Solutions8, along with every other agency I know, by the way, is bleeding clients. Let's see if we can, Hold on to them. And then the business dies off. And it's whoa, what was that for? yeah, exactly. Blood from a turnip. That's the other thing too, is just the responsibility we have to entrepreneurs to tell them the truth. We're shifting our entire business model, which makes me feel like such an epic hypocrite. Cause I, dude, I spent the last three years talking so much about all the agencies and Oh, they try to do everything and be everything for everybody. Welcome to your day. The Google news it's Kostom with one of the best, the brightest, the smartest Caden Thompson. How you doing buddy? Good man. It's been a while. How you doing? it's been a long time since we shot a video together. I think it's been like a year. Oh, at least a year. Yeah. It's been a really long time. I remember first time when I hopped on, I was like starstruck. And now it's like flipping back to we were doing the, what was it? The strategist meetings. And then I think that was, yeah, that was the last time that we had a call together. Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad it's feels like a reunion and this call is going to be quite revealing. I think in a lot of ways, we just got finished putting our itinerary together. And, the last words you said to me before we hit record was, honesty is the best policy. here are the cards on the table solutions eight, along with every other agency I know, by the way, is bleeding clients. in October of 2022, when we sold our agency, we had almost 200 clients. And today we've lost close to 40 percent of them and we're losing them for reasons that are in many cases inexplicable. I've had four clients declare bankruptcy in the last 90 days. I haven't had a client declare bankruptcy on us in the last two years. It's unreal. So there's obviously, there's like an economic environment that nobody wants to talk about for some reason. I did a perpetual traffic episode where I claimed that I think we're in a shadow recession that nobody's talking about and maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong, but there does seem to be like a lot of the clients that we're losing are like, can't fulfill on products. E commerce stores that just can't get products for people that don't, they have positive ROAS per se on an LTV basis, but they don't have the cashflow in order to keep going. some people bringing it in house, we're not losing people to performance really at all. which would, I, to be honest with you, I'd a business owner, I'd prefer, I'd rather lose a client to performance. Cause at least that I know internally I can correct it. And so we're shifting our entire business model, which makes me feel like such an epic hypocrite. Cause I dude, I spent the last three years talking so much shit about all the agencies like, Oh, they try to do everything and be everything for everybody. You need to niche down. And at the time it was true, but it was true because when you niched down, you could actually see what was going on within your niche. And now with iOS 14 and first party data and the death of cookies and all that shit. And the fact that Google and meta continue to lie more, we've had to zoom out and we had to go full funnel. So really what you are Caden is you're my bodyguard. You're here to protect me from the rabid listener. As I explain. The one 80 that we're about to do as an agency, like we're going from the Google ads agency, which we were very successful at, dude, I think we built the biggest Google ads agency in the world because most agencies weren't Google ads specific. So as far as the Google ads specific agency, nobody got as big as we did. but and you said something else before this and I'll stop talking and just hand the mic to you. You said something else before we started recording, which I really appreciate it. You said that, I'm going to try to quote you and then you fix it. Okay. You said that, we used to be able to be responsible for 1 thing, but now that everything is so interdependent, 1 thing because you, have to. You have to rely on so much more. So we have to increase the scope of our responsibility. how did I do quoting you there? Yeah, no, I mean that, that pretty much sums up a lot of the issues that we're seeing across just accounts in general and like communication with clients is like the responsibility of us as marketers is to essentially make a client more profitable. And when you have less tracking and less, and that's going to even be further on based in Q3 for Google. That we can't just look at in app ROAS or try to equate as much to in app ROAS to try to see the full picture. We have to look at what's going on other channels. And when you're an agency that just looks at that one niche, you learn a lot about all these other channels, but then it's wait, they're not doing that right. We can do that. Wait, we can fix that problem over there. And so you start to notice. All these sort of issues that are popping up that are outside of your scope of control and it makes you think why don't we just do this? Why are we having to, look for these problems outside of what we're servicing to, go outside of the scope of what we're doing? And I find it good that we focused on Google ads because it allows us to get really focused on the actual niche itself and then grow from there. So we can notice small correlations that, maybe we wouldn't have if we just threw everything right away. And so it's been a really good baseline. For us to build from, and so I think when it comes to the economic situation that people are in right now, where, you were saying, people are going bankrupt agencies are trying to find or not agencies, but clients are trying to find a way to understand what agencies are doing. it's becoming more and more important for us as an agency to educate the client on those things. However, since we're pushing global numbers and, overall with your bank account, essentially, which is the end all, it becomes 1 of those things to where we're the small agency that's pushing for. All these little things explain what's going on. The client's I don't want to worry about this stuff. is too much to think about. it should be right? is a nightmare. That's, 1 of those things that, all these tools. work on attribution, but no tool is perfect. And so when it comes to marketing, we've just noticed that, having control tests and shifting from us having control over just Google, but us having control over Facebook has turned into really good results. when, we look at it from that perspective, it allows the client to be more comfortable with the understanding of. Okay, global numbers are great. I don't have to judge. Are you doing your job on Google versus Facebook? I can judge it from the perspective of you're making more money. You're in control of the attribution and that's the proof, right? And then they don't have to learn all the attribution nuances that you've spent years figuring out. You just show them. Here's the test. Here's the results. And then what clients can argue with what's in their bank account at the end of the day. Yeah. That's the hard part of niching down is even if you're really good at your niche, you're so heavily reliant on other channels, let's say, or other modalities. And it turns you into kind of a tattletale because then we just spend like our whole Client interaction is like, Hey, your meta agency is screwing up. Your analytics agent is screwing up. The organic is not performing the way that you think it is. Your CRM is not true. we're just constantly here's a problem. Here's a problem. Here's a problem. Here's a problem. And then clients fire us. And you're like, okay, you didn't want the canary in the coal mine, which part of me is I was telling you the truth. But then the other part of me is I get it. It's exactly what you're saying. They're like, look, I don't want somebody to tell me about all the problems I have. I want somebody who comes in and provides me the solution. And it reminds me of that meme. Of the two kissing booths. And one of them says inconvenient truths. And the other one says kind lies. And there's got a great big, strong line up against the kind lies. Like you almost want to go back to being one of the agencies that just sells PMAX ROAS. It's I will rush the ROAS game using performance max. Nobody's going to be better. Give me your money. And dude, those agencies are actually doing really well. It's so nobody realizes that they're lying. I don't even think some of them know they're lying. They're just like, I press this magic button and ROAS goes up. We're geniuses, So it's true. We reframe. it's totally true. And I think, I was on a sales call, I think it was about like a month ago. And I think we were one out of, 18 agencies that this person was going through. Yeah. And, we were the only one that promoted global numbers out of all that. And everyone else was talking row as everyone else was pushing, standard performance max and advantage plus and not looking at the correlations, just going for as much as possible. And it's sure, that might work for a little bit, but if you look at it, Strap laid it out from a long period of time. It's eventually going to eat down and your business is going to be like, what the heck's going on? And you're not really going to look at it from the marketing standpoint, because the rows is doing great because you're going to say, oh no, it's the marketing's great. It's got to be my product. It's got to be something else. But the reality is, no, it's. It's a combination of everything. Like your marketing needs that focus. That's not just on ROAS, like you can't live off of LTV forever. You have to go and find new people. Like it's just, growing a business, you got to find new customers. There's no way around it. so our response is to go full funnel. And at solutions eight now, and you've probably maybe seen some hints of this already, but we are, we're doing other channels or we're doing meta, but we're also doing Amazon and we're doing tabula and outbrain and we're doing CRM and we're doing CRO and we're doing landing pages and we're doing everything that all the agencies are doing. Because we have to if we don't have the ability to influence the global picture like you're saying, so you can't sell global numbers. I guess this is what we found out here. We do. It's come full circle. You can't sell global numbers without selling global services. Yeah, when we could sell Google numbers, we sold Google services and we did great and we exploded and everybody loved us. But then as the narrative changed and we had to sell global numbers. you have to. It's like a stick. If you pick up one end, you have to pick up the other. So here we are a full funnel agency for the first time in 10 years. we've contracted and now we're expanding again. it's like an hourglass. It's like an eight. Oh my goodness. Kate, there you go. It's meant to be. Yeah. It's meant to be it's inception. you know what it reminds me of? I'm a lot older than you, so you might not remember this. Did you ever have a Lightbrite as a kid? Lightbrite, okay, I gotta look this up. I'm gonna, I'll Google it so I can bring up the image on screen share. Oh yes, I did not have one, but yes. that's why I'm embarrassed, I should have known what that was. No, so here's, this is like before Gameboys and shit, old people had Lightbrites. the thing about where digital marketing is Google Ads is one light, It's one peg, and so we're going to this little light, bright, we're putting one peg and then met as one peg and organics, But we can't tell the full picture anymore. And you used to be able to, with Google all by itself, stand alone. You used to be able to actually paint an entire picture. Start to finish end to end, from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel, the beginning of the journey to the end of the journey, you had a full picture. it just atrophied, the top of the funnel atrophied first, the beginning of the journey atrophied first. And now we're like relegated to this little teeny tiny corner. And we don't even have the full corner. We just have this one little peg and we get to tell one part of the story. And so now we're being forced to zoom out. And I gotta be honest, it's so humbling. It's so humbling to go from, Oh, we had a months long wait list I still think we are the best Google ads agency on the planet. And now it's Oh, we have to reinvent ourselves entirely because technology's changed. The market's changed. The customer's changed, the economy's changed. And what we were offering, even though we were the best, Blockbuster was the best video rental agency. It doesn't mean that they're around anymore. Yeah. I wouldn't put us with Blockbuster. I don't think so either, it's just one of those really interesting lessons from an entrepreneurial perspective. Yeah. And I think the benefit we have, because I'm seeing a lot of little agencies just burn up. The benefit we have is we're big enough to weather a storm, thank God. especially given the fact that we've been acquired, they have deep enough pockets to help us figure out what the evolution looks like. But if you're a small agency, and you're experiencing what we're experiencing, which, we've got a mastermind you versus Google, by the way, go join you versus Google. It's amazing for what you get. It's unbelievable. I think it's the most cost effective mastermind I've ever seen put together. It's really phenomenal, amazing members. And everybody in there is saying the exact same thing. dude, I'm just seeing we had a conversation a week or two ago where one of our mastermind members who's also in driven is I've never seen a dryer pipeline in my life. And that's about the environment that we're contending with at the moment. I think the pendulum swings back, but not before a bunch of little agencies go away. And that's what's really interesting too, is you lose 30 percent of the market. So you lose 80 percent of the competition. So now there's this big market to be scooped up. So if you're listening to this, Some of my advice just again, as a guy who's been through a couple of cycles now is just hang on, don't overextend, don't get desperate, don't do anything stupid, just hang on, but realize that we have to do more. We have to offer more. Another thing that you said before is the promises have to be bolder. Like you actually have to know what you're doing and you have to commit to some type of like output, some result, let's say. No, definitely. I think. that's, it's the market demands it. at the end of the day, like you get a fall with the market once. And so if the market wants more emphasis on, Hey, if you're going to give me global numbers, I need to make sure it's you kind of thing, then that's what we got to do. it's one of those things to where it seems like there's the beginning point, like you were saying, and then the end point or the next step in the process of, okay, we start, you see all those beginner agencies, oh, I'm focused on Google. I'm focused on, row as in app numbers. Yeah. Sweet. Oh no, my business dropping off. my average retention rate is six months, three months, whatever it is. And it's if you're growing a business, your average retention rate should be way higher than that. Cause at that point, you're just looking at, okay, I held onto the business this long and then they went away. And it's like, why did they go away? Dude, you know what our retention was when we sold 16 months. Yeah. That's insane. And that's for one channel too. Yeah. Average agency retention is three months. According to HubSpot, we were at 16. the thing we did, man, is God, did we love on people, like we just really treated customers really well. And I think that agencies lost that a little bit. Everybody got real spoiled. It was the land of milk and honey. It was easy to bring customers on. So most agencies were just sales organizations. Yeah. Fulfillment was half assed, outsourced. and that'll bite you quick and you can outsource fulfillment and still a great job. this is an open air conspiracy, but we didn't do our own Google ads for for a longer period of time than we did, but we worked with a great agency and we managed them really well. but man, what a great point you just made about retention. And that's true for all businesses. If you're not retaining past the industry benchmark, you're built to fail. It's forced obsolescence. and it's leveraging the uneducated portion of market that just knows, Hey, this is the common thing to track. Let's just lean into that. And then you realize, oh, wait, this doesn't work anymore. And then who knows when you're going to be able to say, okay, no, I need to not focus on this and to focus on this. Instead. This is how you grow businesses. it's like John's been saying before the, row as versus the end set of things, long term versus short term. Our short term versus long term. In terms of, growing a business, right? We're thinking of this from a year over year perspective, not a hold on to the client for another 3 months. let's see if we can, hold on to them. And then the business size off. It's what was that for? yeah, exactly. Blood from a turnip. That's the other thing too, is just the responsibility. We have entrepreneurs to tell them the truth. Yeah, there's some people and we've done this a lot where it's like you don't need to hire us. You need to turn this off. are hemorrhaging money right now. I don't care that Google says you're getting a ROAS. Because you're not and John's been able to prove that. there was a large client that was going for massive raise. It was like their series B or some shit. I don't know. I don't know what those words mean. I'm not, I went to public. Fancy words, fancy business, fancy business words. They're doing some equity raise with M and a people. And the executive of the company said, Hey, I need to show this. you don't, the start I'm talking about. I need to show an increase in profitability. And John's Oh great. Turn this off. And the guy's what? And he goes, dude, I've been telling you guys to turn this off for the last 18 months, and I don't know what it was, but it was like their brand camp. I'll just to use easy terms, it was like their brand campaign. They're spending six figures on it a month because it showed. Positive results that their board liked. And John's that's not producing anything. And the guy did, trusted him and it was a bold move and he turns it off and sure enough, costs went down. Profits stay the same margins increased and they got whatever they needed to do. But it was just one of those examples of, the dude was pissed at himself and his team. He's and we've been doing this for how long, it's and John's nobody listens to me until it's time to listen to me. So John Moran. It's true though. it's one of those things to where you, have access to all these accounts and you learn like what the whole market is doing and what works and what doesn't work. And I think it's one of those things to where it's like, you got to leverage that as much as possible. If it works in another account, try it in this. And how does that, interact with one another? Google ads has gotten easier in the last two, three years. I think that Google ads has stayed the same. I think that the marketing in general has gotten harder. I think that's what it's come down to. Like the tools themselves have stayed relatively the same. I like attribution obviously has gotten harder, but that's been the lean of you just learn more. And so there's more to worry about. It's really what comes down to. and I think that at least for me personally, that's been my biggest, developing processes. Understanding when to push, when to pull for certain metrics that the client needs to be profitable. and using Google ads is one of those things where it's like, we already know how this functions, but how does this impact everything else? that's a truth that I don't think we've delved deep enough into like private equity. these Silicon Valley guys, these Stanford graduate children that come out and just crack the code on every business. Ecom, even five years ago, but Ecom 10 years ago, there was a ton of margin. You can make a bunch of mistakes. You can still make, you could drop ship shit and still make money. But then you had these Silicon Valley Stanford tech whiz nerd, they just came out and they're like, and then they built the triple PhD blueprint for exactly how this shit works. And then it just commoditized everything. There's no margin. Yeah. Because they've perfected it. And so I think that you're right. Marketing got harder. And at the same time, businesses got way more sophisticated. it's been really, you gotta be good at this shit. You have to have a good offer. You have to have a good business. You have to have good fulfillment, good customer service. Like you just have to be good. And that wasn't true. The sure shit wasn't true 10 years ago. Really wasn't true five years ago. There was still a lot of meat on the bone three years ago. But man, you have to be good. Yeah. And I'm glad for it because that puts us in a better position. Like you were saying, if the majority of the market falls off. You just hold on, like you were saying earlier and you'll survive it and then you get better from it. what sucks about it for us though, is our clients have to be good too. there used to be a hundred plumbers in every city and now there's five. There's a hundred florists in every city and now there's five. that's the commoditization of the market. it's the product distribution. It's the survival of the fittest. And it's always going to naturally turn into this kind of, it's what happened with, wireless and, telecom. it's just interesting the way that works and the way that it manifests. all that to say, we're zooming out. Solutions Aid is zooming out. We're reinventing ourselves. We're offering an insane level of services. To be honest with you, it'll never be cheaper than it is right now because we're figuring it out. So there's a sales pitch here. Bad end of the sales pitch. You're a guinea pig. While we know how to do all this shit because everybody knows how to do all this shit, A, and then B, we've already been doing it even though we haven't said we've been doing it. We don't know how to service it. So you're a guinea pig as we figure out the processes and the client management and the approach, but you get way more than anybody's willing to give you for way less than anybody's ever going to charge. And you'll be grandfathered into that pricing. So if you don't want to be a guinea pig, don't hire us. But if you like the idea of, and that's the other thing too, is it's going to be all hands on deck. We're going to throw way more just in terms of human capital. And then of course, AI, because the people that bought us have. a billion dollar valuation and a ton of ai. we've got the firepower to crack the code and really figure this out. so my agency brethren, who I love dear and deeply, even though you're competitors, hang in there or don't. And here's the advice that I'll give, really. I'll tell you what I did wrong, dude. In my first go round, I tell this story a lot, I had a business that went under when the banking world collapsed 'cause I was building banking software. And imagine having a fleet of ships. That's what a business is in a lot of ways, You have clients and employees and strategic partners or whatever. And if you try to keep the entire fleet of float for too long, the whole thing goes under, it might make a lot of sense to just pick the one best boat in Alamo up. And so don't overextend yourself. Don't spend money you don't have. Don't take out loans. it's okay to wave the white flag. It's okay to quit now. It's okay to go get a job. It's okay to galvanize yourself. It's okay to pay rent. And then wait this out. If you don't have the financial backing to ride out a storm, please don't put yourself at risk. I ended up. Despondent dude, like just no and some people like, Oh, I have no money for Starbucks. I'm like, no, I had no money for anything digging under my car seat for the dollar 50. I could spend on a Costco hot dog, not able to pay rent. I lived in a heroin den because I had somebody I loved that was a drug addict. Like it was the worst time of my life. And it's because I just kept thinking like, roll the dice again, it's going to get better. So I hope that didn't get too touchy feely, but I, hopefully some people can learn from my mistakes. if you do see an end in sight in terms of your runway, it's all right to opt out. Now you can always come back. That's the best part about the agency world is startup costs are low. So there's no shame in crying uncle, especially if you have payroll to make, thank God I never missed a payroll, you have a sacred responsibility to make sure that people work for you paid. last words. Do you what advice do you have for clients agency owners? All that? I would say, just follow the market. Honestly, look for what other companies are offering. Try to understand why they're offering it and then build your own offering from that. Don't just copy paste what other people are offering. Look at it from the perspective of what does the client want? What are they getting? Why is this offer showing up more? And then build your own offer from that. I really like that. It's don't reinvent the wheel. Let the market lead. This is awesome, dude. You're awesome. Kaden Thompson, one of the best and the brightest in the whole wide world. YouTube channel, comment, subscribe.