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7 Mistakes To AVOID When Starting Your Agency w/Tim Brown
Chris Do and Hook Agency's Tim Brown break down the seven critical mistakes freelancers make when scaling into a full-fledged agency.
Chris Do
Founder, The Futur™ · November 20, 2020
The Freelancer's Dilemma
The transition from freelancer to agency owner is a well-trod path paved with good intentions and disastrous mistakes. It begins with the desire for more: more impact, more income, more freedom. But that path often leads directly to a cage of your own making, where you become a prisoner of the very business you built to set you free.
Most freelancers make the leap driven by ambition, only to find themselves drowning in responsibilities they never anticipated. They become the lead designer, the head of sales, the bookkeeper, the project manager, and the janitor. The result is burnout, not breakthrough.
In a conversation with The Futur’s Chris Do, Tim Brown, founder of the Minneapolis-based Hook Agency, unpacks the seven critical errors he made scaling his business from a solo operation to a 15-person team. His journey provides a playbook for avoiding the most common and costly traps.
“I'm most qualified to talk about mistakes,” Brown admits. “You learn a lot from mistakes, and I've made a lot of them.”
These aren't theoretical missteps. They are hard-won lessons from the front lines of entrepreneurship, offering a clear-eyed view of what it truly takes to build a sustainable agency, not just a high-stress job.
Mistake 1: Quitting Your Day Job Too Soon
The first and most fatal error is depending entirely on freelance income before you have robust systems for client acquisition. The romantic notion of quitting a soul-crushing job in a dramatic huff is a Hollywood fantasy. In the real world, it is a recipe for desperation.
Brown learned this the hard way. His first attempt at launching his business came after quitting a restaurant job with just one client. “It was scary,” he recalls. That fear creates a climate of neediness. Desperate freelancers take on bad clients, accept low-ball offers, and say “yes” to work they should refuse. This desperation becomes a toxic cloud that hangs over every client interaction.
The alternative is not to wait for a magical moment of perfect safety. That moment never comes. The alternative is a strategic transition.
Brown points to the work of Sean McCabe, an author and entrepreneur who champions the Overlap Method. The concept is simple: build your freelance business on the side while you still have the security of a full-time salary. The goal is to grow your side income until it consistently overlaps and then exceeds your primary income.
For Brown, this meant working as a marketing director at an agency while building his client list. He successfully grew his freelance revenue to surpass his $70,000 salary. “I was able to exceed my income at the agency with my freelance income,” he says. This strategy provides two critical advantages:
- Financial Runway: Having a salary means you can be selective. You can turn down bad-fit clients without worrying about paying rent. Brown built a $20,000 runway before he left his job. While others told him it wasn't enough, his low expenses and consistent client flow made it viable.
- System Development: The security of a paycheck gives you the mental space to build and test your business development systems without the pressure of imminent financial collapse. You can experiment with marketing, refine your sales process, and build a repeatable model for getting new business.
“If you're too desperate, that's you get bad clients,” Brown warns. “You've got this vibe that like you'll take anything.” A salary is the antidote to that desperation. It allows you to build from a position of strength, not fear. This is one of the key lessons for anyone looking to make a similar leap, a concept explored in depth in The Futur's episode on how to go from freelancing to a 7-figure agency.
Mistake 2: The Tyranny of the Billable Hour
The second mistake is clinging to the billable hour, a relic of an industrial mindset that has no place in a value-driven creative business. Brown’s former agency operated this way, and it always felt fundamentally flawed. “I always felt dishonest, to be honest,” he confesses. “I hate tracking time.”
The problem with charging by the hour is that it incentivizes inefficiency. It punishes expertise. The better you get at your job, the faster you work, and the less you earn. It creates a perverse dynamic where you are either taking longer than necessary to hit quoted hours or finishing early and feeling like you are cheating the client or the company.
The solution is to stop selling your time and start selling outcomes. Chris Do outlines three primary pricing models:
- Time and Materials: The classic billable hour.
- Deliverables: Charging a flat fee for specific outputs (e.g., a logo, a website, a brand guide).
- Value: Basing your price on the economic impact your work will have on the client's business.
Brown advocates for a deliverable-based model. “I like having very clear deliverables and pricing for those,” he says. This shifts the conversation from effort to output. The client knows exactly what they are getting, and you know exactly what you need to produce. It decouples your income from the clock.
Do agrees, noting that this is often the most practical and effective model for many agencies. “For very, very, very many years, like decades here, we did really well, we made four or five million dollars a year basically charging on deliverables,” Do explains. “Nothing wrong with that.”
While value-based pricing is the ultimate goal for many, Do cautions that it is not for everyone. “Value-based pricing is hard. It's not for everybody,” he warns. “You have to have a certain level of experience... you have to have a particular set of skills.” For those without that specific skill set, trying to implement it can lead to confusion and lost sales. A deliverable-based model provides a solid, professional middle ground, a topic Do and pricing expert Ron Baker explore in their value pricing masterclass.
The mindset shift is crucial. You are not a temp worker renting out your brain by the hour. You are a strategic partner providing a defined solution. Price yourself accordingly.
Mistake 3: Failing to Filter Your Clients
As you grow, the temptation to take on any paying work is immense. This is a trap. The third mistake is failing to filter clients to ensure you can not only meet but exceed their expectations. Not every client is a good client, and learning to say “no” is one of the most important skills an agency owner can develop.
Brown’s initial mistake was taking on clients he felt he was “helping.” Small businesses, startups, friends, and family often come with the smallest budgets and the biggest headaches. “You're basically doing what you feel like is a little bit of charity,” he explains. “And it really leads to problems with your expectations about their behavior too.”
This leads to disappointment on both sides. The client has unrealistic expectations for their small investment, and you become resentful of the time suck. Do offers a stark rule of thumb: “If you work with friends and family, do it for free with zero expectations. Otherwise somebody's gonna have their heart broken.”
To avoid this, Brown implemented a rigorous filtering process. His agency, Hook, now has a bottom-line revenue requirement for new clients, typically around $1.5 million. This isn't about being elitist; it's about ensuring the client is large enough to get a clear return on their investment in marketing. A 25% increase in business for a company making $500,000 is simply not large enough to justify a significant agency retainer.
The core of this mistake, as Do points out, is a failure to manage client expectations. “You have to have that conversation,” Do insists. This involves being upfront about your process, availability, and what they can realistically achieve.
Brown uses several tools to manage this:
- The Questionnaire: A simple form to gather initial information. Brown includes questions like, “What is the biggest problem you're trying to solve right now?” and “What does success look like one year from now?” He also asks about their relationship with previous designers or agencies, a key indicator of their behavior as a client.
- The Education and Expectations Meeting: Before a proposal is even sent, Brown’s team holds a meeting to educate the prospect on their process and set clear benchmarks. “Here's the types of the result that you can expect over this six to twelve month period. And if that's not in line with what you're hoping to pay for, then we're probably not the greatest fit.”
- The Vibe Check: Brown filters for what he calls “calm versus agitated” clients. If a prospect is angry about their last three vendors, the pattern is clear. “What makes you think that you're so much different?” he asks.
Ultimately, the goal is to find clients you can turn into evangelists. Brown’s ultimate filter is, “Is this the type of person that's going to refer us business? Is this the type of person that we're going to be able to get them to a five-star review?” It is a high bar, but it is the only way to build a business on a foundation of stellar results and happy partners. To get these ideal clients, you need a system, as outlined in this guide on proven strategies to attract ideal clients.
Mistake 4: Taking Your Foot Off the Gas
The freelancer-to-agency-owner journey is littered with the carcasses of businesses that fell victim to the feast-or-famine cycle. This happens for one reason: they stop marketing when they get busy. This is the fourth, and perhaps most common, mistake.
When you have two or three big projects, you feel like you are swimming in business. The last thing on your mind is prospecting for more. “Any business development stuff or anything like that was just gone,” Brown says of his early days. “I was like, I'm swimming in business with my two or three clients.”
An older agency owner gave him a crucial piece of advice: “It doesn't matter if you're stressed out with the amount of work you have. If you don't keep those systems in place… you have those big roller coaster moments.”
Client acquisition is not a faucet you can turn on and off. It is a well you must constantly prime. If you stop pumping, the water will dry up. By the time you need it again, it will take weeks or months to get the flow started, creating a panic-inducing cash flow gap.
Do frames it perfectly: “Just because you get busy, don't take your foot off the gas.”
The key is to build durable, diversified systems for lead generation. Relying on a single source is fragile. Brown argues you need at least three solid systems in place. For Hook Agency, those systems are:
- Referrals: The lifeblood of many service businesses, amplified by a strong brand and client delight.
- Google (SEO): Brown’s agency specializes in aggressive SEO, so they practice what they preach. They create content that ranks for valuable keywords, generating a steady stream of inbound leads.
- LinkedIn/Outbound: Proactive outreach, particularly on platforms like LinkedIn, targeted at their ideal client profile.
The time to work on these systems is precisely when you feel too busy to do so. Brown suggests a mindset trigger: “I'm super busy with work. Oh, Tim and Chris said not to forget to go push on business development.”
This means you cannot book 40 hours of client work a week. You must build in time to work on the business, not just in it. That 20-30% of your time dedicated to marketing and sales is what an agency provides for its employees. If you are going it alone, you have to do it yourself. This is the non-negotiable work of an owner.
Mistake 5: Ignoring Mission and Significance
As you hire your first employees, the nature of your business changes fundamentally. It is no longer just about you. The fifth mistake is failing to build a highly motivating work environment grounded in a shared mission and a sense of significance.
Brown’s first employee left, and it was a painful wake-up call. “It hurt my heart,” he says. During his time in Seth Godin's altMBA program, he was confronted with hard questions about the purpose of his company. “What's the real mission of the business?”
To an owner, the significance can feel obvious. You see the direct impact on clients and feel the satisfaction of building something. But for an employee toiling away on a small piece of a project, that meaning can be lost. They are trading their time for a paycheck, and if that is the only transaction, they will eventually leave for a better one.
“You have this problem where it's not meaningful to them,” Brown explains. “I didn't filter my employees correctly.”
The solution is to build a culture that is about more than just money. It is about creating a worldview that unites the team. As Chris Do notes, you spend more time with coworkers than with almost anyone else in your life. That team should be selected with the same care as your closest friends.
Brown took this to heart and defined a clear mission for Hook Agency: “To change our clients' lives, to save them time, to get them more leads, and to make a positive impact on our community.” This is not just corporate fluff on a plaque. It is an active principle that guides their actions, from a rallying cry of “Champion the Underdog” to community volunteering and donations.
The goal is to provide a sense of significance. In his quarterly check-ins, Brown asks employees a direct and sometimes uncomfortable question: “Do you feel like your work is significant here?”
This is the work of creating a vibrant, thriving culture. It's about aligning everyone around a common idea, a worldview that transcends tasks and projects. Building a successful personal brand is one way to communicate this mission externally, as discussed in this masterclass on personal and business branding.
Mistake 6: Becoming the Linchpin
Many creative entrepreneurs start a business built around their unique talent. They are the star performer, the genius designer, the mastermind strategist. This is the sixth mistake: becoming the linchpin of your own company.
The term, popularized by Seth Godin's book Linchpin, describes someone who is indispensable. While being a linchpin as an employee is a path to job security, being the linchpin as a business owner is a path to exhaustion.
“As an employee, I wanted to be the linchpin,” Brown says. “As a business owner, I want to not be the linchpin.”
When the entire business revolves around you, you have not built a business. You have built a job with more steps and higher stakes. You are stuck. Every client call, every major decision, every piece of creative feedback must go through you. You can't take a vacation. You can't get sick. The business cannot survive without you.
This is what investors call the key man problem. A business that is wholly dependent on one individual is a fragile and high-risk asset. Even if you never plan to sell, thinking like an investor forces you to build a more resilient company.
Do puts it bluntly: “What happens if you get hit by a car tomorrow and you're bedridden?” If the answer is “the business collapses,” you have failed in your duty as a leader.
The alternative is to systematically work yourself out of a job. This means:
- Hiring people smarter than you: Overcome the ego-driven fear of hiring talent that might outshine you. You need their expertise to grow.
- Delegating crucial tasks: This includes sales kickoffs, presentations, and even design work. Let your team members develop their skills by doing the work.
- Building systems for quality: Instead of pitching your personal genius, pitch your agency's proven process that ensures quality regardless of who is performing the task.
This is the fundamental shift from working in the business to working on the business. It is a transition that many founders struggle with. “I wish I could design more,” Brown admits, “but I know that I need to get out of some of these crucial areas before I can have a little bit more freedom. Otherwise, you're just building a cage for your time.”
Mistake 7: Depending on a Single Lead Source
This final mistake is a close cousin of mistake number four, but it focuses on diversity rather than consistency. Relying on only one or two avenues for new business is a strategic vulnerability. When that one channel dries up, so does your agency.
Brown’s early business relied heavily on referrals and organic Google traffic. While effective, this two-pronged approach was still too fragile. To build a truly resilient business, he knew he needed to diversify.
The first step was identifying a profitable niche. For Hook Agency, that became construction and home services companies. This decision was not random; it was data-driven. “I had like three clients that were in home services... and I liked them,” he says. “I felt like we were giving them what they wanted and they were willing to pay for it.”
Niching down makes your marketing exponentially more effective. It allows you to tailor your messaging and focus your outbound efforts. A tightly defined niche is a prerequisite for building scalable lead generation systems like the ones discussed in this overview of how to grow a creative agency.
With a niche in place, Brown began layering in new client acquisition channels:
- Strategic Partnerships: He started forming relationships with other businesses that serve his ideal client. For example, collaborating on content with a CRM provider for roofers. “We're talking to a roofing CRM later today and like doing some content with them,” he mentions.
- Outbound Sales: With a clear target audience, proactive outbound sales on platforms like LinkedIn become much more manageable and effective.
- Paid Ads & Remarketing: Brown uses paid ads, particularly Google Ads and Facebook remarketing, to stay top-of-mind with prospects who have already visited his website. “If somebody comes to our website, they're going to see us for the rest of their life,” he laughs.
This multi-channel approach creates a resilient, anti-fragile business. If one channel slows down, the others can compensate. It transforms client acquisition from a hopeful activity into a predictable machine.
The journey from freelancer to agency owner is a test of mindset. It requires a fundamental shift from being a doer to being a builder. It demands that you stop thinking like a technician and start thinking like an architect, designing systems and structures that can operate and thrive without your constant intervention.
Avoid these seven mistakes, and you will not just build a business. You will build a legacy.
TRANSCRIPT
hey what is up everybody happy friday so good to see you we're back with another live stream today and today we're going to be talking to tim brown about some something really cool and i think that you guys want to hang out for that we're going to talk about how to go from
freelance agency and the mistakes he's made along the way and we're going to share but first i just want to say hi to everybody that's part of the donation the futurists the doers the donuts you guys know who you are okay so what do i know about tim i know a couple of
things he's based out of minneapolis and he's the ceo and founder of hook agency at one point in his life he was a technical director at min search and also the director of marketing strategy snap agency starting to see a pattern here i think he describes himself as a content strategy evangelist excuse
me there's like three big hype words there so we're gonna have to hold him accountable to find out exactly what a content strategy evangelist is and does his promise is to help his clients hook better leads with aggressive seo joining me today is tim brown you guys can find him on socials at
hook agency and also his website hookagency.com tim welcome to the show hey thanks for having me man yeah jonah's clapping but we can't hear him because he's muted because we had some technical problems but he is definitely clapping right now i also want to welcome all 257 people for joining us live i'll
be monitoring your comments i'm back in my home studio here so i'll be able to read your comments as we go um word of warning to everybody there may be some inadvertent swearing tim asked me if he could do that i said you got to be you got to be 100 you so
i just want to let you know it might happen he's going to try not to but he may have a foul mouth i'm not sure yet we don't know each other that well we'll see yes okay let's dive into it you have a presentation you prepared for us right these seven mistakes yes
you know i'm most qualified to talk about mistakes you learn a lot from mistakes uh and i've uh i've made a lot of them i i do a lot i i throw a lot at the wall and i've i've learned some stuff from that i also like have compassion for other freelancers who
are trying to do this i think it's difficult right it's uh a tough transition trying to hire people trying to market a business i think one of the biggest ones is like getting new business right how do we get new business at scale so um yeah everybody wants some of that yeah so
i've seen some some issues with the way i did it i if i could help some people avoid some pain i'd love to fantastic all right so um i've got my presentation here we've got seven mistakes going from freelancer freelancer to 15-person agency my first mistake i found depending totally on freelance income
before i had systems and habits in place for client acquisition so i actually tried to do the business while i was in college at first i tried to i i quit a restaurant in a huff i had the whole like dramatic thing where i had like i had like one client and like
the chef at that restaurant was just a total jerk to me that day and i uh i ran out and it was it was a really dramatic it was it was scary because i had that one client um and that summer i maybe got like three four clients and i was making websites
i was doing logos i was doing all that stuff i i put myself in a in a magazine like i got a magazine ad to trade for work oh my god yeah it was years by the way this was 2000 i think maybe okay not that long ago and you're running magazine ads
old school yeah magazine and i like i was like this isn't going to get clients they got me two clients and one of them was one of the biggest or like not a big but a pretty big music venue in our city so it's really cool to get a website that way through
a print ad is fun but once i graduated from college i i felt the obligation to go join up with another agency and i did find that um doing the transition at the tail end of a two or two and a half three year stint at that agency and turning in the marketing
director there and stuff like that was way easier because i had way i had less pressure on my income i think that that's the scariest part um i love this dude sean mccabe i don't know if you've ever checked he's been on the channel he talks about the overlap method and that's something
that i took to heart and overlapped i i actually was able to exceed my income at the agency with my freelance um income so i you know whatever i got i was getting decent money as the marketing director and i was able to exceed that with my like monthly i and or i
um kind of evened out my website i sold a lot of websites so i'd like um spread it out over six months and try to think of that as like a monthly recurring and then once i got that monthly recurring up above my um agency income i i decided to leave it never
really was safe i never got to that spot where i was like this is even though i had exceeded my um [Music] you know my salary it never felt safe it was terrifying but i definitely had some runway and i think like when i tell people how much runway i had financially because
this was like very bootstrapped or whatever they always are like that was that's insane you should never have gone out on your own with that that's all you had on runway but i had very low expenses so like my my rent was like 250 bucks uh from i got i needed to get
150 bucks for rent yeah that's crazy because in minneapolis i was in a basement okay okay but still like just to put that in context i was staying in a loft in downtown los angeles basically nothing in it yeah just a bathroom and a sink and i was paying i think twelve hundred
dollars for my space and that was in 1995 so that's just showing you yeah the differences in terms of what you and i were paying for rent you said a couple things i want to ask you about you said that you started to make more money as an independent freelancer than you were
at a highly paid salary job right okay that's pretty remarkable yeah is it okay for me to ask how much you were making at that time sure i was making like 70 000. that's great yeah just fresh out of school too right um couple years two and a half couple years okay and
so now you're starting to make more money as a freelancer building a lot of websites and then you have people saying like don't go and do this because you need more runway how much runway did you have and who were these people ah twenty thousand dollars i had in runway and that's still
pretty good yeah it wasn't it wasn't crazy but that's how that's what i think you know that's what that overlap technique really is right like that um you got to have some right you know i mean it was good for me i felt like it was enough i mean i'm just i've always
been very scrappy and you know i didn't have a ton so that's the way i've kind of looked at it that seemed like enough to me and yeah just put it away in a different account i made a business account and separated it from my other stuff so i wouldn't spend it excellent
so the kind of the alternative is having that salary building your busi uh biz dev systems on the side i think i think that's a pretty big challenge you know as a freelancer how do i get new clients how do i get them regularly in a systematic way and if you're too desperate
if you're too desperate that's you get bad clients right like you you you're out there kind of acting needy and you've got this vibe that like you'll take anything and i've certainly been you know i've done that so i believe that there's this this opportunity to essentially separate yourself from the desperation by
having a salary i get that we all want to freelance out of college i found it useful to have this you know before i did that so mistake number two number two uh charging hours on bigger projects i actually this is how my old agency did this and i always felt dishonest to
be honest and i'm not telling anyone they're doing it wrong but for me this was a mistake because i felt dishonest because i one hate tracking time and two often would get things done in way less time than i said i was gonna get it done in or like we quoted out right
somebody else quoted it out and now i'm getting it done or i'm taking i have to take longer and there's all this pressure internally so i don't know i just always found that hours were a mistake um and to me charging for value and deliverables was better i i like deliverables i know
that you're a proponent of the value based uh i like deliverables too okay i do yeah i just think about like the value-based things sometimes it's really hard for clients to understand or um i haven't had a ton of success i've really experimented with it like charging you know like figuring out what
that result is it's just the result is always a little obscured it's it's marketing you know it's hard to it's hard to get like a revenue increase or profit increase and like really stick to that in my experience so i like having very clear deliverables and pricing for those but there's always a
little bit of that mindset of like this is you know this is an investment not an expense and i'm always trying to make you money with everything i do you know that mindset yep and then another mistake i made and i've made this a lot is not filtering clients to ensure that you
can exceed expectations and sometimes i've found and this is this is hard but sometimes i've found that this can you know land on revenue like if a client if a particular company doesn't have a certain amount of revenue potentially i shouldn't take them and that's hard because i love small businesses i love
i love where i've worked with like dog walking companies with just uh an older gentleman an older woman and it feels so good like i've done like conversion rate optimization for them where i'm like making their website just tweaking it and like i did a low price thing or whatever but as i've
grown as i've grown this company to sit there and try to do some of those companies that are very small they will inevitably like we cost more money now right um there's a lot of disappointment that can come with like the the differing expectations so it's like i need to make sure that
we can exceed these expectations and that they have reasonable expectations for that money um yeah i'd love to hear your take on that but i yeah basically i feel that there's this spot where you can get stuck where you're you're basically doing what you feel like is a little bit of charity like
you're trying to be nice for these small businesses and it really leads to problems with your expectations about their behavior too so i think you shouldn't you shouldn't be spending too much time trying to do nice things for friends and family or trying to do too much nice things for super small businesses
it also comes down to how much value is it to their business is it a high value to their business or are they so small that they it really isn't that much value to their business because they're you know it's percentage of 25 increase in in business on a 500 000 business is
just not that much money so they shouldn't spend mo money on you even if you can provide great work so that i find those like revenue requirements is actually very useful and we don't work with a ton of startups or anything like that so you could say if they've got funding that that's
a different type of thing but for us like kind of putting a bottom cap on revenue at like 1.5 million has been is a mindset shift and i i kind of have to do that because i just find that otherwise the neediness and the impatience will will come in too quick and ours
is like you know we've got web design but we've also got search engine optimization and content marketing i really want there to be clear roi within six to nine months and if there's not i i get like i'm uncomfortable and i like i make our our people uncomfortable too but you know what
i mean yeah i want to talk to you about a couple of things tim first i want to clarify a couple things people who follow this channel i hope you're here because you follow this channel it's not just a random click on a button on youtube yeah but you know that i talk
about that there's three different ways to price you can price based on energy and effort usually measured in in time and materials you can charge based on deliverables the things that you create and that's what tim's talking about here and then you can also charge based on value or the results that you
create for somebody i'm not telling you that there's one way to do anything for everyone it's not possible so you got to do what works for you and generally speaking charging based on deliverables is a good hybrid between charging for time and charging based on results for very very very many years like
decades here we we did really well we made four or five million dollars a year basically charging on deliverables nothing wrong with that okay so i want to be clear about that so not everybody has to run out there value-based pricing is hard it's not for everybody you have to have a certain
level of experience as liam neeson would say you have to have a particular set of skills and if you don't have those skills don't don't try to pretend like you can that doesn't mean that you can't apply any of these lessons based on whatever model you choose and there's hybrid models all over
the place towards the end we started doing hybrid between deliverables and value base okay having said that let's get into the whole mistake thing here i see this on my screen on your on your powerpoint presentation here excuse me and it says not filtering clients i think that's a mistake and then it
says to ensure you can exceed expectations that's also a mistake i don't i'm not quite sure how these two fit together just yet the first part makes a lot of sense to me some clients come to you because the scope is too big the timeline is off the budget is too small and
they don't have clear definitions on what the goal looks like so for you tim you've already articulated that it's not a good fit for you you need to learn to walk away from that also oftentimes doing charity work for friends and family or they're just a bigger headache than know what they're worth
you go in there with the best intentions on the road to hell is paved with good intentions we get that so i've always advised people from this group if you work with friends and family do for free with zero expectations otherwise somebody's gonna have their heart broken that's the problem what i don't
get here is not filtering clients to ensure you can exceed expectations can you tie those two ideas together for me yeah i'm basically saying if you can't exceed expectations you probably shouldn't take that client that's whether yeah so maybe it's just phrased poorly there there's clients that have reasonable expectations and then there's
clients that actually don't know how to you know there's an understand they may not how to know how to manage that project internally either there's like a marketing manager there or there's somebody there um the owner that doesn't understand what you do you kind of need them to understand we have an education
and expectations meeting to you know before we do a proposal which is just educating them a little bit on what we're trying to do and then here's what you can expect here's the types of the result that you can expect over this six to twelve month period and if that's not in line
with what you're hoping to pay for then we're we're probably not the greatest fit so i think that that's good very good a very good um like addition to our sales process um so another way to say this is failure to manage client expectations yes exactly right because they can be big they
can be small but they have to fit within a timetable and a thing that you can realistically deliver on otherwise you are setting yourself up for failure a lot of us especially when we're starting many of you guys are freelancers or just starting out in the marketplace under normal conditions it's tough right
now it's really really tough you have to have that kind of you have to have that conversation you have to be really upfront what are you expecting in terms of like office hours now you can ask that question or you can just tell them i work from nine to five monday through friday
i'm not available 501 i'm just letting you know if that's a problem we're not good fit i'm not available on the weekend you know and and the expectation is that when we give you something to look at is it reasonable to assume that you can get us feedback from a single point of
contact a spock an spoc single point of contact within 48 hours and then you go on and on you just kind of list some basic terms an agreement and you need to talk about it and you need to solidify this in writing so that there's no disagreement later on as well we never
talked about that no i agreed and an alternative you know you're kind of going into it but i like to filter with the questionnaire we've got that education and expectations meeting we use a couple like principles one calm versus agitated and i like filtering with this i'm not saying we're perfect on it
but if somebody comes in agitated let's say let's say they've been mad at their last two or three agencies or freelancers they've been mad at their last couple designers not a good sign what makes you think that you're so much different i'm not saying that you're not an amazing designer and really good
with timelines and all that but it just it starts to become a pattern you know and there are clients that just are not great and they haven't been great to their last couple people that have been serving them and you just had to figure out whether somebody has appropriate expectations the questionnaire is
one tool to do that an education an expectations meeting is one way to do that a couple different people like if you you know i know a lot of your your audience is freelancers but if you have a couple people on your team or something like that having multiple people there to say
is this the type of person that you know ultimately i'm all i'm filtering this might be too hardcore but i'm kind of filtering for is this the type of person that's going to refer us business is this the type of person that we're going to make sure like is this the type of
person that's going to we're going to be able to get them to a five-star review you know i want that mindset you know i understand that um that might be a little too hardcore for people but you kind of have to be willing to to lose more prospects in my opinion and that
means you need to have more prospects so that kind of comes down to like attracting more opportunities and you know we can talk a little bit about that in the next um the next piece here which is my mistake number four stopping pushing on your own marketing when you have a good amount
of business now this yeah this is one that somebody told me real early on i'm so happy that they did because i had whatever two or three websites or something i was working on and i was kind of stressed out with the amount of work that i had i was you know somewhat
new i was really new i was super new but i was sitting there i was working on these websites and i any business development stuff or anything like that was just gone i wasn't thinking about it at all i was like i'm swimming in business you know with my two or three clients
i'm swimming in business i don't need any more and this other agency owner said to me man you it doesn't matter if you're stressed out with the amount of work you have if you don't keep those systems in place if you don't push on your own marketing if you don't find new ways
and i think systems to get new clients like how many proven systems to get new clients do you have in place if it's just one ooh let's get one more if you got two let's get a third you know i'm not saying you have to have 10 of these i'm saying three good
systems for getting new clients ours are referral google and maybe linkedin you know like those are our three biggest systems um i think of social media as complementing referrals so i don't need to go down a rabbit hole there but i believe that if you stop pushing even when you're busy then you
have those big you know um roller coaster moments where you hit that bottom part and it's just it stinks and recurring you know recurring is a big piece to getting out of that too but y'all can't talk about that yeah uh there's a question here first from the previous mistake which was uh
i'm not sure how to say her name but it's i think it's umaima b is asking can you provide us him with some more examples of questions to filter the clients i thought that part was really helpful when you gave you gave an example can you give us a couple more yeah so
one you know the one i think i mentioned was how is your relationship with your last couple designers or agencies um we ask what is the what is the biggest problem you're trying to solve right now we ask what does success look like one year from now and i'm trying to remember what
else we've got um you can see our questionnaire at hook agency.com q if you feel like just looking at ours i mean i think part of this was snatched from somewhere else i'm trying to remember some of the other questions i do like asking in that it's kind of old school but i
do like asking where do you hear about us and just like i also asked i have a second part of that where'd you hear about us and if you googled something what did you google because there's you know there's a lot of marketing platforms out there but they haven't mastered that like keyword
level attribution so i like to ask that and honestly i get great information from that and i then use that to create new content on a regular basis yeah okay so why don't we have a conversation just you and me sure okay and if i were a prospective client and we're talking about
something you i think the mindset is i'm listening very carefully and paying attention to uh spoken and unspoken things to just judge for myself is this going to be a good fit for me exactly uh so you you might ask about previous clients or i'm sorry previous vendors and they'll talk but but
how else can you just organically weave this into the conversation besides what you just said do you have any tips for us yeah i'm working on that because i have a separate sales guy now and so i'm trying to teach him how i do it um because everybody's a job now yeah i
do it naturally right like i'm i'm kind of poking and prodding sometimes i'm actually like confronting them a little bit because i'm trying to get style yeah i actually want to say like so why didn't that person work out you know if they fired somebody or if they had a another design that's
a really good one ask why why did that not work out and i think what else i would ask you know just person to person is just like do you feel like the type like i tell them my skill set or our company's skill set i say does is that sound like what's
gonna create value for you like is this are these the types of actions and skill sets that are going to create value for you we want to we just want to work with people you know it's really that mindset of setting something on the table this is accurate this is what we do
really well setting it on the table and then saying does that sound like something you need right now and i think that we get a little off base when we start just like customizing everything to every single client in my experience because you know i'm making up stuff like we're we're not a
social media marketing company we're you know we're a web design and seo company so we don't we don't do a ton of custom stuff we have very clear deliverables and so we set those on the table and then we say you know does that sound good to you is that what you need
and if not it's all good we'd love to connect you we have this mindset of we'd love to connect you with some other people we we do that a lot and to be honest in the last two weeks we've gotten two five-star reviews on google just from our sales process of being nice
to people which is kind of crazy like we're referring our business and they're giving us a five-star review and yeah we have a lot of little agencies around us in minneapolis that like maybe eat off of us a little bit like i like that i love that there's like these other agencies these
or these freelancers that are doing very well just from knowing us and from that's a good vibe that com that creates community that creates relationships and then they send us business sometimes but i mean it's not about that you know it's not about that we we have done very solidly in this you
know this creating leads you know approach with our content marketing and with you know some of the other things we're doing to build brand and then we can feed other people but yeah i think it comes down to this at making sure that you know why there's been failure in the past and
then making and really talking through what success looks like for that perfect so i'd love to jump in here and provide a broader context and framework for how you may approach this these kinds of questions are great for somebody with tim's experience his confidence his way of speaking the easiest way to think
about this is think what would it be like to work with this person for the next five six weeks on a very intimate level and if you use the same criteria as to how you choose your friends and who you want to hang out with it gives you a sense of like what
you should be looking for i know some people who are very direct blunt and aggressive and they like to work with the same kind of people tony robbins talks about this in terms of how you build rapport with people in that maybe people from the south talk a little slower they're more deliberate
they're very polite and hospitable and people from the coast maybe especially on the east coast so like from new york they're going to talk really fast and they're going to be much more aggressive and they they want to get right to it and so if you're mixing different persona or styles it may
not work well for you so just reflect on yourself what do i like what do i look for in a partner right so you strike me tim as a very uh soft-spoken but direct person uh and kind of a straight shooter and kind of grounded it's no kind of flashy talking i talk
a little bit faster than you right so you can see our energies are a little bit different yeah and so that's kind of what you're trying to to feel out and the best way to talk about it is to talk about previous experiences without guiding that conversation too much so just ask him
like tell me about the the last time you worked with a person like us how did that go what was that experience like tell me more and did you like that and what didn't you like about it what would you change and so you're kind of auditioning them whether or not they make
a good client to you or not i love it so just think of it in that context what do you look for in your friends so for me i look for people who are honest who are open direct that are transparent and they speak their mind because otherwise i don't have to guess
i don't like people who are overly polite and beat around the bush uh and sometimes certain cultures and communities they're very polite especially like japanese clients we've had japanese clients before and get this is a real story we'd have a presentation they seemed very happy everybody would clap and then from the window
i could see that they're outside talking producer to client for a really long time in the parking lot and then the producer came in and told me they didn't like anything i'm like wow that's tough for me to work with because i need to hear and so it's so polite so that's kind
of like and there's a right fit for everybody just like how for every man out there there's a woman for every woman out there there's a man or or woman to woman man's ban i'm not judging you just need to find that right chemistry the right mix for you okay exactly now getting
back to the latest point uh mistake number four i believe you had up there which was about the three ways you generate leads and you say you need to have at least three systems in place to generate leads and that just because you get busy don't take your foot off the gas because
getting clients is not like turning on the faucet it's not an on and off thing and and people talk about this like you have to prime the pump you have to pump uh the well for some period before water actually comes out to spigot right so if you stop and you you make
the mistake that we're so busy we're so hot i can't keep up with the work you're going to find that when you need that work priming the pump again is going to take you weeks if not months and it's going to make you sweat right so tim is saying for him number one
word of mouth advertising is called woma woma word of mouth advertising to some combination of paid and organic traffic uh i don't know if he's boosting things on google but seo optimization seo yeah we spend very little on on paid ads just because content marketing seems so much cheaper to me and superior
yeah yeah and i believe you help people with content marketing right yes absolutely so we've had some success with that and now we sell it so yeah that's perfect so you're actually doing what it is that you advise people to do yeah and then the rest is organic and earned media so those
are you that are new to marketing that's a term you need to know is it paid versus earned media and the best kind of media is the one that you earn because it means you've delivered value to somebody okay back to you and part of it is like you know when you pay
for stuff you don't always see the truth about what really is resonating you know like you're paying for this let's say you're on facebook and you always boost every post or something it's hard to see what really gets right you know that's why i think like if you are boosting stuff on facebook
or something start with the stuff that's actually winning organically and then and go from there that's a great tip um all right so and yeah one of those things is like hey you're so busy with work right now that's a perfect time to go tweak your systems just maybe use that as a
trigger i'm super busy with work oh tim and chris said not to forget to go push on business development when i'm busy with work it's like it's a mindset thing where it's don't don't forget about it and you just gotta build in that kind of that that looseness you can't be you have
40 hours of client work if you're freelance if you're doing 40 hours i mean if you're the type of person that can do that extra 20 then great but otherwise build in like a 30 you know build in that that looseness so that you have built in time to promote you that's why
that's why when you go no i mean this is a good topic because that's why when you go to an agency and they pay you less than you could have made as a freelancer that's why they're do that's why they're paying you less is because they're doing that extra 30 percent to get
the business development systems that's a really hard part about any business is those business development systems and getting those those leads so if you're not going to work for an agency you have to build that in yourself and it is difficult so yeah just being being cognizant of that all right mistake number
five not prioritizing highly motivating work environment for employees significant significance and mission so this one gets into as you start to have a team right and my first employee left so sad it was terrible and honestly it hurt my heart and i was um i was going through seth godin's alt mba at
that time and everyone was asking these questions like these really good questions i think that was my favorite thing about the old mbas it's like really smart people asking you pointed questions and some of them hurt they were like so you know like what's the real mission of the business and it always
seems so soft to me because it always seems soft until it's your business and then you're like oh man mission and vision is actually super super important and it provides a motivating work environment i need significance in my life and maybe if i'm the owner of this company you know equity and money
and you know i i see a little bit more closely that the changes in our clients lives like i see i have closer relationships sometimes and i see them getting better and it's like a little bit more pointed but then some other people on our team are back here just toiling away and
they can't see all the you know the beautiful flowery things that are changing in our clients lives or you know they you know those types of things so you have this problem where it's not meaningful to them and i didn't filter my employees correctly so this kind of is there's different things going
on one is they need to resonate with your your core values people that you hire once you start to hire and then you should have a mission you should have a mission that matters and that it's not just you know fluff and corporate speak and synergy you know what i mean so ours
is to change our clients lives to save them time to get them more leads and to make a positive impact on our community we call it you know we have big up on the wall champion the underdog you know we're trying to make a motivating work environment with swag and this mission and
going out and volunteering and donating and these types of things that's stuff that makes you feel like you didn't just waste another year of your life just trading money for a paycheck i think that you know we're still working on it i don't want it to be that way i want this to
be something where people feel significant it's significance you know you when we ask people like how they're doing every three months we do that you know check in with an employee kind of have that more pointed conversation and we're saying you know do you have what you need in regards to freedom and
autonomy and compensation and and the the one about significance sometimes people get weirded out by that because it's a little intimate to say do you feel like you're like your work is significant here but it's it's a worthwhile aspiration i'm not saying we're perfect on it um i think getting super clear on
mission vision and core values will help and volunteering donating trying to change clients lives having a little bit deeper meaning to these things and that's that's all you really i don't know what else to do i'm working on this chris if you got anything else i'm trying to provide a significant work environment
i might have a thought or two on this and i think it's really good that you're bringing this up i can tell that you're you've been doing this and you do have a real team because as soon as your team grows beyond a couple of people you're gonna run into problems just like
this now before i kind of chime in and tell you what i think in case you're just tuning in first of all welcome thanks for being a part of this don't forget to hit the like button like right now and if you're wondering who not me this gentleman who i'm talking to has
like a perfect skin and it's this young handsome man with like perfectly groomed hair he is tim brown and he runs an agency called hook agency and you can find them at hook agency.com and you can find them on socials at hook agency okay now that i've done that part let's talk about
what you're really talking about is having a vibrant thriving culture where your your efforts and we don't want to over complicate it where your efforts are aligned around a common idea south god will talk about this as a world view like do we believe the same kinds of things if we don't we
probably shouldn't spend as much time as we do together you're probably spending more time with your coworkers than you are with your siblings with your parents sometimes even your spouse or your children if you have any so it needs to be as selective you need to be just as judicious in selecting your
very close friends as you do your team because as the expression goes it only takes one rotten apple to spoil the bunch and we've seen that we've seen toxic personalities or people who aren't team players who are selfish who want to just bring a lot of drama and to be the center of
attention that's very toxic for a workplace unless your entire workplace is like people like that then that's your work culture i'm not saying one is superior to the other but you might want to take a look at yourself and be a little bit more introspective and say just talk with clients who am
i who do i want to be around what things do i care a lot about and things that i don't care a lot about so it sounds to me like you figured something out here tim that you really want to help your clients empower their company their vision their mission through your specialized
area of marketing that makes a lot of sense so people who love marketing who love to help clients and help others realize their goals and our business and marketing and creative savvy okay now we have some principles we have a world view if we all like coffee and dogs that's another thing that
you incorporate into your work culture and you make that to be the focal point right all those things make you unique and you have to work on that but back to you and your uh i think mistake number six mistake number six being the linchpin this is actually this was my mindset as
an employee i wanted to be a linchpin at my company another seth godin thing like his great book linchpin the idea of creating a place where it's all centered around my talents though was not extremely attractive to me i needed i was trying to build the agency around my uniqueness and personality at
first but i think and you know that mindset of being a little bit scared of employees uh that are more talented at certain things than me that was a mistake because you get stu you're gonna be very tired if you continue in that way if you make it so only you can do
the most important stuff then it is very tiring and i think for me this is a giant mistake because it i i need other talented people around me once and sometimes those people have egos too that's another thing they have egos but i'm i'm grateful for them sometimes i'm grateful for all that
because i need other talented people i don't have the energy at a certain point to just be this this linchpin so as an employee i wanted to be the linchpin as a business owner i want to not be the linchpin and investors you know i have a friend that's uh private equity and
they call it the key man problem when a company has it's so focused on one individual that you get a little bit stuck so from my point of view as an agency i don't want to create this key man problem i'm not trying to sell my company but i think these principles are
good which are just if i was to have an accident or something i was incapacitated for some time or whatever you know like not not to be you know macabre or anything but this idea of i want this agency to be around still i want it to be viable and i wanted to
be able to serve clients so i'm always thinking that way now do i achieve it maybe not always but it's a good mindset i think trying to make your business so it can run without you is the alternative getting out of sales kickoffs and presentations and letting people get better than me and
they will they will if you you know if you're not designing like i'm not designing 40 hours a week i am i get to design less than i'd like to be honest running a business and that's something you kind of got to be honest like maybe you don't need to go to agency
if you really want to design 40 hours a week you may not need you know what i mean like just freelancing is awesome but if you want to run a business with you know a good chunk of people it's hard especially unless you can find something like an operating officer or something like
that it's hard to really spend the time in the work so it's that working on the business not in the business it's sometimes annoying i wish i could design more um but i know that i need to get out of some of these crucial areas before i can have a little bit more
freedom otherwise you're just building a cage for your time and i think i'm still not perfect at this but it is an aspiration and i always like i think some people try to force this too quick so i think you got to watch that to me it's around that 10 person mark where
you're trying to maybe uh hand off some of those crucial elements you know sometimes people you know hire your company for you and if they do that you have to be there you have to be doing that but once you have systems that ensure quality you can start to pitch that instead of
like a unique you know genius or something like that and i'm not a unique genius but you know what i mean we all get in that mindset that that's what we are you are unique and sometimes the things you do feel like you're a genius but you're saying you're not always a unique
genius yeah exactly i think you have some friends here somebody named rebel cx i don't know if you know them they said everyone that works at hook agency is a rock star there's some nice compliments coming in on the chats here i just want to point that out that they like yourself speaking
that you seem very confident and just speaking of confidence before we were talking about like when you're busy when you have a lot of work i i know it's correlatory like when you have a lot of work your confidence seems to go up so there's no better time to try new things in
terms of marketing or switching up the team a little bit going after a new client or raising your prices i just want you to keep that in mind you're talking about something that's very important a lot of creatives start an agency or a company or studio and it's really built around them and
only them and they want their name on everything and it's good at the beginning it fills up your ego you feel really important the world loves you you're a rock star and then like you can't do anything because every single call every single client meeting every round of feedback they want to hear
and see from you and then you find that you're stuck and that you've hired all these good people and paid them good money and you're doing almost all of their work because they can't do it without you and it's a dangerous thing so we want to start thinking about almost immediately if you're
a real entrepreneur if you're a thoroughbred entrepreneur you should be thinking about a succession plan that the the economic and business health of your company cannot depend on one person think about microsoft this gigantic multi-billion dollar corporation if at that time bill gates passes the companies still survives without him steve jobs and
apple he passed away obviously company is still running and actually doing better business than they have ever had done in the past right so you want to build that into your business maybe not all right away as tim had mentioned but think about that and the simple phrase is what happens if you
get hit by a car tomorrow and you're bedridden how do the people who show up every single day who've made a pledge to you to give you their best effort during work hours what are you going to do with them and that would be a huge letdown in leadership if you didn't think
this through absolutely love it all right last mistake here mistake number seven depending on only a couple avenues for new business hey i think i already started covering this but biggest ones for us were organic google traffic and referrals so and um you know as time goes on we've tried to do outbound
which is weird we have uh we work with a lot of construction companies and home services companies so that once you have that niche it becomes a little bit easier to do outbound that's why i like a niche we actually have medical clients we have all kinds of clients but when you when
you kind of identify hey what we're doing is super super useful to these types of businesses you know and they like it and they're they're willing to pay for it then i can keep pushing into that everyone always asks me hey how'd you find that like what is that niche like construction like
okay um the answer to that is i had like three clients that were in home services i had a pavement company or a modeling company and a roofing company and i liked them hey i really like them i like their vibe i felt like we were giving them what we what they wanted
and they were willing to pay for it so i just kind of like threaded together three clients and then i made up my niche i had a business coach at the time that said you need a niche and i went for it and so that's been you know slow slowly but surely now
we don't plaster that all over our homepage or anything like that because we don't we get a lot of business from just minneapolis area um and so we have i guess it's kind of two niches minneapolis and home services all over the country so the two right now i may change that you
know in the next next couple years and just go harder on the home services thing i think outbound you know we've gone hard on linkedin we've got referrals we've got google or organic traffic so you start to get these other um these other things and i think just making sure that you diversify
um you know we talked about three to four solid long-term options you know one of the biggest ones for me right now is strategic partnerships with people that own our ideal clients attention we're you know talking to a roofing crm later today and like doing some content with them we do we do
content with people that's strategic partnerships what do we have that's valuable that we can do with this client we can create content with them we can do videos with them we can tag them on social we can hype them up we can be nice and we can connect them to each other because
they're in the same niche so that's good and strategic partnerships sometimes involve a signed agreement sometimes we have a little card that just says like you know 500 bucks and like just give us a client it's 500 bucks we hand that out i don't hand that out that much but we have all
kinds of things we're like always nudging people and just like hey if you got referrals we're here we're making content with them and then we're pushing more of our mindset of marketing into current client delight campaign so for us that means we've been doing we're not a video company but we're you know
web design and seo company but we're going out and doing some video with our clients for not very expensive just because i like to get out on the job with them i i know it's it's difficult right now we're not doing a ton of this at this moment but like i like to
get out on the job with them and it's such a good visual for our social media to like me being in a kitchen remodel or me being on a roof it's like a really good vibe because then they relate because people like us do things like this they see us in as part
of their peer group and they see that their peer group is working with somebody like us so i think it's that kind of like that tribe mentality and really getting into that and then yes we're building out ads and outbound sales campaigns and for us that's you know facebook ads a little bit
more some google ads we do a lot of remarketing i love remarketing if somebody comes to our website they're going to see us for the rest of their life on all around the internet because the cookie's been attached to them yeah exactly and we have people call us up there like uh i
cannot get rid of you you're everywhere how do i turn this off yeah i can i don't mind that's good yeah i want to say a couple things because because of the time confusion between tim and myself he's not in the same time zone we had to move this uh live stream up
a couple hours and so i'm encroaching on my son's piano rehearsal so in case he starts blasting away on his piano that's what you're going to hear in the background and so i've taken as much of the quiet time i think he's about to like explode in a second so i just want
to say that now some people are asking is this live stream going to be available afterwards and yes it is you guys can re-watch this whenever you want so don't worry about that don't sweat it and there's a really good question here from blue key media they want me to ask you tim
about your seo masterpiece of getting one of your team members to rank number one google for sexiest man in minnesota it's a good piece of content this yeah somebody knows you really well yeah this is funny i mean he put this out on linkedin like we did we ranked him in one day
for sexiest man in minnesota and i mean he's he's good looking fine but secretary of state in minnesota i don't know so it's kind of a it's good uh it's a good vibe and it was hilarious first of all it was funny i think funny is something that we could all do in
our content more often you know like we're working on it we're trying to get funnier and so how did we do that we wrote an article about how he was the sexiest man in minnesota and then we got a couple links from other websites back to uh that post and uh and he
he shows so google it right now sexiest man in minnesota see if he's still up there but and we did a funny photo with uh with him just like with his hair blowing back and our logo in the back so is this a good little i think and it's kind of a stunt
too i mean it's not like a really elaborate stunt but it's kind of a stunt plus funny and so it did really well like it like on social media like everyone was was kind of cheering us on for that what's his first name cody warren or it's cody so i wonder if blue
key media is actually cody's like hey talk about that time i was the sexiest person in minnesota but okay very good so i like that you're playful that you're trying to find ways to demonstrate to your clients how if you're clever if you're witty and if you don't take yourself too seriously you
can actually achieve real results and you guys use yourselves as a case study and i encourage everybody out there that before you get a client to hire you to do something and take that risk take the risk yourself go do it and show it it's much easier to talk about things you've actually
done versus theoretically think they should do everybody gets really brave and courageous when it comes to work other people can do not so much on themselves so if it didn't work out you guys have a little pie on your face but luckily it did work out for at least one day yeah uh
exactly i also did smartest man in minnesota but i like the sexiest madness out there um but yeah i i've enjoyed talking to you about this um are there any other good questions on there that we should go into i'm sure there are is was that the seven already do where do you
do all seven oh yeah yeah that was that was oh that was seven okay oh beautiful okay let's get into it then let's see what else people have to say i think they want us to do a role play but i haven't found an organic one for us to do so we're not
gonna do that just because you guys like to see that happen let's see uh jonah or rodrigo who's uh kind of helping us out today do we see anything i have a question go ahead what is an seo mistake that everyone should avoid when starting out i would say empty i don't care
i'm vlogging empty auditorium blogging is when you basically just you know we all had those friends and i was one of them by the way that play in a band and they want everyone to come and uh no one shows up but they they play anyways and there's something that's great i'm glad
people can follow their passions i love playing music i'm still an advocate for musicians when when you're doing that on your blog though let's say you're just writing about what you're passionate about unfortunately if you don't have an audience already that can be a major waste of your time so when i say
empty auditorium blogging i mean just answering what you're interested in and not i think you know we talk about keyword research and keyword strategy we use a tool called a refs ahrefs.com to figure out what people are googling you can you can pop your competitors in there and another one is in the
sales process what are your ideal prospects asking so that's a really organic one if if more than one prospect that you're talking to about your services asks you the same question that's a great thing to write a blog about but what i want is i want it to be something that people i
want there to be content that people actually want i don't want to just i'm not you know hey i love doing font posts i love doing font posts i love doing color posts i'm like i am you know i'm actually underneath all this content marketing stuff i love i love design i'm a
designer and i've i've evolved because it was useful to our clients i've evolved in the way of content marketing and some of this other stuff but basically i just have to watch where i'm going with content because you can you can do a lot of content out there that nobody wants and i
just don't want you to spend your time on that so the questions that prospects are asking and arefs.com are great resources to get out of that trap of i like to call it empty auditorium blogging all right did you just audio okay you're good right you finished saying what you okay that's a
little on audio delay here this is an excellent question this is from kwaku oh junior and i think this is a question for both of us to contemplate we had both said something like hey watch out for the family and friends working together okay so they want us to share a story like
what has been your experience like working with either family first or a friend and have that work out and can you tell us any of the details then i'll share a story where it didn't work out for me yes i can share one of those um [Music] it hurts a little bit right
these these stories always hurt a little bit and you you really have like you said the road to hell is paved with good intentions can't i can't think of anywhere more true than in design work for family or friends and you want it to be so good i've had an experience where i
my comp my my family my dad and my brother have a company that's really cool actually it's a sound and lighting company they're they have some issues right now because of kovid but they're a very successful company and they don't do a lot of marketing so you can imagine how that like kind
of gets under my skin a little bit i'm like ah marketing you have to do it and then they're just like winning you know 10 10 million company that doesn't do any marketing right i mean they they put something out on facebook every couple weeks maybe um and i tried to do their
website and everything was super smooth right the sales process is super smooth they're happy they know me they know you know we didn't do any any education any expectations we're just like i make websites here's a check i make websites here's a check and halfway through that process everything broke down there was
difficult conversations they didn't understand what they were getting it was frustrating it had a negative consequence in our relationship for a few months it was it was painful and you know they're driven people they're not dumb they're they're have a successful business but because because there wasn't a sales process because sales is
really just you know a proposal is just here's the rules of the game you know because we didn't have that there were no rules it was terrible for me it was terrible for them and frankly it affected our relationship and in part the principle really to me came down to i want to
give more i'm giving giving giving but they they don't understand that i'm giving giving giving and they don't understand that i'm taking half the price that i normally would do and you just probably shouldn't do that all right now you could probably hear the piano in the background that is my son playing
okay so i have two stories to share one one worked out okay and one one didn't work out so good and they're both with family members so the first one is i worked with my uncle who invested in my company who wanted this is very early on this is 1995 and we got
into some pretty heated conversations about how shares should be broken apart and it's one of those things where i mean i could feel like the temperature and my body rising and and he's starting to say and use certain language against me that a normal professional person wouldn't because to him i'm just his
nephew who's some idiot kid he's known all his life who's now entering into the world of business and he would say things kind of just to like dismiss me altogether like you're not thinking clearly it's like well says you and it's tough because the whole time i'm thinking that if this relationship goes
south i still have to see this person at thanksgiving at christmas gatherings and other family events and barbecues and things like that with strangers that you wind up working together if it doesn't work out hopefully the world is big enough where you don't have to have to run into them all the time
i remember one time there was a very prominent senior person within my company that after years of working together it just didn't work out and ended kind of really poorly and one of my recurring nightmares was to actually see them at some place and just anytime somebody looked like them i was like
my heart would skip a beat so think about that that's something that you can never escape so a lot of the professional practices the behaviors it's it's kind of baked in when they're your family on the opposite side of this is after i dissolve that business relationship um i was in i thought
i needed another business partner so my brother my older brother calls me up and we're just chatting he's like if you need money i'll be happy to invest in your company and no contracts simple handshake agreement he sends me a bunch of money and i'm starting to work a couple years into the
business i wanted to buy him out because i was like i don't need the money actually i'm doing pretty good i'm i'm cash full of positives the whole time so i called him up and he said i'd like to buy you out what makes sense to you he goes and he says this
he says brother just send me back the money i sent you we're done it's a clean deal and so that's two stories one that ended not so great and one that ended beautifully it's just the strength of my relationship with my older brother that's awesome and i have had a couple great ones
too i just the ones that have been bad were so hard that i i really advocate against it same here it's not worth it it's just not worth it there's an expression like don't poo where you eat or something like that so don't do that yeah i did the clean version there just
for tim right exactly trying to set an example here i appreciate it yes let's see who else we can ask questions or who else has got a good question for us rodrigo anything he's shaking his head okay let's see here well you talked about the mistakes yeah i'm sorry here you talked about
mistakes how about something that you did really well like looking back like one of the best decisions i ever made was x tell us about one of those moments one of the best decisions i ever made was prioritizing the creation of recurring services recurring monthly because having you know and you could do
this with design to like we have a lot of content marketing seo clients but you can also do this with with design it's just a little harder because it's like what are we like maybe it's 10 hours a month or something like that it just goes into hours a little bit more it's
a little harder to make sure that you contain the deliverables but recurring is really great so hey maybe some people want to add seo or content marketing to their services if they're it's not that crazy hard um yeah a couple other things that we we've done well um i do think now i
have this first of all reaching out to people that i don't necessarily think are going to answer me because i've done that right i've i've reached out to seth goden grant cardone chris doe from the future uh i've reached out to a bunch of people that are really cool and they and uh
one of them stefan bio uh paleo um he's from conductor in new york and he was talking to me yesterday it's like our fifth time he's like mentoring me mentoring me i don't deserve that i mean like whatever um but reaching out to people that you don't know that they you don't know
why they would necessarily respond sometimes they do respond and sometimes you get an opportunity to have conversations with really smart people he built into us some things you know like um the prior the priorities around culture we we have our our org chart flipped on its head so my wife and i are
at the bottom and everyone else is above us and and that's a mindset thing you know making you know putting our motto up on the wall prioritizing education like everyone in our team takes a course every single quarter and we pay for that we make sure that they're learning and this this mindset
around leveling up on a regular basis some of that comes from these mentors that didn't have there was no real good reason for them to mentor us you know there there wasn't really an incentive i think one thing you realize is that successful people want to give back because they already have money
they already have money or they're already set and so they're looking they're looking for significance and if they see somebody that will actually take their suggestions and run with them and do them and they're like seeing their suggestions in action moving a company forward they're like excited about it so like reach out
to some people maybe i mean it's not right away it takes a while and you have to actually do the stuff that they tell you to do that's that's one thing i mean i don't like mentoring people sometimes because they won't do what we're saying i'm suggesting but if i you know hey
if somebody reached out to me and asked for you know every couple months of zoom call from this and i could be useful to somebody i'd love to do that if they're if they're going to do the things you know what i mean you have to be that person are you going to
buy in and do this thing so anyways yeah just reach out to people and take take your shot you know some of it was handwritten notes i hand hand wrote a note to seth godin and and then he he replied by email i mean like i was like i did not expect a
reply you know what i mean like so to see that was like whoa and then we got to collaborate on a little bit of content you know like just take your shots take shots and it's fun it's super fun when it starts like it happens it just takes a while i'm persistent and
not not having this like super high expectation and like one out of ten comes through you have to do quantity but like take shots yeah i think the quote is something like you miss 100 of the shots you don't take so you got to just put yourself out there exactly and just just
go into it hope for the best plan for the worst that most likely they're gonna say no and that's okay and you just keep trying or try different ways or with different people there's two questions go ahead one last thing on that is just mentors i've had to loosen up my my idea
of what mentors are a little bit like it's not like successful people to have no time a lot of times and so like i take a conversation here a conversation there every six months that can be like a mentorship it doesn't have to be every week we check in if if your mentor
has two hours for you every single week i have questions about how successful they are just to be honest and other things you know you can you can get a part a partial mentorship by listening to content like listen to their podcasts you know those types of things that's kind of like a
mentorship too you can get a lot out of it you know i have gary vee stuck in my head he's talking all the time you know it's like it's it's uh because i've listened to so much of his content i'm not listening to a ton of his content right now i'm spending more
time creating content but you get those you get kind of like that mindset you know otherwise if you just got the people around you stuck in your head and they're negative or something like that it's really hard to kind of get to the next level all right this question this next question comes
from eunice it's a tough question so get ready tim she wants to know i think it's she she wants to know uh how do you deal with an employee who keeps making the same mistake and his cause a strain in your client relationships basically i want to hear how you tim fire somebody
who's not working out i've never fired somebody in my life chris are you serious i i no talk to me in a year or two chris uh how could you have not fired anybody you know you know it's funny my dad has never fired anyone either and he has like a 40 person
company he coaches them out and okay tell me how you coach somebody else so i don't that's a nice way of saying yeah it's it's a basically around you understand that this is a strong p this is a strong core value and you're not really living up to it in this way and
and you know maybe they see other people getting more opportunities than them um that are earlier in their time at the company i can't i can't speak to this super strongly i i can't speak to how i yo michael scott says i don't fire people i hire people and inspire people so that's
ah that's my take on this i will fire somebody someday i will it's like a midwestern responsibility come on man come on don't be such a nice guy okay when i fire somebody it will be because it's been a long it's been six to nine months of i've given very clear expectations i've
told them more than once that they were not living up to expectations i've expected this is one thing i i'm coaching our uh you know other people that are starting to manage people on our team too is you have to have an expectation that they're going to fix this you have to have
faith that they're going to fix this and give them time to fix it before we make that decision so yes it's a young company so i don't have a ton of experience we have kind of coached somebody out i think you have to give them at least two or three times i think
it's actually like i think three times bef of you are not living up to expectations here and very clear criteria and here are the things you could legitimately improve um and then yeah i can't speak to the actual firing no i'm sure i'm sure i will i'm gonna talk about it so i'm
gonna help you out here so yeah you've helped us out i'm gonna help you out i'm gonna give you a free coaching session on how to fire people i like it it's not something i like to do you know like there's that expression like when a father or mother brings their child in
and they have to like spank them or dish out some punishment and they say to them with a straight face this hurts me more than it hurts you and and it really feels that way and it's and i'm not talking about like hiring some person like george clooney to come in like from
up in the air and saying you know the merciless comes in and just slays everybody in the office 200 people at a time i'm talking about one to one small businesses have to deal with this and it was a big fear of mine and something that hurt me emotionally i would dread doing
it for like weeks and it's just like sleepless nights so i do want to say that and then i got coached on how to do it so i'm going to share with you the last way i fired a person which wasn't that long ago basically pull this person into the office and i
start out with a little context and an emotion i said this is going to be a difficult conversation for me and i've toiled over this for a period of time like weeks and months and i don't know how else to to say this so i'm going to say it so they're bracing for
impact already they know this is tough there's an emotional thing that's going on and they know what is about to come now almost every time i've done this they're always act surprised because people you fire they're like clueless at this point the ones that are doing great have high self-awareness they know how
they fit within the machine they're always looking for ways to improve the ones that are just bumbling around hitting their head on the wall it's like this is just a waste of time and energy and so then i go into the next part which i say to them okay we've had many conversations
about this and you say like you're not living up to the values or whatever i needed this from you and time and time again i've been let down in these very specific areas so at this point i don't know how to do this there's a lot of places you can go but this
is not one of them so today it's going to be your last day here so i have a small severance package go talk to hr and they're going to give you some paperwork to sign and once you're kind of come around to this and emotionally are okay with it if you want to
talk to me happy to have a conversation with you all right thanks for your service to the company i wish you well and that's it that's good how hey do you mind me asking what like percentage like or is it like a couple months severance or how do you do that it depends
on the seniority it depends on the contribution it depends on how many years they've been with the company yeah i believe you can just search on the internet to say like what is standard uh what did that call uh compensation for letting an employee go based on time and you'll find out it's
all over the place right now here's the thing i mean if you hire them usually they can get another job right like if they're capable of that's the thing i always think about you're just scared and you're scared right now like if anyone if i had to do that like just the the
employment situations are difficult i'm a compassionate and i know you are too so that's the that's the hard part about those things i wanted to share something with you that really helped me to understand this that we think a lot about the power we have over people and we tend to obsess and
to amplify it more than it really is to say like well they're working for me and if i put them out especially during these tough economic times with cove and everything they're going to be totally hosed to think that in the world that the only place that could work is for you is
a little self-centered yeah in itself like you have to just get over that and that each person like you said you coached them out or they talked themselves out of a job like i wanted it to work i wanted to give it every opportunity and that's why i took on the risk of
hiring somebody and it's them consistently not living up to the what i would consider even the minimum i'm not talking about going the extra mile but just there's a minimum here like you're taking up precious resources that somebody else could be using that who wants to be here and want to show up
every day so generally speaking those people are phoning it in and at that point i say you know there's other things for you and more often not everybody that i've kind of kept in touch with after the fact they've done much better at some other company that is more in alignment with who
they are like we said the very beginning it's true with clients it's true with employees everybody deserves the right person company place brand vendor for them they just need to find it and it wasn't here with us right it's good okay that was a tough one so let's see what else we can
do maybe i can ask you one or two more questions then we add here yeah um okay here's a good one let's let's just say right now today you're gonna start your agency but i want you to do it with no money not even twenty thousand dollars of savings now that's crazy but
let's just say that you have no money you either just finish school or you decide one day i can't stand the way that this company treats human beings i'm out and you quit what are you going to do tell me the first couple of things you're going to do social media posts about
how i've got i'm open for business i'm open for business and i i have these skills who needs them and then i maybe i say something in there about elso i'm looking for referrals so if you know somebody that needs this where do you post this uh facebook all my personal channels like
i think one thing that people make is a mistake that are like you know we all start out like super no audience like and you can't you sit there and make a page for your company and think that's you know no one follows that page right now so it's nothing you're just you're
talking to the ether so i would go all my personal channels like any friends i got let's say if i got 250 friends on facebook i'm posting to them um and linkedin and and i think that this you know i'd get into content kind of quick i'd get into you know i'd do
a facebook live i'd try to provide value just to people i i would do content that i think the people that have money and need what i do would like okay whether that's a video or a blog post and i would i would i would definitely work out of my home right right
keep your expenses super low yeah especially if you have no money you have no money there's you're not thinking about doing a five year lease on an office space exactly let's let's go this one step at a time and if you if you're willing i'd love to do like freestyle with you and
i think you do some freestyle things yourself so i think this is going to be really fun as i read like interesting facts about you okay you're going to write this letter you just worked at acme studios technology health incorporated whatever and you you you were fired you quit you're going to go
on facebook and just begin the article for us right now freestyle it what's it going to sound like five things your website is doing wrong and we lost oh this is incredible he's about to drop some bars on us you guys yeah right okay he's frozen on my screen too it was going
to be amazing this is going to be epic he was going to do this in iambic pentameter i think is that he did it he's like building up the anticipation right now that was incredible you guys everybody in the chat let me know uh was this hilarious because it seemed like a cliffhanger
ending for maybe season two coming up with tim brown on these seven mistakes you can make including having stable internet connection it's totally frozen maybe i'm frozen too okay everybody's laughing right now it's happening okay here's here's what i thought he was gonna say while we wait for tim to return i will
do my best to to freestyle if you will okay now the first thing he had said was he would go on his personal social channels with his 250 plus friends and let him know that he's looking for work and he's open for business so i thought he was going to say that i
thought he was going to say um today marks a new chapter in my life and for a variety of different different reasons i've decided to move on and actually open my own business in content marketing and i'm thrilled to be potentially working with any of you so if anybody that needs somebody who
does content marketing who needs to optimize their site for seo and to rank in the top 10 google organic i'd love to help you that would be the opening salvo i think i'm going out on my own i tell a little bit of a story and that would be the beginning and then
i would start to do the content marketing that tim talked about which is like five things your website is doing incorrectly and how to fix them and so he's going to develop expertise right away so i want to prompt all of you to start thinking about that like what's your announcement to the
world and tim is absolutely right if you just put it on your website or your behance page or wherever it is it's going to be very hard to find it's like a needle in a haystack so go where people care about you already and there's a good chance that you're two conversations away
from a client that somebody knows someone and they just need a little help in understanding who you are what you do and what you're looking for so make it explicitly clear without being desperate that's really important okay tell a little bit of a story why did you decide to leave now you may
not want to do this but i remember there's a woman i think she was working at microsoft or one of these really big tech companies and she decided to quit and she sang a song about it and that video went thermonuclear and then she got a ton of job offers and then i
think it launched her into a whole another kind of career all right okay what else are we gonna do here are we getting him back jonah is he i don't know he hasn't tried to come back or on zoom i don't see him in the waiting room at all okay so we'll just
chill out for a little bit um why don't i talk to rodrigo how do we go you're in the office you're there for a reason you have a mic let's have a quick conversation and then maybe maybe this is the appropriate time for us to wrap up the show anyways yeah chris i
ask you the same question if you're gonna start all over again into this space with an agency what would be your first steps starting out with no money oh there he is he's back oh god perfect so i won't answer that question you have to stay tuned for the next one tim you're
back can you hear us i'm back i'm so sorry about that no worries what happened uh computer died okay is computer okay computer is fine that is my bad there we go there we go okay let's pick it up okay so joanna kill that mic okay here's we're gonna pick up i asked
you to go ahead and freestyle for us and you said you're gonna do some content marketing you're gonna write something like five things your site is and then we lost you so just pick it up from there yeah five things your website is doing wrong and why it's costing you money and i
would consider doing that on a one-to-one basis for websites for the types of customers you think you can help too so like also i think you know the piece of content is just like general principles and then the outbound like conversations that you could have maybe with businesses you're aware of or know
or admire maybe even in your area that you could do a screen recording of you looking through their website and saying what could be better and in a way that's like hey i just saw these things i think you know this this would be able to make you some more money if you're
able to fix these up and just give walking them through they're just looking at their website and sharing things that you would you would do differently to help them get more customers and and you know it it tends to not be about aesthetics at that point it tends to be about conversion rate
optimization it tends to be about making it easy for their customers to do what they need to do and so that's the focus because their mindset is just revenue a lot of these people they don't care about design they don't care about aesthetics you kind of got open with that maybe if they
let you do their website maybe you can make something beautiful okay uh jonah they're saying there's a super chat question i haven't seen a super chat question and jonah something happened to your display nevermind jonah was there a super chat question yeah there was it was like five bucks i forgot what it
was it might have how did we show that so what kind of insurance and consideration would you strongly recommend for startup company okay we heard that question uh type of insurance yeah that's what he has what kind of insurance would you recommend for a startup company yeah i'm i actually i just know
that we get all the insurances that we're supposed to have like you know i think you have to have like unemployment insurance you have to have basic business insurance there's it's different per state i believe but basically like my dad told me like basically sorry sorry guys it makes it seem like i
talk about my dad who's successful it's like he didn't give me any money i just want to make that clear there's no like investment from that except for that one time i messed on his website um but basically i just get any insurances he suggested to just get him because there's it's relatively
cheap and let's say like unemployment insurance you have to have i know in my state but a lot of these insurances just cover your butt so get them yeah you know there's actually because you talked about this before a key man or key person and and if you're the key person if you
if you were to be incapacitated or die yeah the whole business would crumble and so you can actually buy key person insurance i actually have that kind of insurance i think i have that too actually yeah and that's a responsible thing that a leader should do for their organization so that they can
survive and so my wife and i we have what other people would probably describe as morbid conversations but i just think of it as realistic yeah i say here's your plan of action if i should die tomorrow if i'm on this plane i'm flying to europe to do a talk and i plane
goes down because we're on that boeing i'm just kidding you know and it goes down what are you going to do so first you take this money you chop that money in half half goes to this and had the other half here's who you hire here's who here are the lieutenants what i
would do is i would say go have a private meeting with each one of these and ask them what's their interest and continuing on without me as now that i'm passed away right so talk to each one of them and based on your gut feeling just trust your gut on this if you
have a good feeling go with that person and say now i'm going to promote you to be that person i'm going to give you this salary and then these are your responsibilities and then i said let them run the company let them run it for as long as they can guide them here
and there but eventually it will probably peter out but just make it last as long as possible with the team that you have that's that's real i like that i mean that's kind of how i feel exactly so and we've had those conversations too i don't think my wife loves them but yeah
i mean i i literally i i know i advise this to people i tried to live as if today is my last day because before i get on the road i tell my kids i love them and they know where i stand same thing with my wife because you keep waiting for tomorrow
and tomorrow may never come and then that's a horrible way so like if we die today i think for the most part i've done what i needed to do okay no more morbid conversation this was really about mistakes and and avoiding some of those mistakes going from freelance to to agency we're kind
of talking about content so i just want to throw a couple more principles for content beautiful um because kind of i believe in it you know i believe it like deeply that's the evangelist thing nada not buzzwords real content strategy evangelist i like it i don't i don't remember when i wrote that
but i i like it good job former tim um of it is your content needs to talk about pain needs to talk about pain that your customers are experiencing now and if you can state the problem that your customers are having then and i don't know what that is it depends on your
service it depends on what you're really your key value proposition but it and your ideal customer right but when you understand their pain and their problem and you can state it clearly that's compelling to them they want they just the fact that you know that problem they are more likely to trust you
in solving it you know and so your content can really do that it can it can communicate the problems that they're having and it can really capture their attention quickly because if they see their problem like it's a facebook post and it says their problem they're like you may be you know have
a high revenue but low profit it's like ah how'd you know you know like and and they and then how then yes you have to have some ability to solve it you know and also it might form your your services a little bit but content should be kind of and i think what
is aggravating that problem a little bit it's a dull lake in the back of their mind anyways bring it to the forefront articulate that problem if you articulate that problem with clarity your content is going to be a lot better so i think that that's a big one i think yeah you got
to have clickbait a little bit it's a little bit of click bait like we we all know how to do it once once you put out content on a regular basis so get started is the first thing but then as you get into it you understand what's going to make people click and
then seek to deliver on that i always you know i use this price high and justify as a way to you know get my prices up when i was just first starting price high and justify was high for me um the same with clickbait you know right clickbait headlines and then make sure
to deliver on those headlines you know like start with the title and make sure it's something that your ideal customer would actually click go hard on that first spend more time on that stop go back make it better and then make sure you deliver on that excellent okay so it's something that we
describe as painting the pain and you want to do it in high fidelity full color so when you talk about like bringing that pain to the front it's kind of like putting your finger in the wound a little bit because you want them to feel that you want them to know that you
understand that pain and you can describe it in gory details uh about clickbait people hate that term click bait yeah they because it just sounds terrible but let's just let's just call it i don't know a hook yeah let's call it a hook book agency you just have a hook where can you
get ideas for hooks there's two places the places where it matters right so when you're in the department store or not a department store like a pharmacy you go up to the front all the impulse buys are right there by the register and you kind of study that for a moment and see
like what's grabbing your attention and you'll notice those tabloid magazines and the the things like us and people they're designed to pull you in with outrageous headlines buy yourself a copy indulge in your inner trash and just go for it pick up one of those things and study how they write to pull
you in because their their stopping power is incredible and just study reverse engineer to deconstruct it and then figure out the formula because that's what gets people to stop and you'll notice that they're like online versions of this now like uh look at what happened um you won't believe how these child stars
turned out you won't believe the real life spouse of this person and it's like uh i i guess i don't believe it let me check it out and it's just like these household items you're using them all wrong and i yeah yeah i love those i went like 20 in i mean yeah
after a while you get fatigued right you're like click click like or something like that i was like no wonder you promoted this tweet but at the same time i think it's also empathy for them right like yeah you have let's say you have abd and let's say you need like a little
bit of flash to get involved with a an article like i have empathy for that because i have a little bit of that you know like i also only like things that are bright and shiny sometimes so i need like you're empathizing with your audience you're giving them what they need on the
front end you're you're giving the candy on the front end to get them into the meat you know like there's this element of like you need to to actually like appreciate their perspective and and click what did you call it a hook a hook yeah a hook is empathy a hooker is empathy
with your audience and actually caring about what they what what's going to capture their attention yeah okay so i love the way they said that about empathizing with them um the other the second source that you can get great ideas for like how to draw somebody in is is look at book titles
if you think about it that also has a have the stopping power to like make you curious so the image the color the topography whatever it is and bookstores are going away like dinosaurs but you can go to amazon and type in something that you're interested in see what authors call their books
because they spend a lot of time thinking about what to call it and a lot of times it's a value proposition or it's a shocking statement it's going to provoke thought and at least get you to stop and and then look at the design well well more often than not subconsciously just choose
a thing that's more striking that's more beautiful aesthetically pleasing lean into your design chops there okay i think we're gonna wrap up the show pretty soon but rodrigo did can i throw one thing in that because absolutely i just found out that um think and grow rich the first title that he had
was use your noodle to get the boodle i think it's supposed to be money but i uh thought that was hilarious i love the book think and grow rich so this is about the title right right yeah right before uh right before he like submitted it to his publisher or something like that
he had a different name which is hilarious which think and grow rich is a much better title superior title yes yes now i have i almost said napoleon dynamite napoleon hill i have the book i started reading it i was like okay i'm starting to feel funny about this book and then i
read about him it's cheesy well it's not just cheesy though okay apparently he's a con man okay the book is fabricated right okay is it tim you know i've read it six times so don't tell me don't destroy your world right now no [Laughter] i don't know i i tend to think of
things like once i put something into action when i put a specific thing into action like i like affirmations and that's enough i like information affirmations i don't know how scientific it is all i know is priming the pumps i'm priming the pumps for my brain and i'm more likely to see if
i say affirmations i'm more likely to see the evidence of that out in the world and that's my thing but once you take something and put it into practice a lot of people hate grant cardone too i i personally what's that yes they do he's one of your heroes yeah i i like
i i put his stuff into practice so my first year as a freelancer i hit 340k 000 just by myself in the one year i am never gonna hate on grant cardone that was because i set a giant goal because his thing is set a giant goal and do whatever it takes to
hit it like what would you have done if you hit that giant goal now do that and i'm never gonna even though i understand why some people don't like him i now that i've put his stuff into practice it's kind of mine now in a way it's not his anymore it's mine okay
awesome okay um i was gonna say something but i think we're running out of time so i'll save this for later prom i promise you we'll do this somebody just remind me later rodrigo asked if you had to start all over again what would you do i did have a plan but i
think it would take too long for us to talk about this and we're kind of already up on an hour and a half here come back next piece of content stay tuned for the answer to that question let's wrap it up joanna are you ready so who have been talking to today that's
been mr tim brown he wasn't voted the sexiest man but maybe the smartest man in in minneapolis or minnesota and he has an agency called hook agency.com and you can find him on social medias at hook agency and i think that's going to do it for me guys thanks very much for tuning
in i hope you have an amazing wonderful killer weekend that's restful and rejuvenating that's it for us thank you very much for being part of the one billion mission don't forget to like comment subscribe and hit the bell for notifications that's it for me on behalf of the entire team jonah ricky rodrigo
and tim see you guys later
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