Welcome to Virtual Assistance, the Agency Growth Machine podcast. Take your digital marketing agency to the next level as we share secrets, strategies, and client success stories. Step back from the DayToday of your agency and activate massive growth using Virtual Assistance. And now your host, ZAR Sadiki. Today, my guest is Chris Martinez and running an amazing agency out of California. And we're going to talk about Dude just in a little bit. And one thing that caught my eye, Chris, on your Instagram profile is that it says that in 2017, Chris launched Dude with wrestling mask and a dream. So tell us about that. Yeah, I love telling the story. I started an agency in 2012, and then I ended up moving my operations, my design, development, project, management, everything to Tijuana, Mexico, in 2015. And that helped us to grow from 50 to over 200 clients on retainer. And so fast forward to 2017. And I have this amazing team of people in Mexico, a place that I call, like, the hidden gem of talent for North America. And I was getting a little bit just wasn't as happy running the agency. And so I had this idea to help other agencies get access to this talent pool that I had discovered. And so we started running ads for Dude, and literally, like, just running Facebook ads to try and prove the concept that this is something that could work. And so when I would run the ads, I was all about just trying to stop the scroll and getting people to pay attention. So I had a few different variations of those ads. One of them was wearing, like, a Batman mask that I had had. And then the other one was wearing this wrestling mask that I had had, like, for almost ten years. It had been sitting in my closet just collecting dust because I picked it up on a trip that I did with some friends back in the late 2000s down in Mexico. And on the way back, we just all got wrestling masks. And of course, we were probably ten margaritas deep when we made that purchase. So the mask had been sitting there. I was like, you know what? I'm trying all this crazy stuff. I might as well put on the mask. So I put that on. At the time, the mask was actually black. So if you look at a lot of my early videos, it's a black mask with white outlines. And then when we decided that Dude was going to work after kind of proving the concept, and we went to the trafficking conversion conference, which I had gone to as an attendee many times, but never as an exhibitor, I knew that I had to do something unique to get people's attention. So me having no shame, I decided I was going to create this character called the Dude Beast, which was a Mexican wrestling character. And essentially, I pieced together my own wrestling costume so I had the wrestling boots. I had white spandex tights. I had a blue speedo, a blue Cape, a white shirt. And then I changed the mask to be blue. And that was essentially the character. And so I wore that at the trafficking conversion conference 2019. And that's the conference that really set us off on our trajectory. Nice. Yeah. We're planning on going there this year. I think it's highly recommended for September. I highly recommend it. Yeah, perfect. And so you mentioned that you started your first agency in 2012. Tell me a little bit about what this agency was and where you focused on a niche right from the get go. What were you doing? It looks like you really scaled it to 100 plus clients. Brute force or what? I was coming off of a failed business. So my dad died of cancer in 2007, and I decided that I wanted to start a business. So I started a soccer magazine because I've played soccer my entire life. I love the sport. And I decided, you know what? I'm going to start this magazine. And long story short, it failed miserably. I lost everything. I was so unbelievably broke. And then I had to go get a job, and I had a good amount of debt that I had to pay off as well. And so I ended up getting a job in sales, which I had done straight out of College as well. And being an entrepreneur, I had all these crazy ideas, and I didn't know the first thing about web design and development. Nothing. So a friend of mine, I saw that he had built his girlfriend at the time who was a trainer. He built her website on this thing called WordPress. So I called him up, and I was like, hey, Amir, what's this WordPress thing? And then I asked him, can you help me build this website? I got this idea, and he's like, no, man, you need to learn how to build it yourself. And I was just like, I remember being so frustrated. I was like, Why doesn't this guy want to help me? But in retrospect, it was like the greatest thing ever that he told me to do it myself. And over the course of a weekend by watching online videos. They weren't even YouTube. Like, YouTube. Youtube. Okay. Yeah. So YouTube was starting to grow, but it wasn't really what it is. So I found some random website that had all these random videos about how to build a WordPress website. And between those videos and calling HostGator support a million times, I was able to build my very first WordPress website over the course of a weekend. And then that turned into me building more websites and buying themes. And back then, a landing page theme would be like, $250. You can get it there everywhere. And you're building these for anyone you could just for myself. I have these crazy ideas. I was learning about direct response marketing and copywriting. And like Laser Kennedy Insider Circle, I was in that group. And then, of course, I wanted to learn how to drive traffic. I ended up hiring Russell Brunson had a company at the time that taught people how to do digital marketing. So I signed up for their premium coaching course that was costing me like $500 a month. And I did pick up a few freelance type of clients. But then I started working for Reach Local that did pay per click management. This is in late 2011. No, mid 2011. You have a parallel there with Josh Nelson. Yeah, I know. We both worked at Reach at the same time. And you're doing sales here, too, at Reach Local? Yes, absolutely. I was laying in PPC management services. Nice. And you guys know each other from back then? I was on the West Coast. He was on the East Coast. I forgot it was a huge company. They would have national sales calls at least once a month, and so everybody would come on. So my office was I think it was the West La office is what they call this. We were in Culver City and so he's been in Florida. So I feel like I recognized his name, but we were so far apart. But we probably both went to the same training center that they had in Dallas for our training. And obviously at that time when I started with that company, the founder, Nate, was still very much involved in the company. He was such a good guy. Talk about a dynamic leader. He was somebody actually, he doesn't know this, of course, but that I definitely respected as an owner. So anyway, I started at Reach Local and Reach Local. Didn't do websites. And so I had this idea like, what if we sold websites to these clients and I ended up partnering with a guy that had a small team in the Philippines. I met him through a B and I group and away we went. And our very first client was actually we did it for free. So I was still flat broke because I was paying off all this debt for my first business. I was very resourceful. I've always been able to be very resourceful. And depending on the type of person that you are, when you are up against the wall and you have no other options and you're basically starving, you figure out ways you learn to be resourceful. Yeah, you can be resourceful. Human beings in general are very resourceful if they choose to be. I was really good at finagling my way into certain things. So there was this Women in Business conference that I think they were selling the tickets for like$200 a piece, and I didn't have that. So the night before they were going to do the conference, I called up one of the owners or one of the organizers who I had met through all these networking events that I would go to. And I said, hey, Bibi, I don't know if you need anything, but I'm more than willing to come help. And she said, actually, we do need help. So they had all these speakers lined up and they needed somebody to walk around and hand the microphone to people that were asking questions in the audience and also keep time for the speakers. And I said, perfect, I'll do it. And then I said, you know what? I can also offer a free website or offer a website as part of the silent auction that they were hosting. So I got to meet all these women in business. And then I had my first project was actually a silent auction item to an attorney that attended the conference. This is for your first agency, Chris. And how did you have the insight? Or I guess it was your hustle mode where you're just starting to hit these networking events right from the get go. Or was that just the marketing that you could do at that time? That was also by chance. So I was working at Reach Local and Reach Local wanted you to cold call. I hate cold calling. I still hate cold calling. But Reach Local thing was like, grab a phone book and then just dial in, put your finger in the middle of the phone, work and start dialing because those people are advertising and yellow people have money. Yeah, I freaking hated that. So out of the blue, I was really frustrated one afternoon sitting in the office dialing for dollars, just not getting anywhere. And I Googled networking events in Redondo Beach. And it just so happened that that night there was a networking event that was near where I lived. So right now I was at a hotel right down the street from where I live. So I said, what the heck? I'm going to go. I've never really gone to that many networking events. I've gone to conventions, I've worked conventions, and I can make friends pretty easily. So I decided, what the heck, I'm going to go. So I walk in and I remember I'm looking for the place, and there were these two women that were there that I'm still friends with to this day. This is 2011, I believe. And they were lost just like I was. I said, hey, are you looking for this networking event? And they're like, yeah, let's go find it together. So we ended up talking, and I ended up meeting a lot of other people at that little event. I mean, it wasn't a big event. It was maybe 30 people and we're having drinks and just sharing stories and getting to know each other. And one of the guys invited me to a BNI networking group. And I never heard of that organization. You never heard of B? And I it's a global referral organization. It's really cool. And so the guy invited me, we need an Internet marketing person. I said, Perfect. I'll come. So I go to this event and it's a weekly meeting. So I show up for the first time and I'm just like blown away. I'm like, I'm in. So I ended up getting the spot in this B and I group. Then I learned a systematic approach to networking. And so from that I started going to all these other groups. And those types of groups are great for a certain stage of company and a certain type of business owner. So I started to go to all these groups. I went to every networking group in the freaking city. And so I was at all of them. I knew everybody. And my objective to begin with was to reach local pay per click management services. Okay. But at the time reach local, the minimum ad spend to have a semi decent campaign was $1,500 a month. Well, a lot of these folks that were going to these networking events, they didn't have $1,500 a month. So it was a giant waste of time. But the websites, they all needed websites. And so we decided that we were going to start selling websites and we were going to do a subscription based model website as a service, if you will. And we were going to be super cheap when we were super cheap. Like, way too cheap. We started out doing it for like $40 a month. Oh, yeah, nice. So cheap. I'm still very impressed by the insights that you have because doing these networking events early on and moving on to dude, we'll talk about that. But also being on the subscription level right from the get go, because it takes time for normal people like us to get to that level where we know that SaaS is the way to go. But you figured that part out early on. I sold my first website for God, maybe $200, but that was a one time fee and it's done. Right. It's $40 over a year. You already crossed me by in the first year. Right. And these people usually continue forever. I still have clients from that day. One that I closed from my first Fax campaign that I did in Calgary back in 2008. Yeah. So it was pretty easy to get clients to that level. And we were providing ongoing support and things like that. But the other thing that I had to my advantage well, one was that I could live unbelievably cheap. Right. I knew how to stretch a dollar when I was running my magazine, and I was literally like, on my last couple of $100, I would go to the 99 Cent store, which they have in California, where everything is$0.99 and they have produce and everything. The funny thing about the 99 cent store is you never knew what was going to be their day to day. So some days they'd have a special on asparagus and I'd get a ton of asparagus some days they'd have zucchini, so I would eat like a ton of zucchini. Sometimes they'd have potatoes, sometimes they'd have red potatoes. But I was able to survive off of$50 a week for food at least. And so I was very resourceful. I didn't need a lot of money to survive. So that was one thing I had to my advantage. The second is that I was working for each local. So for the first year of my agency, I was moonlighting working for somebody else. So that was essentially paying my way to start this business. I'm really enjoying this because a lot of the stuff I've been through as well in my journey, and I'm seeing a lot of parallel with the clients that we work with or the agency owners were my friends, especially with you having to work the sales jobs. I've done that. I know many of us have been on the sales side of things as well. And just being the way you've been resourceful, launching that after the magazine. Just keep going before I move on. The last thing I want to ask you on this, Chris, is starting a business. Was this, like from the get go? Like, as soon as you realize who you are, you're like, I'm going to be an entrepreneur. I'm going to run a big ass business or something like that. That's a tough question to answer because I didn't have a lot of role models growing up of people who were entrepreneurs. I didn't have an entrepreneurial family. Everybody's got that uncle, right? So I literally had an uncle uncle uncle who had started a business. He invented a technology in the 60s and sold it for millions and basically lived off that for the rest of his life. But I didn't have direct access on a day to day basis to somebody who was a true entrepreneur. So in my mind, I knew that I wanted to be my own boss, but I didn't really know what that meant or what it entailed. But I liked the idea of being able to control my own destiny. I knew that I wanted to have a business, but I didn't necessarily know what it truly meant to be an entrepreneur. I had little things on the side. I was always interested in business, but I don't really feel like I stepped into my true entrepreneurial mindset until probably the mid 2010. This is right after that magazine. And now you're at Reach Local, I think, and you're starting to go towards this first agency that you're going to be launching. And what did you call this agency in 2005? Days website. Nice. So that URL alone gets a lot of attention. Awesome. So now you go from you start this business and you're getting all these subscriptions, and I'm assuming that you increase the price somewhere between 2012 and 2015, and you scaled it to how many customers at this point, 220. Nice. A little over $220. Well, that happened right around 20 16. 20 17 is when we got to that level. Okay. Now at this point, when did you get the realization that you want to take over? Because initially, I think I'm assuming that you were having the work done in Philippines and just contracted out, started with the Philippines and then ended up moving the team to Mexico because of the time difference. So for us and for most agencies, game time is essentially between eight and five North America time zone. That's when our clients are open to communicating with us. That's when we need to get stuff done. And when we started, the Philippines was fine because we didn't have that many customers. But once you get to about 50, 60 customers and you have clients saying, like, hey, this broke. I need it fixed immediately. You can't tell that you cannot tell them, my team is asleep. Can you wait 8 hours? It just doesn't work. So that's when I had to find other options. And by this time, I'm living in San Diego. So I opened up the team in Mexico, and that's truly what helped us to get to that $220. Nice. So now going on to dude. So now how did you get the realization that you want to now niche down and work with it had always been my dream. And this is the funny thing is you start to grow a business, and there's people that are having way more customers than me, and I'm sure they've experienced the same thing where you set the goal for this much, and then you get it and you're like, it doesn't feel that much different. And then you set the goal again and you're like, doesn't feel that much different. So I'd always wanted to break first it was get to 50, then it was get to 100, then 150, then the 200. And so we got into 220. And as the same as what happened all the other times, it wasn't as amazing as I thought it would be. And for the kind of money that I wanted to make and what we were charging, I recognized that I would have to put in so much more time and effort before I was personally able to kind of make the money that I wanted to make where the company would be multiple seven figures. Yeah. So then I was literally just thinking about what I wanted to do. Maybe I'll sell this thing and go start something else. I have these great team members that I really cared about. So I was kind of having that come to Jesus moments that I think a lot of entrepreneurs have about. Is this worth it? And so I was listening to a podcast of Russ Perry, who started Design Pickle. That is another massive design agency that does unlimited design and development. I'm sorry, unlimited design. And I had a light bulb moment where I was like, man, I wonder if I could do that using my team in Mexico and providing development support. And it wasn't even for agencies, just agencies at the time. So that's where I came up with the idea. And the name Dude kind of came to me. That's a whole other story. And so then we started running the ads. And by this time, I'd failed so many times that I recognized like, hey, we have to have some proof of concept. It might be great to Chris, but Chris's opinion doesn't really matter. We got to see how the market is going to respond. And so that's when we started running the ads. And I believe that our ads at the time were 497 unlimited design and development for anybody. So it's an insanely good offer, right? And we got a bunch of leads. We started getting customers. And so then that's what kind of gave us the belief that this could be possible, that this could turn into something. And we got that business up to over ten K a month very quickly, like probably within three months. So were you getting clients who are agency owner primarily, right from the get go at first. So I had a built up of a decent network of people that I knew. So we did pick up some people that were non agency clients. But the agency clients were much easier to work with for us, partly because they knew the basics of how to communicate with. Like, when you run an agency and you're working with a small business owner or a gym, this is an actual story that happened when I had my agency. The gym owner said, I need you guys to build me a landing page that will convert everybody. I don't have a product or an offer. It's like, Dude, is that really how you think it works? Like, we look at that, we're like, how unbelievably stupid you can be. One thing, right. He got one thing right, the landing page. He knew he needed a landing page. He was probably on some webinar, and somebody said, and then he Googled, what's a landing page? Oh, yeah, I need that. We just didn't want to have to educate our customers on the foundational basics of marketing. And the agencies, for the most part, they kind of knew what they want. They all struggle with operations in general, but at least they could communicate on a level where it would move a little bit more efficiently. These projects could get done a little bit more effectively. And so we saw that the agencies were the bigger need. And then within a month, I was like, you know what? Screw all these other people. We're just going to work with the agencies. Nice. That's when it really started to kind of pick up. Nice. So do you mind sharing what's the client Rostom like now? How big have you taken? Dude, is this your primary focus these days? I ended up selling my agency in 2020 right before the pandemic. Okay. I completely removed myself from the agency in 2018 when Dude took off. And I was just like, this is the future. Got you to that point. We're charging way more. The clients are easier. And this is the crazy thing about working with the small businesses that we have is that 90% of the clients were amazing. Like, didn't cause us any problems. 10% of them. I wanted to rip their heads off, and those 10% just also my personality. I just couldn't stand being around them anymore. And I should have canceled them, obviously. But at the time, I'll let somebody else deal with it. Got you. So with Dude now, I think we've got over 80 clients. We'll do over 3 million this year is what we're forecasting. And you guys are selling to digital marketing agency owners, right? So that's a feat in itself because these guys are pros. And we were kind of having experience a similar thing on our side because that's our focus as well. But it's a market that if you're going to put out an ad to them, then they're going to really look into that ad. Yeah, it's really challenging. Covet was a big reset for the agency industry because up to COVID, you had so many of these gurus that were telling everybody, like, watch my course, and in a month you'll be a millionaire. That's nonsense. Complete bullshit. And it saturated our industry with people that didn't know what the hell they were doing and ripped off a lot of honest, hardworking business owners. And so as a community, as an agency on the community, we have a lot of damage repair that we need to do because most business owners think that marketing people, digital marketing people are scumbags. I hate to break it to you. So our evolution in our own agency is that we've become way more specific about who we work with. We have a very thorough screening process about the types of agencies that we work with. We only want to work with the best of the best. We only want to work with people who've got a good, solid foundation. We only want to work with agencies that know how to sell. They have to be at a certain revenue range. They have to have a certain number of clients, have a certain type of deliverables, and then also just be nice people. Not a lot of agency owners are dickheads, but there is a decent amount those folks we don't talk to. Chris, sorry to cut you off there. Let me ask why we're talking about this. Let's talk about how you're doing your own marketing right now. Because we just talked about that you're pitching or trying to get these ads in front of or sell to digital marketing agency owners. And these guys already know how these things work. They're looking at your ads with a grain of salt. So how do you conduct your marketing and then we will move on to your sales side? Great question. So agency owners in general are very hard to market to because we've seen everything. Nothing surprises us. So we've gotten clients in a bunch of different ways. We have our own podcast, which I highly recommend that you do. We chop up our podcast, have little snippets. We use that as top of the funnel ads, and then we'll retarget to those people. Targeting is not as effective as it was a few years ago. So that's also going to change. Referrals. We still very much rely on referrals from our happy clients. Events. So now that live events are coming back, we are definitely going to do more of those. We went to a live event last week. We picked up 24 qualified appointments in two days. Nice. Yeah. And these events, like the one you were talking about, traffic and conversion conference. Would you be taking a booth over here or you just I will not be doing traffic and conversion. Probably not for a while, just because our client is not necessarily the ideal person that's going to go to traffic and conversion. Now, I only know that because I've been at traffic and conversion a bunch the last time we did the event. It was horrible. Like 2018 was great. 2019 not great. I spoke last year at it and we were prospecting. But again, it's the same thing. It's not the right audience for us, but other conventions where there's going to be agencies that are doing a million dollars plus revenue. We love those folks. Those are the folks that we can help the most. One of the other ways that we get a decent amount of traffic to our website. I've been interviewed on podcasts, some of the biggest podcasts that are out there. We've gotten some press as well. We won some awards last year for Minority owned Business of the year. Yeah, I saw that a couple of years ago. Those help. It's a bunch of different things for us. It's usually not going to be one big thing. All of this activity is culminating into both strategy calls or discovery calls for yourself. Exactly. Yes, exactly. And we're not looking for a ton of clients every month. We're not what you would call probably like a volume. We don't have a volume based model. We're looking for very strategic partners that we can grow and have them paying us a quarter million Bucks a year. Nice. Very nice. That's amazing. So you got this marketing set up and now these people are coming in through everything that you're doing. You just talked about preposition to buy. They book a discovery call and now the sales process takes over. So tell me a little bit about that. Like who's doing that? You have sales people in place and what's going on. So basically we implemented a qualification call prior to the closing call. And the reason why we did that is because, one, we don't want to waste time with people that aren't our ideal clients, but it also standardize the way that we're evaluating people. So there's literally a type form that we have, and the person conducting the qualification call will just ask them a few questions. If the call takes like 15 to 20 minutes, and then that'll give us a sense of the profile of that agency owner. And if it's somebody that we can help, if it's not, we just say, hey, not a good fit. Good luck to you. Now, when I started doing that process, we actually had an in house sales guy. So if you qualify, then you take them to the next step and you book another appointment for them. Book another call. Yeah, it's only about 30 minutes, and then we can close got you. So originally when we started doing that kind of two step closer, and this is new for me because I've always been a one call, close kind of guy. That's exactly what we're going through right now, Chris, on our side, we have a very good and it's been producing for a year and a half, really great results, and it's been a one step process. But now we're really contemplating to move to this two step and just control a little bit more of the quality of client we bring in. There's no right or wrong way to do it. You have to really look at the type of client that you're going after in the price point and your long term goal for that client. So low price point. If it's a low barrier to entry, like, there's not a lot of thought process, close them right there. There's no reason to stretch it out. But if it's a complex process and it only works for a certain type of people, I think you should stretch out the sales process. Yeah. Kind of like have them want to cross that velvet rope to get inside. That's a great insight there, Chris. And for everyone who's listening, I think, and most of agency owners that I know are selling packages which are 2000, $3,000 a month and take some time. So, you know, why not break that, slow that process down, take control and close the right people. Right. So avoid the pain. So here's great insight. Yeah. I have a massive tip on the qualification process. So we used to have our old sales guy or former sales guy doing the qualification calls. Well, because he's commissioned, a lot of the people were getting qualified that were not qualified. So we switched that. We actually have our customer experience team doing the qualification calls. Now, how are they incentivized? They get bonused out on retention, so they are way more incentivized to find great clients. That's sweet. They're not getting commissioned at all on the initial sale. They get a Commission every time that person stays. Yeah. So that completely changed the game. So now when we have somebody that comes onto that closing call, they're fired up. They also appreciate that they didn't have to go through a sales guy to get to me. And then after that, once we close the deal, we know that it's going to be a fantastic client. Nice. That's excellent. Now, you already touched on my last part of this journey from marketing, sales, and then retention. What did you call them? Your client retention team. Yeah, customer experience team, customer experience. So we call them clients success managers. And these are the people who are the front line, and they're responsible for retaining all of your 80 clients every single month. So tell me a little bit about how this process is working and how many people you got there right now. So we've got three people on that team in general. Most of those, like any of your customer experience or customer success, they can handle anywhere from 20 to 30 accounts. That's a general like, you have to look at what you're selling. Yeah, but there's another level. So basically, there's the operations team that's doing all the fulfillment. All of our clients have a direct contact on the operations team. Okay. We have an operations manager. So kind of think of it like it's a dance or I don't know if you play team sports or soccer, like in soccer, the whole unit has to move together. So if one person drops back, another person moves forward. It's the same with the communication between operations, customer experience, finance, sales, and then, of course, me. So everybody, we have a weekly communication call where we're talking about what's in the pipeline. Who are we going to bring on? Do we have enough team members to staff those people? Do we need to turn on our hiring funnel right now to get everything backfilled? And the customer experience is like they have a list of what they call red zone clients. Those are clients that we have not had a very good experience with or they're in danger of canceling for whatever reason. And so we have to turn certain knobs and flick certain levers to make sure that those people are that we fix those issues that we've had. So it's a constant dance to try and get everything working. Customer retention objective. Well, everybody's objective, for the most part, comes down to a three part philosophy that we created called bridge, connect and deliver. And if you're having clients canceling, it's usually because you are not doing bridge connect in the liver. So bridge essentially means having open lines of communication. This is the catch 22 of being so good at automation is that we try and automate the trust building and the relationship too much. Human beings are hardwired to talk to each other. You can't type your way into a truly fulfilling relationship with the client. Right. You have to have face to face communication. Now, what usually happens is that in the sales process, we talk a lot, right? Then we hand off to operations and it's silent. They don't know who to talk to. They don't know who how to communicate. So we have an entire 60 day onboarding where we are talking to them constantly, like daily. Right. And it's all mapped out. We have a giant spreadsheet of the customer journey. How can one get our hands on some philosophy like this? Chris, there's a fantastic book called Never Lose a Customer Again. Can't remember the name of the author. We base a lot of what we do on that book, and essentially they give you a great framework to start with. And we just took their framework, and then we built on our uniqueness on top of that. Got it. So that's step one is bridge. You have to have open lines of communication. And in the first 60 to 90 days, you have to be talking constantly. Live calls at least once a week. Updates. Show them the quick wins, show them that things are moving the right way. Why is that so important? Because your customers have buyers remorse every single time. At some point, they're always going to second guess their decision to work with you, partly because they have somebody else in their ear calling them, hitting up on LinkedIn, saying, I can do it better, I can do it faster, I can do it cheaper. Yeah. You have to build that relationship by having those open lines of communication. The second step is connect. And that's essentially where we're establishing trust. We need the customer to feel like we care about them and we have their back and we're never going to let them down. So once you have those open lines of communication, now you can start focusing on building that trust, that connect part of it. And the third part, which is the easiest conceptually deliver. It's so hard for people to do this. You have to say what you're going to do. For example, you have to hit deadlines. If you promise something by a certain date, you have to do it. Your team has to be living up to the things that they say that you're going to do. And also you have to do what you promised in the sales process. So you can do two out of the three really well. But if you don't do all three, you will lose clients. Lead generation agencies have problems with this all the time. They deliver, they deliver great results. They're getting leads all the time, but maybe they're not bridging and they're not connecting well. Eventually somebody is going to come by and they're going to say, hey, how much are you paying per lead?$50 to lead. I can do it for 30. And then because that customer doesn't feel like you care about them and they don't even know how to communicate to you guys. They're like, what's the worst that can happen? I can always go back to Chris. He seems like he's too busy for me anyways. And then they cancel and they never come back, and then vice versa. You can have the greatest communication you can have. That client can feel like they know you. Maybe they invite you to their wedding or their kids'birthday party, but if you are delivering the results, they're going to cancel. It's a financial decision. At that point, they're just going to cancel. So you really do need to focus on bridge, connect and deliver. And if you have a good process for documenting like a ticketing system, documenting that communication flow between you and the customers, you can literally pinpoint where the relationship went bad and then reverse engineer how to ensure that that never happens again. What a great insight, man. On the retention side, especially, I know a lot of agency owners and we are really great at delivering, but a lot of times what's missing is the bridge and connect part. So thanks for giving us that amazing negative wisdom, Chris, with all of these things that you got going on, what I'm curious to know what's the retention ratio that you guys are boosting right now? Yeah. So it's around 4%. We turn about 4% of our clients. Okay, 96% for our industry. That's unbelievably good. We're kind of like in that white label outsourcing space, even though we do a lot more and our tagline has completely removed that verbiage. But we were at 16%, and then when I brought in the customer experience team and we started to figure out the bridge, connect and deliver and where things were falling off the rails, we were able to get it down from 16 down to ten within about a month, and ten down to eight. Eight down to five. And now we're right around four. That's excellent, man. Amazing. And so I'm guessing that you are the person. I think we're over time here, Chris, as well. My last two questions were wrapped this up over here, but it's just too good stuff, man, that you're just that. But when you go into the retention side of things, how do you come up with these strategies? How did you know to read that book first, or were you actively seeking a solution for your retention issue? Yeah. That book specifically, Never lose a customer again. I think I got it from Russ. Maybe somebody else I can't remember. Just continually learn like this is one of the keys to being successful in life and in business is that you have to be so in love with learning. There's so much information out there, and if you don't have that desire to continue to grow and learn yourself, then you're never going to be able to find the answers. Now, the second part of that is you don't have to come up with all the answers so I'm fortunate that I have an amazing team and they're really good at things that I suck at. I am personally not good at customer experience. It's just not one of my talents. It's not one of my skill sets. And this is something that you eventually you discover about yourself. And then when you start to have a little bit more financial success in the business, that gives you more options to bring in people that will cover your weak spots. Yeah. So Erin came in and that's her area of genius. She's absolutely amazing at that. And I'm humble enough to know and be comfortable saying, like, hey, Aaron, I don't know the answer. What do you think? I know this is where we need to go. Can you come up with the answers? And you as a leader, don't feel bad asking people to come up with the solutions for you. That's one of the reasons why you hire them. You hire them because they can solve problems that you can't solve, and you hire them because it enables you to buy back your time. My time is not best spent trying to figure out customer experience stuff, or core calling, for that matter. Yeah, exactly. Some of these things, like you probably have at Reach Local. You've done it because the moment required. You wanted to learn it. But when the time comes, you don't have to do it anymore. Right. So you get to step back from that thing. So what's the size of the team right now, Chris? We've got a little under 100 folks. Oh, nice, man. Yeah, we've kind of been in that 95 to 100 range for a little bit. Are you traveling back and forth? Quite a bit. So I've been living in Mexico for about four years. I live in TJ. I've been here. So I go back, I go to San Diego a few times a week right across I've heard it's beautiful place. So hopefully soon I'll come down and visit you. Yeah. So 100 people. That's amazing, Chris. You're doing an amazing job, man. It's been an awesome talking to you. What's the why behind all of this thing? Like, what gets you going? What's the reason that you started out with that magazine and that other agency with the five day websites? So my personal mission is to be a billionaire and donate it all to charity. So I don't think I'll have kids, but if I do ever have kids, they're not getting shit. I'm doing every Penny back to charity to try and do something better for the world. In terms of our company, we have three missions. One is to help our agencies double their size every single year by providing them team members. The second mission is to create job opportunities. We love creating job opportunities. All of our team members understand that when they do an amazing job for their clients and the agency's clients see success, then they're going to come back to us and say, hey, we're growing so fast. We need more people then that gives us the opportunity to give job opportunities to people that have just been not even considered in the past. And the third one is to show the world that dude has the best agency talent in the world. Now, we staff most of our folks in Mexico and South America but we do have some folks in Asia as well. So we want to build this reputation that anybody who works for dude is an absolute rock star. And let's be honest, these people are not going to work for us forever. We want to build this reputation so that people can say, I worked at dude in places like Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Facebook. These companies will say you are a rock star. It's essentially like saying that you went to Harvard or Stanford or these big, impressive universities. We want to build that reputation that will live beyond dude, that will live beyond me and that will also help people create social mobility for themselves. What does that drive us? What I've been hearing? I think you're already doing most of those things. Congratulations, Chris, on building such an amazing company and having such an amazing way behind this momentum that you got. And it's been a pleasure having you on our show today. Thank you very much. Always fun to share their story. This has been the virtual assistant the agency growth machine podcast by Azar Sadiki, Co founder at Rep Stack If you liked today's episode, you can find more news.