The dirty competition. Here's what I see. I think that there is a recession coming and there's a lot of dead wood that's gonna be burned off, but dead wood doesn't just fall by the wayside and cause no problems. Right. I think what we're gonna see is a lot of these little agencies that are, inefficient or inexperienced, they're gonna do exactly what you said earlier, which is clutch at life. And that hole we run your ads for free thing. We're seeing a little bit of that too. I'm seeing some of my clients getting outbound outreach from folks saying, we'll run for nothing, and then there's some performance based kicker on the back end, or only pay after 90 days or whatever. And my comment to them has always been, there's nothing more expensive than a cheap resource. But I'm curious how y'all are protecting yourself and if there is a way to protect yourself. Half of my audiences are agency owners. What are you doing a batting down your hatches? Because as the death rattle ensues we're just gonna see a lot of, you know, that. playing below the belt. And I don't always, sometimes with clients, I'm like, all right, God bless you. I'll see you. I'll see you in 90 days when you come back and they've broken everything that you're doing. But I, I'm curious if you have a better narrative than that. I think for us we've expanded our offers. So like I said, three, four years ago, it was just as management. Now we do a full audit and a three month plan. We do the ads management, we do consulting, coaching, training, all that kind of stuff. Because what we've realized is there is no one type of client in, in terms of life stage. There are people that are just starting their e-commerce store and they wanna know how to get started. There's people that are scaling to a hundred K a month, 500 k a month, and they've hit a plateau. We can help all of them, but at different levels, and for us, there's different values there as well. And what I find is the ones that are penny pinching to find the cheapest agency, they're not really our best prospect anyway. Mm-hmm. So we know when that conversation goes down that way. Now I've been in the agency game since 2017, so we have a good reputation, especially with people that know me and know the agency, and they know we've found over time. They know what our agency are capable of and therefore if we're gonna charge them a fee, that's maybe double what the other agency's charging. That comes with the results we've created. So that for us, gives us a bit of leeway and a bit of comfort. I also train up agency owners and, and a lot of these agency owners are doing 10 k, 20 k a month. They don't really have big case studies or a brand or anything like that. And what I'm saying to them is get a foot in the door, offer out, show them your expertise, whether it's free or it's a hundred dollars or a $500 thing. Give them the plan of exactly what you are going to do for them. Some, you know, even if they take that away and say, oh thanks, I'm gonna take this and run it myself, most of 'em won't, but they'll be blown away by the fact that you haven't just told them, you know what you're gonna do. Go into their ad account, their funnel, critique it. I'll use the something called the advertising call for. There's only four things we care and, and look about. Look at their products or their service, their audience that they're targeting, the offer and the funnel. Without even looking at anything. If I look at those four things, I can know whether the business is A, ready for Facebook ads, and B, ready for scaling. and you know, you mentioned offer if your offer and funnel is off, it doesn't matter what else you're doing. You're not scaling on Facebook, right? Like, you have to get those things narrowed. If your offer's really good, but your funnel's funnel is poor, you'll fumble your way through, but you're gonna hit those high CPMs and things like that. So we already know that from the off. So when a client comes into us, we do that analysis. It takes us about 20 minutes. We give back analysis check sheet. Like when you take your car into. A garage and they give you like a 92 point safety checklist or something like that. We have a checklist so we can give that back to the client and say, these are the red items you have to fix. You don't fix these things. It doesn't matter which agency you go to, you're going to suffer. So we are there as consultants, you wanna take up our offer, that's fine if you don't go to the next person, but give them this plan. Go for your half price agency offer. So we kind of build that trust and authority in what we do, and we're trying to train agency owners. So take that route, be the expert, but be the guide, be the friend. Even if you don't get the business, guess what? If it doesn't work out, they'll come back to you as well. So I'm just trying to get people to understand. You're not gonna close every single client. First of all, think about their life stage. Are they just starting? Are they growing? Are they scaling? And then think about how you can get your foot in the door to get your expertise into the head regardless of what conversations they're having. Cuz you know, if you prove to them you can, just quickly look at their a business and give them the pointer. You're gonna build the trust and then it's the law of reciprocity and they'll want to come back and give you some money or whatever it is as well. So that's the kinda way we're tackling it as well. I love that man. I really appreciate that paradigm too. That approach is just very integrous. You know, you take the high road and, and then let the chips fall. TMB Brees, you've got something you've been working on. Am I allowed to talk about it or is it still in the lab? You can talk about it. Well, can I just add to what Debe saying? Yeah. I wish you would. Sure. I'm a global interviewer, by the way. I don't know if y'all picked up on that. Like I'm not good at, so you're gonna have to, if you don't self-advocate here, you're just not gonna get your bit in. You are brilliant at this. You kind of like, I, I, I watched your videos and I'm just like, Oh, you p pull this all together so easily. Cause I know it is John, isn't it? Who's your big, big brain. He's the, yeah. Yeah. He's the big, big brain. I truly do really get a kick outta talking about this stuff, so, I get excited and I think, that resonates with folks. Maybe, maybe that's what I do well, I love it how he talks like 4,000 miles an hour. Then you're like, you still talk pretty quick as well, but I'm like listening to your videos, I'm like, This is like a far hydrant of amazing content. And now I just, there's no well, we'll talk about the tool in a minute, but like, yeah, it's, people can go through your content and just go over and over and over, just let getting great content from you. to add to what Tepe is saying, and I think that we see this from a performance Agency. So I know that this is not a plug for myself, but the way we run things is we, we spend the ad spend. So instead of we say, we'll spend client money, we spend our own money, and then we only make money when the client's making money. Um, yeah, which is crazy by the way. Like you just strapped on a cape in my eyes that you're putting your money where your mouth is. You've got some coones there, man, that's huge. Well, a lot of qualification and I'm making sure that I can win. the table stacks my favor. And then I play easy bets, basically. one of the things that we often look at and explore, and it's, it's been, we've done like a bit of a rebrand more recently as well, is to kind of like try and pull on something we always talk about with ads. It's like to say there's an identity behind. Dealing with your brand, so it's like you are an agency that want to keeps your client, then I would try and identify what it is you do that's so special and build an identity around that build, like give your client status as a result of being your agency. You know, like, so they feel like proud to wear your agency as a badge almost of honor, so to speak, to say, this is who we get to work with. and sometimes like to incorporate that into a deeper levels to sometimes use your own language or. Use terminology. I know Ralph does had tier 11, so you kind of work through the tears and that's like a really clever strategy I think. Cause you feel like Right, I'm on the ladder. Like coming off this ladder is actually quite a big painer disconnect potentially. Right. As well. But I was gonna ask you Depeche about this as well. Like Cause we have like a consultancy piece from Tan Time. We don't do a huge amount of it, but we, kind of toying with the idea of having like from time time, like an off-ramp strategy to say if you don't wanna work with us any longer as an agency for any reason, like we're lucky cuz we're spending our own money so we don't get it very often. But if there was that and people were like, oh, we wanna go in-house or something having like an off ramp. Service, you know, to say, okay, cool, we'll help you train up your own internal team and we'll help you get that all into place. you do that or is that something you just have haven't explored or cause that would for me would be like, oh, if you're an agency, you'd still trust you even on the off ramping and then be like, oh, you're now our consultant around that piece as well. I mean, that's exactly why we did it. Cuz when I start the agency, we got to this silly place where within three to six months we're scaling. we've gone from spending 20 k a month to a hundred k a month and because we're percent of ad spend, our costs have gone up for the agency for the client. And we got to this silly phase where, We'd run the agency account for three to five months, we'd lose the account because now they're paying us too much and they're like, oh, well for a 10 or 15 K a month they could bring in two, three media buyers and do it ourselves. Yeah, of course you can. You can't. But that's the mentality. then I figured out, okay, rather than fight that, what if we just went with a flow and said, alright, offboard us from a media buying point of view, but keep the strategy like this is what I can bring. And it became like a fractional C M O type of thing with the added benefit of the whole agency, like the. Analytics, the insights, the creative, the media buying reports, we provided all of that, and it enabled. Brands look at us differently from the point of will, and we'd have that conversation from the start, which was, we'll run your ads for three to six months, but there's also an option where we can also help you hire, embed, train, and take me to buying in house. And that became so much more attractive. So that product itself, as I mentioned earlier, that's a blue ocean I think, not just for Facebook ads agencies, but for everyone. No, that's genius. Yeah. It's really clever to have that. Cause it's, it's trust in the piece where they're like, oh, we're even considering. It's like, well, there's always this, service we have for you. And then you'll be like, right, well, I'm still wanna follow everything and all the guidance you, you provide as well. cause it's a pain, right? If there.. Let's say they start paying us seven and a half K a month, and in five months time they're paying 30, 35 K a month. That's painful. It doesn't matter that they're making five 10 x more than they were three, five months ago. It's still a pain to say. I was paying this and now they're charging that. In reality, we're not really doing that much more work. So I can't say difference in, let's not tell people that depends. Let's irrelevant. Yeah. The fact of the max is broke up there. I don't, I didn't hear that. Yeah, but I mean, look, let's be honest, there's magnitudes of scale. When you start getting to the higher ad spends with Facebook, guess what? It becomes a lot more stable and predictable, believe it or not. So it's easier for us to predict what's gonna happen. No, Google's much harder as you spend more. Oh yeah, yeah, definitely on the Google side. But you know that, that's the crazy thing. So if you are now spending, let's say three, 400 K a month with us, the team is a bit more dedicated. Cuz guess what? When things go wrong, the magnitudes of the wrong become bigger. But at the same time, that's my point. When people are like, well why do you make 'em wrong? I'm like, cuz you get to call me. You know, 2:00 AM on Sunday. That's right. And yeah. And that's actually really worth something because if I'm not charging, if you're spending half million dollars a month, I'm not charging you a fee for half million bucks. You know, you, you don't want a part-time firefighter there. Well, that, that's like such a valuable piece. I think that's like a, a piece that falls into that identity. Like, oh no, when I'm at this level with you guys, then I have you on speed dial, like Right, exactly. And, and, and that I feel like, do I get that with other people? Probably not. and, oh, I don't trust it. Yeah. So I feel like there's these sorts of things that build into that identity and that status piece. It's like, cool. I know that I feel love to someone and they've got my back and I know that I can call them. And yeah, stuff will happen from time to time, but I know that they're just in the end of the phone call if I need them. That's a huge piece I feel like, but no one really taps into. We've been on the receiving. Hopefully they never watched this video. We've been on the receiving end of this in, in the worst way. We had a client that we love dearly. They were with us for a couple of years. They grew so big. They're like, you guys, we have to take this in house. They hired their own media buyers, took it in house, and then, I don't remember the, the timeline, but it wasn't long. It was like eight weeks later something exploded and they didn't call their media buyers. They called us. I'm like, so wait a minute now, you know, like, you get what? And now they've been with us for years and we helped 'em out and we fixed it. But if I had what Depe is talking about, Then, you know, at least I'd continue to be able to, to profit from that client. And then they could call me maybe with a little more integrity and, you know, not with their tail tuck between their legs, but it was, it was interesting to be on the sitting end of it. So I think it's a good question, Tom. And asking for referrals. That's a great one as well. Yeah, that's exactly right. It's difficult for them to be like, I'm off now, I'm not gonna use them anymore. And you tied them in psychologically. Yeah. Tom, tell us about what you're building. Ah, yeah, man. Okay, cool. So we have been building in the background a piece of software that we are very proud of. So what it is, is that you can connect your YouTube account or YouTube channel to our tool, and we call it the X-ray. So what it does is it, It takes in all the data from your YouTube channel x-rays it as in terms of like, finds all the important figures and then allows you to finally get to grips with some analytical data that's useful from a content standpoint. So nothing to do with SEO or getting videos ranked or being suggested videos and that type of stuff. It's much more to do with What are your audience actually like? what themes of content teams to resonate with your customers, and how long are people sticking around on some videos versus other videos? and you can benchmark all your videos against each other for certain time periods or look at the intros of your videos and the middle section of your videos and see if you've got right retention drops anywhere, or see what your videos are doing from a subscriber standpoint. And then also we call these magic moments if there's like a peak. In retention at any point in your video, we analyze it and give you links to the highest peaks across the whole of your channel. And it allows you, well, you've seen it, haven't you? It allows you to then just see what content actually works and what people like and what people enjoy from you. And so it just guides you and it is like, so, like it is just so obvious about what's the next video you need to create? Either redo great content you've already got, but maybe with a week intro or something. Or keep doing more of a certain topic cuz you didn't realize that your customers absolutely love that content. we're kind of building out and everyone seems to absolutely love it and get so much from it, which is cool. And yeah, that's kind of something that we're focusing on right now and it still needs to be. polished up a little bit, but right now it's performing really well and it just, they were gearing up. where it takes us is to say, right, if you can isolate like three or four videos from your channel that are just like the best performers especially in terms of lead gen and things, then you just put a little bit of spend behind them a specific way when you run your ads. And my word like. It's so exciting to see Jake, these people that can create great content, have good products, maybe not great offers, but still they're able to kill it. So they just produce these great videos back in the past and they just put a little bit of ad spend and it just drives leads and sales every single day for them. And these are not big, big brands. These are kind of people that have a good YouTube following, but haven't really figured out the Dara response bit just yet. So it's a great way of introducing those people into like the world of paid advertising to drive. Profit at scale. so far so good, man. Like it's working really well. And we'll put a link in the description maybe or something if people wanna find out more.