[Top Agency Series] Building a Seven-Figure Agency With Ed Goss

Edward Goss is the Founder of Ten Thousand Foot View, a search marketing agency based in Toronto that specializes in paid search marketing and high-conversion-rate campaigns. Over the past 12 years, Ed has grown Ten Thousand Foot View into a seven-figure agency with virtually no initial investment. He shares his deep expertise in optimizing Google Ads and provides valuable insights into navigating digital marketing challenges — including AI and automation’s evolving role in shaping strategies and outcomes.

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

• [03:28] The importance of service niching over industry niching
• [05:32] How a medical device background sparked Ed’s interest in Google Ads
• [07:36] The entrepreneurial leap and startup success mindset
• [09:52] Secrets to acquiring initial clients through networking and freelancing
• [12:13] Competitive intelligence strategies for agency pricing
• [20:33] Innovative hiring with freelancers for agency growth
• [28:05] Common Google Ads mistakes and how to avoid them
• [37:29] How life lessons from personal experiences can drive entrepreneurial success

In this episode…

Are you ready to dive into the world of marketing agencies and discover the secrets behind successful business growth? How do you scale a business from zero to seven figures without any initial investment? In a rapidly changing industry, what strategies are crucial to not only survive, but thrive?

Edward Goss provides insightful answers to these questions by sharing his journey of building a thriving marketing agency specializing in Google Ads. He discusses the pivotal decision to niche down by focusing on service rather than industry, which helped mitigate risks associated with economic downturns in specific sectors. Ed highlights the importance of automation and AI in staying competitive, as well as the innovative approach he took by utilizing freelancers rather than traditional employees, fostering a more dynamic and growth-oriented work environment. 

In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, host Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Ed Goss, Founder of Ten Thousand Foot View, to discuss leveraging specialized services and automation in marketing. Ed shares valuable lessons on pricing models, the significance of standard operating procedures, and the advantages of building strong client relationships. He also provides tips on avoiding common pitfalls in paid advertising and the evolution of creative strategies using AI.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Edward Goss on LinkedIn
• Ten Thousand Foot View
• Mike Rhodes’ P-Max Script
• Upwork
• The Agency Forge
• DoorLoop
• SEMrush
• ChatGPT
• Gemini

Special Mention(s):

• Perry Marshall on LinkedIn
• Mike Rhodes on LinkedIn
• Ed Leake on LinkedIn
• David Bitton on LinkedIn

Related episode(s):

• [Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital on Inspired Insider Podcast
• [Top Agency Series] Expanding Your Brand Impact Through Social With Duncan Alney of Firebelly Marketing on Inspired Insider Podcast
• [Sweet Process Series] How to Save Hundreds of Hours a Month Using Top Productivity Tools with Adi Klevit of Business Success Consulting Group on Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “You get to a point where you just have a stronger belief in yourself than you do in the CEOs you previously worked for.”
• “The important thing is to understand our own limitations, and I do get that limitation in myself.”
• “I think by year three, things were going really well.”
• “I started being more hands-on with SEO and with pay-per-click, and that really opened my eyes.”
• “Starting this business has been one of the most positive things in my life because it’s something I aspired to.”

Action Steps:

1. Embrace niching for growth: Focusing on a specific service or niche can enhance your agency’s expertise and resilience in fluctuating markets.
2. Leverage automation and AI in marketing: Adopting automated tools and AI can optimize your ad campaigns by improving efficiency and targeting, keeping you competitive in the evolving digital landscape.
3. Develop robust standard operating procedures: Detailed SOPs ensure consistency, quality control, and scalability.
4. Build a flexible, freelancer-based workforce: Consider hiring freelancers for specialized roles to maintain flexibility and scalability in your business operations. This model aligns incentives and enhances client retention.
5. Engage in continuous learning and networking: Stay updated with industry trends and insights by connecting with other professionals and utilizing online resources in order to adapt and innovate in response to new challenges and opportunities.

Episode Transcript

Intro 00:15

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

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder of InspiredInsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Ed Goss, TenThousandFootView.com. You can check them out. Ed, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out.

Since this is part of the Top Agency Series. It was a really good episode I did with Todd Taskey. Todd Taskey helps pair agency owners with private equity to help sell agencies. He’s got the Second Bite Podcast. He’s got some great episodes. He talks about Second Bite Podcast because sometimes when they sell the private equity, the agency owner makes more on the second bite when the private equity company sells again than they did on the first, as well. There was another great interview I did with Duncan Alney. He does social media marketing for food and beverage companies. So we’ll talk a little bit about services and niches with Ed today. Duncan has a great you can check him out at Firebelly Marketing. Another good one. My favorite was Adi Klevit. Adi Klevit is an agency that helps people create SOPs, so she’s an easy button for a company to create SOPs, so to smooth out the client onboarding, staff onboarding, and anything that needs to be documented, get outside their head to help systematize the business. So we talked about our favorite productivity tools and software on that episode. You can check out that and more on InspiredInsider.com.

And this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, the accountability, and the full execution. So we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the hosts so they can create amazing content, create amazing relationships, and most importantly, run their business. You know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I always look for ways to give to my best relationships, and I found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should. If you have questions, you can go to rise25.com or email us at [email protected]. I actually have a lot of free episodes on Inspired Insider if you search for podcasts. We probably answer almost every question we’ve gotten on there, so check that out.

I’m excited to introduce Ed Goss. Over the past 12 years, he’s grown Ten Thousand Foot View from 0 to 7 figure agency with virtually no investment and Ten Thousand Foot View is a search marketing agency headquartered in Toronto. They focus on paid search marketing and other campaigns that generate high bottom-of-the-funnel conversion rates, and I’m excited to dig in. Ed, thanks for joining me.

Ed Goss 03:16

Hey, thank you. Thank you very much.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 03:18

Just start us off and if you are listening to the audio, there’s a video I’m going to pull up the website. Tell people about Ten Thousand Foot View. View a little bit more on what you do.

Ed Goss 03:28

Yeah. So Ten Thousand Foot View is, as you mentioned, a search marketing company. We’re very heavy into Google Ads. We do about 70% of our businesses on that platform. And you know, you talked a little bit about Niching earlier. And I know that’s kind of where the industry is going. And there’s two ways to niche really. You can niche in industry or you can niche in service. And we really chose to go the service route. We used to actually provide a bigger basket of services, including SEO and some other stuff. But you know, after Covid, you know, I kind of decided, yeah, we’re going to have to follow suit with this niching thing, but I didn’t want to go industry because if you pick the wrong industry and there’s a downturn in that industry, it can really impact your bottom line. And so that’s kind of what we focused on is really becoming a Google Ads shop. But you know, along the way we still do Microsoft ads and meta ads as well.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 04:24

Talk about the decision to cut out services, because that could be a painful thing, especially if you have clients on it. I’m sure you did. And you have to basically say, hey, we can’t do this for you anymore. Talk about how that came about. And in that conversation in your head, and then what the conversation you had with your clients.

Ed Goss 04:44

Yeah. So it wasn’t as hard as that. We were already seeing a decline in SEO because it wasn’t really a core focus for us. Like this is going back to maybe 2021. And so, you know, we had a handful of clients still on it, and we did essentially a soft shutdown of that. So we didn’t really, you know, discontinue the service for existing clients. We just pulled it as a new service offering. And then over time, you know, those clients naturally dropped off. So I think we still do have two clients on SEO and we’re happy to provide that. But, you know, not forever, right? So maybe another year or two. If they’re still doing it, we’ll refer them out to, you know, a comparable service provider.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 05:25

How did you get into Google Ads and paid ads in the first place?

Ed Goss 05:32

Yeah. So my background is in the medical devices space, and I worked for a whole bunch of startups here in Toronto for most of my career. And then the last couple of roles I was in, you know, kind of online was becoming more of a thing, even though medical devices as a marketing business is really behind the times. And it’s all just still trade shows. But online was becoming more prevalent and important. And so in my roles in sales and marketing, I started being more hands on with SEO and with pay per click. And that really opened my eyes up to Google Ads in particular. And that was my aha moment to kind of transition out of another startup, which I was about to be downsized in and do something else.

So yeah, effectively got downsized, I think December 24th, it was literally Christmas Eve 2012 and January 1st, 2013. Up went my website. And yeah, so that’s how I got started. So I had, you know, a little bit of hands-on experience with Google ads, but I was by no means an expert and had no agency experience. So, you know, it was just freelancing for the first couple of years to build up a client base. But to my credit, I will say like, I got a client the first month and the agency has been profitable every single month of its existence. So I didn’t exactly light it up in terms of paying myself for the first couple of years. But by year three things were going really well.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 07:13

Yeah, I don’t know if that’s the best way to celebrate Christmas, but it turned out for the best, I guess. Talk about the decision at that point, because you could have gone out. It sounds like you were successful with some of the medical device companies. You could have brought your skill set and be like, hey, I figured out this way to gain more customers, clients, why strike out on your own at that point?

Ed Goss  07:36

Yeah, I mean, it was something that was in the back of my mind for a number of years. One of the reasons I was in the startup is, you know, I’m an entrepreneur and kind of like the aspect of growing a business from nothing. And I, you know, I got downsized eight times over about, you know, 18 years and that’s enough. And I think you get to a point where you just have a stronger belief in yourself than you do in the CEOs that you previously worked for. And so that was it. And, you know, also being, you know, in my 40s, I kind of had a nest egg saved up at that point. So it was not as difficult as, say, doing when you know you’re 25 years old. So those things just kind of lined up. And yeah, I just figured I’d go for it. What was another nice thing about starting an agency is there’s no overhead, right? Or no overhead. So it wasn’t like I had to pony up $1 million to start the business.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 08:31

What was your mindset at that point? What did family life look like? Because I know there’s factors in there. Okay. I’m going to start this up. Were you like, okay, I’m going to do this for six months. And if it doesn’t work, I’m going to do something like, what was your mindset at the time when you were starting it?

Ed Goss 08:45

Yeah. So I didn’t really have a timeline in mind, and nor did I have a family, so that made things a lot easier. I was just looking out for myself. I think I had a girlfriend at that time, but you know, we weren’t cohabitating or anything like that. So, you know, I wasn’t really responsible for her to that level anyway. So that made it a lot easier than, you know, being single and also, I mean, just, you know, free time, right? Not having a family life because that obviously requires quite a commitment as well. So that made it quite a bit easier.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 09:20

So you’re like I’m just going to go for it. I’m not going to stop until I make this thing successful. That’s what you’re.

Ed Goss 09:26

I Don’t know I don’t know if I, if I would have never stopped. When, you know, I think if I got eight months in and I had landed a client. Yeah, I’d probably be looking for another job by then. But, yeah, I mean, just, you know, things went fairly well in terms of, you know, within the first six months I had, I think, 5 or 6 clients. How did you do it?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 09:50

How did you get your initial clients?

Ed Goss 09:52

Yeah. So the first ones, the first ones ever came in through business networking. So I joined a couple of local groups just, you know, where you meet up and you do a little spiel in front of a bunch of people about what kind of thing you do. And, you know, they’re small business owners. So it’s kind of a natural place to sell marketing services. The first lady I worked with was in real estate lending and worked for a large company, but as an independent broker, I did a website for her, and we did SEO and we did some pay-per-click. I mentioned earlier doing a bigger basket of services. That’s invariably where everybody that gets into marketing, they start when they’re doing freelancing is like, yeah, I can email marketing for you, right? Yeah, I can do your groceries and paint your house too, right? Like whatever you need to do.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 10:42

Exactly.

Ed Goss 10:43

That is to secure that business. But that was kind of client number one. And I think we worked together for about six months. She didn’t have a lot of budget. But then I started getting a lot of clients from ELance and oDesk, which merged and eventually became Upwork, which we know today. And I’d say, you know, over the first kind of two years, that’s where most of my clients end up coming from. I pricked myself out of that channel like year three, year four. It just got to a point where, you know, we’re charging a good buck now. And obviously having other people work for me that, you know, the margins, you need to be charging more money. 

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 11:28

I do want to get into that piece. So I get the kind of evolution of the services you start off doing everything: SEO website, we do email marketing, we do PPC. Over time, you kind of just narrow the service. You kept the industry open but really narrowed the service to PPC early on. Charging again, you just start the agency. How do you decide how to do the pricing for these initially?

Ed Goss 11:55

Yeah, so I think the first year it was competitive intelligence through web browsing. So it’s literally going to other websites to see what those offers are. 

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 12:10

What were you seeing at the time? What were people charging?

Ed Goss 12:13

Oh, for the more established agencies it was like minimum $500 I think to do pay-per-click.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 12:20

That’s it. $500 a month.

Ed Goss 12:22

Yeah. And there’s still. So we still have entry level pricing at 500 bucks. At that time I think I might have been 250. This was 13 years ago. Right. So it’s a little while ago. But yeah, you know, it wasn’t a lot. And you know, we still have our entry level, Entry level pricing. Still $500. That’s gone up every couple of years since the beginning, you know, but that’s for a client spending a very little amount of money on pay per click. And the truth is, a lot of those clients that come in, most, most advertisers, they want to grow their business. So they come in at 500 and in 18 months they’re spending a couple thousand with us. Right. Because we’ve been able to grow their account.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 13:09

I’ve heard, you know, from and we don’t do paid ads or anything like that. I’m not an expert or anything, but I’ve heard various pricing options, like some people just do flat, some people do a flat, plus a percentage of the, you know, the spend. Because obviously if someone’s spending more, it takes more time. What’s your philosophy on that?

Ed Goss  13:32

So we’re percentage-based. And then we have a tiered based approach. So as you spend more, the percentage we charge on the incremental amount of ad spend goes down, right. So somebody spending 50,000 a month on Google, they’re going to pay us a lower percentage overall than somebody that’s spending, say, $5,000. And there’s I mean, a few different aspects there. One is just recognizing that, you know, we don’t do twice as much work because there’s twice as much ad spend.

There is more work because there’s more opportunity to build, you know, a variety of different campaigns, and you’re going to be in the account more often when you’re spending more money, because there’s more data to look at to optimize around. But certainly, yeah, it’s not linear. And then the other piece is obviously we want to obtain and retain bigger clients. Right. Because obviously it’s a bigger profit center for us. But I do think that model really does align. It’s a value based approach or as good as we get with that or approximating that. I’m not a big fan of hourly, because usually those agencies either get restricted by the client saying, I cannot afford to pay you more than 20 hours a month or whatever the case may be, that’s bad for business, because that means there may be opportunities in the account that are not being addressed.

Or conversely, if the agency is given a free hand, often they will set up their agency to do a lot of busy work, right? So no automation, basically doing everything manually, a lot of complexity, inefficiency. That’s not really good for the client either. But with a value based model, we need to be good and efficient. So we spend a lot of effort doing it. You mentioned SOPs earlier, developing and maintaining our SOPs and best practices, and using things like AI strategically, where it makes sense to, you know, obviously reduce our workload on accounts.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 15:35

And I’m curious, you know, who you learned from over the years? If there’s any specific resources or mentors, it could be like personal mentors or distant mentors when it comes to agency or marketing.

Ed Goss  15:49

Yeah. So for a lot of years, I just mostly figured it out on my own, right. Finding online resources like YouTube videos, Google’s own learnings. There is Isaac Radzinsky’s course, which I learned a lot from, like on the technical side for Google Ads. And that course became badly out of date, but he’s recently revamped it, so that was a great course. But I’d say more recently, over the last couple of years, there’s Ed Leake. He has Agency Forge, and that’s really more designed for agency owners to help structure their business, to figure out how to, you know, create effective offers. I wish I had signed up for that. I wish it existed in the beginning, or maybe like in year 2 or 3 as I was starting to, you know, look at hiring people. It did not. So I was pretty far ahead of the curve when I started using that. But I’d say for anybody else that’s like kind of year 2 or 3 in their agency. It’s a great resource.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 16:49

I noticed, too, on your website, you have something about Mike Rhodes. This seems like way above my pay grade from a technical perspective, but. Mike Rhodes P-Max Script reminded me, because I we were I had an interview the other day with David Bitton who runs a SaaS company called Door Loop, and he said that one of his, you know, breakthroughs with, I think they just raised $130 million and have 200 staff, was actually Google ads and learning from Perry Marshall. And I remember hearing from Perry Marshall about Mike Rhodes. So what what is this Mike Rhodes’ P-Max Script

Ed Goss 17:37

A real splash. I guess. Over the last year or so, I’m going to be a little fuzzy on dates because we only started using the script ourselves a couple months ago. Yeah, but Google has this campaign called Performance Max, this campaign type that they launched a couple of years ago. And anybody in the industry will tell you it’s really a black box that, you know, your inputs are a bunch of creative and some audience targeting. And then Google decides everything behind the scenes in terms of what keywords to target and what different platforms, because it’s going to run on video display, search, shopping. It’s kind of an all in one solution.

So it’s been a real challenge for agencies to offer value in terms of an optimization service. When you’re just once you set it up, it’s not set it and forget it, but it approaches that. That’s kind of the idea. So what Mike has done is he’s created a Google script that generates a lot of data output that you cannot otherwise see directly in the Google Ads interface. So this kind of unlocks the ability to analyze what’s going on in the campaign and optimize it much better than you can without the tool.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 18:59

That’s cool. Yeah.

Ed Goss 19:01

Yeah. He says something like, thousands of agencies have downloaded this. So I think he will end this. A very rich man, from the looks of it.

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