Why Luke Tobin spends $10,000 a month on his personal brand

Transcription

Daniel: In this episode, I sat down with Luke because I had to understand how he managed to do all of these things. We dive into the nitty-gritty, including what it takes to actually succeed as a founder and whether things like paid boosting of your posts on LinkedIn actually work. You won't want to miss this one. Let's dive into it. Welcome to Connection Accepted. Today we've got Luke Tobin on the pod. Matt: Luke, thanks for coming on. Daniel: Matt, thanks for having me here. Appreciate it. Matt: Luke, for people who have never met you before, who is Luke Tobin? Luke: So, I mean, that's a big open-ended question, isn't it? Let's go for the business side of me. So my business background, kind of been doing this crazy thing called entrepreneurship for about 22 years. I've had seven businesses in that time, three exits in three different industries from hospitality to e-commerce, and then more recently, agency. Outside of that, you know, I, I work now on trying to support founders and help them with their growth journeys. I do a lot of work around positioning for exits and helping founders reach kind of successful outcomes. And I also write a newsletter. We've got about a hundred thousand subscribers on there called the success method. And we do a lot of kind of coaching around success psychology and mindset and that kind of stuff. So yeah, quite a mixed bag. Matt: Let's start with the seven different businesses. Were you always an entrepreneur growing up or when, where and how did this start? Luke: Yeah, I mean, I had my first business when I was 18. I think as soon as I was like legally able to have a business, I basically had one and got into it. And the first business was a complete flop, I have to say. It was like a, a modeling agency, like casting agency, which was really difficult to scale. Um, we did all right, but it was, it was hard work and ended up, you know, losing a bit of cash on that. My second business was a fine drinks and events company buying in spirits and wine from all over Europe and then selling them through hospitality and trade in the UK off the back of that going pretty well. We had, we had quite good margins on the products. We set up a bar hire and events company. So we were going to pretty much all the major festivals in the UK from V-Fest, Glastonbury, whatever. We've worked them at some stage and we had bar hire units there, um, selling different products. Our kind of spin was we sold a lot of um alternative liquors. So things like meads, country wines, just something that was a little bit different to a standard bar. And that worked pretty well. So yeah, I mean, look, I had businesses from a young age. I think my, um. I grew up, my dad was fairly entrepreneurial. My mum always struggled kind of financially. And I thought, you know what, I need to make sure I can make my own way. Daniel: And I, I think, you know, entrepreneurship gives you that ability to, to carve your own path. So, um, yeah, I've always, always been entrepreneurial. Matt: Luke, that is, first of all, super inspiring for people like me and I'm sure a lot of the audience as well who are either interested in entrepreneurship or are already in the arena and building something, whether it be, you know, a software or a services business or, you know, e-commerce as well. And it sounds like you have had a very wide breadth of experience running businesses in different industries and different models as well. How do you land on these different ideas when you're on your third or fourth business and then you're thinking, okay, there's this other idea that I want to pursue. The reason why I ask is because I think a lot of us struggle with prioritization and focus. And personally, I find this too, as someone who right now, as we speak, is running an agency and also doing this podcast, Connection Accepted and still running my personal YouTube channel on the, on the backend. And sometimes I feel like, should I just be focusing on one thing as opposed to splitting my attention across three different things? But it sounds like you've found a way to almost effectively prioritize your energy so that you can run so many different businesses. Daniel: I'll be honest with you. I think if I go back in time a little bit, so I've got the gift of a few years behind me, I guess I'm 40 now. So when I look back, I, um, in my earlier part of my career, when I had those first businesses, they were like all or nothing for me. Like I was all in and there was no distraction. There was no, arguably there wasn't a pull to social media. There wasn't this like comparison, doubt thing that we all have now looking at other people going, oh my God, I need to do more because, so actually, like when I had that fine drinks and events company, that was all I was doing. And that was my full focus and it worked. Earlier in my career, I always found that if I tried to spread myself too thin, things just wouldn't get the right momentum. They wouldn't get the same amount of energy, in which case they just didn't, didn't work. A good example of that was my most recent exit. It was a fairly large agency. I built, built a kind of agency to 90 people and sold that in late 2022. When I started that business, I was doing some consultancy work outside of it. So I was one foot in, one foot out. I was holding onto this like well-paying consultancy gig, was trying to build the agency. The agency for the first three years did okay. We had like 10, 11 staff by the time I went full time. But in that period, then from me going full time to exiting, it was four years and we grew literally over a hundred percent a year for that four year period every year, doubling the business. And I think to myself, what would have happened if I'd just gone all in earlier and not been so scared to commit and like get myself diluted. Daniel: So as much as now, um, I probably have too many projects on. I have to say that the things that have gone best for me historically have been where I've been able to be pretty laser sighted and not diluted. So I don't have the magic wand for that. I actually think if you try to take on too much, they're probably not getting enough attention. Like, to really build something, I think it takes a lot of hard work, graft, and momentum. Like as the founder, you're the energy, you're the center of the eye of the storm, right? You need to build that storm around you and create that energy and pull people into the storm with you. If you're trying to create three storms at the same time, how can you give it enough power? Matt: Luke, that's such a beautiful analogy of as a founder, you're almost, you said storm. I think of almost a magnet that attracts other people, talented individuals to build the business together. So many thoughts there, but from your experience, having run so many different businesses, what's in your opinion, the most important skill or quality that a founder needs to have? And I'll give you my take first, as a very new budding entrepreneur. Something that I unexpectedly realized is quite important is the ability to hire good people. And at the start, I thought that being a good entrepreneur was simply, oh yeah, you just need to be persistent and don't give up. But what I'm slowly realizing over time as I build this agency is there's a lot of key man risk, and to scale, it cannot simply be me. So finding people that are good at delivering the service and that I can trust and that I can put in front of clients, that's actually become the biggest challenge for me. But I want to hear from you, of course, what you think the most important skill or trait should be. Daniel: So you've hit the nail on the head with that. So I think early on in your, as you're building a business and you're building those foundations and getting that magnet or storm going, you need to attract the people that believe what you believe that you can bring on the journey. And like bringing in those first people is the responsibility of the founder, right? And getting that right is like make or break for the business. If you bring the wrong people in, it sets you back three or six months. And like the whole thing's difficult. Also, it's interesting that you're in that service-based space that I know so well, because unlike tech businesses or certain product-based businesses, you are solely reliant on your ability for those individuals to deliver for you. And your reputation is stacked behind those other individuals. So it's more critical in a service business than any other type of business to get people right. So, and there's this whole philosophy of like delegate to elevate and it's so important, but you need the right people to be able to do this. So I totally agree with what you're saying. Matt: I think probably the biggest attribute or character trait that a founder can have is resilience. Like you need to be extremely resilient and that comes with being able to, you know, put yourself out there, take knocks, take setbacks. But I think probably the one thing that all founders can do and should do early on is focus on new revenue. So sales, like new revenue fixes pretty much all problems, right? If you generate enough revenue, you can hire the people. You can hire the people who can fix the problems. You can do the work, you can do whatever. Obviously there has to be some sense around that. But for me, sales are sat Balance of the two, so yeah, sales focus is really important. Daniel: That's so interesting, Luke. I want to dig in on that. When it comes to sales, what do you think makes someone good at sales? And I ask this because, obviously, I go into sales calls and I think different styles as well, depending on who the person is. But curious from your perspective as you think about maybe some of the friends that are really good at sales, what do you think makes someone an effective salesman? Matt: It's like, it's like the anti-sale these days, isn't it? It's coming around to a different way. So actually, it's about relationships. It's about building strong foundations, strong relationships. And I've always been a big fan of that consultative sale. Like, figure out a pain area or a problem or something that somebody's trying to solve and solve it for them or give them the answer. And if you can do that and you can do that in a way that is perceived high value, then you will be able to sell the product. You know, people, people will happily pay for a solution, a quicker route, the answer, whatever it is, but it's about positioning and it's about being able to present it in a way that is attractive to people. So yeah, I think it's um it's about a consultative approach. Daniel: I totally agree with you, Luke. And the thing you said about the anti sale, it feels so relevant because these days it feels like people are so sensitive to being pitched things. And I think there's nuance between B2C versus B2B sales, but at the end of the day, it's still a person, right? So you are still trying to appeal to an individual. And because of how much people are used to getting pitched or getting messages, getting DMs if they're a decision maker at a, at a business that a lot of people want to work with, then you almost have to come at it with a I’m just trying to help you, like, let me provide value up front first before I even mention anything about working together. But I, I love that. I do want to talk a little bit about what you've learned about marketing different products and services over the years. You've run a number of different businesses. Maybe let's just start high level in general. Daniel: How do you think about marketing and how has that changed, if at all, over the last X Y years that you've been running these different businesses? Matt: Yeah, marketing has completely changed. So I think it's probably changed two or three times in my, in my lifetime or business time. So, you know, I, I was kind of in the world of work, believe it or not, before Google was even a, you know, was, was a thing. It didn't have ad words and you know, all of those things. It's changed a lot. And I remember getting into digital marketing back in like 2009, 2008, and Google was just kind of starting to dominate everything and search and they, they bought DoubleClick, which became AdWords. And then there was a whole digital craze and now we're with AI and all of these things. So I think, you know, if we look at the current circumstance with the way the world has changed, like things have become much more persona-led, like individually-led. And I know we're going to touch on LinkedIn and personal branding and those things. And I think that's a, that's a big piece of this, right? Demand gen is really tricky these days. Like people just are not able to get the same levels of traffic to their website. It's just not happening. So how do you go about kind of countering that? Probably the best way is develop a personal brand and people will buy from other people, like people, you look at the rise of the creator space and influencers. Like I think that's become one of the best marketing opportunities of our time, which is, you know, it's an interesting time to be alive. Daniel: This is an excellent segue, Luke, into talking about your personal brand because on LinkedIn, I know you've got 150, over 150,000 followers. When did you start building your personal brand? Matt: So not early enough. So I, I joined LinkedIn in 2010, right? I should have started building my personal brand in 2010. And today I'd be, well, God knows where I'd be with my personal brand. But I actually only really started focusing on it two years ago. And, you know, I've grown quickly in that time. It's been great. I've also been able to focus cross channel, which a lot of LinkedIn creators or entrepreneurs have struggled to do. So I think cross platform now I've got nearly 900,000 followers, which is great. So, um, and that's been done in two years. So it shows that it is still possible, although really hard work. And I've invested heavily and a lot of time into it, mainly for the reasons I just said, you know, I'm a big believer now that I think personal brands are the way that you connect with potential buyers for B2B, but also potential product at B2C. Without a personal brand behind a business, you will struggle as we go forward to, to scale and start and, and build companies. I, I'm a big believer in that. So, um, a couple of years ago, I saw that that was the way things were going and I've kind of gone all in on it really since. Daniel: That's super impressive, first of all, 900,000, I think was the number you quoted across platforms. Are you doing this mostly yourself or do you have a team behind you that's solely dedicated to, you know, coming up with the content ideas and the strategy? Matt: How do you, how does someone go from zero to 900,000? Yeah. I mean, it wasn't zero, but it was a few thousands. But certainly, let's just, let's say basically zero. A lot of, uh, too many hours on social media to start with, um, an unhealthy amount of time on social media to try and figure it out. A lot of testing iteration. And I'll be completely honest, a huge amount of investment. You know, some months I've been spending 10K plus on my personal brand building, like, you know, whether that's testing ads, whether it's paying third party suppliers, whether it's video producers, whether it's rebranding myself, whether it's building websites, like it's taken a lot to, to build it and to scale it to where it is. And if you talk to anybody these days, everybody will tell you they want a personal brand, but most people have absolutely no idea what it takes to get into that top 1% or 2%. It is like a relentless constant pull of your time and focus. But that's cool. You know, I decided to do it. And that's why I went all in on it. And I've been happy to invest. I think after about three months of kind of trying to figure it out for myself, and I'm a marketeer in my mind, so I love trying to reverse engineer this stuff and figure it out. So after a while, I realized that I couldn't do it on my own. And I started building a team. So I now do have somebody that helps with the copywriting, somebody that helps with some of the creative design, and I've got two video teams. So I live in Portugal, so I've got a team here and a team in London. And depending on where I am, I'll, I'll produce video with those guys. I'm in the process of trying to buy a space here where I'm going to build my own studio and like, really, you know, again, more investment, more time, more focus on it. But yeah, it's, um, it's, it's, yeah, it's been a fascinating journey, that's for sure. Daniel: Luke, this is awesome. And I also want to talk about LinkedIn specifically, where you have 150,000 followers, as I mentioned. When you think about LinkedIn as a platform to you and your businesses, and I know you're running Unusual Group today, which we should probably also give the audience a little bit of context on what that is. Do you see it as more just a top of funnel brand awareness play, or are you actually getting customers directly through LinkedIn, whether it's DMs or whatnot? Matt: It's a mixed bag, I would say. What one thing I didn't do until fairly recently is I never tried to monetize my audience, actually. What I found initially really beneficial from having a fairly large footprint on LinkedIn is that when I go into calls with prospects, potential buyers, I do a lot of investing as well. So I go on investor calls. Matt: People check you out before, right? And when they check you out and you have a fairly big profile, you go in with a slightly, you know, upper hand. And actually, you know, I would find that it would give me really good leverage in negotiating. It was, I, I was like going in and people were saying, oh, I've, you know, read some of your content. I've been following your newsletter or, you know, those types of things. People feel like they know you before they know you. And I think there's, there's some strength in that, which, which I, I saw really early on. And that was, you know, even at like 10, 20, 30,000 followers, that kind of thing started to happen. More lately, I've been able to start converting that into revenue and into traction. So, um, I probably should have done it a bit earlier, but Q3 last year, I started doing sponsorship, for example, with a few brands. So I worked with LinkedIn, I worked with Fixer AI. I've worked with Dell Technologies. I've worked with some, some big brands, which has been cool. And educational formats. We're doing well. There was like a, and not that they're, they still do well. I think they'll always do well. People, people want to be able to get like a quick win, a takeaway, something they can action. And people love frameworks. People love motivational, inspiring content. Like, you know, it's human nature. We need those kind of, we need to see every now and again, like a nice bit of motivational quote or something that gives us a, you know, a spring in our step for the day. Like all of those things are good. What I've found over the last six months or so is the algorithms changed a lot and a lot of the reason for that is it's become pay to play in some ways. You know, they put in this boosting feature now. The reach has dropped dramatically from where it was six to 12 months ago. You know, I think that's going to continue to get difficult, more difficult. So it's about authenticity more than ever. I think for a long time, and unfortunately, you look at the feed on LinkedIn, it's quite samey a lot of the time, you know, because people have cottoned on to what was working. So now it's, it's going back full circle. It's like authenticity, like building the personal into personal brand a bit more. For a while, it was quite disconnected, I think, from the actual individual and more about, well, what information can I push out? And there's been some really interesting and big creators that have built these profiles, but with no real backup behind them. Like a lot of them not necessarily, they don't necessarily have the business acumen or support or exits or whatever. They've just managed to build these big profiles by pushing out viral content. So for me, I think it's good. Daniel: I think in the future now, people that have actually done something and have built a profile with credibility behind them, I think will become more transparent because I think the algorithm is going to force people to be more authentic and, you know, post more genuine content that's like relevant to that individual. And I think that's, that's the way that it needs to go. And I think people will respect that more. That's how it used to be. And then it kind of lost its way for a little bit and LinkedIn have been trying to pull it back. So for me, we do a mix of, of content types. We still do some of the educational kind of formats, but a lot of what we're trying to do now is much more building in public, sharing what we're doing in the businesses and really bringing people into our, our story, which I think is really, you know, what personal branding is about, right? Matt: Look, I think that you hit the nail on the head there, and it reminds me of a conversation that Daniel and I had last week with another LinkedIn creator. Her name's Dr. Juliana Chan, but she's actually, she was a professor trained at Cambridge MIT, didn't do anything with content for many, many years. And then one year decided to document what she was learning at the Davos economic forum in Switzerland and realized there was a huge, huge space for people in her, in her specific situation. It was academics who wanted to hear and learn from someone who was in the same field as them. And when you say people that are doing real things coming on and documenting their journey, I think that is so, such an important distinction because it's just going viral, I think is very different. It's it's a very valuable skill to be able to go viral, but when it comes to business owners that usually want to build their personal brands to help their businesses, I think that plays sometimes different. And the approach that you have to take is a little bit different than just optimizing for pure attention. There is a sliding scale of like pure attention versus pure conversion, perhaps where you're, you know, you're only optimizing for getting new customers versus only optimizing for the views, but it sounds like what you guys have achieved is somewhere in the middle where the building in public is showing people your personality. It's showing them who you are, that you're a human being and also building your credibility because they can see that you're spending your time working on your businesses. They can see the experience that you've had in the past and that you're a real operator who's also exited multiple times. And that sets you apart from all the different voices on LinkedIn. That's definitely the idea. That's definitely the plan. So you mentioned the paid boosting, and I am curious to get your thoughts on this because anyone who's been posting on LinkedIn recently has seen the button that pops up immediately above your post. Hey, boost this to relevant audiences. Matt: And something that I've been hearing across a lot of our guests as well is impressions being down. So organic reach is not as high as it was in the past and LinkedIn definitely seeming to push ads and paid boosting a lot more curious from the, if you guys have experimented with LinkedIn ads at all or the paid boosting and how that's going for you, if you've learned anything from that. Daniel: Yeah, it's it's fascinating to see the change. I think we have, we've tested, we've probably put, I don't know, a couple of grand in to boosting over the last couple of months since they rolled out the feature last year. You definitely get more reach and you get more, you know, how, how productive it is from a engagement perspective, I think is, is still arguably, you know, I'm not that sure, but I think all that it's doing is it's free in the algorithm to serve it better. I mean, look, they've copied Instagram's model for doing this and the method did it so well for so many years and made a fortune doing it. It makes sense that at some point Microsoft would bring this in. Matt: I think, yeah, it works. It's not going to be for everybody. I think they know that they've got such a growing, motivated audience on there now of people that are posting regularly that actually that boosting feature can generate them a lot of, a lot of income, which is why they've rolled it out now. And they waited until there was enough regular posting. Like for a long time, like LinkedIn were trying to encourage people to post, you know, three, four times a week. And I think only 1% of LinkedIn actually posted more than once a week until two years ago or something crazy. Now the percentages are much higher. So it makes sense as to why they've rolled it out now. Daniel: And yeah, we've tested it. We think it, I mean, look, it works at the moment. I think it's fairly cost-effective for the reach that you get, but again, you've got to be really laser sighted on like why you want the additional views because views in their own right don't really mean anything. You know, if I look back over the last 12 months, I've probably had God knows tens of millions of views on my content. But like unless your CTA is something tangible or actionable, like I always push people to my newsletter or to some way I can help them or support them. But like, I'm not sure that just boosting an individual post is going to have much impact on that. So again, for most people, I don't know how much it's really going to help them. Matt: Yeah. That's a very realistic take. And you mentioned the CTA, which depending on what the business is or what you're looking to get out of the content can be different. You said that you're driving people to your newsletter. Daniel: Has that always been the case? And one thing that I was curious to get your thoughts on as well as someone who has run many different businesses is some people may feel like how do I effectively use my personal brand if I'm doing a lot of different things? Because conventional content advice is focused on one profile, focus on one customer ICP and try to just speak to that one person. But what if I'm running multiple businesses or what if there are two or three different audiences? Is it even worth trying to speak to all three at once or should I just double down on one? Curious your, your thoughts there. Matt: I don't think I've always got this right, if I'm honest with you. So because I found myself in a position where I run a investment firm, I have an unusual group and I, and I've got this kind of personal brand. I don't know if I've got the right answer. I mean, I, my first response, if I was coaching someone on this would be like, Hey, just go all in on one thing, do it well, get known for it, like specialize niche. Like, but I don't think I've followed my own advice as well as I should. And actually I probably haven't maximized my ability to convert some of that traffic because of that, you know. the one consistent that I have had is this newsletter and that's worked pretty well. You know, we've got just shy of a hundred thousand subs now, which is amazing. And you know, we, we really feel like we do a lot of great work on supporting that audience, which is great. But could we have had 3000, 300,000 if we did more targeted and more, probably, yeah. I mean, I've probably mixed my messaging, mixed my ICPs along the way, but then at the same time, you've got to test your got to iterate. But my, my probably strong advice would be like, go all in on one thing and do it really well, get known for it. And then, you know, build that. What does Daniel Priestley say? Build your key person of influence in that niche and that sector. And then you can broaden out afterwards. Daniel: Talk a little bit about the newsletter as well. What are you writing in this newsletter? Matt: So it's this success, I can't say the word the success method. And we focus on mainly success psychology. So we talk a lot about the different I had to be hands-on and helping to write it. I love, love doing it. So yeah, it's actionable psychology to help people day-to-day. Daniel: That's awesome. And I can imagine you're providing a astronomical amount of value to your audience. A couple other things I wanted to dive into LinkedIn specifically, Luke, because you've been using the platform for a while now, both in the early days as just a user, and then now as someone who posts content there. Is there anything about LinkedIn that you would like them to change or is there something that feels like it would be useful if they had it, whether it be a new feature or whatnot? Matt: I think they've been trying to nail for a long time this video format. And I think it would be amazing to have more video on LinkedIn. Matt: I think the, the difficulty is they've always struggled with getting the reach and the uptake, and they used to have the video feature where you could just go and scroll video and it's just not really taking. So I think it would be nice to see them do something innovative with that. Like, what can they do that's a bit different? They've just tried to copy other platforms previously, but like, what could LinkedIn do that's, you know, that's different? Like, for example, can they create a filter, a clear filter where you can filter by business or you can filter by a topic or by a problem or something, and you can go and you filter it that way. Like there's lots of cool things, based on it being more of a professional business platform that I think they could lean into. And like, think about like the Ted Talk stuff and, you know, TEDx and all of those things like LinkedIn could do their own version of that and invite people to, to do those as lives or as sessions. Like, I think that would be amazing. And they've got the platform, they've got the people, like, yeah, it could be really interesting. Daniel: That's fascinating. And I never thought of that TED Talk idea that you mentioned. Anyone from LinkedIn, if you're watching this, I know we have a few folks from LinkedIn who are fans of the podcast. You heard it here first. It's a good idea. If you steal it, we'll take 10% of the revenue from your boosting. But no, I think it's a great idea. And, and, you know, people would go crazy. That's one way that you could look at the success of Ted Talks, right? That's one way that they could do a different angle, different spin. They've got so many good people on the platform that I think it would be, yeah, it would be great. It'd be a really good series for them to focus on. Matt: Luke, I want to also talk a little bit about your current business ventures. And you and I, before this, before we hit record, we're talking about Unusual Group. Can you give a little bit of context to the audience? What, what is that? What are you working on? And what's the genesis of that idea? Daniel: Of course. Yeah. So I'll take you back a little bit. So when I sold my last agency, I, I sold into a large independent agency group, a business called Cadastro. They're based in South America and Brazil. Through the acquisition, I joined the board there as the co-CEO. And it was a fascinating two and a half year experience. We had 1300 staff, lots of global offices, very corporate, maybe not where I wanted to be long-term, but enjoyed the, the experience of it. And in the time there, we completed on a few other transactions, a few other acquisitions. The thing that I found fascinating was that most of those businesses were able to add 40, 50% in revenue the following year. Daniel: And a lot of it came down to having unified processes, access to like growth methodologies, frameworks for marketing that had worked before, like just good guidance with strong delivery and support that normally as like an independent operator, especially in the agency world, you just don't have access to, like you've got fragmented services. You're using an accountant over here. You've got a legal person you dial in if there's a problem, your HR team's probably outsourced until you get to five million in revenue. You've got like all of this stuff all over the place and nobody is looking at it like you are with the same lens. And all of this distributed and dispersed way of operating isn't actually that productive. It means that you're wasting a lot of time, but also often you're not able to move forward as clearly as you would like to. So coming out of that business, I scoured the market and said, okay, what's out there for agency founders? Like the success rate of like growing to selling an agency is really low. Only 4% of agencies ever exit. Out of that 4%, almost half of those are sold in distress. So some form of like burnout, need to sell, cashflow issues, whatever. So only really 2% sell for like a decent chunk of money. So that's like 98 in every hundred people unsuccessful at building and selling an agency. And that to me is just criminal, especially because success leaves clues. There are ways that you can benchmark against success to increase your outcomes of success. So looked at the market. There's nothing out there offering this group level infrastructure and support with the coaching, with the methodology, with some access to investing and capital. So we built it and we've built this ecosystem of incredible agencies. Now we're at 16 agencies as of today. We only launched in October, so we're growing quickly. We've invested in seven of those agencies. The others are just members, you know, paying for the service and the support. And that's great. And, you know, the, the investment's not for everybody and that's absolutely okay. And we've focused very heavily on trying to scale those businesses to some sort of eventual exit and outcome. And that's really the, the core focus for us. So there's a lot of alignment. There's a lot of work that goes into it, as you can imagine. We've built our own methodology framework, the Unusual method, which is a proprietary place and way of building these businesses. Next week as well, and I'll drop it here first, we are launching our own mergers and acquisitions brokerage so we can literally do the full scale. So you come in, we help scale the agency through to a saleable asset, and then we can take you to market for our brokerage. So we've got the full life cycle that we're able to offer an agency founder to increase those, those outcomes. Matt: So yeah, that's the business. That's fascinating. Daniel: And selfishly, I'm very interested in what you're doing, obviously, because I am running a, a LinkedIn personal branding agency. Curious, when you look at different agencies, when you're evaluating people that apply or are seeking investment, what are you looking for? What is the ideal profile of an agency? Matt: First and foremost, we have a scoring criteria, but first and foremost, it comes down to the founder. Like, is the founder somebody that we feel like is open to suggestions, ideas, malleable, wants to grow, ambitious enough to take this all the way? Then it's looking at positioning, productization, all the opportunities that come with like scale and, and, you know, how the, the positioning and the value prop of the business is. So we do a lot of work upfront to really understand like what that looks like and make sure that it's aligned with the rest of the group. The other thing that we're trying to do is find compelling businesses that add value to the group because there's a lot of work that goes on obviously within the group. And I think it's, it's, it's important to make sure we're bringing in people that are culturally aligned, but also, you know, aligned as far as like discipline and what they're able to bring. And then a lot of it comes down to like stages of business can be quite varied. So we've got two startups, literally, you know, they're six months out the gates and we're, we're helping to scale them. The majority of our businesses is somewhere in that middle stage, you know, one to seven, 8 million revenue, something like that. And then we've got a few later stage, which are probably 6, 12 months away from needing to exit that we're getting exit ready and then we'll help to, to sell through the brokerage. So we have this fairly broad approach, but the beauty of that is it offers a lot of different levels of experience for each of the members to learn and leverage from each other. So we think it's important to have agencies at different stages as long as the founders are really driven. Daniel: That's so interesting. And it sounds like you have a breadth of people running agencies at different stages. And I can imagine that there's different learnings for people at different stages and someone running an eight figure agency is going to be in a very different situation and be learning very different things than someone who's six months out of the gate of starting their agency. Man, this is so fascinating. So what do you see as the three or five year, if everything went well, would Unusual Group scale up the number of agencies that they're working with from 16 to 30, 40, 50? Matt: Yeah, we see it as like maybe growing to 50 would be an amazing number. Obviously being able to then serve those businesses and ideally get all of them to an exit outcome, you know, and as some exit, bring some more in. There's the potential in the future to, to sell as a group as this collective as well. That's another opportunity. Matt: But really the, the big focus is on, yeah, building stability. We want to, to branch out more internationally. We're looking at, you know, branching out into the U S and other markets and, you know, supporting a wide range of forward-thinking Listen's bit can start to fall out and then you need to hire and then you're kind of getting this equilibrium. It's the challenge. So certainly as agencies are scaling, but actually probably arguably at all sizes, revenue and being able to win new customers and then retention is a common theme, right? You're only as good as your last client acquisition. You're constantly fighting to keep revenue, to upsell, to keep clients happy. So there is a, yeah, there's a constant need to iterate process and add more value to do that. So a lot of the work we do upfront is on, okay, well, what does this sales engine look like? How are you acquiring customers? And, you know, how are you targeting those customers? And then we do a lot of work on like, okay, what, how do you actually support and sustain and keep that customer for, for years? If you look at the the marketing industry, especially, I mean, creative services is a little bit different depending on the vertical. But marketing specifically, the turnover rate or the churn rate of customers year over year on average is 40%. So you start a year and then you lose 40% of that business by the end of the year. So you've got to go and if you want to grow, you've got to go and sell at least 41% again in order to, so that's the average agency. So it's pretty scary. So a lot of the work we do is on like, how can we make sure you're in the top 1% of that, not in the, not in, well, that you're reducing that rather than being that kind of average. So if we can get churn rates to below 5%, for example, you're already in the top league and then we can just dial in bringing in more that there's a lot of methods to the way that we do it, but they're probably two of the most critical things that we focus on early on anyway. Daniel: Yeah. It's really fascinating that you say that, Luke, because I feel as though a lot of the advice that's given to people that are running marketing agencies or who want to start marketing agencies is to focus a lot on the offer and to focus a lot on sales. And while that is definitely important, something that I personally have found is the quality of the fulfillment and the service that's actually being provided is in some cases equally, if not more important because you don't want to have a leaky bucket. And to some extent, it's impossible. I think there will always be some clients that will churn off after, you know, shorter than we would like. Daniel: But something that I, as a, as an agency owner, am still working through and definitely do not have it figured out, but is top of mind is how do I maintain a certain level of quality and really focus on delivering excellent service so that even if we are doing those extra sales and we're adding revenue to the business, we are not letting the other, the older customers' service quality decline or we're not breaking fulfillment in the backend just because we've taken on more than we can, we can handle at this point in time. But super fascinating. Matt: Luke, I want to close out. Is there anything else that we haven't talked about related to LinkedIn or what you're doing with the business that you'd love to share with the audience? Daniel: I think we've covered most of it. I think, you know, obviously unusual group would be, you know, keen for people to give feedback. We're still iterating. We're launching our brokers next week. So yeah, that, that, that's cool. Obviously the success method, you know, I'll do a bit of a plug here, but I'm always welcome new people to come in. It's obviously a free resource. We give loads of value away. So very welcome to come check it out. And you can go on my website, LukeTobin.com to, to find that. Matt: Thanks for coming on, Luke. Daniel: Thanks for having me. Cheers.