Jeremy Weisz 17:27
Before we hit record, Shamil, we were talking about business models. Yeah, it was interesting, your thoughts on looking at agencies and seeing successful agencies doing different types of things, whether it’s just doubling down and growing or software or talk about some of the in your mind, the business models as an agency owner that you think about.
Shamil Shamilov 17:52
I noticed so in the space, there’s a bunch of guys that just kind of run the way they run. They might grow a bit, they might shrink a bit, but they just kind of, it’s a paycheck for them. There’s not a lot of growth for change. I’m not counting those, right? There are other agencies that really pushing the gas pedal and are growing and scaling. You mentioned private equity, I was gonna say, in the first seven, eight years of me doing this right like there were two inquiries to buy us at the time, and we were a bigger agency, or a relatively big agency at the time. In the last four or five years, I’ve been approached half a dozen times, personally. So I feel that people are realized that that’s the market out there, and they try to really push the pace. And it’s easier to push the pace if you have a model that works right, like the paid search management, for example, or something where it’s like social media management, right?
You grow the portfolio, you hit the repeat button. And a lot of people try to scale that way, and it’s also what your personal preference, right? Like, do you want to grow an agency of 100 people? I never really had that desire. I wanted to have larger clients and more complex campaigns, but I didn’t want to have 100-plus clients or 100-plus, or 50-plus employees. We’re 20-strong right now. I enjoy the people I work with. I enjoy my clients and interactions with them. And we’re comfortable where we are, although we’re growing. And I see other agencies either pivot towards developing some sort of an app, right or web CIS, right application, the partner up with a client and theirs, and build something custom for them, and kind of grow that aspect of the business. Others, as I mentioned, scale and try to, kind of hit the high numbers and eventually maybe get bought out. Maybe not right.
So we are at that pivotal point where we’re thinking what to do. I was gonna say a huge, huge factor is the space. So, because we are, I would say, a turnkey digital marketing agency, right? Or we take care of more than one thing. We do content, SEO, paid search, web design, right? We kind of keep it at that. We’ve threw out a lot of the smaller side services, right? We don’t take them by themselves. We could add them on or use a partner to kind of provide that service to a client. But organic SEO, paid search, these are key for specific niches. As I mentioned, we are at a point where we’re just thinking kind of, what’s the next logical step for us? And I was going to say that the geography really matters. We’ve attended a number of conferences in the US were legal versus the Canadian market. And at one of them, there were seven of my competitors with booths, right?
These people were 15-20 years senior me, right. So you talk about 60-year-old guys who’ve been in the space for a long, long time, right? And I kind of looked at them, and the question right is, do you want to do the same thing 20 years down the road, right? What are you going to pivot niche, as I mentioned, and find your own? I don’t know.
Jeremy Weisz 21:39
Yeah, it was interesting. I had a friend of the podcast, Jordan Harbinger, who people can check out his podcast. Jordan Harbinger Show, he’s had Mark Cuban, he’s had Kobe Bryant, and he’s had Shaq. He’s got a bunch of cool guests. And he gets millions of dollars a month, but he started as a lawyer, and he tells a story that, just like what you’re saying trails like he looked around. He looked at some guy who’s working 80 hours a week, maybe he was in his late 60s. He’s like, I don’t, you know, I some people love that, right? And he was like, I cannot see myself doing that for that. He’s like, oh, my. It scared him a bit. And he was like, I needed to do something else. I don’t think I could do this for the next whatever number of years.
Shamil Shamilov 22:34
I have a lawyer friend who is very successful in private equity, and he’s a classically trained lawyer, but he did internship, or whatever, the article, he had a law firm. We had lunch the other week, and he told me, I realized I don’t want to do that. I don’t want it to be my life. So what I meant to say is that, like, if you want to grow and scale, I find it’s a lot more lucrative and easier to grow in the US, because the stigma, like, I’ll explain, like, even the home improvement or lawyers that we do have as clients in the US, they go from state to state to state, right? So it is very common for a law firm to have three or four offices, at least in various states. In Canada because geography in the population, that’s not the case, right? You’re either kind of staying in the Ontario, GTA area, right? Very, very few samples of having West Coast and East Coast exposure, right?
And I feel that once you cross the gap between Canada and US, I’m talking about just generically agency space that provide more than one service. If you’re only doing pavers, it doesn’t matter, you obviously attracting clients from the US. So I remember going to an LMA conference, lawyer, Marketing Association, this is during COVID, and I met a gentleman from Texas, and he was really cool, and he said something to me that he’s like, maybe it’s better to be a big fish in a small pond. And I disregarded it at the time, and we still kind of do work in the US, but I guess the plan at this point is to dominate the Canadian legal marketing field, at the very least, because I know my competitors who they are, and we want to grow in that direction, right?
And single home improvements, we work with some very large clients in Canada who are nationally recognized, and we do lead generation for them. So to kind of have that reputation as the go-to the key guy, right? I feel the geography in this case helps me, right? Could it be easier to scale if we were in the US, definitely, but at the same time, more, I guess, less competition, and tighter market, where everybody knows everybody.
Jeremy Weisz 24:57
I mean, so we talked about, obviously, there’s different agency growth models and ambitions. There’s also people going into apps or software, like the famous one. Obviously, MailChimp is a famous one that was an agency, and I don’t know how much they sold for in the billions, but really it spun out a MailChimp, a SaaS product out of it. Another one we were talking about was equity piece, right? And so I’d love to hear your thoughts on, I don’t know, really, all of the business models from Gary V right? Gary Vaynerchuk, if people have checked out his books, but I know at one point. I don’t know if he still is, but they were bringing on brands and using the agency as an engine to build those brands. And maybe they’ll keep them, maybe they’ll sell them. I don’t know what they’re going to do, but talk about the equity piece with companies, and your thoughts.
Shamil Shamilov 26:02
It has to be a good thing. Good fit. I feel like, you know, the company that brings on a marketing agency and essentially for equity piece, and I read Gary V’s books, right? It has to be a good fit and a good piece. Some of my vendors that I work with are living in Thailand, and these guys are like the SEO groups. They go to old SEO conferences, and one of them was in Toronto, actually, last month, and we went out for coffee, and he was telling me that, like, that’s the trend right now. That’s very hot, where a lot of the agencies partner up with brands, as he said, for equity. And he’s like, that’s the kind of, the new thing, that he’s seeing from his from where he is, a lot of the like, I think the biggest SEO conferences happens in the world, in Thailand.
And he invited me to come over and the guys like, Neil Patel, Backlinko, like, all those guys are there, and he was telling me that, like, it’s also Jeremy, what you want to do, it’s kind of like leverage, what you have, right? Like, the reason I love being somewhat hands on in my business is because I love the relationships, right? I’m meeting. The reason we stick to small to medium business is that I have direct access to decision-makers, and I really enjoy that. We have larger clients where I’m talking to marketing managers, and they’re great people, and I enjoy that too, but as you know, it’s purely business, as opposed to a relationship and a connection and ability to kind of go for stake with the CEO or big offer, like a managing partner. So my point about, I’ve seen some agencies develop a product and sell B2B, right? So they’ll develop like a content piece, and they’ll provide content writing services to other agencies, right?
You have to leverage your strength. If you have a back office in Thailand or Southeast Asia, right, and you manage to build a network of link-building whatever websites, right? You have relatively access to cheap, educated labor. Maybe that’s the way for you to scale up, right? Because you kind of leverage your strength, your back office in Thailand, for example, to each his own right, like I’m on the forefront here, right, dealing directly with clients building I believe, good service, good product for them. So I think the next logical continuation is going to be something in the mix of equity, as you mentioned, but something where I enjoy it as well. I don’t want to be the guy behind the scenes, kind of like, developing a brand, I enjoy the people aspect of it a lot.
Jeremy Weisz 29:05
Yeah, I just had Andrew Morgan on the podcast from Marknology, and he they specialize in Amazon businesses, right? And doing marketing in Amazon. And he was telling me, there’s one brand. And, like you said, maybe it was just a fit. He was talking about how he had, he was working with them, and he took an equity stake in it, and then they sold the company, because he was kind of the growth engine, helping with the growth engine behind that. So for that one, it worked out. For maybe others, it wouldn’t work out. So it’s an interesting model to think about. And I don’t know, he didn’t show the details if maybe they were paying him a small. We were talking before he hit record. There’s options of like, maybe they’re paying him a smaller amount than they would have, right? And he gets equity. And obviously there’s cases where maybe they don’t pay at all, and then everything in between. So it doesn’t have to be just like a one-size-fits-all, I imagine too.
Shamil Shamilov 30:04
I agree with you, and it’s also your strength that, if you think about it, our clients, like I have friends at all agencies that focus on e-commerce, right? I always say that we’re more B2C services, whether it’s home improvement service, legal service, obviously different caliber. If you’re selling on Amazon or if you’re doing e-commerce, right, it’s a lot more transactional, a lot more I guess same aspects, right? But you’re selling product, you want to sell more. You want to optimize your cost per acquisition of a sale. And I feel that that model that you talk about, about the equity, we kind of mentioned it before that, if you own 51% and I’m a big proponent of Cody Sanchez, he’s like a YouTuber personality, former private equity, right?
That her whole spiel is, there’s a lot of smaller businesses retiring, and nobody to replace them, and relatively easy to scale them. So that’s the direction I’m looking at, right? And the dilemma that you and I were talking about before is that, if you own the majority of it, and we’re considering something like that, you would need to operate that business. So now I don’t know much of an interest I have managing a plumbing company, but if you have a revenue share right where they bring you on as an agency.
Jeremy Weisz 31:32
There’s nothing that will create a faster call in our house if the toilet is clogged. So maybe it’s good.
Shamil Shamilov 31:40
That’s what I’m saying. And in those type of businesses, the necessity businesses, right, like plumbing, electrical work, roofing, right? Like they’re the ones that are going to be in AI, it’s not going to affect them much. Neither is ChatGPT, because you still need somebody to come over and fix it.
Jeremy Weisz 31:58
ChatGPT, fix my toilet. That’s exactly, exactly. Maybe they’ll ask it, how to fix it, and then I would probably break it even more. But, yeah, that’s another thing.
Shamil Shamilov 32:07
Yeah, I’m saying, at the end of the day, those businesses are going to be around and, you know, partnering up with, like, a service-based, like, on an equity level, that’s something that, you know, we’re considering,
Jeremy Weisz 32:20
Talk about, I know you’ve been in this game a while, some of your favorite software tools or resources that you like and you use to run your business.
Shamil Shamilov 32:30
You need a good project management tool. You need a good CRM. Because we have relatively low turnover of clients, we don’t heavily use it, but we’re with HubSpot for the project management. I feel that onboarding new staff is key, right? There’s some fancier pm project management tools out there. We use Trello, right? We kind of stuck with it. We’ve experimented with Monday.com, but Trello WordPress, there’s a ton of tools for SEO analytics, and some come out every day, right? Some are cheaper than others. We use both Ahrefs and SEMrush. I guess SEMrush more than Ahrefs, for sake of presentation and user experience. We use Ahrefs for a link analysis more heavily, local for Google My Business Listings and optimization. You know what I find?
There are a lot of softwares do one little thing, right, and they might be cheaper, and people always, I’m sure you see it on your feed, in Instagram or whatever Facebook, where people like hey, say no to Ahrefs 10 times cheaper, right? But you find that it’s all glitchy, and I find that sometimes it’s better to pay more to use something reliable, call it a day and optimize its use, as opposed to always try to find the new best thing that would be $100 cheaper a month. And there’s so many of them coming out. Time is of the essence. And AI, ChatGPT, kind of like you could literally ask it for old softwares. How are you going to test them up? You’re going to read reviews, right? Those reviews might be biased, so you have to physically use all, Reddit helps and more helps. And first, then using those tools also help. We use a lot of what converts. We’ll call tracking one, tracking conversion optimization, when we run our paid campaigns. We’re also use call rail some of our clients, but prefer kind of what converts. Other than that, I mean, there are certain plugins and softwares, in addition to websites that we advocate for, for each of the niches we work with.
There’s a hot little thing called in-taker or legal field, right? It’s like a little video chat that pops up with the face of the lawyer, right? How can I help you? Right? Then, they’re like prerecorded messages that we do into a funnel. They’re very hot, they’ve been kind of like going through a lot of we see more and more wealth and use them, but then they’re pretty expensive, and some people say they don’t really work, right? So I let the client, and we kind of give them options, and if they feel it puts an issue in the firm. You provide options for them to solve, right? But you got to understand that different businesses have different business models of how they operate.
Jeremy Weisz 33:36
Shamil, I love that. Actually, I’m gonna look at Intake here. There’s an interview I did with Delphi. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen delphi.ai, and it lets you. So I had the founder on, but I interviewed his AI version, just me and his AI version, video version. It’s fascinating that I’m I put on the end of it, the actual, like, shorter interview with the person, but I’m sure me, I’m wondering if people use that in the law firm space, but it’s fascinating. I literally had, like, a regular interview with this AI version.
Shamil Shamilov 35:49
How realistic was it?
Jeremy Weisz 35:55
It was pretty phenomenal actually.
Shamil Shamilov 36:07
I’ve been asking for the link because there’s type nine form, right? Like the type form. That’s a software they developed a product called video apps.
Jeremy Weisz 36:46
Oh yeah, I’ve used that. Yep.
Shamil Shamilov 36:48
I’ve used it too. I’ve installed it on some clients. And then I have clients that are just like, too shy to be on camera. And I’m not going to remember off the top of my head, but you’ve seen them. They’re like, video AI-generated avatars that say what you want them to say, I forget the name of the software right now. And we’ve used that too successfully, right? But I feel like, again, the more people use it, the more people realize it is AI so if I know what you look like, right? It’s like, I could be like, I see that that person is not necessarily you.
Jeremy Weisz 37:21
And by the way, it was, it wasn’t meant to fool, like, that particular one wasn’t meant to be, like, I’m actually interviewing the person I said, this is the person’s AI video clone the, you know what I mean, like, that’s what it’s meant to be.
Shamil Shamilov 37:37
It’s getting better and better, I’ve seen chat conversations that are very authentic. Recently, a lawyer, and I’m not going to obviously name the firm, but I love the drive for innovation. But somebody pitched them to have, like, an automated AI receptionist, and these guys do litigation, and some of the partners jumped on the idea, right? And then, like me and the office manager kind of put a stop to it, because you could tell it was AI. And I said, listen, if you were, as you said, fixing toilets, right, or customer support for an appliance repair store, right? But you’re doing complicated manners, highly intelligent and capable people, that would definitely be a turn-off in ruin our conversion.
I would love to have this conversation in five years. I feel that even having an auto responder who can have a conversation on the phone will become indistinguishable from a real person, and would kind of improve the conversion for many, many websites, because, believe it or not, we still have clients who don’t have a protocol of properly answering phone getting back to the client. Very old school.
Jeremy Weisz 38:46
When that comes out, I’ll share with you. You’ll let me know what you think. I just want to be the first one to thank you. Everyone check out dnovogroup.com to learn more and more episodes of the podcast, and we’ll see everyone next time. Shamil, thanks so much.
Shamil Shamilov 39:02
Thank you Jeremy for having me. Cheers.
