[Top Agency Series] Driving Results in the eCommerce Space With Brett Curry

Brett Curry is the CEO of OMG Commerce, a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency. OMG helps e-commerce brands accelerate growth by utilizing Google, YouTube, and Amazon ads and full Amazon brand management.

Brett is an entrepreneur, online marketer, e-commerce strategist, and speaker who is passionate about helping companies grow through creative marketing efforts. He hosts the Spicy Curry Podcast and eCommerce Evolution Podcast, highlighting what’s new and next in e-commerce.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• Brett Curry talks about inspirational resources and the early days of OMG Commerce
• The evolution of OMG and its ideal strategic partner
• What are the best masterminds for e-commerce brand owners?
• How Brett and his partner divide their responsibilities at OMG — and Brett’s advice for creating long-term partnerships
• How Brett’s role has shifted at OMG 
• Brett’s pivotal hiring moments 
• The power of email marketing 
• Tips to grow on YouTube

In this episode…

The digital landscape is a challenge for many brands due to its hyper-competitive nature. So how can you accelerate growth and drive results through world-class online marketing?

For a brand to thrive online, Brett Curry recommends partnering with an agency that will help you uncover new possibilities and digital products. Thanks to OMG Commerce, brands can now enjoy world-class strategies and tactics to break through the online clutter and grow their brand. Today, Brett’s sharing tips to help e-commerce companies grow and other strategies for business success.

Learn more in this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast as Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Brett Curry, the CEO of OMG Commerce. Brett talks about OMG Commerce and how it has evolved, tips to create lasting partnerships, the power of email marketing, and key culture hires that shaped his business.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• OMG Commerce
• Brett Curry on LinkedIn
• Spicy Curry Podcast
• eCommerce Evolution Podcast
• The Ultimate Guide to Google Shopping
• Chris Brewer on LinkedIn

Special Mention(s):

• Dan Kennedy on LinkedIn
• Jay Abraham
• John Caples | Scientific Advertising
• Ryan Deiss on LinkedIn
• Drew Sanocki on LinkedIn
• Ezra Firestone on LinkedIn
• Ryan Mckenzie on LinkedIn
• Jacques Spitzer
• Blue Ribbon Mastermind
• Enneagram test
• Culture Index
• Kolbe
• “How to Create Funny Video Ads that SELL – Without Hiring an Expert with Joseph Wilkins” on the Spicy Curry Podcast
• FunnySalesVideos.com
• Live Bearded
• Leadership Podcast

Book(s) Mentioned:

• My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins
• Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene M. Schwartz
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t by Jim Collins
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni
• Failing Forward: Turning Mistakes Into Stepping Stones for Success by John C. Maxwell
• The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber
• Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Agency Series] Growth Through Acquisitions – What is Your KPI and Northstar? With Jason Swenk”
• “Building a Great Team and More Helpful Insights with Jason Swenk Host of The Smart Agency Master Class Podcast”
• “[One Question] Building a Platform to Empower Others with Jason Swenk Host of The Smart Agency Master Class Podcast”
• “How to Set and Achieve Goals With Ian Garlic, Founder of Video Case Story”
• “[Top Giver Series] The Power of Video Storytelling to Transform Your Business with Ian Garlic of StoryCrews”
• “How To Start From Scratch With a Food Product Business with Peter Rahal Founder of RxBar”
• “[One Question] Tips to Increase Sales with Chad Rubin Co-Founder of Skubana”
• “Why You Should Test Your Message with Daniel Harmon Co-Founder of Harmon Brothers”
• “How a Business Grew to $100 Million Using Direct Mail With Kevin Donlin, Founder of Client Cloning Systems”
• “What Inspires Brian Kurtz, VP at Boardroom Inc.?”
• “A Business Built on Full Transparency with Roy Krebs Co-Founder of Natural Stacks”
• “Orlando Magic Cofounder: Starting an NBA Franchise -with Pat Williams [Big Lessons in Leadership]”
• “Permission To Be Yourself with Ed O’Keefe Founder of TimeCollapsing.com”

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today is no different I Brett Curry of OMG Commerce and Brett before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes, people should check out. And when I think of you, I think of a combination of agency, e-commerce and direct response. So some of the past guests include Jason Swenk, who built his agency out for over eight figures sold it. And we also have an episode of how he’s acquiring agencies and when he looks for. I had Ian Garlic on who talks about the importance of video case stories and what you should include what you shouldn’t include in there. I had some e-commerce interviews, CPG interviews, natural stacks, that was probably the best intro ever. I’ll just let people check it out that I’ve ever had over the past 15 years. And it has to do with ESPN. But if you want to check that out. RXBar was good one and then to our mutual friend Chad Rubin. This is when in the Skubana days when he had Skubana and he sold that and now he runs Profasee so people can check that out and then from a direct response because I’m going to hear Brett’s actual favorite resources direct response resources but I Daniel Harmon from Harmon Brothers, he talks about their process for producing viral videos and Kevin Donlin talks about helping a business grow to $100 million using direct mail, Old School Direct mail. So this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream 100 relationships. And how do we do that we actually help you run your podcast. We are an easy button for a company to launch or on a podcast we provide Strategy, accountability and full execution. For me, Brett, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. And I found no better way to do that than over the past decade profile of people in companies I most admire and share with the world they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about and we’ll talk about Brett’s podcast, too. If you’ve thought about podcasting, you should if you have questions, you can go to rise25.com John and I both been doing it for over a decade. So without further ado, Brett Curry is the CEO of OMG Commerce, a performance marketing agency. They’re Google premier partner, Amazon ad partner, and he also hosts two leading e-commerce podcasts, Spicy Curry, and eCommerce Evolution Podcast and they highlight what’s new and what’s next in e-commerce. He and his team actually manages Google YouTube Amazon ad campaigns for growing e-commerce brands that includes Native Deodorant, Boom by Cindy Joseph, Organifi, Madison Reed and many, many more. Brett, thanks for joining me.

Brett Curry 3:13 

Hey, what’s up, Jeremy, thanks for having me. Great intro. Thank you for that. And I’m excited to be here, man. And you’ve been podcasting for over a decade. That’s impressive. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a show that’s been around that long. So this feels good.

Jeremy Weisz 3:25 

Cool. And the most impressive thing which I left on your bio is you have a family and you have eight kids. And so you run all of this with eight kids. I’ve had a guest on they had more kids than you actually. Ed O’Keefe is second closest was seven. I don’t know if you know Ed.

Brett Curry 3:41 

Shoutouts out Eddie. Yep, I got him beat by one. He’s a quitter. That’s why I tell him all the time. I say you’re just a quitter.

Jeremy Weisz 3:48 

But Pat Williams, I think he had like 11. I mean, some of them are foster kids that they adopted. But he was one of the cofounders of the Orlando Magic. And he talked about that. Yeah. So. But anyways, this is not a contest of how many kids but that is unbelievable.

Brett Curry 4:09 

I’m glad to let him win. Let him win that guy. I’m feeling very content.

Jeremy Weisz 4:13 

I got to go out and get three more of these.

Brett Curry 4:17 

I’m not feeling that?

Jeremy Weisz 4:18 

So Brett, tell people a little bit more about OMG Commerce and what you do I give a little introduction?

Brett Curry 4:24 

Yeah. So we’re a performance marketing agency. We help e-commerce companies accelerate their growth. And the primary channels we use are everything in the Google Ads ecosystem. So search shopping, YouTube display, Performance Max, which is kind of a combination of all those email marketing. So believe it or not, email marketing is not dead. It’s actually very, very powerful. I think it’s going to be powerful for the foreseeable future. And then Amazon and really we’re kind of full channel management on Amazon, but ultimately, I’m a bit of a marketing junkie and I’m so glad you mentioned direct response, but a direct response for 15 years plus, I love great brands. And I love great marketing and I love consumer psychology, why don’t people buy what they buy? And so I actually love the agency world. We love partnering with great brands to help them grow. And so that’s kind of the brief overview.

Jeremy Weisz 5:18 

So talk about some of your favorite direct response resources. I know that you are a Dan Kennedy fan, who else do you like to study or that you’ve looked at over the years?

Brett Curry 5:28 

Yeah, man, I was introduced to Dan Kennedy and Jay Abraham when I was still in college, so I was in college. I already gotten married. So we got married young, and I was selling for radio station paying my way through college, got introduced to Jay Abraham. I’m not that old, but I was listening to cassette tapes. Okay, so cassette tapes were old at the time. But that’s what I had, my uncle gave me a bunch of JVM cassette tapes. And so I’m like, devouring these things that I subscribe to Dan Kennedy newsletter. I’m all in on this stuff. Right. And I was sort of like to tell when I was a young teenager. I remember seeing the prayer that saw the Ginsu knife infomercial, and it’s thought Ron Popeil.

Jeremy Weisz 6:11 

Was that Ron Popeil? Or was that someone else?

Brett Curry 6:13 

I don’t know actually just talked to a guy who like put together this collection of old ads from like the 80s and stuff. Love to go back and look because he like built this resource. That’s awesome. But I don’t remember who did that. But I remember watching it and thinking one, that’s awesome. I want one of these knives. Which by the way, quick sidenote, we just bought a rental property. And the previous owners left some Ginsu knives like in the cabinet. Yeah, not that impressive, but the ad was freaking awesome. And so remember watching the ad and being impressed by them thinking, who makes those, like who? Who’s the one that like, puts that together? Right? Because I was interested in film and stuff. Anyway, so I kind of had this early attraction to advertising and so in terms of resources, I also read some of the classics, John Caples, Scientific Advertising, My Life in Advertising by Claude Hopkins. Love those guys have been a Ryan Deiss fan for a long time. So digital marketer and following what they put together. I just recently I was kind of late to this game but Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz. I don’t think I got a pirated copy. I think it may be public domain. I don’t know. I ended up with a PDF on my remarkable tab. And so I’m like, marking it up and go through it. Yeah, so that’s fantastic.

Jeremy Weisz 7:32 

Brian Kurtz. I don’t know if you know, Brian. He’s been on the show. And he’s a good friend. I believe he has the rights to Breakthrough Advertising. So any of the books that come out? It’s actually he’s the one that’s putting them out.

Brett Curry 7:46 

Very interesting. Buddy of mine Drew Sanocki, shout out to Drew he just mentioned, he had this great post on Twitter the other day where he said, hey, don’t pay so much attention to ChatGPT. Pay attention to Gary Halbert. Right, or Halbert and just talking about, hey, what’s the most important part of good copy? It’s not your headline, it’s not your subject line. It’s not any of this. It’s having a starving crowd, right? I love that. But yeah, those are a few man, I just have our things. I listen to podcasts a lot. And just always been a student of marketing. It’s fun for me, like I’ll read marketing books on vacation.

Jeremy Weisz 8:25 

If someone listens to all the things you said Brett and gets those resources, they will be very versed in direct response and I think…

Brett Curry 8:37 

It’ll change your marketing life, those resources.

Jeremy Weisz 8:40 

Agreed, I had, like, almost all of the Gary Halbert protégées on my podcast before, like, oh, just, Gary’s not around anymore, unfortunately. But they shared some amazing stories and things. So I love that.

Brett Curry 8:58 

Dan Kennedy was quoted saying Dan Kennedy could write copy and which funny story about Dan Kennedy everybody thought Dan Kennedy died. I thought Dan Kennedy died. Russell Brunson is actually a friend of mine. And Russell bought out his business and I was like, wait a min. I was talking to Russell’s right-hand man, John Parkes, and he’s like, yeah, Dan didn’t die because Dan wrote like this letter from his deathbed or whatever. And I was moving letter. And I was like, well, he’s gone. And he’s not. So he’s like speaking at events. So thankfully, Dan pulled through. But Dan Kennedy said one time he said, hey, I’ll put my copy up against anybody’s but nobody’s better than Gary Halbert. And Gary is better than me. Right. So that like, that’s a pretty high price.

Jeremy Weisz 9:38 

Huge. I love to talk about the agency. And when you first started the agency, because you’ve been at this game for a long time, it wasn’t what it is now, what did it start off being? What did the beginning look like?

Brett Curry 9:52 

Yeah, yeah. So it has evolved substantially in the last 13 years. We’re starting 2010. My business partner Chris Brewer and I, we’ve done some projects and things together in the past. I had another agency at the time that was doing TV, radio, print, direct mail, stuff like that. He had a direct mail company, and we’re like, hey, let’s do some online stuff together. Right? So we basically started this company as a project, like, let’s just see what happens, and we were selling local Google Map optimization to local businesses. And it exploded, and it was just like, we had good trust with people. We were pretty good at sales, we understood marketing, and it just exploded. But even early on, we thought, well, maybe it’d be like Chris and I and some admins and a couple support people, whatever. And we’ll just kind of do our things will be these brilliant marketing guys. Well, we started to just do a little bit of everything right. We did website design, we did copywriting, we helped with your TV, because I had a lot of TV experience. Anyway, it was a nightmare is too much. We tried to do too many things. And I quickly pivoted away from that, Brett and Chris and a couple other people to build the team. I was almost like, inspired or called to build a team. And so we started to hire people. And we of course have the revenue to do that. And he and I had two other businesses that were kind of paying our bills, we didn’t need to take a salary from OMG in the beginning, which was nice. But as we started sampling on thing and trying different things were like, hey, we got to focus. Right. So what do we really good at? What can we world-class at? And I don’t know, are you Jim Collins fan? Good to Great. Yeah. I love the idea of the hedgehog concept, where you look at, what are you passionate about? What can you be best in the world at, and then what drives your economic engine, and you got to find the intersection of all those things like it like a Venn diagram, and we realized they were really good at search, really, to search marketing, like combines all the things that we are good at. And so let’s go deep into search, marketing and blow that up. That’s what we did. And so we started working with e-commerce companies pretty early on. Also, because by the Jay Abraham days, I’m a big believer in strategic partnerships. So it’s one of the skill sets I’ve had for a long time, I can build relationships and partner with people and I don’t have to be the winner always like him let other people win and stuff. And so we started forming these partnerships and just start getting a lot of e-commerce clients coming in the door and kind of obsessed about Google Shopping back in the day and ended up partnering with Shopify and wrote The Ultimate Guide to Google Shopping, met Ezra Firestone at an event, we kind of hit it off, we started doing some stuff together is when he was first starting his mastermind and a few things. And so yeah, I can dive into any more of that.

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