? Is this person reliable? Are they open-minded? And those are our core values. And if you're not feeling it, usually you can feel it within the first five to 10 minutes or so. Like this person's got it, you probably shouldn't make the move and, like you know, is this person smarter than you. Would you work for this person? Would you admire this person? Like these things all matter and again, nobody's going to care as much as you.

Darren Lee: 1:23:51

The founder, you've interviewed Ayman Al-Abdul-Aviv. He has a very interesting approach towards hiring about. Would you one be jealous or envious if they went to a competitor? And the second is could you get on a 12-hour flight with them?

Eric Siu: 1:24:09

Yeah, I like the first one. The 12-hour flight thing, I don't know. I've sat on long flights with people on my team. It's all right. But I think the first one's good. Like it's, um, it's, it's almost similar to like you know, uh, how indifferent would you feel if this person left Right, like that's the question that we ask, and so it's, it's, it's a good, it's a good heuristic. The problem with the question, too, is during the interview process, that particular one is. You don't really know the person that well Exactly, yeah.

Eric Siu: 1:24:35

Some people don't interview well, yeah, and so like we, we like to run people through like a paid challenge or like we put them through like a written assessment.

Darren Lee: 1:24:41

But that's easier to game now with chat, gpt, but you can also tell when people are are chat GPTing it, um, but've run tests Like we do, like a weekly paid test in the beginning, um, and if someone has a question mark over doing it or not, it's like dude, if you're not willing to do the test, that sets up.

Eric Siu: 1:25:03

If they're not responding to you quickly, if you're not willing to do the test right, if they start to like you know the delay on things, it's just it's not worth it, because Because they're not that excited and the question I like to ask them when they come in is like so how did you prepare for this conversation? Oh yeah, I don't know. So what do you know about the content that we put out? Oh yeah, I only looked at your website, or whatever it's like. You clearly did no research.

Darren Lee: 1:25:26

And you also don't give a shit, right, you want the money versus anything else just getting paid anything else, just getting paid. I want to ask you about lead generation. So you have a framework around the 60% gap, the gap of 60%. What made you come to that realization? How did you figure it out?

Eric Siu: 1:25:40

Yeah, so we call this the missing 60%. So you know, this is actually during a mastermind. Earlier this year we did it in Scottsdale, and I think the more extreme example here is that you have 5% of people that are in market ready to buy your product or service. 95% of people are not right. How we broke it down was like okay, maybe 20% of people are ready to buy, 20% will never buy, but it's the missing 60%, or the 95% of people that you should be focusing on.

Eric Siu: 1:26:07

You should be nurturing these people over time, whether it's through content, whether it's through your email list, whether it's through retargeting to, you know, using thought leadership ads on LinkedIn, at least for us or doing webinars. You're constantly trying to stay top of mind. That's really what it is about, at least for us, because a lot of people, when they reach out, sometimes it's just like they might've seen me or met up with me at a conference recently. Right, it's like hey, no-transcript, a bunch of money for this other company. Um, I don't know anybody else Like, so, you just happen to be in the right place at the right time and, um, that comes through a lot of nurturing. What do?

Darren Lee: 1:26:50

you think about the argument that nurturing doesn't work?

Eric Siu: 1:26:54

Yeah, I think nurturing does, Because in this case, right now, we've never met until today. This is a form of nurturing, and this is a deeper form of nurturing because we spent two hours together or something like that, and so I would just say that nurturing goes a long way. You have to nurture. Forget about business for a second. Everything's about relationships. If you don't put the time and effort into it, then the relationship eventually is going to decay and it's going to become nothing. So you have to continue to nurture it. It's like you and your wife, for example. You have to continue to nurture it. Both of you do.

Darren Lee: 1:27:27

Everything will atrophy until you work on it. Yeah, man, because that's a, I think, what you do with your agency. I guess you could go in and speak with a client or a prospect and say we'll help you generate X amount of revenue or products or customers, whereas for me, I've always called it the intangibles. In podcasting that you have the tangible, which is product and services, and the intangibles are all the second, third, fourth order of consequences. But most people who don't play an infinite game are not willing to even entertain the idea of that, and I think to get into that front mindset, you need to obviously be at a certain stage. You don't need the cash today, and so on, so forth.

Darren Lee: 1:28:06

But I think if more people think like that and that's how, that's how we're here today yeah, you know it's a perfect example, right, like I'm a lot further behind you and your journey, but I've done 250 episodes, usually two and a half thousand. Yeah, I've done 10 percent of it. Yeah, but it's just a time thing, exactly, but again, as a result, like we've had our own successes in our own right, but it's not very interesting though, like people could look at you and think it's the business, where it's not just the business, it's all the other things that have played into it. Last question for you is how has your business impacted your relationships? So, do you have a wife?

Eric Siu: 1:28:39

No.

Darren Lee: 1:28:40

So you're already single, girlfriend, girlfriend. So how has that kind of affected your, or impacted positively or negatively? How do you balance the two?

Eric Siu: 1:28:47

I mean she lets me do my thing. I think that's the biggest thing. I talked to my you know the $100 million CEO dinner the other day. He's been married for 30 years and so I asked him what is the secret to your marriage? And he's like for us it's just, it comes down to space. She lets me do my thing, I let her do her thing, and then when we come together it's amazing. We'll travel together and things like that, but you know we're separate human beings. I think one of the biggest things is for me at least is they need to let me be me, because if I need to change, then I'm no longer me at the end of the day, and then I can't deliver in the relationship too. I can't bring my real self.

Darren Lee: 1:29:26

And also what attracted your girlfriend to you is what you want to maintain, versus you changing to be a different individual.

Eric Siu: 1:29:36

Yeah, it's inauthentic and people can smell it. Yeah, and then there's a codependency being created and you become a people pleaser and then they hate that.

Darren Lee: 1:29:44

Are you familiar with James Kemp?

Eric Siu: 1:29:46

No.

Darren Lee: 1:29:46

So James Kemp's running a solo business effectively. Really cool guy, very, very interesting guy. He definitely connects with him. He's recently divorced his two kids and he said the biggest thing with his like relationships now is that everything doesn't have a codependency. So it's like I was okay before I met this client. I was okay before I met my new girlfriend. Therefore, I will be okay, yeah, if we don't work together, whereas in the agency space there's a huge codependency, right, people shoot their problems off each other and I always like to say that if there's an emergency, you call 911, you don't call me. Yeah, yeah, that's true, man, I want to say a big thank you. I really appreciate it. Yeah, no, this is a great conversation, man, for you. It's so natural, right, and I can just see everything and I really do appreciate the time.