Welcome to the six Figure Business Mastery Podcast, where every week Kirsten and

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Welcome to today's episode.

After 25 years in digital marketing, our next guest.

He's a UK agency owner and he's gonna break down the biggest mistakes that new

business owners make and what it really takes to build a business that works.

Happy to introduce you to Jim Banks from Spades Media.

Thanks for joining us.

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We look forward to seeing you there.

Thank you so much for inviting me to come along and talk to you

and your amazing audience today.

Thanks, Jim.

We are really excited to learn more about you and about your business

and what took you into helping business owners with advertising.

I'm excited about this conversation today.

I'm really excited to come and talk as well.

Yeah, 25 years of, I guess, making mistakes and learning from those mistakes,

I feel I've got a lot to help and share with other entrepreneurs, either just

starting out thinking, just starting out.

Right.

'cause we all have to start somewhere.

And sometimes having people that can share the scars and the war

stories can be a good thing.

Digital marketing's changed a little bit over 25 years, wouldn't you say?

And, and it's funny, I, I was reading somewhere the other day that today

was saying that chat, GPT and LLMs are basically 17 times more dangerous than

the.com crash that happened in 2000.

And I'm like, wow, that's pretty bad.

'cause I remember the sort of the initial kind of.com boom

and bust that happened in 2000.

And funnily enough, that was my sort of segue into setting up my own business.

'cause I'd worked for three other companies.

And I'd been laid off three times and I just thought, you know what?

I don't want to be in a position where somebody else can have

control over my destiny anymore.

So I set up my own business and I just thought to myself, what do I do now?

And I know most people that have set up businesses, that's typically

what the catalyst for them is.

They aspire to do their own thing.

They think it's easy, right?

I've employed a lot of people and they all go, oh, I can run my own business.

I like carry on you.

You go and do it.

And I think like later on they realized just how difficult some of

the challenges of setting up can be.

When you first got started, what services were you offering in your business?

I can even remember the name of the company.

I don't think the company exists anymore.

It's a company called Cal Panya Opal, and there's a guy, I guess

for want of a better way, but he's probably a drop shipper.

And I was offering him SEO services, and I think my initial contract with

this guy was something like $50 a month.

I was running around the house really excited and my wife said.

$50 isn't really gonna last very long.

We'd need a lot of clients in order for us to do that.

So initially I started off doing SEO, and then I realized that

technically it wasn't quite my bag.

And at the time, the onset of paid media or PPPC pay-per-click, so

a lot of people would associate that with Google Ads and Microsoft

advertising that had just started.

So I was using that to try and generate leads for my SEO business.

And then I realized that actually that was a lot more fun, enjoyable than.

The actual doing SEO.

So I pivoted and started to offer PPC as a service for

clients who needed help with it.

And it's funny, like back then there was no YouTube, there were no videos

that you could go and learn what to do.

There hardly any communities that existed.

I think in total there are probably a thousand people in the whole world that

were involved in digital marketing.

When you look at how many people are involved in it now, there's

probably tens of millions of people that do digital marketing in one

way, shape or form for a living.

We're grateful for people like you who understand how to do ads and do them

well, because that is not our forte.

Yeah, and it's funny, I always say to people as, as good as I am at running paid

ads, I don't want to be buying paid ads.

If I can avoid having to buy them, then let's avoid them.

Right?

But what it does enable you to do is it enables you to test.

Much quicker than you're able to if you don't run paid ads.

If you're trying to do it organically, you could wait 6, 9, 12 months before

you get any sort of results at all.

And it's very difficult to pivot if the results are not quite

what you're expecting them to be.

Whereas with paid ads, you can fire them up pretty quickly, test them

for a little while, and then if they work great, carry on, scale them.

If they don't work, then.

Try something different and go in a different direction.

Yeah.

I'm so glad we met you and have a resource because we have a lot of

clients who are interested in ads.

And again, we love referring people like you because it's just not something we do.

And I think a lot of people have a misnomer about ads.

I don't think they always realize that in order to test something, you do have

to have a fair amount of money upfront.

You're not testing something for a hundred bucks.

And so when you're coaching someone on running ads, what do you usually

recommend that their ad spend is?

Yeah, I mean, it can be expensive, certainly in a lot of

competitive environments, right?

But what you have to bear in mind is like that whole sort of analogy of if

you are running away from a bear, you only need to be kind of faster than

the person that you are against, rather than taking on the big bear itself.

So I've always maintained.

That in most cases, the competitors that you'll be up against will

include huge businesses, but also be an awful lot of small businesses,

and that's primarily what you need to try and be better at, right?

So just try and understand what they're doing and be better than them, rather than

trying to be better than eBay or Amazon or some huge target or whoever, right?

You'll never compete with them when it comes to how much money you've got to

spend versus what they've got to spend.

And I've always maintained that whatever it is that you are trying

to, again, if you are selling product, I usually recommend that

you want to try and have a budget.

That's probably something like 10 times, whatever.

It's gonna cost the value of the product as a budget to test on advertising.

But be prepared.

You need to be prepared to lose all of the money that you're spending on advertising

initially, just to get some data.

And I think more importantly, before anyone spends any money on data, right?

I always maintain that you need to get your analytics and tracking

set up in the backend, right?

So that you can understand what people did when they came through, right?

Because paid media is not a magic wand, right?

You need to have a good website, a good proposition, whether it's a lead

magnet or you're selling services.

What is it you want people to do?

And I think the biggest mistake I see.

Business owners make is they're trying to sell too many things at the same time.

So they have a landing page that's got 12 different things that people can do.

Yeah.

And it's much better to just expect 'em to do one thing.

And even if you are selling a big ticket item, you are not

selling that big ticket item.

What you're doing is initially just selling the initial kind of consultation,

whether it's 15 minutes, 30 minutes.

Right.

That's what you're trying to get people over the line for.

What I find really challenging about ads too, is it's not just the ad and

the copy or the video or whatever.

You also have to have a landing page that's effective as well, because you

know you can get all the traffic you want to go to the page, but then if the page

isn't converting, that's a problem too.

Do you see that with businesses?

Yeah, I mean, certainly what you tend to find is that in some of the

clients that I've worked with, they have a SEO team and they have a PPC

team, and they're always in kind of conflict with each other, right?

Because SEO wants the page to be full of stuff, and PPC, people like me want the

page to be stripped away of everything other than what it is you want them to do.

I'm not saying that you don't want to have the ability to be

able to build a relationship with prospective clients, right?

So yes, you want to be able to.

Offer.

Here's a link to our Facebook, here's a link to our LinkedIn.

Here's a link to our all the social profiles.

But if you've paid money to get them to your website in the first

place, what you don't want to do is leak it away to somewhere else.

'cause people will just be, they'll be gone.

They'll not come back.

So for me, I always make sure if there's a navigation at the top, I

say, let's strip all of that away.

If there's a login for existing customers, strip that away because I'm only targeting

people that are not existing customers.

So I will strip down.

A landing page so that there's very little on it other than the bare

minimum that I need to get them to do what it is that I want them to do.

I love that.

Does that make sense?

I just think you want to try and eliminate the leakage as best you can.

Absolutely.

When you are working with somebody who's just getting started, know you like to

help them figure out how to be successful from the start, what do you feel like

are some of the biggest struggles and challenges of people that are just

getting started with their businesses?

I think, again, I know I made this mistake when I first started out,

I'd be like, I'll work with anyone.

And the reality of it is as soon as you start working with anyone, you

realize that some of those anyones are not the sort of people that you wanna

be working with for various reasons.

And I think one of the most important things any business owner can do is

to define their ideal client prospect.

Right?

But be very specific about the types of businesses that you want to work with.

And then from there, all of your content should talk to that audience, right?

Imagine that you've written it for one person, right?

And I, again, I've done this before, you grab a stock image

of what that person looks like.

So when you are actually trying to pitch to somebody, you can actually

visualize that person in front of you.

You know everything about them, whether they're married, how many

kids they have, where they live, what sort of cars they drive.

Again, it sounds corny.

You need to.

Visualize and what are the problems that your solutions solve for them, right?

But rather than it being all of the problems, like what's the biggest problem?

Because a lot of the times what I found is that a lot of the prospective clients

that I talk to, they don't realize they've got the problem that I present

to them at the time that I've talked to them, because they're oblivious to it.

They don't realize just how difficult things are.

And I think for me, having that ability to be able to kind of

position things in that way.

But it's important that, like I said, you want to try and be very specific

about the ideal client prospect.

Right?

So in my case it's, I work with businesses that are running on Shopify, right,

that are currently be doing between one and $5 million a year in revenue.

Look to grow to between five and 50 million.

That's my sort of sweet spot.

That doesn't mean that I don't work with people outside of that, right?

I do a lot of clients.

Where they're not in that sort of ecosystem, but I'm, I have control,

I almost have the ability to pass on business and I think that's one of the

biggest challenges that I see a lot of business owners make is they don't decline

business, which seems counter-intuitive.

If it's not a good fit for you, then it, you are setting yourself up to fail.

If you get a big enterprise client prospect that approaches you.

You are not geared up for it.

All you're gonna do is you're gonna let them down and you'll let yourself down.

'cause you'll spend a lot of time chasing after a contract that's too big for you

and just won't be worthwhile for you.

You'll get sucked into all these big meetings and everything else.

It'll drain the life out of you.

But some people thrive on that.

That's their ICP.

They want to work with.

Fortune 500 companies and everything else.

And great if you do, knock yourself out.

That's not for me.

That's not my cup of tea reading.

It's funny, gem.

'cause I feel like Jamie and I have gotten even more clarity after many

years of business this year because we brought on a VP of sales and we have

another sales person that came on with us and being able to say, because we

work with coaches and consultants, but we also work with real estate agents.

Right?

But what we realized was what they all have in common and

who our ideal client really is.

Is that solo entrepreneur, that person who, it's just them and

they're wearing all the hats and trying to do all the things, and

they've heard about outsourcing.

They know they need help, but they either don't know how, or they're

so far in the weeds, they can't come up for air to even think about it.

So they really need that support of getting that

person up and running quickly.

Really, I think when we dialed in and just said, really it's that solo

business owner, it's that person who often is overcharged, everybody's trying

to sell them something, often, things that they don't need at that time.

You know, that's the person that we really want to help get that support

that can take them to the next level.

And it's funny because I think with our fantastic VP of marketing.

He came from Fortune 100 companies.

That was who he sold to.

So it was really funny 'cause when we first met him, he said, oh, I

mostly was with Fortune 500 companies, sold to Fortune 500 companies.

And they said, to be honest, it was really more like Fortune 100 companies.

And I said, okay, take that and flip it upside down because we're,

you're gonna be working with the absolute opposite of that.

You're working with that one person, that one, that business

owner that you know primarily.

It's just them.

And so that really helped us, I think a lot.

With our verbiage and how we're thinking about how we communicate with people.

But it is hard, and I think for those of you that are listening, I can't speak for

Jim, but I can speak for Jeanie and I, it takes time and it evolves a little bit.

Do you agree with that, Jim?

Is that what you found with yourself and your clients?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Like I said, I've reinvented the proposition multiple times, and

again, I think part of it is because the ecosystem has evolved, right?

Again, if you look at what's going on at the moment, the onset of like artificial

intelligence, Facebook and Google.

Are probably two of the biggest platforms that most people will go to seek help

from when it comes to advertising.

And I think Mark Zuckerberg has gone on record saying he wants to get to the point

where the only thing you have to do is go, here's my credit cards, charge it what?

Whatever you like, and that us do all the ads for you.

So I'm looking at it and I know a lot of people who are running agencies

that that do advertising be like, well, I'm basically gonna be outta work.

I think the reality of it is there's more, even more need for agencies now

to understand some of those nuances.

'cause Mark Zuckerberg might have a great proposition for elements to

happen within the Facebook ecosystem.

But as we know, most people's journeys to find a solution provider

can take in multiple places.

It could include Pinterest or Reddit, or Quora or Facebook or Google or Microsoft.

So many different places that they can go to get information.

And you, in some respects, I see the role of an agency.

Now I'm almost like a conductor, right?

I'm there to conduct the orchestra 'cause I've got all of this resource

available and each client that I have will have a different requirement,

which then presents a different solution provider that would be the

best sort of outcome for them, right?

And I think understanding sort of that ecosystem is really important.

I think a lot of people.

I'm a bit wary.

There's a lot of agencies that we're just a Facebook ads agency or a Google

Ads agency and I'm like, when people leave the reservation, what do you do?

Then once they've gone to a different platform, what happens then?

It's nothing to do with us, right?

And I'm like, surely it should be everything to do with you because

you want, I always say that your.

Prospects move through a process, right?

So you'll get to the point where they become a suspect.

Then they become a prospect, right?

Then they become a marketing qualified lead.

Then they become a sales qualified lead, right?

Then we produce a proposal, right?

Then you try and close them.

You either get a close lost or a close one, and that sort of funnel, that

journey that people go through, right?

The messaging should be different depending on what stage in

the journey they've got to.

And I'm always amazed how people just go for the kill.

They either get it or they don't get it.

They don't get it.

They walk away from it and say, okay, I didn't get it.

And sometimes the biggest mistake that people make is they don't understand

the decision making process within the organizations that they're talking to.

To your point about the solopreneurs, I like working with solopreneurs because

one, they're the decision maker, right?

Ultimately, they're the person that can say, yes, I wanna go

ahead with this, or I don't.

And some of the clients that I've got.

I started working with them when they were just on their own right.

And we've grown together, right?

I've grown their business right.

They've trusted me, I've trusted them.

We've grown together, and because of that, they now pay me a lot

more money than they did initially.

Right.

But at the same time, they understand the value that we bring to the

table and that it's scalable.

Right.

That's what you want, really your resource to do.

You wanna be able to have.

Propositions that will scale over time.

I love how you explained the suspect, the prospect.

I think a lot of people just think prospect lead sale.

There's so many more phases and I think it's amazing how you're talking about

your messaging and your, whether it's your ads or your landing page needs

to be in alignment with where you're meeting that person in their journey.

Yeah, I, I guess because I, I came from an old school direct sales background.

I used to sell insurance for a living, and it was almost one of those things,

if I had a goal in mind that I needed to close, let's say I needed to close

four bits of business every week.

I needed to speak to a certain number of people every week in order

to get those appointments right.

And on that basis, I needed to do a certain amount of marketing,

which could include knocking on doors, it could include dropping

leaflets, making phone calls, right?

But I knew if I didn't do the first bit.

The, the last bit would be the bit that would suffer.

And I think that's the, the kind of challenge with small

business owners now, right?

Is they have a capacity.

And so I think sometimes the capacity problem is they have not enough capacity

and sometimes they have too much.

And I think it's almost like Goldilocks, you gotta to just try and get it just

because, again, I dunno about you ladies, I'm getting swamped with kind of.

Emails from people on LinkedIn saying, I can fill your inbox

with 30 new leads a week.

And I'm like, I don't want 30 new leads a week.

I don't want any new leads a week, but, but it's, again, if you are

working on the basis, let's say you've got the capacity for two new

pieces of business every month, right?

Then it's like, what do I need to do at the front end to bring

those two in at the back end?

And if you don't do the work at the front end, that's the

only bit that you can control.

Really, the only thing you have.

In your capabilities is the control element of the actual

output of the front end.

What happens at the back end?

That's down to your selling skills and everything else.

And again, when you're a solo business owner, you have to

be skillful at everything.

Right?

You have to be skillful at marketing and selling and finance

and operations and everything.

Yeah.

Right.

Although I know from talking to on my podcast, you guys

do a lot of support with.

The ecosystem that happens behind the scenes with virtual assistants

and things like that, which I think is a genius way of handling

kind of business growth, really.

Thank you.

Yeah.

If we can free people up for doing things like their bookkeeping, like that's

generally not the best use of your time.

Right?

So if we can free them up on certain things that they're

spending their time on.

Hopefully that gives them more time to think about their customer journey, to

really dial in their messaging, like you said, to do more stuff on the front end

so that they can start getting to those conversations and making those sales.

I think you and I probably spoke about this on your podcast as human beings.

Sometimes we'll do the things we know we shouldn't be doing because

it's safer than getting rejected.

It's safer than having that conversation.

And that's what we wanna help our clients do, is to realize that you

delegate these other things so you have the support that you need.

And I was surprised to see how many people their confidence went up when they started

delegating, even if it was just a few hours a month, like their bookkeeping.

But to see their confidence go up and that empowers them to want

to do more of the hard stuff.

I love what you're doing and I love your philosophy.

I know you and I really hit it off when I was on your podcast and so it, if you

could give like a small business owner, like one piece of advice, something

you wish someone had told you back in the day that would really help you

with your journey and not necessarily a strategy, but it could have been

something that you dealt with emotionally.

Like what do you, looking back on your journey, what do you

feel like you've struggled?

That you wish somebody had supported you with early on?

Yeah, I think probably one of the biggest mistakes was I thought I was

the only person that could do all of the things that I did, and it wasn't until

I started hiring people that I realized that I was probably the worst person to

do some of the things that I was doing.

You mentioned about delegating.

I think some people.

View, delegation and abdication the same thing, right?

I want to make sure if I'm delegating something, it's because my time is best

utilized doing other things that are better tutored to my skillset, right?

That doesn't mean I can't do the things that I'm delegating,

but it's just more of a.

I can add more value to the business by focusing on the things that

I'm good at and the only I can do.

And sometimes that's building the relationships with clients.

If you have Filipino VAs, you can't really get them to build the sort of relationship

that I build with the clients I work with.

But at the same time, they're an important and integral part of.

The success mechanism, right?

You need to have people behind you to deliver the work, right?

Otherwise you're gonna be failing to deliver what is expected of you, right?

And I think the most important thing is have a good support

network behind you, right?

Whether that's coaches, trainers, they like yourself to a back office

kind of ecosystem, help support you and share with your family and

your friends, and also communities that you've become part of, right?

Share the ideas of what you're working on.

Again, don't feel that you are in this on your own right.

Even though you are technically on your own, you're never on your own.

There's so many communities out there where you can go and get support and help

and guidance of things that may be getting in the way of you actually moving things

forward in the way that you want to.

You are so right Jim and I can totally appreciate the part where you were

talking about how we think we are the only ones who can do things and you

outsource to someone and yeah, they might not do it exactly the way you did

it, but I oftentimes found they do it better than I did, which is really fun.

Yeah.

I, I use something, it's called an edict, right?

So it's explain, demonstrate, imitate, consolidate.

So I explain what the task is, right.

Demonstrate the task being done right.

I want them to effectively do the task while I watch and then they consolidate.

And as you say, like sometimes I will have a written down SOP, the

way I do certain things that over time should have evolved but haven't.

And sometimes the resource that I have can go, Jim, there's a

better way of doing that now.

Why don't we do it this way?

And I'm like.

Great.

Let's do it that way and let's rewrite the SOP so that if we have

to train somebody else coming into the business, that we've got a more

UpToDate and accurate sort of SOP of what that process actually looks like.

So, yeah.

And one of the things that Jeanie and I talk about too, is not just with

outsourcing, but hiring someone like you.

You wanna run ads rather than spending all of this time trying

to learn all the things, which.

There's a lot, right?

There's a lot that goes into it.

Reach out to someone.

Ask for a referral to someone who that other people like and trust.

In this case, we'd highly recommend you, but being confident to hire people

that can help you in your business with things like ads or, I always like to

use the example of an auto mechanic.

I can't fix my car, but I can hire an auto mechanic who can.

And there's some things in our businesses that it makes more sense to find a

professional like yourself and hire them.

You'll get a lot further, a lot faster.

And even though it might seem more costly at the beginning, I could assure you

it's gonna be more cost effective in the long run because Deon and I learn that

ourselves trying to run our own ads.

Back in the day, the level of frustration that we had, and we always

joke when we have to write sales copy, we bicker like six year olds.

So the bickering and then the trying to run the ads and then the landing

page is not working just constantly.

In the past we've had to hire other people to run ads For us, it's gone

much better and it was way more cost effective, not just with money,

but time and energy and stress.

Yeah.

I've quite often, if I get to the point where I'm.

Pre presenting a proposal.

People say That's expensive, and I always go compared to what?

But equally, I always say, I'd much rather they focused on what they're

getting rather than what I'm getting.

Because what they're getting is my 25 years of expertise.

I've made all the mistakes that they would make themselves as much as they

think Google and Facebook might help them.

Google's objectives, Facebook's objectives.

Uh, primarily to their shareholders.

They will recommend things that maybe work great if you are a Fortune 100 or

Fortune 500 company, but if you are a small mom and pop shop or whatever, you

need to understand at that level what sort of steps you need to be taking.

Some of the recommendations that they make to you will be really

harmful to your overall success.

And I've always maintained like.

Most of the clients I work with, literally, and I'm not exaggerating

when I say this, within the first 20 minutes of working with them, I can

find five or six things they're doing really badly wrong right now, right?

That I could fix immediately.

That would pretty much put them on a much better playing field moving forward, no

matter what I charge 'em, even including my fee into that arrangement, right?

It'll be so much better for them as a result.

And it just comes back to people just need to feel.

Confident that they've got the right person, which is why generally speaking,

I never have to go looking for work.

The work always finds me by virtue of the fact that I do good work for clients.

They talk to their friends and peer groups and what have you, and then my phone rings

and I can be selective if it's a good.

Personality fit, then I'll work with people even if they're outside of

my ICP, 'cause I'm in a luxurious position now of being able to make

those sorts of choices, right?

'cause I've done the hard yards to get to that point.

Whereas if you're starting out, you may feel more inclined to kinda

work with everyone to begin with.

And if you do, again, don't get me wrong, if you.

Do decide that you're gonna work with everyone.

Just know that at some point in time that will bite you and you'll need to reset

the kind of the table at that point.

And it could be you end up having to fire a bunch of clients 'cause

they're not a good fit for you, right?

Or you may need to hire a lot more resource in to manage it.

There'll always be scope creep, so people will expect this amount of work done.

And then there'll be, can you do this?

Can you do this?

And before you're doing three times as much work for the same money.

And that's always one of those things I always say.

Like when somebody says, can you do this?

I say, what would you like me not to do if we're gonna incorporate

it in the current fee agreement?

So I love that I send you a weekly report.

I we do a kind of weekly call, which one of those don't you want

to do to enable me to do this other thing that you're asking me to do?

And they can either agree to stop doing something right or

they can agree to pay more money.

That's genius.

Jim, this has been so informative and so fabulous.

We thank you for being here.

But tell everyone who's listening, because I know they're thinking.

How am I gonna get ahold of him because I need his expertise.

So what's the best way for them to reach out to you?

Yeah, so again, because I've been lucky to be in this industry for a

long time, I'm the at Jim Banks on virtually every platform that exists.

So Twitter, Instagram, right?

There is a politician who's got the same name as me.

He's a senator, I think from Indiana, and I get all of his hate tweets,

but my dms are open on Instagram.

On Twitter, or X is it called Now?

Again, generally speaking, if you go.

Jim Banks digital marketing.

You'll find me perfect.

That's fantastic.

Well, again, Jim, thank you so much for coming and sharing

your 25 years of expertise.

It clearly shows and I'm sure the companies that you work for,

so appreciate your expertise and your help in helping them grow.

So thanks for joining us today.

Thank you for inviting me to come and talk to you and your amazing audience today.

Thanks for listening to the six Figure Business Mastery Podcast.

If you enjoyed listening to this episode and you are ready to leverage video

marketing on all online platforms, or maybe even start your own video

podcast, then you need to check out the Done for You and Done with You program

at the marketing va advantage.com and take your business to the next level.