Ralph Burns 3:00
Oh, well, it’s definitely Ian Garlic. He’s been on twice
Jeremy Weisz 3:05
without saying,
Ralph Burns 3:06
Oh, yeah. So yeah, he introduced us so that’s great. But no, actually his stuff is really really good it one of the one of the most fun shows I think we ever actually did I have a relatively new ish host within the last three to four or five months cost of ASAN, which we have a lot of fun doing these sorts of things. I would say probably just, you know, any of the episodes in the last three to four months, I think those are the best ones.
Jeremy Weisz 3:33
Are there any fan favorites that stick out that come up even over the years? That people keep saying, Oh, they can’t keep going back to that one?
Ralph Burns 3:41
Yeah, I think it’s episode 145. Like that was a long time ago. But it’s still actually something that we use to this very day it was, but how we sort of divvy up traffic on Facebook. And it still stands to this this very moment, we were just actually on a on a team call. And they said lo and behold, and I had never been into this campaign for what one of our media buyers was talking about on our team call. But lo and behold, it was set up exactly like the ad amplifier system, which we talked about way back on 145. So go back and check that out. That’s an oldie but a goodie. But we’ve since updated some of the information on that in the last year or so. But you know, a lot of our a lot of our listeners are very tactical. And so we try and give some strategic advice as well as super tactical things. And with all the changes in digital media and digital advertising the last three to six months, I would say the most recent episodes and maybe the ones that are even more relevant to maybe some of your listeners. Oh,
Jeremy Weisz 4:39
yeah, we’re gonna dig into some case stories. And there’s amazing one where someone went from spending 20,000 pounds a month to 200,000 pounds a month. There’s a couple simple things you help them with. It always seems simple and you know what you’re doing, I guess, but um, and talking about virtual team running a virtual team. I wanted to kind of start with your journey a little bit because you’ve been Do this for a long time now. And what is Christian men dating have to do with your journey?
Ralph Burns 5:08
Oh my god. Yeah, that’s a blast from the past. Well, that actually was the affiliate offer that I spent, I think it was $3,000 on one night that I didn’t have any caps on or spend caps on my Facebook ad account the first time I ever ran Facebook ads to you doing your research on that one. But yeah, a that’s when I realized that even though I had a horrible landing page, and not a very well, converting offer normal, my ads really all that good. I realized that there’s a lot of people on Facebook. And this was back in 2009 2010. Maybe like right around that time, maybe like January 2010, when Facebook had the right hand rail, ads, and I was an affiliate, that’s how I was sort of getting into what I eventually you’re doing right now is that I sold affiliate offers by eating what I killed, I suppose in this case, it was leads for Christian Mingle, which is just my wife hates when I tell the story. But it’s true. Because I was just struck, I had to figure out a way to make money because I just did not want to go back to the corporate world after getting fired twice. And there was no way that I could actually go and work for somebody else. So I was I was I was absolutely committed. I burned the boats on the beach, so to speak. And thankfully, my wife had a pretty good job. So I wasn’t starving, per se, even though we had some young kids that were eating a whole lot and could have eaten us out of house and home at that point in time. But yeah, so the the Christian Mingle offer was one that I first tried on Facebook. And it was great, because there was the only really the type of targeting that was on Facebook was how old somebody was, where they lived, what their marital status was, and if they’re interested in men, women, or other I guess at that point, or if they were single, and I’m like, Well, this is great for dating offer. And then a year or two later, Facebook changed all that was really super specific targeting which they still had to this day. But yeah, that was my first foray into Facebook ads and went full time as an agency in 2012. Just because the platform was so damn good, and it still is today. So
Jeremy Weisz 7:23
I guess when someone’s choosing an offer a sex, money health are all good categories to to look at. When you go back round. If you went back right now, to that time, what would you do differently with running the ads or maybe creating auxiliary materials? What would you do?
Ralph Burns 7:40
Yeah, yeah, I mean, they say now you have a lot of expertise. So right, right. It’s health, wealth and relationships, I suppose, like the three big categories. But I suppose I would have worked on my landing page a little bit more. And I would have learned a little bit more of the rules of how to do stop loss and how to do spend limits on Facebook. And I think that was, that was something that they had back then. But if I knew what I known now, I think that was a big, it was more of like a just a revelation that this was another traffic source. Because I think, you know, when I was an affiliate, at that point in time, I was doing two things I was buying display. I was literally calling up if you can believe this, calling up websites that had content that was similar to the offer that I was trying to sell, and I would buy space literally on the phone with the website owner, I don’t even know how I got their name a number, but somehow I did I think I did a who is look up or whatever it happens to be. And that’s how I started. So I was looking for like a really, really reliable traffic source. Because I was you’re
Jeremy Weisz 8:47
placing like a banner ad on a site, you knew that that’s genius. I mean, people people can do that today, like go on like sem rush or something, find out what you know, obviously you can you buy at scale with with ad networks, but you could approach some site and say I just want to put this banner on your site that doesn’t
Ralph Burns 9:06
Yeah, I remember that the site was like when it was wh wahm work at home moms and I was selling a Work at Home program that was specific for females. So this is a different offer, not the one on Christian Mingle. But the point was, is I did get a banner placed on their site because they ranked really well organically, I believe for work at home mothers or work at home products. So I just figured out okay, 123 anything above the fold, I’m going to call all those because I want those keywords, I don’t want to have to pay for them through pay per click. And that’s how I got even more traffic. And then I eventually figured out a way in which to actually pay for those keywords with the affiliate offers which led to a few Google Ad Account bans, which I probably you know, it still sort of haunts me to this day every now if I use a certain email like these bad, bad things happen inside Google But anyway, we don’t need to let them know that. But I think you just have to get it out, it’s like, you just got to figure out a way to do it. Like there’s there was no turning back. And I was going to do whatever it took, in order to make this thing work. Because my back was to the wall, I did not want to go back working for somebody else working for eight holes, which is what I was doing at that point in time and make this thing, a go of it. And here we are today, you know, 10 plus years later,
Jeremy Weisz 10:25
if one of the things you, you know, when I look at your site, you do traffic, you also talk to people about conversion optimization, I mean, you’re forced into that in some respect, because you want, you could drive as much traffic as possible. But if it their site or landing page is terrible, then your work is for nothing. So I’d love to hear some mistakes people make with landing pages. And your thoughts around that.
Ralph Burns 10:52
Yeah, it’s interesting, we actually, we just, we just hired a great guy that we’re talking exactly about this today. It was sort of this first week, and I, you know, one of the things that we do when people come on board is that they have a call with me just to kind of check in. And I’m not necessarily part of the interviewing process, because we have people that do that. And he said, You know, it’s great that Tier 11 Does all this after the click stuff, because so many agencies don’t do it. And I think a lot of agencies don’t do it, or nor do they even pay any attention to it. It’s like everything up to the click. That’s our job. And then everything after the click, that’s your job, Mr. Customer, Mr. Business Owner. And I think it’s somewhat negligent of an agency to not at least give some insight into what they think will work after the click. And when I was first starting this back in 2012 2013, I would do the ads, and I would also create the landing pages. And that’s how I did it. And then I think we all became so specialized and just got away from it. And about two plus years ago, we realized that, alright, traffic costs are going up, nothing is getting cheaper. There’s lots of competition, and we swung back to doing that. And we still now do that to this day, we always advise customers on what to do. And that’s what we have, you know, we are super smart media buyers that also understand conversion. But now we offer all of that as a service. And we doing that as sort of a package deal for the last couple years. And it’s worked out really well.
Jeremy Weisz 12:25
Or what mistakes do people make? I don’t know, if there’s a site that sticks out to you, I can even pull one up, I should have asked you before of maybe when you go to it you frequent, it just gets to you like you want them to, you know, if they change the survey, say Would it would improve? Or what are some of the common things you see people doing wrong with their landing pages?
Ralph Burns 12:47
Yeah, I mean, I think you can go to, you know, just about any, I hate to generalize, but any big brand, where there’s a pay per click ad and just do a Google search, and then click from whatever search term that you put in and look at their landing page. And there usually isn’t any sort of resonance between the message and the ad that you just clicked on in the page that you got to. And I still think you have to have resonance between what I’m expecting. And what actually happens once you click because unless you’re using, you know, an in, in platform measurement tool, or an in platform vise, like, you know, Instagram shopping, or Facebook shops, where everything is on the platform, you still have to do the work after the click. And like the job of an advertiser is not just a one sided part of things. So I think any pay per click ad like yeah, home, I’m
Jeremy Weisz 13:48
just I don’t know why this got to me, I, I just put it Home Depot, you know, obviously, they have an ad running here. And so that
Ralph Burns 13:55
is Whew, that’s a branded search ads. So that that would be all right. Like, let’s say I want, I don’t know, like tools for something, a drill or like a power saw or something like that, you would expect that one of the first ads from Home Depot would actually have a drill or a power saw, or once you get past saws, Google Shopping. So there’s a good example of one right there. You click that. But in a lot of cases, that’s actually if you load that page, chances are, yeah, you’ve actually got you’ve got a good message match here. Like this is something that if they’re just sending to a homepage, just what a lot of other businesses do. We’re getting a good example here like this is exactly what you want. Now, if you are looking for a Ryobi circular saw, you should have a page that has RYOBI circular saw as soon as you click to it. The point is is like a lot of businesses. We see this all the time, there’s a penalty that Google will will inflict upon you If the back click immediately, if there’s a high bounce rate, it’s the same thing with Facebook ads, we see it all the time, probably a better example in our space. And what we specialize in, because we add on Google on top of Facebook and Instagram typically, is that we see a lot of ads in our newsfeed that are maybe very stock footage, images, and then you click off. And it’s something completely different. And that kind of message, lack of that lack of resonance really does not do anything, but just punish you to paying higher CPMs and lower conversion rates at the end of the day.
Jeremy Weisz 15:35
So basically, if I did click through a lot of brands would basically just send me to a general page, and there’s no match to what I was just seeing to the the next thing that I’m saying,
Ralph Burns 15:45
exactly, it’s like a shock to the system for you, which doesn’t help anyone, it’s a wasted click. And I mean, the more specific you can get on your keyword phrases, obviously the the landing page that you’re sending them to, that’s just sort of the basics of pay per click, the same kind of thing goes on in social, I mean, in the case of the ryobi, circular saw, you have an intent based ad there, you’re looking for something you’re, you maybe have been thinking about purchasing for quite some time. And then Alright, now I’ve narrowed down my search. RYOBI is the one that I want, it’s cordless, it’s in my price range. So you’re very close to buying. So you have to make it really, really easy for that visitor to make the purchase or go to the store, find the store location, so you can go pick it up. Same thing sort of happens in Facebook ads, the difference is, is that with Facebook ads, it’s interruption marketing, it’s showing in your feed, because you’ve shown some sort of proclivity or interest or you’ve clicked on a page or your web search or something in your profile would indicate that you might be interested in that particular product or service.
Jeremy Weisz 16:51
I want to talk about, you know, I mentioned on the front of the interview about there were two things, then there was this jewelry company talk a little bit about what happened with that.
Ralph Burns 17:02
Yeah, I mean, this is a jewelry company that’s based in the UK and a great customer, somebody that we really enjoy working with because they they get it they’re like, Alright, listen, we’re, we’re doing okay with what we’re currently doing, because we have good products and they were spending it the way that we sort of look at things is when when a new customer comes to us, we make an assessment we call the Strategic Growth Plan. But it’s basically it’s an assessment of where they’ve been where they’re at right now where they want to go. And in the where they want to go, we make recommendations. So we diagnose what the issue is, we prescribe a solution in this strategic growth plan. And then we implement that solution when they come on board. And we iterate on it, as time goes on, as they bring out new products. So this customer was actually was doing pretty well, for the type of product that’s in the, you know, 1000s of dollar range, like these are engagement rings, eternity rings, Blue Sapphire rings, like really expensive items. And they were because their product was so good. They were literally just sending traffic, right from the image of the blue sapphire ring, right to a blue sapphire ring page where they could the customer or the prospect could just purchase. And that worked. Okay, there were breaking even would that which which isn’t bad. Like if you’re breaking even on the front end sale, especially with a product that’s, you know, in this case, it’s all in pounds, it’s not dollars, but 1000s of pounds, you’re doing pretty good. So when we made the assessment of art, can we scale and grow these guys, we knew that they had an offer that had some legs, it was at least backing out to a certain degree. But in our assessment, we saw that there was this smaller campaign with a really small spend that in our analysis, we saw that this was doing this small campaign with maybe a couple $100 In spend, didn’t really well with huge click through rates had some pretty good return on ad spend, I believe was about two to 3x. So they were spending $1. And they were getting about two to 3x In return, but they hadn’t really scaled it up. So in our part of our analysis, or part of our sort of diagnosis of what the issue was we said, Okay, you’re trying to scale and grow. So what we recommend is we recommend instead of sending all your traffic on Facebook, cold traffic, not looking for your product, once again, interruption based marketing, nobody is going into Facebook typing in I want to buy a wedding ring or I want to buy an eternity ring. So we put videos and images in the newsfeed in their ads, but instead of sending them to a product page, we would entice them with a little bit more of a story of the company itself. And in one particular case we actually I created an entire blog post on one of the Royals, which I’m not really much of a royal person don’t really follow any of that. But this Kate Middleton ring, there was this beautiful like sapphire ring, and we created a whole blog post around this ring. And inside the blog post, there was what my friend Russ Henneberry refers to as Johnson boxes, which is, you know, click here to learn more about rings similar to this one or, you know, hyperlink to other links very not salesy, you know, we made it, we kind of squashed the right hand rail on the blog post a little bit to the side and eliminated some of the things that would click off. But what we noticed is that, once we redid this blog post and put a story behind it, all of a sudden, we were getting just a point eight return on adspend. All of a sudden, we started to get 234 X return. And the best part was, is that when we combine this with a second campaign of people who had clicked, landed on that page, that blog post, and then we retargeted them with just pure product ads, like really simple stuff. This is not rocket science by any stretch. Jeremy, this is like really kind of simple, like, wow, the combination of the two, allow them to 10x their monthly ad spend in the month of November, and they ended up pulling in about 1.5 million in revenue in the month of November. Now that was a great month, that’s a Black Friday month, they had a great sale going on, they had a really good product. Do we take credit for the 10x? You know, no, it was us in combination with putting a strategy together that really works to sell people in the right way and realize like, you need another touch point before you ask for the sale. But the sale at that point was kind of a given. It already showed interest. They clicked through a lot of the links to a lot of the products and we put in our retargeting, we put in our E comm ad amplifier system, or what we now call the traffic Harmonizers system, we harmonized it with all there, we did there, Google ads, Facebook ads, everything kind of worked together. And now this customer is is selling, you know, hundreds of 1000s of dollars worth of these rings every single month, profitably on the first transaction, not to mention all this stuff they make in the back end once they become a customer, which is the real reason why you run Facebook ads and why you’re trying to grow and scale is acquiring customers and then sell them over and over again, or upsell them, you know with certain different service offerings and that kind of thing. And that’s sort of our goal, as an agency is to do that for purpose driven companies that we really believe in have a great story. And this case is a good example of that.
Jeremy Weisz 22:52
And so the two things would be really double downing on creating a amazing blog post with a lot of content and then doing retargeting to anyone who hits that.
Ralph Burns 23:05
Yeah, yeah, I would say that’s the easiest thing to do, oftentimes is to take your best piece of content and just put it on your page, and just post on a regular basis, and then maybe boosted with a couple of bucks, in this case a couple of pounds like $5, because what you’ll find out is you’ll find out which content which front end hook message will give you an indication as to what maybe you should create ads around and then put hundreds of 1000s of dollars behind it. And it’s a really easy way for you as a business owner to get a signal. Initially like this is a few dollars a day now my friend Dennis Hughes says this just boosted posts for a couple of bucks a day. Absolutely. That’s what you should do. You have to kind of create content on a regular basis. We do at a Tier 11, we do that as well for all of our customers and our customers. Remember, like a an ad on Facebook is a page post, it is a post from your page. So the more content you actually have on your Facebook page, the friendlier Facebook typically is for you. And if you have engagement on those posts, even better, but the ones with the most engagement like a 5% 7% 10% engagement rate, which is really easy to see inside your page insights. Like those are ones you might want to actually turn into an ad because people are engaging with it. As long as it’s relating to your product or service. It’s a really good low cost way to start. Yeah,
Jeremy Weisz 24:39
a lot of people will ask me, Well, should I create a webinar as a webinar? Right? Do you have any good case stories and talk about on kind of how you structure a webinar funnel? And the type of industry it was? Uh,
Ralph Burns 24:56
yeah, webinars still work. I mean, I think that was it. When people thought that webinars maybe had had their day, they still work to this day. We’re in the throes of one right now for a customer in the education space. And, you know, this is the lead gen component of webinars I think is really, really important. I think sending cold traffic to a webinar, depending on what your space is, is far more challenging from a cost per acquisition or cost per registration phase. But I think one of the things that we’ve noticed, and we have a lot of customers that do webinars either, whether it’s evergreen, or whether it’s episodic, this one particular is using one that’s that’s, you know, at the launch right now, using a webinar using a chunky piece of educational content to ultimately sell not a extremely high ticket item. But you know, hundreds of dollars, several $100 for the Ask is to create leads to constantly be creating lists of leads, always doing that always creating some kind of way to create warmish audiences. And those warmish audiences could be video views. One of the other strategies that we use with this jewelry customer is that we started to do video posts that they might not sell on that post itself or on that ad, but what we could do is if they engaged a certain percentage of the video, that’s a pretty warm audience. And that’s an audience that’s on Facebook, iOS doesn’t change that you still capture all those audiences. It’s literally it’s first party data you’re taking from Facebook, and then you can retarget those people, for your webinar for sort of that next step. If you’re constantly out there, gathering leads, we do it at Tier 11, we, we do a lead gen campaign, it’s evergreen, we change it up every now and then. And then we email we use to the to in combination with each other, especially if you’re trying to sell high ticket item. People that are cold, you don’t know who you are, and you’re trying to sell them 234 $1,000 products, you’re gonna have a hard time selling to cold traffic. I mean, you get some, the point is, is like there is a process here. And I think we’ve realized that, especially in competitive spaces like this biz op space, you know, the Make Money space, the self development space, constant lead gen is an absolute must. So you gotta have a good front end lead magnet, you gotta have something to be able to give away in exchange for a name and an email address. And then utilizing those audiences in your launches. This is a, this is a strategy for success.
Jeremy Weisz 27:39
Are you finding people are using YouTube ads in this scenario? To me, it seems like, Oh, you’re watching a video? And then you’re how does he? Where does he? Where do you find YouTube ads fallen?
Ralph Burns 27:51
I haven’t seen that. I mean, I know that there’s some people that have used YouTube ads for a webinar, lead gen. I haven’t seen common, it’s not as common. You know, we do a fair amount on YouTube. And a lot of that is boosting of content, or going straight to a potential offer, especially if it’s, you know, it’s in the multiple $100 range. But we’ve had a couple of customers that have added on to their Facebook spend for a webinar. And the scenario that we usually we use for YouTube and or for a webinar or when it comes to video itself is what’s the most important part of that webinar. What’s the big thing, what’s the big idea that’s easily implemented, is maybe a small chunk of the overall content that’s being presented on the webinar that can get them the quick win right now. And we use a video strategy called the teaching pitch, where we might start off with some kind of way in which to gather their attention, and then give them some little tip and then say, hey, if this was helpful for you, and you can visualize yourself actually use a lot utilizing this and getting the result that you’re looking for based upon whatever my product happens to be. I’ve got, you know, seven other things that I teach a lot of my students and I’m holding a free webinar next Tuesday, click the link in around this video to register. So we found that video is really, really effective, the cost per registration to webinar is typically higher, but because they’ve consumed a certain amount of content, the show rate is also higher. And then once again, when you’re using video on the front end, same as on YouTube, you can then retarget those audience to make sure they show up. We all know that the show rates for webinars not what they used to be way back in the day. So that’s really the key and then obviously tying that back in with a good email sequence. So getting them to show once you get the lead is as not, if not more important. Getting the lead itself because it’s relatively simple to get the lead. But you ultimately want them to get on that that webinar, consume the content and ultimately, hear the pitch at whatever point that time is. And then ultimately purchase, which is the next logical step.
Jeremy Weisz 30:14
Ralph, I’m one part of your site that I like. And I want to encourage people to check out tiereleven.com. And it’s TI, er, and then spelled out e l, e, v, e, n tiereleven.com. I love the manifesto pitch. Okay, so I encourage you to check it out. And one part that I like, you know, the the who’s who we like to work with whose people and the companies that we, you know, shy away from. One part I want to ask you about is one of the bullet says, customers who are not prepared to work with us, even though they think they are. So that’s you, what does that look like? They think they are but you’re identifying? No, you’re not really ready.
Ralph Burns 30:59
Yeah, it’s a, it could be a potential list of things. It the, the most glaring example of that is the one who comes to us and says, Okay, I’ve got this new product. And I just needed an agency to just get it out there. And you guys are gonna do all the magic. And all I’ve done is create the product and you guys take it from here, that raises a lot of red flags for me, unless it’s a current customer. And we do this all the time for customers like, Alright, you got a you’re gonna launch a new product. Yeah, y’all are no new products, that’s a whole different thing. If it’s to a completely different audience, there’s a conversation that goes on there. But if it’s an add on, or it’s slightly different, it’s in the same niche, no problem, we’ll certainly do that. And that’s part of our service. We don’t know who they are. I mean, in our team is pretty well, schooled on how to do this tactically, like, I typically will tell people like, Listen, guys, I don’t know who really you are. But unless you’re prepared to spend $30,000 a month for four months, probably about 120 grand to test and figure out or try and give them a big number to kind of scare him off. But like, unless you have that runway, we have no idea whether or not the world wants what you have. So what I would do instead, is get out your credit card, you know, we’ve got some training that we can we can give you for and you do it on your own, test it out for a couple of months, and then come back to us. If they’re really adamant about hiring an agency, we might reference it out to partners of ours that you work with, with maybe smaller budgets, that kind of thing. So because at the end of the day, it’s like that’s this formula that we found really doesn’t work. Now, the flip side to that is, so for example, we have customers coming on board, they, they do $25 million in direct mail, sales, like they have an offer that works. And they have runway, and they’re a mature business. But they have not been able to figure out Facebook, social, anything digital, and they’ve got a great business. That’s a very different conversation. And that’s one that we would engage in, but I would still give them the same answer is that we it’s going to take 60 to 90 to 120 days to really figure this out. So let’s talk about a budget, how we’re going to be able to do that, what our KPIs might look like, as we figure out this digital thing, but we’re gonna be pulling a lot from what you’re currently successful doing in the offline world, very different conversation. So somebody’s not ready to work with us is that you know, I’m a guy with an offer and all I need is an agency. That’s really not our thing.
Jeremy Weisz 34:00
Yeah, they’re missing a lot of key components. They haven’t proven it out and proven out, you can’t really scale it. So I totally get that. The I know, we have a little bit of time left, I wanted you to talk about, you know, running 100% virtual company. And some of the things that you do to maintain culture is you over 60 people, they’re all over on different continents, different countries. What are the some of the things you know, everyone can learn from you about helping culture when we’re all over the place in virtual?
Ralph Burns 34:32
Yeah, I think, you know, this is not something that I purposely went, I said, I’m gonna start a virtual company, and then that’s it. Now it’s a thing. But after the second time, I was fired. I had 20 years in the corporate world where I was running sales teams, and I ran the East Coast sales division for a fortune 500 company was doing great, you know, that was when they realized I was doing this moonlighting thing on the side, which I had my own blog. They fired me as a result of that. But anyway, that’s a whole other story. But my teens and the deer were, you know, hundreds of salespeople and multiple dozens of, of district sales managers, who all rolled up to me and I was running in essence of virtual sales team, I would go out into the field and visit with, you know, either a DSM, or maybe a sales rep and account executive, that would do stuff in the field. But the most of the time, I was sort of running things from either the office with a couple of days in the field in the middle of it, and I got kind of adept at
Jeremy Weisz 35:33
how to wrangle salespeople. That’s not an easy job.
Ralph Burns 35:36
Yeah, it was not an easy job, for sure. But it was one that I actually really enjoyed doing. Because I think it’s you know, as any business owner, you know, this, like selling is such an essential skill, and I didn’t learn how to do it in college, I had to go out and figure it out on my own. So there was a basis for a business there. And I never really felt that the office environment was all that important. Now there is value to it no matter what. But there’s pros and cons. There’s the commute, there’s the wasted time, there’s the boss, sort of looking over your shoulder. And I said, you know, if you can hire the right types of people who I just trust to do the job, at the end of the day, I was running sales teams, and it was all about doesn’t matter, I don’t really care how many hours you work, what I care about is that it’s the numbers at the end of the month, the quarter, your quota. All that was very much I managed by behaviors and actions. So much so that I realized that I wasn’t ever going to be somebody who said you need to be out in the field at eight and we’ll be back at home at five it like it just didn’t matter. So that type of mindset I brought to the company and I said, Well, if I hire the right types of people who have these five core characteristics that we now hire for inside Tier 11, one of which is drive, you know, sort of drive to succeed, then I realized that you can build an organization without having to have them physically check in with you. And it was all about, in our case, it’s all performance marketing, like the client can fire us in 45 days notice. So and at that point in time, I was paying basically everybody based upon our revenue, so they are highly incentivized to do the job as best as they possibly could. And what we found Jeremy and running a virtual organization is that once you get the right people in the right seats on the bus, so to speak, it’s not about getting them to work more, it’s actually putting benchmarks in place and guidelines in place for them to take time off. Because more people at Tier 11 I’ve seen suffered from burnout because they didn’t take the time off then they did because they were lazy or got we got rid of them because they weren’t doing their job it was everyone was over achieving. So I think if you trust people to do the right thing, and you hire the right types of people that fit within the tenets of your organization I think it’s a really good formula for success and we have a very good hiring process and like I said we we hire for five core characteristics and it’s it’s worked out really well for us.
Jeremy Weisz 38:23
Those four are drive what else?
Ralph Burns 38:27
Well, it’s really it’s a hunger his drive is humble, hungry, smart, precise, and gets shit done. Those are the five that we look at now. We just amended get shit done to the best rating now on iTunes but GSR D get there or G RST get the right shit done, as opposed to just working. But we noticed is that people who you don’t have to ask twice to get something like I asked once. Like, when can you get that to me by Oh, I can get that to you by Monday morning at 8am I set my little slack, you know, reminder if I need to. And sure enough, they typically will send it by Sunday at midnight. So the point is, is yeah, there is those five components right? They’re so humble, hungry, smart, smart is more emotional IQ. Okay, and then precision which is really important in our business, you got to be precise whether you’re writing ad copy or buying media, you’re a deaf person. And then last but not least is G RSD. So
Jeremy Weisz 39:32
Ralph I don’t know if you have to hop off I had one last question. You know, and I want to point people towards Tier 11 checkout Tiereleven.com Perpetual Traffic, the the podcast, they do amazing work there. So check everything out. A quick follow up on that is time off. Right. How do you bake in time off into the company for people?
Ralph Burns 39:56
Yeah, I mean, because we’re 100% virtual. We’re all independent contractors, and it’s the way that we’ve always done it with 20. I think it’s actually 27 countries now, our payroll would be an absolute nightmare plus with all the sort of local laws and everything else. So we we run this by our legal team every single year. And so we run things that way. And that’s the way that we’ve always done it. As far as time off, because it’s compulsory that everyone gets three weeks off, that’s 15 days. And we don’t say specifically holidays. But it’s written in to our agreements, and not necessarily our agreements. But it’s it’s written in our SOPs that you have to take this time off, and we we monitor it. And we actually have someone on staff who makes sure that people are taking time off and like people don’t get burned out. Because this is like it’s 24/7 with advertising. That’s our you know, the internet never sleeps, like kids used to say that the internet never sleeps, and neither does Dad. You know, now I sleep thankfully, because I have really good people, but I make sure that they sleep because that’s our biggest safeguard. So long as we’ve got those five key characteristics, or core values, whatever it is that you want to call it, like we make sure that people do take time off and are good for the good to themselves and take care of themselves. Because we’ve seen the downside of working too much. And in some cases you know, I’ve certainly seen it on my end and even in some cases for people who’ve worked in Tier 11 unless you put in those benchmarks as much as you possibly can. This business can really take a toll on you and we try to prevent that as much as we possibly can.
Jeremy Weisz 41:41
Everyone check out Tiereleven.com Perpetual Traffic podcast check out Rise25 Inspired Insider Ralph, thank you so much.
Ralph Burns 41:51
Thanks for having me.
