Jeremy Weisz 17:15
Yeah, that’s a lot. I forgot how much I made like nothing. So that’s a lot for that age. Yeah. So then what happened? At what point did you decide not to be a pastor?
Ashton Shanks 17:31
This would have been 20, maybe 2017, or 2016? What was the reason? So essentially, it just no opportunities were coming there. And business opportunities kept coming. When I first turned 18, I moved to New Orleans, and helped plant a church in New Orleans, as in acted as their creative director. And then I moved to Seattle, and I helped a part of another church plant there. And then I was going to go to school, for going into ministry and theology. And a little bit before classes started, there were some family issues that happened that caused me to really need to be able to provide more money. And so I had to drop out. And that’s when I went into I was working at Verizon sales at the time for just work. But then started to see this whole online world and started actually see a buddy of mine started to do really well. And I knew him in high school. I was like, Man, he’s doing stuff that I used to do at these other companies I worked at, he’s making how much money, I can do that. And so thus began the journey.
Jeremy Weisz 18:37
So I want to get into the mindset of an unpaid intern, okay, because you want to make money, but like, what was your mindset, like, at the time, too, because you know, at that point, you have the skills, you’ve already proven it at this e-commerce company. But something drew you to taking this unpaid internship.
Ashton Shanks 19:01
Yeah, it’s interesting, right? Because on paper, I do have all of these experiences. But I’ve always been a person that I do not believe I am where I should be, I feel like I should be much further in my wisdom, understanding skill set. And so even in that point, while I did believe I could do just about anything I put my mind to, there was still this idea that I have so much to learn. And if all at that time, all I knew was Facebook ads in digital marketing, and in my head, it was a, but you need so much more to be a good business owner. And so if I just stopped this learning opportunity to get myself around people that clearly know what they’re doing, then I’m just going to be this Facebook ads guy forever. And then what happens if something happens to Facebook or if this is all I got, then I’m really not in a good spot.
Jeremy Weisz 19:50
Yeah, that makes sense. No, I appreciate that. I love that, mistakes on hiring. Right. So this is, I don’t know hashtag agency life, you were talking before you hit record, and there’s a lot of HR and hiring involved, right? As you grow, you keep hiring. So talk about some of the mistakes in hiring, you mentioned one before, which is just expecting you can just pay for tail lot, which is not a bad thing. I mean, there’s truth to that, though, you know, what are some of the mistakes you’ve made along the way?
Ashton Shanks 20:25
I think, especially on what I’ve realized, right, like, when it comes to hiring and paying for talent, to a certain extent you can, but what really, what you get to do when you pay for something is you pay for expectations, right. And so you don’t really necessarily get paid for talent, you get paid for the ability to expect a certain amount. But for us, I think, our mistakes, obviously, the first one is not doing a clean enough vetting process for people. Especially when you get into the marketing game, or any high-performance, fast-growth game, like people who work with startup-level companies who are not looking for just corporate, they are typically smarter, I hate to say it, but they are typically more ingenuitive. They’re more innovative. And so you can get a lot more fancy talk, when you get into that realm. And so doing more vetting and not afraid to vet people or to ask harder questions. I think sometimes as founders, we can almost treat interviews, like a sales call, where we’re trying to sell our company and our opportunity, especially when we’re talking to someone we think could do really well, we start selling and when we do that we make mistakes, we don’t dig deep enough or ask the right questions. So I think that’s probably one big mistake, I think another one is, when you’re young, a lot of times you kind of higher on potential, because you can’t afford the people that have the experience. But as you get bigger, I wish I would have started changing that decision-making process a lot sooner to where it’s like, you need to start hiring on experience, you need people who are further than you. Because for any startup, and even in our own company, what you find quickly is that as the founder, you’re the biggest bottleneck of the company. And you’ll always be the biggest bottleneck until you start hiring people that have been further than you and know more than you in certain areas. And so lowering that ego, but also realizing that at some point you have to do it or else you will bottleneck your company.
Jeremy Weisz 22:17
I love that. That’s fantastic. I love what you said there about hiring experience necessarily on potential. Yeah, and you flip that switch. What are some of the hard questions that you like to ask or you’ve heard other people ask that would be good in the interview?
Ashton Shanks 22:33
Yeah, so walk me through the last three projects that you worked on? What were they? What were the goals? How did you do? And getting those specific and then more importantly, here is calling the references they gave you in checking on that. Because they can tell you all the things in the world and almost all of them will tell you it blew it out of the water, we got a 20x row as in, and it did incredible. But actually being able to vet that is a really big one. I also really love to know, what are they studying right now? What books are they reading right now. And if they’re in the advertising space, most likely I know that book and I’ve read that book or know the author, and so then starting to be able to dive deeper and if see if they’re actually telling you the truth. But those are really, really big ones. I think also asking like, okay, one thing if I didn’t pay you any money, how would you be paid at this company? Like if you weren’t getting compensated monetarily?
Jeremy Weisz 23:25
I would say protein bars, personally.
Ashton Shanks 23:31
Yeah, figuring out what drives them up. But then also, even the reverse side of it going what about our company or our culture would make this a deal killer for you. Putting that flip side on it before they know much about how you guys operate, and then seeing what they say to see if it could be a potential issue in the future.
Jeremy Weisz 23:52
Are there any resources that you recommend that you studied or looked at when it came to hiring?
Ashton Shanks 23:57
So there’s a fantastic book The Great CEO Within I forget the author’s name, but The Great CEO Within has a fantastic almost step by step, the entire interview process the vetting processes, and it covers more than just hiring but that’s a big section inside of the book. That’s a fantastic one that I would encourage everyone to read.
Jeremy Weisz 24:18
I have to look it up really quickly. Is it the one that is the great seat, Matt Mockery? I’m not sure that’s how you pronounce it. The Great CEO Within, that the tactical guide to company building. Okay, cool. Yeah, that’s interesting. There’s another one that like Topgrading. And they have a great podcast TalentWins. Chris Mursau is the CEO. And I think the person who wrote Topgrading I think his son wrote another book and I’m blanking on the name of it, but some people have mentioned that on the podcast as well. So check those out. Talk about Shop Nova for a second. And what you did with them?
Ashton Shanks 24:18
Yeah. So on our staffing side, it’s always really cool to kind of see not only when a company comes to us and sees that, obviously we’re providing a service that fills their gap, they came to us for staffing, they had had some really, times that were their business wasn’t looking great. And they knew they needed some more marketer to come into the company as a marketing director essentially to be able to turn things around. And so they had come to us on the staffing side, we essentially equipped and staffed them with the marketing director who over the next 60 days essentially, completely turned around the business. And they actually came back then to hire three more media buyers, because they were rolling so much, because they needed to grow out the team underneath that director that they had. So that was just a really cool one that we had had on the staffing side of our company.
Jeremy Weisz 25:55
I love it. I want to talk about the paid ads paid media. Talk about YouTube ads.
Ashton Shanks 26:03
Yeah. So I mean, YouTube right now, I love where YouTube is headed. But I also think for many businesses, it’s one of the harder nuts to crack inside of their business for getting their YouTube ads fixed. But I also believe that the ones who can figure out how to get it to crack, it’s the strongest platform to be on. Our company. And I think most businesses, even across the board right now, still, the majority of their spend is on Facebook, there are some that are spending majority on Google. But by and large, most people are still spending all their money on Facebook, even if they like TikTok or YouTube, they’re still spending most of it there. But YouTube it as a platform itself, not even just from an ADS perspective, but even organic side, their data is just so rich, and their algorithm is just so strong that I really do believe that businesses need to be doing it as much as possible, especially when, every single year the amount of people that focus more on platform-based content, rather than television, cable, all that stuff. It’s all platform-based now, and the more you can be where the people are is always how you do better. And so yes, it’s one of my favorite platforms to see.
Jeremy Weisz 27:12
You say tough to crack. And so, are there any things that stick out on what people should watch out for when doing YouTube ads?
Ashton Shanks 27:23
Yeah, so one is, I would say, if you’re gonna go into the YouTube ads, you need to be willing to invest. And what I mean by invest is, don’t go into it thinking you’re going to spend $50 $100, even a $500 and you’re going to start making some money. Google is extremely good at optimizing, and they have incredible data signals that they get. But this is a platform that needs the data. Really, I’ve seen that it takes people about anywhere from 500 to 1000 conversions, to be able to start really seeing good optimization that steady and scalable. And so when you think about that, then you go into it going, okay, well, if I’m expecting to do $10, a lead or $20, a lead great times that by 500, and that is your baseline investment, just to see if the platform will give it a shot.
Jeremy Weisz 28:11
And that’s why you find that people are gravitating towards Facebook, because it’s just quicker and easier.
Ashton Shanks 28:17
Yeah, it’s so easy. It’s most of the time, very quick feedback loops. Since iOS 14, and data attribution loss, it’s taken longer, if people are being wiser about it, you need to give it a little bit more time and actually optimize. But even then, you’re looking at three days, four days, and you’re gonna know whether or not that thing is going to work.
Jeremy Weisz 28:38
We think of agencies and we mentioned, you know, that your fast trajectory. But you had a lot of experience beforehand. And you also had a community where you were helping people talk about what you did with one of your first clients. They were manufacturing.
Ashton Shanks 28:52
Yeah, yeah. So they came into me, they actually had seen, the owner had seen my transition post, essentially, that I was leaving Traffic and Funnels, and they had reached out. And they owned a decor manufacturing company. And they were doing really, really well. They had grown really well. They had 100,000 square foot warehouse, dozens of employees, and they’re doing incredible things. And so anyway, when I came in, if anyone was an e-commerce back in 2020, you already know it was an incredible time, it was the gold rush. Everyone was making money in e-commerce in 2020. And this company was no different when I came in, we had unlocked, essentially, this free plus shipping style funnel, going after we wanted to pivot targeting medical people, teachers, everyone, essentially, that was affected by COVID. And so we started creating promotions directing it towards those people, because our question was, who right now still have jobs? Well, it’s first responders, it’s medical staff. These people have jobs. And so let’s create promotions for these companies and those types of demographics. And so we did that and exploded. I mean, we were spending anywhere from 40 to $60,000 a day in advertising. And we were doing really CPAs cost to acquire customers. At 100,000 customers a month, we were acquiring about $3.54. Just unreal in what they had to do. Ultimately, the company had to hire 40 people they bought at another warehouse, and they started 24/7 shifts at the warehouse just to keep up with the demand. And I believe even from that, even the city started to show appreciation because they were picking up and hiring people that were getting laid off because of COVID. So it was really cool experience to see.
Jeremy Weisz 30:35
You talk about Ashton, the importance of your customer, client avatar, right? And you just said, Thank you started with that with this conversation, which is you were looking at one who still has jobs, right, so they can pay like teachers for service monitors. Talk about how you break down how you think about the avatar, because you need to know this to target people with what you do for a living.
Ashton Shanks 31:04
Yeah. And it really kind of comes down to what you’re selling. As far as how deep do you need to go, right, because when it comes to commodities, there’s not a huge need to know your market as DEP kind of need to know where they are, what’s their general income range, and what maybe political opinions do they have, so that you make sure you don’t miss people off, right? We saw that with Bud Light, right. And so first, that’s kind of that thing. But the ticket price gets to be more expensive, and really what you’re selling becomes less about the utility of what you’re selling and more about the identity so one must have in order to buy it, aka, a Ferrari, right, you don’t buy a Ferrari because you want to go A to B or you want to save family vehicle, you buy it because of what it says about you as a person, right? The more you get into that range, that’s when you have to start getting really, really deep, you want to know what keeps them up at night, you want to know what makes them embarrassed. You want to know the seductive sexual feelings that they have in their brain that they’re not even willing to voice, right? You want to be great at direct response. That’s how deep you got to go. And that’s why I love what I do every day because psychology is my favorite subject. Philosophy is my favorite subject. And so I get to do what I love to do every day.
Jeremy Weisz 32:11
I’m not sure if you remember, if you can’t know where it recall, but Paris talks in depth about some of this stuff. And I can’t remember all of it, I’d have to look at my notes from when I’ve heard them talk. But is there anything else on a deeper level that when you think of kind of those, you know, embarrassing things or anything you want from Paris, or one of the other direct response marketers as far as getting into the mind of your customer client?
Ashton Shanks 32:41
Well, actually, it’s so funny. He said this, because literally yesterday I posted this quote is from Dan Kennedy, which I can’t believe I didn’t even mention him earlier. But he says…
Jeremy Weisz 32:50
He’s the godfather of everyone, I get 100%. Yeah.
Ashton Shanks 32:53
He says to determine the psychographics of your target market, ask yourself, what keeps them awake at night, staring at the ceiling unable to fall asleep as it relates to your product or service? What are they frustrated about? What’s causing them pain right now, as it relates to your product or service? What is their single biggest problem that you can solve for them? What do they secretly privately desire most? And that’s what he says, to really give you a good starting point of going who is my Market? And how do I talk to them? I always say that, realistically, marketing is the game of you pretend that you’re on one side and your market is over here. And all you’re doing is sending little messages to them little love notes saying is this how you feel? And it’s the company or the market that can that can best answer that question of Is this how you feel? That’s the company that actually wins?
Jeremy Weisz 33:41
Yeah. We talked about the staffing side, we talked a little about the advertising side. I want to talk a little about the training side. There was a professor you worked with?
Ashton Shanks 33:55
Yeah. So we’re really fortunate since we started HemonX, which was maybe about two years ago. We’ve served right around 400 some clients that have come into our programs we’ve got put them through our 10-week process, essentially of training them from CRO to copywriting, to media buying on all these platforms, to creative to psychology, all of that stuff. And so, anyways, we’ve had a professor at USC that he came into our program had gone through, it’s so cool actually thinking about him, but he’s 68 years old. One of those guys that just learns everything is multiple businesses on top of being a professor and just a learner, a student, and even from our program, really, they’re starting to change how they’re teaching advertising and marketing in their programs at colleges, which is really, really cool to see but, the program has gone for all over the board from people who their business had completely crashed after COVID had come in and they were going 120k a month in revenue, but it crashed to 17k a month came through our program and is now doing nearly 200k a month in revenue just because our program, what I think it does holistically is it gets marketing to click in people’s heads, they can finally see the actual puzzle pieces and know how the whole machine works. Because once you understand that marketing becomes pretty fun and easy.
Jeremy Weisz 35:14
And so Ashton, can people find that training? Is that where they would go to thehemongroup.com and then the training tab? Is that correct? Exactly. Okay. Yeah. So if you want to learn more, you can go to thehemongroup.com/training. I did show it earlier on. I’ll pull it up here in a second, just so you can see it. I want to also just talk about how sometimes your training is too good. You’ve lost people, you’ve lost staff members. That’s painful. You said it with a smile when we were talking. I was like crying on the inside for you. But talk about that for a second.
Ashton Shanks 35:58
Yeah, I mean, sometimes, when we had a staff, we’ve had staff members. And I think one of the coolest things as being an owner or a business owner is that sometimes we can fall into that trap that we think our team is ours, right? Or like, we just don’t want change. And we try to hold on to everything that we have. Because as a business owner, a lot of times, we’re just trying to hold the business together, right. And so you can have team grow and learn and develop. And even recently, we had our director of plant operations who had really been with us since nearly the beginning of our company. And he had worked at another smaller-sized agency before us, but we started coming in brilliant dude. But he started coming in to train with us. And he’s really, it turned into an incredible not only marketer, but a leader. He’s turned into incredible leader, but he actually just got hired to be the Director of Digital for Hilton Hotels. And it’s so sad when you see a vital element in your organization lead, but it’s also really cool when you get to see that that person is moving on to a bigger and better project, that their life is now progressing that their life is better from your company. And so I think it’s something we’re really proud of.
Jeremy Weisz 37:06
His proud too, especially if they bring The Hemon Group in to run those ads. So if you’re listening, bring them over. That’s right. Once you get your feet wet a little bit, you don’t want to make too much change early on. With the staffing side Ashton, we are talking also about employee expectations. And you’ve probably seen a lot in this realm. Just speak to that employee expectation.
Ashton Shanks 37:38
Yeah, I think in the time that we are now you have a very interesting influx, but the staffing expectation, or the people expectation is people are wanting to get paid more and more and more for the work that they do. I don’t know why. But that’s just kind of what we’re seeing is that people’s expectations of not only I want to get paid this amount, but now I also want to be hybrid, I want to work from home, three days a week now or in now I also want benefits and the expectation on the employee side, we see pretty consistently rising not even just in our industry, but in all industries across the board. That’s what we’re seeing.
Jeremy Weisz 38:12
Really interesting. And what about, as a CEO, you’re constantly having to learn and practice leadership, development and develop other leaders in the organization. What are you doing for yourself and for the people in your company in that regards?
Ashton Shanks 38:30
Yeah, so really, it’s on two sides. So on my side, the discipline of it is extremely important. So right now I read a minimum of 45 minutes a day I journal, realistically, probably about three days a week, I’d say normally I’d like to say I get to journal every day. But really, it’s about three days a week. And what I really do is what a practice I learned from the book, The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham, but called Time Think, essentially. But essentially having that undistracted time to really work through your biggest problems or the things that you’re really thinking about or meditating on. But personal development has been a huge aspect of our company at Hemon, it’s a big culture value that we have here that we’re all forever students. And so, one with me, it’s communication with my board of directors. So we meet once a week, but what we emphasize on is like, you know, even this productivity stuff I showed you, a part of the onboarding that we give everyone at our company is training them on that exact system, and they’re expected to do it. We have end-of-day reports every day that ranks them on their clarity, their energy, their biology, did they work out? Did they read did they journal today that gets collected every day, and we keep track and data of it. And then in the mornings, everyone at our company is tracks what we call scorecard which is very first thing in the mornings. It asks them five different questions ranking themselves up one to five in the different areas of how they’re feeling and that’s our way as a company actually to monitor over the longer time horizon, how are teams reacting, so we can start actually knowing that, hey, Johnny, every 60 days, it starts to go into a slump, let’s give them a three day weekend coming, because we can see this data over a long enough period of time. Or this is actually what gives us as what we started as a remote company, the ability to actually know how our team’s doing because they’re remote, you have no idea, you don’t know what their day is, like, you don’t know if their spouse is yelling at them for the last six hours straight and they’re trying to focus or their kids are yelling or crying. We can assume that. Yeah, we can assume and especially if they just had a kid, right. But when you have something like this, it’s visual, you can actually see all of a sudden, like, man, Billy was doing really well. And then all of a sudden drop off, drop off, drop off. Okay, we need to reach out, see what’s going on. And that’s really helped with I think staff churn, but also just culture.
Jeremy Weisz 40:48
Ashton, you mentioned board of directors, and it kind of goes into my last question. So I have one last question for you. First of all, thanks for sharing your journey, the stories along the way, I want to encourage people to check out thehemongroup.com to learn more. My last question is mentors. And this could be your mentors. It could be distant mentors, books, everything in between, you mentioned board of directors, who are some of the mentors in your life throughout the years or now. And it could be also in addition other books too.
Ashton Shanks 41:29
So I think, in my personal life, I would say, Taylor Welch has definitely been a really big mentor of mine. And Chris Evans, of course, they were both really great mentors of mine and, and I learned so much from them. And Taylor, him and I talked still quite often, and are able now just more as peers and friends, which is really cool to kind of see that transition. But I also would say one of my best friends Eddie Maloof, he owns an agency for media out of Atlanta. They’re incredible. And he’s been one of my closest friends, but also someone I really look up to and respect. When it comes to books, though, there’s quite a few. I have to say one of my first books ever into this whole world of being able to be an entrepreneur and create your own future Tim Grover’s book, Relentless, was one that man, I’d read books in the past, but that one connected to me in a different way that no book had really ever have. I felt really understood and his next book Winning made me cry like three times, which was super weird to read to cry in that book, but I love that those books, so I feel like to me in a sense, he was a mentor. I think Ray Dalio is book Principles is a lot of what we tried to build our company and infrastructure off of. And I would consider him one for me anyway, just because I’ve read that book. I mean, at least by this point, maybe nine or 10 times over the last three years, and I’ve really, really enjoyed it.
Jeremy Weisz 42:48
Ashton, thank you so much, everyone, check out more episodes of the podcast check out thehemongroup.com and we’ll see you next time. Thanks, Ashton.
