Mastering Growth and Resilience with a Marketing Agency Side Hustle with Jan Almasy

Speaker 1: 0:04

Welcome to Side Hustle City and thanks for joining us. Our goal is to help you connect to real people who found success turning their side hustle into a main hustle, and we hope you can too. I'm Adam Kaler. I'm joined by Kyle Stevie, my co-host. Let's get started, all right. Welcome back everybody to the Side Hustle City podcast Today's special guest, jan Olmacy. Jan, how you doing, man?

Speaker 2: 0:31

Not too bad, Adam. Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 1: 0:33

I was just up in Cleveland a couple of days ago at a political thing and I was like dang, I should have hit you up.

Speaker 2: 0:41

Oh, who are you up repping, or who are you up seeing?

Speaker 1: 0:45

Bernie Morenono. I was at his, like, victory party, yeah, yeah, I think he kind of knew he was gonna win, but he was the only candidate that came down here and actually met with me. So I was like really, yeah, I'll support him, you know. I mean, he, you know, came down, talked to me, invited me down to a uh fundraiser that he was having in Miami a while back, kind of the bow Harbor area. And yeah, man, he came out and I said, hey, if he's willing to come out and chat with me. None of the other two were. So, yeah, throw my support at him, you know.

Speaker 2: 1:16

Yeah, heck, yeah. No, I've been seeing a lot of his name circulating around. That's why I was curious when you said who you're going up to see. But that's awesome, I love going up to events in Cleveland I mean, being from Canton, it's, you know, 40 minutes away to the south side and then you know you've got the Indians up there, you've got the Q. Well, I guess they're the Guardians. Now, right, the Guardians, you've got the Q and it's just a beautiful city. I think it's underestimated, being the quote unquote mistake on the lake right.

Speaker 1: 1:49

Well, you could tell there was money up there at one point. I remember seeing a thing from 1949, the cities with the highest per capita income. I think Cleveland was second. I think Detroit was first, Cleveland was second.

Speaker 1: 2:02

It was wild that sounds about right Back when manufacturing was popping and you know the cars were rolling off the assembly lines and you know that was what drove most of the US economy back in the day. You know, and you know Cleveland and Detroit and cities like that were at the forefront of it. Pittsburgh, you know, with all their steel and everything, and that's since gone overseas and now there's a lot of people who worked in that industry with no jobs. So that's.

Speaker 2: 2:29

That's even how Canton is. When I look at Canton you drive around inside of this city. You know we're kind of like a minor C compared to Cincinnati, cleveland and Columbus, but still along that same highway path. We used to be the only pit stop between Youngstown and Chicago on old Route 30. So there's these beautiful old hotels and you know a lot of ornate architecture that the city has actually been doing a great job of kind of restoring to its original glory, rather than like the fabricated stuff that got put over top of it to make it all look, you know, dystopian in my eyes, but that's, that's exactly the same way they can is. You let the manufacturing and everything else kind of moved and now it's a place where it's a little bit more rural. I mean, I still think there's a lot of stuff hopping here, but I'm also biased because you know I was going to come back in.

Speaker 1: 3:21

So yeah, yeah, I mean you've got the, the big intel plant coming south of of columbus there and you've got a lot of things happening. I met a developer in columbus and he said he just can't find enough workers and I think that's one problem. I think ohio could grow. It's just we don't have enough people to build stuff here and it's crazy when you think of it as like a manufacturing state. Now you've got people that have just ignored a lot of the trades and you know, everybody thought they had to go to college. I mean this is what the seventh largest state population wise in the entire country and it's located in a great place. I mean from Cincinnati, you're a day's drive from a third of the US population. I mean we're a few hours from Nashville, a couple hours from Louisville, an hour and a half from Louisville, an hour from Lexington, an hour and a half from Columbus, an hour to Dayton, three and a half hours to Cleveland, an hour and a half from Indianapolis, four hours to Pittsburgh, four and a half hours, five hours to Chicago. I mean the list goes on and on. I mean direction you go, and I mean you're in a great spot. You got river transport up there in cleveland they have, uh, you know the, the lake. You've got i-70 kind of cutting through the middle of the state going east and west. You got i-75 going north and south. I mean it's it's. It's wild that logistically this is a state that's in such a good spot and the weather's not terrible. People crack on the weather.

Speaker 1: 4:47

Up in cleveland. When I left the other day it was snowing, so and then as soon as I got to columbus it's like sunny and 20 degrees warmer. But it's just you got that lake effect. You know of cold and snow and stuff that happens up there. But it was actually nice to see snow because we didn't get much of it down here, uh, this year. So hardly at all. Yeah, hardly at all, man, but yeah, so you grew up in canton. I mean you know there's some famous people from canton. I mean that whole area columbus, I'd say well, cincinnati too. I looked at a stat. It said some of the highest per capita athletes, professional athletes, have come from since it was st louis was number one, cincinnati was number two. Youngstown, believe it or not, was like number four. That doesn't from since it was. St Louis was number one, cincinnati was number two, youngstown, believe it or not, was like number four. That doesn't surprise me.

Speaker 2: 5:28

It was wild.

Speaker 1: 5:29

I mean the people, the athletes that come from the city, from Cincinnati, dayton, cleveland, youngstown and Pittsburgh, like this area right here. It's unbelievable how many athletes have come from here.

Speaker 2: 5:43

And just right here, it's unbelievable how many athletes have come from here and just, I think, resilient people in general. I talk to people about being born and raised in you know, like kind of consider ourselves the Midwest but like Northeast Ohio is really the area that I kind of point to Football culture, crazy wrestling culture, insane A lot of immigrant populations that moved into these areas and that mentality is still very deeply rooted in a lot of these cities. Pick yourself up. You got to keep moving, you got to be able to figure things out. There's actually a study.

Speaker 2: 6:14

So I spent six, seven years in the Air National Guard and when I was in the Air National Guard I originally was going on a track where I was going to get my nursing license and I wanted to apply for something called the special operations surgical teams. So this was before I started. Apex and all that other dream kind of entered, you know, pretty drastically rapidly and I had to pivot paths. But when I was doing research into the special operations teams, right, inevitably the way that I approach things in life is I'm going to know everything I can possibly about it. How am I going to approach this thing from as many different angles as I can check off all of those angles, you know, then go on the attack. So I'm reading all of these stats on what are the things that get people through special operations, training. You know it's not always raw physicality, actually. In fact, most of the often it's not strictly raw physicality, right, there's a lot of mental stuff that goes into lasting through extremely difficult times.

Speaker 2: 7:09

Um, and there's this malt. There's multiple research reports out, um, that kind of point to this area of Ohio and the Midwest in general. Um, and then it kind of goes up and follows, like the eastern coastal cities, but ones that experience like really harsh winters. That's kind of like the persona of the city that we're inside of these studies and they actually saw that individuals that were born and raised in those areas had higher resiliency rates, really, when they were exposed to different temperatures of training and other stuff like that, because we have the seasons and they can get so intense that it you do have to go outside and work in a 95 degree summer but you also have to survive a negative 20 degree wind chill, yeah, and figure out how to go on with your day so I've always thought that that was interesting, that you know people from that area um we.

Speaker 1: 8:02

We are more resilient as a group and you got to have a bigger closet so you got to have coats. Some people don't have coats. I feel bad for people who have coats. Where do they put their stuff in the winter? You're walking around. You got plenty of pockets. Yeah, I have to carry around like a man purse in the summer because I don't have anywhere to put my stuff. You go down to Miami. Everybody's got a fanny pack kind of across their chest because they don't have anywhere to put my stuff you go down to miami, everybody's got a fanny pack kind of across their chest because, that's, you know, they don't have coats, man, too bad for them.

Speaker 1: 8:29

Sad they don't get to layer up and have all these different styles and stuff. You know it's too hot, so but yeah, man, uh. So when I first met, you guys were, uh, you guys were building wells in africa. You were working on water bottles. You've've been doing, you know, agency work. You've got your own like thing going on there. You've got your own podcast. Tell us a little bit, actually tell us about your podcast.

Speaker 2: 8:52

OK, yeah. So, man, it's been what? Two years probably since we first first met at this point, so, yeah, like starting the journey with Joe Knopp. Joe Knopp, um, you know, in the Ripple brand, um, which was an amazing thing to watch. He graduated from the same university that I did, uh, met him very organically, uh, and then just got to help out with Ripple from day one through acquisition, um, which was a massive blessing, um, to watch it come to that fruition, um, but also to be able to go on the experience of, you know, stepping ground in Uganda and putting my money where my mouth is and actually going out and doing the thing was life-changing and that kind of plays into like the whole mission behind the podcast that I initially started.

Speaker 2: 9:39

At this point I have two different shows that I really focus on. The original one that I started it kind of kicked off the whole landslide of life altering decisions that had to be made and, you know, pulled me off of the trajectory I was on for nursing and the military and you know the special operations, surgical teams and all that other kind of stuff was called the apex podcast and that one's still running. We still publish probably twice a month on average, heavily interview based. But also we have just me and my co-founder kind of bantering about the days and nights of running an agency, you know, and keeping people honest about what it's actually like, versus you see these people on Instagram preaching like start a marketing agency and you'll be able to make a quarter million dollars a year in six months. And those people are making money selling courses.

Speaker 1: 10:29

They're not making money. Building agencies, I mean, anybody can go on chat.

Speaker 2: 10:32

Somebody said it yeah.

Speaker 1: 10:33

Build me a course. Go on chat. You say, build me a course on how to build an advertising agency and it'll build you an entire outline. You could just go on and make a course. These guys are like 24 and they're building courses on how to build like multimillion dollar agencies.

Speaker 1: 10:47

Dude, I've worked at multimillion dollar agencies and none of them are like solopreneurs. They're all right, they're all like I mean, got a hundred people working there and yeah, there's a lot of stuff. The margins can be kind of thin, you know, the more people you bring on and I get it like offshoring and a lot of that other stuff. But man, it takes years just to find the right group of service providers for your agency, even if you're going to offshore stuff. I mean it's tough and you know they'll do everything, jump through fire hoops just to get your business. But then after a few months it kind of starts slowing down, they stop caring about your brand. But then after a few months it kind of like starts slowing down, they stop caring about your brand, they start slacking off a little bit and then you know next thing, your brand suffers. And not saying that's happening to everybody, but it's just things you got to watch out for, and I'm sure you guys talk about those.

Speaker 2: 11:34

Yeah, and that's those. Actually, a lot of the stuff that you just brought up are things that I recall in recent conversations. You know that we've had on the show, uh, where we'll talk about the difference between getting into something like a marketing agency with a legacy mindset of like wanting to build something that's going to last you or outlast you, um, and what it means to actually build relationships as a marketing agency in a core area, um, and why it's important to to lean into the trust of those customers that are. They're trusting their businesses with you. A lot of our customers they're $3,000 a month in ad spend or whatever they're trusting us with for optimizing their SEO or whatever is going on. These are three to $5 million mom and pop companies that are family owned, 20, 30 years, you know.

Speaker 1: 12:22

So when they say I am trusting you to keep my leads alive, that means something to them, yeah, um well, something that they've worked hard to build for a while, and I mean, I'm sure they have employees and they got to pay these employees and that's one of the hardest things about our families exactly and now that becomes your responsibility.

Speaker 1: 12:41

So yeah, I mean, if their leads start to slow down or something happens or, uh, you know you rebuild a website. Next thing you know, you get you didn't do the redirects and they lose a bunch of traffic or backlinks. Uh, you've got some issues and they've got some issues, and if they can't pay their employees, then I mean it's.

Speaker 2: 12:59

There's a whole bunch of stuff that I could think about that is not good If you're somebody that is, you know, putting out these courses and it's one thing that drives me nuts when I read these courses is like, oh, there's going to be this churn rate. Like, oh, it's fine if you screw over a couple of people along the way, Like you got to break a couple of eggs to really make an omelet. I will not argue with the fact that there are customers that become misal aligned or that you mess up on and you will churn like that's inevitable. That's doing business right. There's people that are going to like working with you, People that aren't going to like working with you, people that are a fit at a time, and then you outgrow them. You have to figure out how to either raise their account or offload them. That's the natural by-product doing business. What I have an issue with is going into business with the mentality that there are going to be a couple of people that I'm going to try to screw over along the way.

Speaker 1: 13:45

Well, and not only that dude like that's it's kind of messed up that they would even say that but the personal relationship. The reason a lot of people use agencies like ours is because they can call you, they can talk to you, they can email you, you get back to them, you explain things to them, because most people are running whatever their business is. They don't know much about marketing. They know a little bit, right, but they don't know you know how to build a proper funnel, or they don't know how to, how to change the code on their website or any of that kind of stuff. Right, they need you to help them with that.

Speaker 1: 14:17

And what I hear from a lot of these people is oh, just automate the whole damn thing. You automate everything. Just use this software and that software and use some zaps and do this and do that and use AI and use offshore people and all this and that, but you take, you just become another digital agency. At that point You're not. You lose the, the, the thing that people want to pay for because they could do that same thing. Right, and a lot of them do. They just go build a Wix website and they use ChatGPT to do the content and what the hell do they need you for? Right? Right, it's the understanding of the things like do they know about titles and descriptions? Do they know how to properly write those? Do they know how to the right keyword density? Do they know which keywords to put in there? Have they done any research on their competitor sites?

Speaker 2: 15:06

Like there's a bunch of stuff that they just like they kind of leave out you know, yeah, yeah, agreed, and then a lot of it is the customer service piece, which, I mean, kind of takes me back to like the second half of what we talk about on the on the apex podcast. So you know, the one episode style is really just our banter. But we do have an interview style episode on that podcast as well where our premise was ordinary people accomplishing extraordinary things. That was kind of the thought process, Right, and we try to find these individuals that have taken something that either neither of us have ever thought of. Like I'm just mind blown at the fact that they were able to pull it off and I'm like, wow, you found a market where I didn't even know there was a market.

Speaker 1: 15:47

Isn't that wild when people bring something up and you're like holy crap, how did I not think of that? But I love that feeling though, that feeling of like just getting smacked with ignorance.

Speaker 2: 15:57

You're like, wow, yeah, there's a whole wide world out there that I am not aware of. That's right that this person just tapped into. So we find them and we bring them on and we just start to dive in, like, what are these things that you're able to do? And over and over and over again we've done over 200 interviews now, and I know that you know this is a podcaster too you start to see these golden threads, right. They kind of just trickle through every single person's story over and over.

Speaker 1: 16:23

I'm interested. What are those that you've uncovered?

Speaker 2: 16:27

Yeah, so one of the ones very pertinent to what we're talking about right now is just, you know, you constantly get this idea of being a contrarian thinker, being the latest and greatest.

Speaker 2: 16:40

You have to be the first one to the new thing Right. And over and over and over again, I've heard from people that are they, don't, don't break it, or, if it's not broken, don't fix it. In some senses, and the one that comes up the most often is what you just tapped on, which is one-on-one relationships and customer service and just showing up for your customers when they need it and not trying to automate them out of a process or treating them like they're a nuisance. That's another thread that kind of comes up is like customers can feel when you're like bothered by them asking a question or needing assistance or something. Yeah, exactly, I've seen that over and over again across, you know, trash removal, marketing agencies, supply chain logistics consultants, roofers, like every industry, every business owner that I've ever talked about or talked to, they don't, you know, some of them bring up tech, but not everybody does. Every single one of them brings up that personal relationship with customers.

Speaker 1: 17:43

Yeah, and it's something that when you think about what you buy, it's weird. People don't make that transition when they own a business, right, it's like I want to automate the hell out of it. I just want to automate it, make it super fast. But think about it. Mcdonald's is automated, right, but people go to Chick-fil-A because the people are nice. I mean you could go get something at McDonald's. I mean the food's not as good either, but I mean people will comment on how nice the people are at Chick-fil-A. It's like a thing, right, that they train their employees way better and everybody's nice, everybody's sweet. I've noticed, you know what, since that kind of has been pervasive around the internet and you know, just in Americana in general, people know this about Chick-fil-A I've noticed the people at McDonald's are getting nicer at the drive-thru and I think that's there. I you know, I don't know anybody works in pressure.

Speaker 1: 18:33

I don't know anybody that works at McDonald's, so I don't know, but I'm guessing that there was some pressure and they said hey, look, we need to start training our people better and they need to be nicer and smile more and things like that. But yeah, even those experiences.

Speaker 1: 18:46

Well, even a company that's spent its entirety just automating everything, automating their food processes. I mean because when you buy a McDonald's franchise, you're buying a process. Right, you're buying a system and a process and you're not necessarily buying, you know, the food I mean. You are, but it's a process, is what you're buying? You're buying one of the best processes in business, and what separates them? What? What could Chick-fil-A do? Oh, we just got another chicken sandwich, right. Like, what do we do? How do we stand out? And it was with customer service, I think.

Speaker 2: 19:18

Yeah, oh, agreed 100%. And that actually brings me to another. That's a another golden thread that has consistently popped up is you choose what you want to be known for, yeah, and then you become that thing Like I I'm going to butcher this, but I think the way that I had it explained to me by one of my mentors named John Koontz uh, he's a great guy Um, he kind of planted this seed in my head where he was like if you see things where people are saying fake it till you make it ignore that advice, he's he, he always would change that to embody it until you become it oh interesting if you fake it till you make it, you just end up living somebody else's you feel like a fraud too.

Speaker 1: 20:00

Yeah, because you're like, oh, I'm faking it instead of I'm embracing it. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 20:11

Yeah, and so he was. He was a big one with me where I didn't want to automate a whole bunch of stuff early on. You know I was willing to do that in the trenches work. I was willing to do some of this manual labor. And a lot of my friends in the agency space were why are you going to physical networking events with a small group of local business owners? Like, why are you doing these things? Why are you doing these things? Shouldn't you just be sending out? You know mastering your email automation sequence and getting out bulk. You know numbers and then, okay, 500 people get the same message and you know, a hundred people convert here on email one, blah, blah, blah, blah, go down the funnel. But in my mind I was like, no, I want to. Early on in the business I was like, no, I want to it.

Speaker 2: 20:47

Early on in the business I'm, I'm feeling called to invest more in the personal relationships. And John would always tell me cause. I would feel this imposter syndrome where I'm like maybe I just do need to fake it till I make it. I actually don't care as much about this stuff I I could see where some of it's valuable. It's not really working for me, but maybe I just need to push harder and do this more and it'll start working all of a sudden. And when he kind of said, you know, embody it till you become it, to me in our mentorship sessions it was really lean into those strengths because they're standing out to you for a reason. Maybe you're seeing stuff in the market that's you know.

Speaker 2: 21:22

I see the value of you know, pontificating your brand on social media, massively decreasing Right, I tell people all the time social is not meant to be a platform where you're shouting out a cliff at your audience. It's meant to be a place where you have conversations with people. So if you're not liking commenting on other people's stuff and you're just posting all the time, it's not social. You're just yelling at a newsfeed. And the same thing applies in that real life situation. I saw that social was having issues and thought that Facebook was going to get sued and privacy was going to be an issue and all this other stuff multiple years ago. And now I talked to some of my friends that have agencies where their entire business model was based off of Facebook ads and other stuff like that and they're like how are you maintaining revenues? I'm like well cause, I have relationships.

Speaker 1: 22:13

Yeah In my community, like that's the thing you got to own where you're at I mean the fact that you're in Canton but you're very sophisticated when it comes to marketing and you know what the hell you're doing, you know. I think that's a big benefit, especially guys, if you're listening and you're not in a huge city like I'm in a pretty big metro area. I mean this is the biggest metro area in the state of ohio. There's three million something people in this area if you include dayton. So I mean I could do business here. I could drive up an hour 45 minutes and do business in dayton. There's a couple cities in between. Big suburbs in between dayton and cinc could go down to Lexington. I could. I mean, like I said before, there's a bunch of cities around here. But I could really own Northern Kentucky because my building is here in Northern Kentucky. If I say ad agency in Cincinnati, my physical location is actually in Covington Kentucky. It's not in Cincinnati, right? So but I could own Covington Kentucky because there's not a whole lot of agencies in Covington. There's a bunch of them over in Cincinnati because you got Procter and Gamble to compete with these big guys out of New York and all that stuff. But I do and I have for 13, almost 14 years now.

Speaker 1: 23:37

But own your local market. Go out like Jan, like you're telling people, go out, network, meet people, join a B&I group if you got to. But own your local market, build a reputation. You never know when that one small little client, that flooring laminate guy or the HVAC guy you don't know who he knows, the HVAC guy's going out here putting in commercial HVAC in bigger companies. Oh wow, how'd you find me? Oh, I saw your website. It looked great. Oh, yeah, you know who did that.

Speaker 1: 24:07

Jan did that website. Oh, who's Jan? Oh, call him up. If you guys are looking to do a website, next thing you know you got a million dollar website. So it's things like that. People don't understand these online relationships that you can form. Those aren't going to be as strong and you're pulling in clients from all over the country those aren't going to be as strong as your local ones. So I would almost say what you're saying and repeat it own your local, have personal relationships in your own community, and I think those are going to be kind of the base of your agency, of your agency revenue. I would say Agreed.

Speaker 2: 24:41

I love hearing that, especially from somebody that's been in the agency space longer, right, because I can give it the perspective of going into year six, and so you know we're relatively young. It's taken us all of the six years to really earn the trust in the market. But to know, you know, in my mind I'm just building the foundation. I know that we want to go bigger. I know that we want to have a bigger clients that are. You know, we have relationships in Chicago. We do business in NYC, we do business in Miami, which is the beautiful part about having those relationships.

Speaker 2: 25:13

But every single time one of those contracts cancels early or does something else. I have this rock solid 30 client base that I could drive to any of their offices. There's been times where I couldn't make payroll if I wouldn't have been able to drive to a location and pick up a check that day and deposit it. And clients were like, yeah, we'll cut this a week early. We got you To make ends meet in the early years and those relationships are irreplaceable when stuff like that comes up.

Speaker 2: 25:45

And what it ended up doing, because we were willing to follow through. They did that favor to us and we continue to treat each other right. I'm not nervous going into, you know, an election year and all this other kind of stuff because I really feel like those relationships are all rock solid all the way around. So at a bare minimum I know we have enough revenue coming in at this point going into year six that I can cover all of the bills, the benefits for my team and payroll stably without really needing to expand. We can add in those bigger accounts and I am pursuing those larger accounts at this point to start continuing forward momentum. But building that relationship is the only reason why I can look at my P&L every month and be like, oh, I have some freedom to like actually work on the business, not just in it fight or flight mode, trying to draw in contracts or feel like my clients are only month to month.

Speaker 1: 26:36

Yeah, well, tell people, I mean, the challenges. I think a lot of people don't understand the challenges with cashflow. Do you, do you have a line of credit with the bank? Like, how do you manage cashflow when you're dealing with situations like you mentioned, having to go pick up a check? That can be really, really stressful, especially payrolls creeping up. There's not that much in the bank right now. You're trying to get the clients for whatever they can hey, hurry up and pay me, I got to pay my guys kind of mentality. But do you have some kind of a line of credit? Or do you use credit cards? Or what do you do? And I know a lot of people want to know this because you know, even people that have been in the business for a long time probably don't understand a solution.

Speaker 2: 27:17

Right, yeah. So I mean early on, just to be straight with everybody listening like we did years one through 3.5, no cashflow management, right, I came from a nursing and a clinical psych background, served in the Air Force, had no traditional business training, so I just kind of dove in and the company kind of started on accident. Right, I made my first six figures as a solo and just started hiring people. I'm like I'm going to figure this out. If I step on a few bear traps along the way and I can stitch myself up, I'll be fine.

Speaker 2: 27:46

So the first three and a half years was were scary. I was in that fight or flight mode, right, landing contracts for whatever we could land them with, because I hired people too early and, you know, tried to delegate too soon and encountered all of these problems early on. That put me into a place where I couldn't even see past a three-month mark. Sometimes it was even a two-week mark. Are we going to make it through the next two weeks Sending out mass cold outreaches or DMs getting on the phone? Actually, one of our original conversations two, three years ago now was in one of those valleys where I'm like what am I doing? Why do I want to be here To realize that all of that existential stress I was feeling was just something called poor cashflow management was such a freeing revelation that I was like, oh, that's actually a problem that a lot of people face. I just need to figure out how to fix it and make myself more resilient to it.

Speaker 1: 28:47

Do you think it's just your problem, Like you're on an island and it's just something that you're dealing with. But no, every business, especially small businesses, deal with that on a regular basis and the problem is, unless you've got a you know, advanced business degree or you worked in accounting or something like that, you don't even know what the name of the problem is so that you could look up a solution for it.

Speaker 2: 29:07

Dude, yep, put the words in my mouth. That's exactly how it felt. And then, when I remember having that realization, like, oh, it's like when you buy a new car, all of a sudden you see 40 blue Hondas everywhere. Right, you're like, oh, that makes sense, okay, like it actually is everywhere and it's been there the whole time I just hadn't bought the car.

Speaker 2: 29:26

So years you know, 3.5 to now we progressively implementing stuff that is really alleviated. It, I mean a. We set a profit margin minimum for any accounts that we were going to bring on and really stay diligent to that and had to get used to the fact that, even though our nervous system said, take every client you can, there's actually more growth in creating this place of selectiveness. You know when people in the community are talking about, oh, I need to get to here and then Apex will let me become a client, you know it does something and it makes your organization feel more sought after in a way. I think is what ended up happening for us.

Speaker 2: 30:05

The second thing that we started doing that was more inward think is what ended up happening for us. The second thing that we started doing that was more inward facing is I have a great ops guy and he looked at stuff and he said well, me as founder, salesman, visionary brain, not process oriented guy was like well, I'm just going to invoice people. When we invoice people and it'll be at the end of the month and some of it will be at the beginning of the month. But there's no really rhyme or reason. Like, whenever the sale closes, I'm going to send out the invoice so we can draw in cash, which was necessary in some of those early days, like I said, just trying to make payroll.

Speaker 2: 30:37

It's like I'm going to invoice you on Monday, please pay by Friday. Please, for the love of God, pay by Friday. But as soon as we got to a place where we could say, hey, invoices go out on the first for client subtype A, they go out on the 15th for client subtype B, oh, everybody's on a net 10. And then cash flow is now constantly we get a big bump on the first, we get a well from the between the first and the seventh and then we get a big bump between the 15th and the 21st or whatever that second seven day period is, and that's been fantastic for predicting stability and being able to look at all of our metrics and think OK, we have X number of Google ads accounts, those all get invoiced at the end of the month.

Speaker 2: 31:24

If we want to increase our end of the month stability, we need to land some more Google ads accounts. If we have these one-off projects or big web dev jobs or whatever else, those are always invoiced on the 15th. So those types of jobs, if we want to beef up our middle of the month, we land those, and then one-off projects just kind of fall in between there. But they all get grouped into those two groups. So that was probably the second thing. And then to your point with the line of credit. Thankfully I've never had to dip into one since I've gotten one.

Speaker 2: 31:55

But as soon as I was able to apply for one, I applied for one that was essentially covering three months of payroll, oh and kept. You know, I have never touched it. The goal is to not have to utilize it, but I think a by-product that I wasn't expecting that I was actually it was holding me back from accessing that line of credit was oh, you know, if I have it I'm going to use it needlessly, or I might try to lean into it. You know, maybe I don't want to have that option. What I wasn't accounting for is the amount of bandwidth. The potential anxiety of not making a payroll was eating up in my brain and how much more stuff I would be able to accomplish if that just wasn't a factor.

Speaker 1: 32:45

Yes.

Speaker 2: 32:45

I'm not worried about whether or not I touch it, but knowing that it's there lets me be a little bit more risk not risk averse, but a little bit more risky on the growth side. Gives me the chance to like go to sleep and get good rest on a nightly basis, just knowing that that thing is in the back, yeah, and that our cash flows are stable. So those are probably the three things like yeah and that our cash flows are stable.

Speaker 1: 33:09

So those are probably the three things like our perception of the community grouping invo every year of all your clients because they say you know, 10% of your clients are like 80% of your revenue, right, or something like that, and they're, and they're the ones that don't mess with you as much, like they don't need as much from you. Where you have, say, 80, say like 60% of your clients are just a complete pain in the butt and not really worth your time. Like the amount of time you spend with them is not worth it. So do you believe in firing clients?

Speaker 2: 33:58

I do, and I have um and and I say fire very lightly. I have referred them to better suited. Ah, there you go, yes Is how I phrase it. So in our name, apex Communications Network. The reason why I chose that name is because it allowed me to lean into the tagline. Our duty is to find you a solution, whether that's in-house or elsewhere. That's our, our go-to. And I think about this because I'm like.

Speaker 2: 34:23

I came from the medical field, right? So as an RN, I see physicians all the time saying hey, I may not be the best surgeon for this, you need to go talk to so-and-so. He's a specialist in cardiac or this needs to happen here, this needs to happen here. So I explain to people. We're like a primary care provider. You come in and talk to us, I'm going to draw some labs, I'm going to give you a head-to to toe observation, we're going to take your blood pressure, make sure you do some checks, and then I'm going to figure out whether or not you need a Z-Pak, which we can totally handle in-house, or if I need to send you to a gut surgeon because you have a tumor. You know, that's a totally different conversation. Yeah, right.

Speaker 2: 35:04

But it makes people feel comfortable because even when we have to let them go which I have cleansed the clients list in the past I'm in the process of doing that right now with a couple of accounts because we set new goals for next quarter yeah, I'm able to just tell them hey, this is a part of our mission statement. I'm not, you know, leaving you in the dust. I'm setting you up with somebody that's better suited to take care of you with where you're at Um and that's that's worked out really well. Um, on the second half of that like, how often do you do that? How do you evaluate that?

Speaker 2: 35:38

Um, we personally are on an every six month schedule um, we look at our clients list and I actually learned this in a curriculum that I'm now the head of community for called indie collective, which is essentially like a 10-week accelerator program um for solopreneurs, agency owners, um coaches, uh, consultants, uh. It walks you through designing your life around what they call the three L's your living, lifestyle and loving relationships and then takes you all the way through setting up your business, prototyping your service, streamlining your back office and developing a bulletproof psychology is what they call it.

Speaker 2: 36:18

And what one thing that they've brought up. That was revolutionary for me when I was a student this is a great realization. Way before I started doing the head of community, work was something that they called their 80-20 customer audit. So 80-20 principle is pretty widely known, right, and you kind of referenced it. 20% of your clients are going to bring you 80% of your revenue, so how do you figure out who fits in what bucket?

Speaker 2: 36:43

So every six months we sit down and we go over this sheet that I got essentially from the Indie Collective program and it asks you a couple of questions. It's list all of the clients. List how much you've made from that client for the year, list how many hours you've had to work on that project collectively, and then ask everybody that is on the project team for that client to rate their satisfaction of the project on a scale of one to five. And it asks you a couple. It asks you in a couple of different ways, right, like how satisfied are you with client communication? How open do you believe the client is to improvements?

Speaker 2: 37:22

Um, there's a couple of different things that it asks, but at the end of that you can look and say, hey, this client is really only in the 40th percentile as far as the money that it makes us, and we're extremely unhappy with working with this customer. Yes, and not just me, but like my team members who are boots on the ground doing this work, because it's not just me anymore, we have a staff of five. So I'm looking at them. I'm like do you want to? Do you find yourself getting anxious when this person calls? Do you want to be on? Do you want to genuinely see this person's business succeed? Cause if you don't, we're doing them a disservice.

Speaker 1: 37:58

Yeah, but like you said, send them off to somebody else.

Speaker 2: 38:03

Yeah, that may be more passionate about what they're doing. So that's really the only context that we've ever had for, like us firing a client has been they failed an 80, 20 audit and kind of look at it and say, okay, now we have a quarter to start having a conversation about how to reallocate this person. And that's also important. Like, you have to set time bound goals for yourself after you have the realization, otherwise it'll just end up being an infinite thorn in the side. Give yourself a runway, say I know that this is a problem. Now I'm going to try to figure out what to do in X amount of time.

Speaker 1: 38:39

Well, and also you got to keep track of things in your agency, otherwise you can't even do a report like that. And when you're a solopreneur, when you're going out on your own, you're just like, ah, it's all me, like it's my time. But you do have to value your own time and you have to keep track of the amount of time you spend on things, because you may not think that email that you sent should be billable or the proposal you put together. Obviously, most of the time those aren't billable, but you'd be surprised how much time you spend on just administrative tasks for a particular client. And if you're not keeping track of that stuff, you can't even do that report you're talking about.

Speaker 2: 39:18

Right. Well, and I mean kind of. The reason I like this report is because all you really need to know is who the client is, how much money you've made from them and what the sentiment is about your relationship with that client. So it kind of points you in the right direction. But to your point, when it comes down to actually making a critical decision, yeah, you can look at that and be like everybody feels sad when they're talking to this customer. Yeah, you can look at that and be like everybody feels sad when they're talking to this customer. But if they're an 80th percentile customer and you're just going through a difficult season of work, then that person that you can infer based on the actual metrics yeah, okay, this person is actually probably better suited staying on the client book, like we're just having a tough project with them right now. That's right. But if you don't have those numbers to lean back on, you're just going to base everything off of emotion and that's its own rabbit hole of bad decision making, I think.

Speaker 1: 40:10

Yeah, I think so, and you got to have tough skin too. You can't just, I mean, there's a lot of people nowadays are like, well, if a client's mean to me, I'm just going to cancel them. But you know what? But you know what? You're providing them a service? I mean, are you always nice to everybody who provides you a service? I mean there's people out here who are complete dicks to servers at restaurants and they expect everyone to be nice to them when they have their own service business. And it's just not how the world works.

Speaker 1: 40:41

I mean, sometimes you're going to have people that are difficult, just tougher, thicker-skinned people that are used to working a certain way. Uh, you know, I mean I could, I, I'm sure there's a lot of guys like that up in Canton and Cleveland. Uh, that are tough guys that are, you know, hard nose. You know probably gamble, smoke cigars, go to gentlemen's clubs and, uh, you know, worked in the steel industry at some point, you know, and and those guys, they don't, they don't got time for BS. You know they can sniff out BS, or from the streets, you know, and you're going to have those clients that are tough like that, or ladies who have fought their way up the corporate ladder, who've had to be tough the whole way up, and you know they don't take nonsense from anybody.

Speaker 2: 41:16

You're going to have people like that, um, and, and you got to have tougher skin when you start an agency I I agree with that and I know you can relate to this too, because I've seen you talk about it multiple times. But I think that what you just talked about right there tough skin, being able to stay genuine to yourself even in crazy circumstances I've, you know, like I was mentioning earlier, we've now done work wildly outside of canton. You know London, chicago, new York, all those different cities and cultures that you encounter and one thing I get consistently from people is their appreciation for the directness and honesty that I'm able to bring into conversations, because they're like you're never trying to play an angle, you're trying to tell me what the situation is, and I really think that that is a gift that being raised under the median household income average gave me right. I look around and I'm able to be genuine and honest about stuff, because I'm so baffled that I'm at where I'm at, that I'm just grateful to be here. And so, when it comes to forming those relationships with people, I'm not thinking well, how can I squeeze another half a percent into this? Or how can I make sure that this gets counted towards X, y or Z? Okay, you have to draw a line at some point. You can't just give away everything for free, right? Obviously you have to make a living. You got to have a business.

Speaker 2: 42:37

But I talked to some of these people that are, you know, example a construction company worked with out of Chicago, very direct, straight to the point, very high effort, very high demand, and we weren't used to working with that type of client when we first started working with them. And I could have looked at it one of two ways. I could have looked at it as I'm going to get out of this as soon as I possibly can because this client's not a fit, I chose to look at it Like I signed up for this for a year. What's the worst that I could learn out of putting myself in this situation for a year? Yeah, you know, it's tough, it's new, it's a group of people I don't know, it's a culture from a city that I've never lived in. There's all this other stuff that goes to it, but approaching it from that place of, like damn dude, I'm just so grateful to be in this room. I'm going to deal with it for a year. Yeah, we ended up parting ways at the end of that year.

Speaker 2: 43:31

I'm not saying to just stay in that relationship for a decade, you know. But I also want to get across, because I think I've been saying a lot of you know stay. But I also want to get across, because I think I've been saying a lot of you know stay true to yourself and stay true to the things that make you comfortable. That sometimes those situations that put you in that uncomfort zone are what actually spearheads you. It forced me to come up with better procedures. It forced me to come up with prettier PowerPoint presentations. It forced me to understand how to communicate to an executive team that has zero time for you and your problems. You know, there's all of these other supplemental things that I was able to draw in and that's a huge learning experience and that's something you have to learn by doing.

Speaker 1: 44:13

You can't really have somebody teach a course on that and it makes you a better owner at the end of the day. Now I want to talk about something pro project work versus retainer work. A lot of people don't understand it. Like, when you start at your agency, chances are you're just going to be doing project work for people, like you'll be doing a logo, here and there you'll be doing maybe one website, forum and uh, but over time, if you start to have employees, you need retainers you need. So what are some of the types of services that you sell on retainer? Like you mentioned this guy in Chicago you, you had him. It was a year long project. Was that a retainer job? What kind of retainer type of services do you guys offer?

Speaker 2: 45:00

Um. So I think that, to your point, when you're starting out, uh, you know, take you typically specialize in one area and you start to branch right. I know people that started in web dev. I know people that started in paid. I know people that started in social, as graphic designers, and you know they're all agency owners now, one way or the other. They just started with a different skills set. So you're absolutely right, like early on, when you're doing those projects, I think you haven't had enough experience inside of the arena yet to really know what pairs with what right. You're not a what do they call it? A sommelier, like the wine.

Speaker 1: 45:35

Yeah, you're a logo designer, right? Or you're a web designer, right? Yeah, right, exactly. You're not a marketing expert or a funnel development person or, you know, a growth hacker. You're none of those things, you're just know how to design things.

Speaker 2: 45:48

Exactly, exactly, um. And so, by no fault of your own, you're looking at that client's problems through that lens 24, seven, like everything that you see that client struggling with, you're going to buy. Again, no fault of your own, it's just a lack of knowledge or things to connect with. You're going to be thinking, oh well, I bet I could fix that through modifying their Squarespace or doing X, y or Z. Like, let's say, you're a web designer, right, um? And then you start to dive into SEO and all this other stuff and it's like, oh, I actually don't need to redesign the website, I need to put good content on the site if I want to do X, y or Z. And then, oh well, now I can sell a website and SEO package. If I build them their website, then they can. I can charge them $500 a month or a thousand dollars a month to create content for their site. Whoa, there's a retainer right there. Look at that. Um, you start as a graphic designer, right? Maybe you learn how to do social media management. That's a slippery slope, because now everybody expects a social media manager to wear like 40 hats. But let's say it's a utopian world, right? You could say, oh, I can design the posts for you and I can post them. I'll do the design as a project, I'll charge you X amount for 10. And then boom, here's this retainer. I'll actually post them for you on a monthly basis for X amount of dollars. That's kind of how we started.

Speaker 2: 47:08

So we just started experimenting with like what, what services pair nicely together. You know, what meal do I want to serve with this glass of wine? And then, as we kept tinkering, we started to realize people were employing, like some of the small businesses in our area dude, it's wild to me that they're employing like three or four different agencies. Like they have one agency for their Google my Business because they got upsold by some national brand that called them on the phone. And then they have one agency managing their SEO they're not talking to the Google my Business people. Then they have one agency managing their SEO they're not talking to the Google my Business people. And then their PPC guy is some dude that oversees that. You know they fell into a sales funnel on and none of them are talking to each other None of them. So all the strategies are going in different directions. And once I had that realization that that's what small businesses were dealing with.

Speaker 2: 47:59

I started walking in and our top two ways of kicking projects off now are redesigning your website or doing something that we call an SEO refresh, which is going into your current site. We're not really like building you a new one from scratch. We're just optimizing it and doing a bunch of competitive research and helping you actually rank for stuff that you want to rank for, and it comes with X number of pieces of content that we upload into the site to help, depending on the package that you purchase, and then following up each one of those services. I have basically a. I wouldn't say it's like a menu, because they're heavily recommended, but more like when you go to the doctor's office and it's like here's all the different meds that could potentially solve your problem. Let's talk about the risks and benefits and costs of each of them, right, yeah, and so then I'm able to look at them and say, okay, seo takes a little bit longer. Your cashflow is kind of poop right now. Maybe we do paid ads to get your cashflow up. And then you invest in SEO a little bit later, right, smart, invest in SEO a little bit later, right, um, smart strategy. And I have that a little bit of a custom conversation with them and I'm willing to give away what I perceive as a strategic insight to them for free, because it's so asinine to me that I'm fine giving that away because it's it's just like a little aha Right. Then, when they put me on retainer and they're like wow, we're getting leads from this website, we've built trust there. Hey, can we start running Google ads with you? Can we fire this other agency? 100%, come on over, we'll help take care of you there. And I've seen this across dozens of accounts.

Speaker 2: 49:35

At this point, getting in with something simple like SEO or I'm not trying to say that SEO is simple for all my SEO people out there but getting in with something that is defined and executable, like an SEO content package or a website redesign or something like that that's tangible, it has a start and end date, building trust, finding that point along that project cycle where the client is just like wow, you guys are killing it, you're answering all my calls, you're doing everything else. Have a 30 minute conversation with them and say what, what else are you dealing with? Like, I know I've heard through these conversations that we've been having that you're dealing with these other agencies or you're unhappy with this, you're unhappy with this. Can you just vent to me about the problems that you're facing? Don't try to sell them on that call. Just let them vent. And then dollars to donuts.

Speaker 2: 50:23

Within a week they're either hitting you up and saying, hey, I know that we had that conversation. Could you actually send me a quote Like, what if we were to do that through you guys? Yeah, or you're following up with them and you're saying, hey, based on that conversation we had, I genuinely think and this is what makes it less salesy, because you now have genuine context I genuinely believe that these services would do you a service and we could put everything under one house. So all you have to do is pay one invoice and you know that everything's getting taken care of, and that's kind of been our upsell strategy across all of them. So it starts as that one-off project and it almost always ends up in that you know MRR, monthly, recurring, whatever you want to call that retainer project so, yeah, and how?

Speaker 1: 51:08

how do people reach out to you what? What's, what's? How do they find your podcast? How do they find your the url for your company? You know, linkedin, all that good stuff yeah.

Speaker 2: 51:20

So if you want to find me on LinkedIn, it's Jan. Looks like Jan J-A-N. Uh, all in the C-A-L-M-A-S-Y. Um, I do. Linkedin's probably the most active platform that I'm on these days. I do a lot of posting on there. Um, like I was mentioning, on top of the agency stuff, I'm also the head of community for organization called Indie Collective, so constantly sharing stories about other entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, teams that are out there doing cool random stuff in the world. So that's what you'll find if you scroll through my LinkedIn feed.

Speaker 2: 51:52

The podcast the two that I host the most often are called the Apex Podcast, and that logo is like a little triangle. And then the other one's called the Modern Independent, and that one is way more focused on people. I like to think of it passing through the gateway into the freelance economy, right. What is that journey like to enter, Starting off as somebody just doing gigs, and then next thing you know you have three streams of income and you're actually more resilient than somebody that has a full-time job 100%. What are those stories like? So those are the two podcasts that you could find me as well.

Speaker 1: 52:26

And they're on any platform. Anywhere people go to listen to podcasts, right?

Speaker 2: 52:30

Spotify, apple podcasts pretty much everything that you can think of.

Speaker 1: 52:35

Awesome, jan. This has been great. I'm glad that I got to hear a little bit more about your story and where you guys are at right now. I'm glad that I got to hear a little bit more about your story and where you guys are at right now. I'm on the same page with you. I mean, it's tough running an agency but you know, people just got to fight through it.

Speaker 2: 52:52

People got to listen to folks like you and I listen to more podcasts. Listen to your podcasts and be more prepared.

Speaker 1: 52:57

Agreed, agreed, awesome man. Well, thank you, sir, for being on today. All right, adam thanks for having me. I'll talk to you soon, see ya. Thanks for joining us on this week's episode of side hustle city. Well, you've heard from our guests. Now let's hear from you. Join our community on Facebook, side hustle city. It's a group where people share ideas, share their inspirational stories and motivate each other to be successful and turn their side hustle into their main hustle. We'll see you there and we'll see you next week on the show. Thank you.