We Send 100,000 LinkedIn DMs a Month (Here's What Works) | Niall Ratcliffe | #37

Speaker A: You're set to do over a million pounds in revenue from LinkedIn alone this year.

Speaker B: I saw the opportunity on LinkedIn and I capitalized on it. It's the biggest open database of working people on the planet.

Speaker A: I'm interested to know how you got into LinkedIn in the first place and starting an agency around it as well.

Speaker B: When I was 19, I got this really unusual opportunity to go and work in a startup in London. I was watching him raise money in his LinkedIn DMs and he raised eight figures through LinkedIn and he offered me my full time salary trip to run his LinkedIn. Within 11 days we'd hit a six figure run rate. It was a complete shit show. Like we never took a pound out for the first 18 months.

Speaker A: What's your data on, um, sending a connection request with a message versus without?

Speaker B: 30 to 40% is the benchmark for no message and then with a message is like 5 to 10%. Like the maths just don't add up. To send it with a message, how

Speaker A: do people stand out? How do they grow a brand?

Speaker B: The only thing you should share if you're looking for awareness, is two things. The objective of all marketing is just to start conversations. There's never been a better time to run a small marketing agency. Everyone above you is dying and not willing to admit it.

Speaker A: Niall, welcome to agency giants.

Speaker B: Thanks for having me. I'm super excited to do this.

Speaker A: So you're set to do over a million pounds in revenue from LinkedIn alone this year. What's driving that growth on the platform?

Speaker B: You know, my about section on LinkedIn says like, I'm a very ordinary guy with a very fast growing business because of two reasons and it's uh, one, I saw the opportunity on LinkedIn and two, I capitalized on it. Um, and that's exactly why we're doing so well with driving that amount of sales, um, on LinkedIn. Um, there's a massive misunderstanding of what the platform is. Um, people are fundamentally just mistaking LinkedIn for a TikTok and Instagram, like the B2B of social media. And that is not what LinkedIn is at all. And all we are doing is capitalizing on that gap of the missing information that other people are seeing LinkedIn as and people just aren't even seeing the opportunity, uh, and that we've been able to capitalize on.

Speaker A: What do you think people see LinkedIn as versus how you see it?

Speaker B: So people see it as a social media platform, right? So if you look at LinkedIn, naturally you associate it with like an Instagram or Facebook, you see comments, likes, reposts. But when you look at how the platform is built from like a business level, on LinkedIn side, they built it as a networking platform. So originally it was built as a Rolodex so you could go to a networking event. Um, you would connect with people that you met there and you had this big list of contacts. And because of that fundamental how the platform was built, it's the biggest open database of working people on the planet. So while there is a social media element to it, the benefit is not the social media element. The benefit is how it's set up as a networking platform. It's built to help you have conversations with other people. So the stats are something like the average salary of someone on LinkedIn is $75,000. Something like 10 million C suite execs, 75 million decision makers and like though. And the platform is built to help me connect with them. There's no other platform on the planet where I could just message the CMO of Aldi Matalan. What other? Like, uh, I wouldn't get in touch with probably the CMO of Amazon, but they're all available on the platform. And that is the massive benefit of LinkedIn, how it's built to help you get in touch with them, not the fact that I can post and get 20,000 impressions.

Speaker A: Interesting. I want to um, unpack your strategy and just general philosophy around LinkedIn, but we'll hold it for now. I'm interested to know how you got into LinkedIn in the first place. And of course then starting an agency around it as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, so when I was 19, I got this like really unusual opportunity to go and work in a startup in London. And I say it was unusual because it was personal branding agency. And at the time, like personal branding wasn't a thing. Like over the last like five years, it's exploded. At the time personal branding was like more pr. So I was employee number three there. And because there were no personal branding agencies, we were working with like some of the top people in London. So like famous podcasters, athletes, billion dollar CEOs. Um, it was a small agency and when you're at a small agency, they give you a lot of responsibility. So at 19, with like very little marketing experience, I was um, the personal brand manager for these massive names. And there was two incidents which really uh, woke me up to LinkedIn. The first one, there was a guy who had a music startup that was raising money and I was watching him raise money in his LinkedIn DMs. Um, and he raised eight figures through LinkedIn. He was like, what's your check size? You're writing? He was sending them the deck, just DMing back and forth with PE firms, investors and, and then they were like, okay, magic, let's hop on a call. This looks good. And the next minute I'd get a text from M WhatsApp. These person just closed the round. Can we do an announcement of it? Like this people just raised so just invested. Can m we do an announcement on it? And that was crazy. And the other one, we had this coaching client who had a podcast and at the time we were doing everything, full personal branding suite. We had Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, pr. We were getting them on podcasts. It was like full range. And we did LinkedIn. But that was like a side piece of the agency. It was like we're just doing a little bit of LinkedIn and this coach in particular was just signing like 10 figure contract. So 10 figure, 10,000 pound a month contracts in his DMs. It was just like. And I was watching the messages at 19 and at the time I had very little money to my name and I was like, everyone is talking about TikTok, YouTube, all these platforms where you can go viral and then there's this weird job site to the side and that's why everyone seems to be making the easiest money. And that was my um, first opportunity that I saw. And the second thing was about nine months into that role I had a CEO reach out to me and I was posting on the platform, maybe had 2,000 followers and he offered me my full time salary to run his LinkedIn. And I, I remember when I was that age I was like, if I could just earn £30,000 a year, like I would have made it. Like that's amazing. And he offered me over that, just run his own LinkedIn. I was like, why is he doing that? Like I couldn't understand it. And that's when I realized like the reason he's doing it is because there's an opportunity there. Um, and that's when we kind of grabbed onto that with both hands, started the agency and um, within 11 days we'd hit a six figure run rate.

Speaker A: Wow, that's awesome. 11 days.

Speaker B: Yes, we posted and um, I have the post. It's really funny, I mean like a puma top. I've got like a, I haven't cut my hair, I look a mess. And I literally posted something like today's my first day going freelance and I call it freelance at the time because I didn't want to say I started a business because like, that wasn't a thing. I didn't want to be like, I'm not a business owner, I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing. It was like, it's my first day being a freelancer. I'm thinking I'm going to run people's LinkedIn accounts. Not like, not sure. That was virtually the post. And off that post we'd already hit a six figure run rate. So we're doing over 10 grand a month within 11 days. Me posting that, um, and it was just like a really clear example of like a bit of luck and a bit of action taken and we fell upon a really nice opportunity.

Speaker A: How did that original service look like for those initial clients and how has that evolved today?

Speaker B: Yeah, so the original service was, um. And by the. I think it's really important to say that we hit six figure run rate and everyone's. Some people are like, especially if you've not run a business, they're like, wow, that's amazing. It was a complete shit show. Like, no one wants to. Like, I had no idea. Like no business bank account, didn't know what an accountant did or was like, didn't know how to hire. Like, it was terrible. Our first six months were like horrific. So much so that we never took a pound out for the first 18 months because we were so scared of taking money. Like there was this Monzo account, um, which was terrible at the time anyway. And like it was just stacking up on me and my brother who started the business with me. We were like, we just don't want to touch it. Because we were like, I have no idea what we're doing. Let's just like leave that there. Um, the original service though was very much content focused. So obviously, uh, I was starting to perform better and better on the platform. I was gaining followers still only like sub 10k, which I think is important to reference. Um, and we were literally just taking general, like a founder, CEO, maybe an exec team and, and just sharing content for them. Um, and at the time that's all you needed to do on LinkedIn. I think there's something interesting happening now where a lot of the gurus on LinkedIn are still saying to use those same tactics, but we can get into how the supply and demand equation shifted on LinkedIn. But back then all I did and for the first two years of the business was post content, get leads, close those leads, post more content. And that's all we did for clients was just post content. They'd get leads, they close them with, we'd post more content. And it was a no brainer at the time. But LinkedIn's changed dramatically since then.

Speaker A: Interesting. How is that? Uh, actually no, I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of how this has changed and what we're going to do about it, because there's so much for us to go down there, um, in order to. Yeah, okay, let's park that. As far as you getting those initial clients, presumably that one post didn't build the entire momentum of the whole agency. Did you then have to Outbound on LinkedIn to get new business? What was the client acquisition strategy?

Speaker B: Yes, literally for the first, I'd say 18 months to two years of the business, we'd never sent one outbound message. So at the time it was literally just all content. Um, and all you had to do on the early days of LinkedIn was just post. And the reason was there's this massive supply and demand equation. So LinkedIn was growing rapidly. The platform, I think it was like 300 million active users and only 1% of those posted. And still everyone uses that stat, like 1% of posts. So if you think of it from just simple supply and demand, there's a massive demand for content and then there's only really small percentage seeing it. So you had this interesting uh, flip where I could have 2000 followers, but if I was posting content, LinkedIn had to share it to more people because it had to fill their feeds, they had to fill it with some content. So I'd have 2,000 followers, but I get 20,000 impressions a post. There's a beautiful supply and demand equation. And not to already get into it, but like over the last three or four years everyone's seen that opportunity. I was listening to the pod you did with Lauren and she was like pushing you to post on, on LinkedIn as well. But everyone also had that same inkling over the last kind of five years. So. So there's a couple of different things that happened. The first one was people saw it. So if you're posting on Twitter and YouTube and you see like uh, a Lara get from 0 to like 100k in six months, you're like, oh, I'm gonna go post there. There's a massive influx of new content being posted on the platform. Then AI and ChatGPT exploded and next minute it was like, anyone can now post content very, very easily. So the supply and demand equation changed where there's still, um, a big gap between active users and active posters, but it is much, much smaller. In fact, it's jumped from Shield analytics released, but it went from about 1% posting to about 5%. That's a 4% jump, which seems like nothing, but it's actually more like 20 million people posting a day extra. Which means the supply and demand equation is very much changed. And now while content, there's still potential for content to get a lot of views. It's not the same as it used to be. In fact, you're now, they don't need to share your posts to this thousands and thousands of people because they have so much content to distribute. Shield analytics also release that the average amount of impressions you'll get on LinkedIn, you have 10,000 followers, about 734 impressions per post. If you think about that flip, when I launched the business, I, uh, had 2,000 followers, would get 20,000 impressions a post. Now if you have 10,000 followers, you'll get under a thousand impressions a post on average. And that's benchmarked across like a billion posts that went through that platform.

Speaker A: That's so interesting. You know, screw it, we're going to get into, yeah, let's just do this. We'll get into the business afterwards. Screw the rules. Okay, so you saw the interview of Lara. Lots of lot. And I've had other LinkedIn creators I've spoken to over the years, LinkedIn agencies and experts and gurus and so on, and everyone's always like, post, post, post, post, post. Um, I myself personally got a lot of resistance to. I used to love LinkedIn was amazing. Uh, for me, it's sort of my sales career. I actually did get hold of the CEO of Universal Studios, but in Middle east, and then flew me out to Middle east. And I did this publication for this job that I was working on back then. So I'm a huge advocate for being able to get hold of great execs on and used to use the platform a lot in my business career. Now being so Busy running the YouTube channel, having success there, I haven't been able to translate that success over to uh, LinkedIn. So I've felt resistance in putting in the time and so on. So you do what everyone does and get a copywriter and you get them to write posts and so on. And they're using a little bit of AI now to make life easier. And I'm getting 10 likes a post feeling super demoralized, thinking, why am I doing this? So, um, you must have looked at my LinkedIn, maybe beforehand. Did you have a little look?

Speaker B: Yeah, I've had it before. For you, yeah.

Speaker A: What do you think? Uh, the mistakes that people making, like now, now that algorithm has shifted. Like, you know, I'm posting, I'm aware of content, but maybe it's just the fact that it's too generic. Like, how do people stand out? How do they grow a brand?

Speaker B: That's a really good question. Um, so the first thing you have to understand is that the content on LinkedIn, the fundamental benefit of it isn't to get impressions, right? So, like, we know on TikTok we can get more impressions on YouTube, if you put out good content, you'll get dramatically more impressions than you can get on LinkedIn. So that's great. Um, you know, why would you post on TikTok? Reach is available, but that's not the same reason you could post on LinkedIn. That was the confusion. People came to LinkedIn and was like, I'm posting on LinkedIn for impressions. It's like, no, I don't care if my post gets 2000 impressions because the average person who sees it earn 75k a year and it's more than likely a decision maker. So, like, my impressions have dropped off. I did something like 30 million impressions in 2025, 2024 this year, I'll do about 2 million. Looking at that, you'd be like, this is an absolute failure. But like we said, we're doing a million in sales this year on LinkedIn. The initial benefit of it is, um, you have to understand this. It's not impressions, it's like the quality of people we're doing and we can get into like, how you can add those to your network as well. That's like the fundamental thing you have to understand is like, I am not posting on LinkedIn for the reach. Like, that is a lie sold to us by gurus who, um. And let me be. I love Laura, by the way. I'm good friends with Laura. And, um, gurus who are telling you to post aren't lying and there still is a benefit there and you can still go viral. The issue is, for 95% of people, they're never going to achieve 10,000 followers on LinkedIn anymore. It's very, very tough. Um, so that's why it's a flawed concept. And to start thinking that's the objective versus, like, understanding. If I want followers and impressions, go to TikTok, go to a high reach platform. If I want high value people, I'm going to go to LinkedIn. And the reason so many gurus just tell you to just post and you'll go viral, because that's what happened to them. I went from 0 to 60k followers. I went from 0 to 10 over 2 years. I went from 10 to 60 in about 7 months. Just posting, nothing special. Um, so what content should you be posting? For me there's two types of content that I post. Um, the first one is awareness content. So I'm good friends with Ash Jones who runs Great Influence and he's probably one of the best minds in the UK when it comes to personal branding. Runs Gary Neville's personal brand, um, Sasha Lord's. What was Stephen Bartlett on the come up? Um, and I was talking to him recently about like AI and like content being generic and he said the only thing you should share if you're looking for awareness is two things he said, um, uh, personal experience and unique perspectives. And the reason that is is because that's the things that only they can share. And ironically someone doing it better than anyone right now is Bartlett. So if you look at Bartlett's LinkedIn, he's sharing a lot of content around. For example, he'll pull the data from Diary CEO and explain the data he has and what he's seeing from it. No one else can replicate that type of content because it's like it's his data. It's like one thing that I shared recently was how my LinkedIn articles are getting more impressions in my videos. It's a much more simplified version but no one else can share that. Before uh, the podcast you were talking uh, to me about decisions you'd made around uh, the agency and where it was going to be located. That's something that only you can share on LinkedIn because no one else can share that. That's your personal experience. And the other thing is unique perspectives. You'll have unique perspectives on um, how to do marketing. AI we talked about before Claude Code like these are unique perspectives that only you have because you've experienced that and that's why they're interesting. That's awareness content if you want to get um, viewed by the right people. The other type of content that we do a lot of now is phishing content. So with the rise of AI you're able to use AI agents very, very easily, like non technical to scrape the engagement of any LinkedIn posts on the platform. And we're actually doing it to steal our competitors leads which we can get into down the line as well. Um, so phishing content, if I can scrape the engagement of anyone who engages on my content. It's really important I put out the right type of content. If I did a post on me coming to do podcast in London, that's great. But if I scrape that, I can't reach out to them because none of them are leads. Like they're just curious about me. If I do a post on how we did LinkedIn outreach for an engineering firm that might get 75 likes, but I can go through that, uh, and that's a clear intent Signal that all 75 of those are curious about LinkedIn for, uh, uh, engineering firms. So I know I have 75 leads to reach out to in general for my fishing content. I get about 1500-2000 engagements that get filtered through clay and become leads for our sales team. Like that alone. And by the way, is zero paid spend, completely organic. Like with paid ads would cost a bottom probably 5,6k a month, I'm guessing. And that's just fully organic for me putting out content. So when I'm looking at fishing content, I'm trying to be in the niche direct to our ICP and really keep it high value, high utility. So as useful as possible I can make it. But the most important thing is it's on the topic of the people that I want to talk to. So all the people that engage with it are the ones that we can then sell to. Lur down.

Speaker A: Nice. Love that. I want to get into the GTM piece, but on the note of building the brand itself. How do you feel about if it is harder to get the reach at the moment and it isn't about the reach and it's about the impressions. How do people gain momentum on the platform? If you know you're getting a couple of likes, a post like you're not getting much engagement is. Do you think social proof is important on a platform like LinkedIn or.

Speaker B: It's a really good question. There's a few things you can do that are really, really key. So Stanford did this um, study with recruiters, I think it was in 2018. Um, and they studied how long people stay on people's profiles with eye tracking study. And you mentioned case studies M and proof. And I want to start with the profile. So on the first thing you have to do on LinkedIn is like positioning if you want to like a lot of people think that content's the issue for getting all likes and generally speaking it's positioning. And that all starts with like the profile and how you're setting yourself up. So Stanford did this study with eye tracking and they found that, um, people make a decision on you, an opinion on you, with being on your profile for 3.2 seconds and then they, um, judge whether they want to go further down and read your content in about 30 seconds. So, you know, when you get someone on your profile, you have about 3.2 seconds to convince them that you're an authority and then you have 30 seconds to convince them to do something else across platform, go to your website, whatever else. And that 3.2 seconds is what we focus on a lot. If my content was not getting engagement, the first thing I would focus on is like, how can I just signal that I'm an authority in 3.2 seconds? The easiest ways, professional headshot, professional banner. Um, when I say professional headshot, you can take it with an iPhone. Just make sure the light is half decent. Stand outside, don't have a holiday photo where you've got like a bee and your missus in the background. Um, professionally written headline. Like nowadays you can do it with a ChatGPT or Claude, but just like have something that shows authority, have that proof and credibility in there because, um, people really underestimate the impact of that setup positioning wise on the content. For example, why would anyone read my content? Well, if you look at my, as I appear on the feed, my headshots professional and um, my headline says, UK's number one LinkedIn agency within two seconds. You know, like, generally speaking, he probably knows what he's doing. If I just had like Nar Ratcliffe, it was me in a selfie, see me on the feed. It's like I've already registered that this person isn't worth listening to before I've even read the post. Um, so that's probably where I'd start, just on the positioning element. Nice.

Speaker A: Ah, visual elements as well. Do you think that's important? People say about putting in carousels and so on and so forth. A lot of high effort for people just starting out.

Speaker B: Or I think overrated. Overrated. Um, it'd be like me telling you to go on TikTok and like start, like pay for an editor, pay for a videographer. It's like, why don't you just test proof of concept? And like, people go viral on TikTok and it's just like they hold the phone. No one's. No editing, no cuts. It's just like that. And, and it's the same with LinkedIn. If your content's genuinely good and useful. Um, there's some guys from Shake Content who are a LinkedIn agency in London and one of their founders posts like, no images, just text. And he flies all the time. It's like, why his content's good. Like, if your content's good, like full stop. If you're trying to game it with a carousel, and I've been there, I've put out my fair share of carousels in my time. If you're trying to game it, generally speaking, it's a signal that you're probably not putting stuff out there useful enough or unique enough.

Speaker A: So presumably you're writing content for clients, so you're pulling that piece off. Well, I'm evidently failing at that pace at the moment. Um, what is your process for taking these? And this is a personal roadblock of mine is taking the ideas that the founder has, that the company has, that the brand has, and distilling them into posts. Like, how are you doing taking that? How are you feeding it? Are you having a weekly meeting and creating a massive library to start off with? Like, what is that?

Speaker B: Really, really simple? Um, so I'll be honest as well. When we first started, we'd spend a lot more time on this process. Um, so when we first started the agency, we'd do like three one hour calls with clients. One would be like, um, a positioning call and like how they want to come across all that type of thing. Then do an onboarding call where they told us the whole life story for like an hour and a half and we digest it all. Um, get the notes and then we do one more call where we did like strategy and agreed with them. Um, and while that's fantastic, when you're trying to build like a massive personal brand, um, which a lot of it was like originally people came to us for. Now it's like you actually don't need. That's not essential. Um, so the way we do it is really, really simple. We do a 45 minute to an hour call with each person we're writing for. Generally speaking, we'll take on four or five profiles which we get into why that's important anyway, down the line, um, 45 minutes understanding of what your perspective on things. Um, like what do you want to talk about, what's off limits and that's it. And the rest of it we're like reverse engineering from the audience, which I think is underrated. And that means what we're doing is like taking a deep understanding of who are they going after and what are the problems that they're having. And then we're just taking the unique perspectives we got from the call and just applying them to that. So let me give you an example. Let's say I'm working with uh, a, ah, freight forwarding, uh, firm that's one of our clients at the minute and they help uh, transatlantic, um, uh, forwarding of freight. It's a really basic like traditional business. Like we want to say, okay, what are all things that are wrong with the industry on our call? What are your unique perspectives on it? What might you say that your competitors wouldn't say? And then we're just sitting down and being like, what are all the issues that their current audience is having? Okay, it's a timeline issue, it's a risk issue. They don't want to switch from their current agency and we're saying, okay, they don't want to switch. But actually he's at a unique perspective that there's a stat that when you switch from your freight forwarding agency currently it dramatically increases the efficiency. Okay, great. There's a portal piecing together. So we're starting with unique perspectives and then we're just reverse engineering from what the audience wants to hear, what the problems are dealing with. Um, and that's like a minimum standard that everyone can start with as well.

Speaker A: Nice. What do you think are some of the biggest mistakes and therefore highest leverage things that people can do to use AI to help writing the content but actually avoid it being AI based content and therefore driver on the news?

Speaker B: Yeah, um, I think it's place they start from. Right. So like I can write a post with Clay, sorry, Clay Claude or Chat bt. If it starts from like a unique thought process or perspective I've had, it's almost like the foundational starting point. So for example, if I go to Claude now on my phone was like, give me 10 LinkedIn post ideas. Like you're naturally starting from like a flawed beginning. What you actually want to do is start from, okay, what are 10 ideas that I can share that are really unique? I can write on the blips of the post, I can put that in Claude and get Claude to write it. And that's a very, very different flip of like actually it's still a unique idea. Claude's just written it and formatted it. And by the way, there's like zero value in a human doing that nowadays. There's a very marginal gap between what a human can write and what Claude can write for that. And I'm saying that as someone who employs content writers who are the top standard, um, the minimal gap, the actual real value is in like fundamental step of what's, what's the idea? Um, I think that's where people go wrong is like they probably outsource that rather than the other thing. That's why I think, you know, Lara's tool, Clio, not to do. But a placement here, um, is really useful for that because it starts with like they can do the. Right. The AI does the writing element. But actually like you have to still input your ideas. It's not taking the ideation away from you, just taking the copywriting which is already been quantitized.

Speaker A: Yeah. Nice. And kind of already thinking as you've been talking about this, it's really a good place for people to start, is probably just extracting the data that they've got. We host 5,700 coaching calls a year, 600 group calls. There's so much data and information in there about the audience and those are

Speaker B: things that you can say that I can't say.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So it's just like an instant differentiation. And the things that I can say that you can say, like I said about my content or the data we have on LinkedIn, but like I can't talk about the lessons you've got on coaching calls.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You mentioned that LinkedIn's like a networking platform first and foremost. That's how it was built. So you've got, you kind of got the content piece, but then how are you, how are you introducing the networking side of it and building through that?

Speaker B: Yeah. So, um, we say that LinkedIn, any LinkedIn strategy is a LinkedIn pyramid. So the fundamental level of positioning. So we talked about that a little bit, getting your profile right, how you positioned across company pages and exec teams. Layer two is content. So just distributing content, generally speaking, the best way to do it is across four or five execs. Um, just because you have this like, um, omniscient feeling that you're everywhere, um, on the platform. Then you have outreach layer three and then ads layer four for 90, probably 5%, especially agencies, but businesses. You don't need to touch ads on LinkedIn unless you have like 10k a month to spend. Um, or to burn is the better way I'd put it. Like if you're happy to burn 10k, it doesn't work every month. That's great. You should. You probably stay where you can do ads or you need to do such a scale that you have to ads. So you're like Intel, Amazon. It's like it wasn't make sense. Like they can't do the scale and outreach that they could do with ads. So other than that, you should touch the first three layers. Um, and to be clear, we right now do no internal ads. Like the million sales we do for LinkedIn is through the content and the outreach. And I say that to show you that like, you don't need to touch ads to generate a large, um, amount of revenue and sales through the platform. So where it ties in. So you mentioned like your content you weren't happy with. Right now I think if I, uh, I can't do this, but if I could just remove the likes and impressions number from your content, I think you'd fundamentally flip why you're putting out content on LinkedIn and you start to realize like, okay, these are high value buyers. I need to put out content for the high value buyers. I'm going to completely forget about the impressions. The next thing is, well, I've got not enough high value buyers in my network and the content's not reaching them, so I'm not expanding my audience. And it's like LinkedIn is the only platform that I'm aware of on the planet where I can add my audience to my network. Literally. Um, on the simplest level, you could just be like, this is my target audience. I'm going to put out content for them and I'm going to set up an automated campaign just to add them to my network. So every week I have 40 more of my ICP who are going to see my content. And then you no longer need to have this expansive compounding effect of like, on YouTube, you need to get views to get more people into the network, to get more views, to get more clients. LinkedIn, it's like I can just literally add them. Like if that was added as a feature on YouTube, like, it'd be like, and they charged you 1,000 pound a month. Everyone on the planet would pay for it. And LinkedIn is free. Like I can just set it up like free of charge. Uh, well, minus automation software, which is like hundreds of pounds, not thousands. Um, so how do you type both together? Is like, the first thing I would do is like, I'm putting out content for a specific icp. I would start doing like simple outreach campaigns. Just add them to my network on the basic level and then you're starting conversations with them. So people who don't understand it. There's three ways you can start a conversation on LinkedIn. You can send a connection request with a message so I can say, hi, Jordan, I'm now would love to add you to my network. Et cetera, start the conversation. Once they're connected, you can send a natural dm, so I can just reach out like a message. And then you have inmails and technically you have conversation ads, but we'll forget the ads and you can automate all three of those. So literally, um, right now for like, majority of our clients, we'll have 2k plus prospects a month that we'll add to each person's network and starting a conversation with them. And like, um, I have this story I like to tell of, um, about a year ago we worked with the former CEO of Pandora. He's called Jeremy Schwartz, and he's one of the best CVs of anyone I've ever met. He worked at, uh, CEO of Pandora, brand marketing director at L' Oreal Sainsbury's, um, incredible CV. And on our first call I was like, this guy's got way more experience than me. So I actually jumped on. I don't use to do onboarding calls. I'm going to ask him some questions, just like, selfishly. So I asked him, like, when you went to Pandora, it was a turnaround job. So when he went in to see on Pandora, it was like on the slide. And they brought him in to kind of turn things around, marketing, um, background. They thought it'd be helpful. So I said, what was the first thing you did when uh, you went to work at Pandora? And I thought he would say, like, pumped money into ads or like, did these brand activations. And he was like, I literally went to my Instagram, said, I went to hashtag Pandora. I found people who posted about Pandora more than once and it was like, I reached out to them to ask them, like, what products are you interested in? What would you like to see more of? And I was like, why would you do that? And he was like, fundamentally, all marketing starts and the objective of all marketing is just to start conversations. And it really, really resonated with me. It ties back to this where it's like, what am I doing on LinkedIn? I'm trying to start conversations. And the simplest way to do it is I can set up an automated campaign to start conversations with my icp. And it's virtually the only platform on the planet available that you can do that. Um, and Jack's not the number one thing talked about everyone talks about. If I went to YouTube, was like, LinkedIn, right now I watch 100 videos talking about how to post content and they'd be probably zero videos, like one or two that I see say, like, here's how you can start conversations with all your dream clients.

Speaker A: What's the. Your, your data on, um, sending a connection request with a message versus without? Because I hear a lot of debate on. Some people say, don't send it with a message because you'll get more people accepting because they're so used to receiving that.

Speaker B: Yeah, the only reason you would send it with a message is if you've got so many leads coming out of your ass that you're like, I don't want people out of my network. Um, other than that, it's like 30 to 40% is the benchmark for no message. And. And then with a message is like 5 to 10%. The math just don't add up. To send it with a message, um, the only reason you would literally send it is like, if I had, for example, 150 people that could buy from me, I'd probably do a message because actually starting the conversation there is more important than getting them into the network of M. These very, very rare circumstances I would ever send connection request campaigns with a message.

Speaker A: Interesting. What do you think that is from, like, a psychological standpoint?

Speaker B: Um, one very, very tough to word a connection request, like, not in a sales way. When you're having a sales conversation. It's like, I believe that sales conversations that we're starting should be as, like, honest as possible and show up with something valuable. Whereas, like, if some. I see a connection request, I was doing it before this podcast, like, I can go through my connections. I have like 4,000 right now. And I see like, hi, Niall. And it's like, they start and I'm like, this is like, this is for you, not me. So I'm not going to accept that one if it's blank and I see CEO at this company, I'm like, interesting connect. It's just like the, um, friction there is so limited. Um, but also just like opens the door after it. When there's no connection request, you can send anything after that other than blocking you. You've always got access to them as well.

Speaker A: What about those? So you're filtering out who you accept and who you don't accept. Um, what about if somebody has built a LinkedIn platform from like a previous role or something like that? A profile from a previous role and they've got 10,000 followers or connections in irrelevant industry now. What do they do to reverse that?

Speaker B: Um, two things I would do is like, one, stop talking about my new thing and that would naturally start to change the network. Secondly, I just add the right network like my background was in personal branding. We don't see ourselves a personal branding agency. We don't necessarily. Even the content we do, we don't call it personal branding. So what do I do? I add, um, probably 8% of our roster is traditional businesses. So what do I do? I add in traditional businesses to my network every single week. Like manufacturing firms. Probably isn't a manufacturing firm in the UK or Ireland that isn't connected with me right now because I'm reaching out to thousands every single month.

Speaker A: M. Nice. And then your strategy then for when you do connect with them and you send them that outreach, like, how are you going, are you going in with a lead magnet? Are you pitching them on a call? Like, what are you doing?

Speaker B: Yeah. So there was a study done by um, it was an American university with Brown University and they found that with B2B outreach, um, you get 2 to 3x higher response rates when you start with something of value to them. They defined it as a case study, uh, like a lead magnet, um, or a stat that they thought would be useful for them. So, um, the best way you can do it is we call it a sales asset. But you show up with something. And the analogy I like to use is, uh, if you went to like someone's wedding, you would like show up with a gift. If you go to like someone's house, you might show up with wine. You never show up empty handed to somewhere else. And I was thinking like, we're dropping in the inbox. I don't want to show up empty handed. So one of our highest converting messages, um, it was actually last year going into December, I posted about it. It was a really simple message where I said, hi, um, so you've been engaged on this type of content and it was like LinkedIn outreach. We've recently put together a guide on two or three interesting ways you can do it as a manufacturing firm. Are you against me sending it over? It's a really simple message of like, I'm dropping in the inbox, I've got something for you and all you have to say is, no, I'm not against sending it over or yeah, please fire it over. And it's also a really simple no for them as well. So it's not awkward. They can just say like, no, I'm not interested right now. Great, that's great. Um, but it's also really sets up ah, a great sales conversation afterwards. So, um, with sales conversations you need a reason to follow up. A lot of like original cold email agencies got this Wrong where they had no reason to follow up. So, like, the messages would be like, hi, just following up. Just following on the sales message I sent above. We can follow up with, hi, did you get a chance to read the resource? Hi, I know you got the resource. Is that something you're thinking about internally right now? These are really easy, um, questions we can follow up with that just signal this is a sales conversation and if you want to go down this route, you can go down this route. And if not, no. Um, but, like, they're all conversational questions. Like I said, like, are you thinking about this internally? Did you get a chance to read it? Yes, I got a chance to read it. No, I didn't get a chance to read it. Or would it be easy if I just jumped on a call with you and walked you through it? Um, yeah, we are thinking about internally. Or maybe it'd be useful if I jumped on a call and I could show you through deeper these really simple steps that we can take. So that's what we generally lead with. There's some, some campaigns we don't lead with a lead magnet, but I would say, like 75% of the time I'd recommend starting with a lead magnet. That's just genuinely useful.

Speaker A: Nice. And are you still using those for posts as well and getting people to comment down below and using that strategy?

Speaker B: No, um, like, um, I don't, I don't really. So we have lead magnets that we use separately for posts. Like, we just did a live event on Tuesday. Um, that will get people to. But, like, no, I will separate the outreach from, like, I almost see it as a completely separate channel than, like, the content and, like, thing I'm doing with content is, is different from what I'm doing with the outreach. The outreach is like purely sales conversations. And for me, to be fair, like, um, my content may be slightly different, what I do with clients, because I do have an element of trying to build the brand while it's not just probably like 60, 40 brand and sales through the content, which, uh, is probably slightly hypocritical.

Speaker A: Interesting. So you would change the format of the lead magnet for the DMs as well. Or is it.

Speaker B: Yeah. Um, so, for example, if I'm posting content, a lead magnet, that might work really well. We just released a LinkedIn report and we had like five LinkedIn experts comment on it. Laura was one, Ash Johnson, Sophie Miller, and each had a section where they commented on where they thought LinkedIn was at right now. That is a beautiful thing. I can promote in content because it's like a LinkedIn report. It has the natural thing. It did 500 downloads, completely organic. Great. A LinkedIn report isn't massive value add in the DMs. It's like, hi, I have a LinkedIn report. Thought it'd be useful for you. Whereas I can have something really actionable for. Like we just did this for a manufacturing client. I thought it might be applicable to you guys seeming like you're in the same space. That's something that's like very, very useful to a niche audience that I can send in a dm but, but just like wouldn't resonate from a content perspective. Content, um, lead magnets. I'm trying to think broad and um, inside a box. What I mean by that is, um, if I'm a marketing director, report makes sense to me. It's like people publish reports, this is a report I will download. Whereas like, if it was like, this is a manufacturing case study, it's like, oh, that's not something I naturally download. I'm trying to think in a box. It's content, broad in a box. Lots of people can download and it's something that they understand what it is. White papers, um, uh, reports, that type of thing in the DMs. I can also explain better what it is and how it applies to them. I'm trying to think really niche, really simple, uh, utility. So like, can they action this in the next like 60 Minutes? Um, which, like, which wouldn't resonate from a content perspective.

Speaker A: You meant to clearly use automation on LinkedIn. Yeah, it's obviously a big debate that Lara, for example, I know is quite anti, um, automation. Some people are. What is your general mindset around it? Um, do you have favored tool and have you ever ran into any issues? Should people be concerned?

Speaker B: Yeah, good question. Um, no, we've never run into any issues. We send, God knows, like probably close to 100,000 DMS, uh, a month on LinkedIn for clients and ourselves and zero accounts have ever been taken down. Um, tools nowadays are so Good. We use Heyreach for our LinkedIn automation and for actually like a sending mechanism. It's a little bit more complicated than just heyright, but it's a good sending mechanism. They do an amazing job of one limiting it. Um, so it's like you don't push any LinkedIn boundaries. But they also like naturally cool off accounts, for example, if you've had loads of replies and they're worried the software is built to uh, cool it down, but it's not even close to a comparison of cold email. We have never, ever had a client's LinkedIn account being taken down. Cold email domains, you know, in five a week, you know, I mean, you rotate in the market, like, it's a very, very different game. Um, and I think that anyone who's worried about the automation either, like, um, the opportunity cost, it doesn't work for them. Laura, like, anything that could possibly get her account taken down is like, even if it made 100,000 pound this year, it's just not worth the opportunity cost. Um, and, like, hasn't needed to do it at scale. Like, if you're, like I said, a freight forwarding firm and you want to be charged 10,000 prospects a month, it's like, well, you're going to need some automation to do that. Um, but it's a real, for me, a myth of, um, what actually is getting taken down. I think LinkedIn promotes that myth. To reduce the automation. They want you to buy their internal. They're incentivized to get you to get Sales Navigator, which isn't automated and obviously is revenue for them. Um, why would they tell you that? Yeah, it's great. You can just use automation.

Speaker A: Yeah, makes sense. What are the caps on these days on, like, how many people do you use burner accounts as well?

Speaker B: No, no, um, we had a. We were interviewing for our GTM team and someone, like, suggested that and I was like, that's, uh, for me it's crazy. Like, it's just like massively high risk that, like, for a client to be reaching out from, like, someone who doesn't exist and someone's like, oh, yeah, I talked to Lucy and it's like, oh, yeah, she actually doesn't exist. Um, is a bit wild to me.

Speaker A: Uh, you have to do it on email, though. Yeah, yeah, 100 email accounts.

Speaker B: Yeah. That's why I think LinkedIn works much more personal. As you can see, Lucy's got head. No, it's a fake head. It's just all a bit of a weird trust barrier. Um, what was the original question? The limits. So you can do about 25 connection requests a day. And, um, that's like a really safe, um, boundary. And then off the back of that, you're looking about 40 messages a day per account. Um, and that's why you need multiple profiles to do it. You scale LinkedIn outbound with profiles, um, not, um, domains like email. I can scale volume and only have like one person technically. And just like, I could have J Platten N ratcliffe um, with LinkedIn and you scale it by profiles and that's why it's key to do it with, like, sales team, exec team, uh, and have people willing to use their profiles for it.

Speaker A: Fine. Cool. Nice. I want to. We'll probably come back to the service side of things, just from the perspective of the agency, but I want to, like, jump ship for a moment because, um, you mentioned Stephen Bartlett earlier. I know you once met Dom, who was the co founder at Stephen Bartlett. I saw you mention that. He said that, um, your business sucked and I wanted to get you back in that headspace. And have you explained kind of what happened there and what that then changed in the company?

Speaker B: It's a really good question. So I've had the pleasure of meeting Dom and Steve over the last, um, few years. Dom in particular, we had a really close relationship with. We still do. Um, so when we started the agency, we moved to Portugal and the two reasons we did that was tax efficiencies. But also, um, we wanted to be on our side so we didn't need to take money out of the business. Um, and it allowed us to scale to about 10 or 15 by doing that, um, which was really, really useful. And around that time, though, we were a little bit lost with where to go with the agency. We were a team of 15 and we were doing well, um, under seven figures a year. Uh, um, maybe just. And anyway, we got connected with Dom through a friend of ours called Jack, and he'd done a podcast with Dom. Anyway, we got in the room with Dom and I remember, ironically, we were sat in the car park beforehand and me and Morgan were like, oh, my God, is he even going to give us the time of day to talk here? Because, uh, we're really early on in the business journey. But when we went in, we explained the full business for him. And I remember we had this big white piece of paper and he was making these massive notes. We talked like 45 minutes. This is everything about the business. And the first thing he said, he took a second after we finished talking, took a breath, and we were like, oh, my God. He just went Brandt's way off. And we were like, brands, everything. Uh, what do you mean? And at the time we were called Ratcliffe Brothers. And like, he then went on for like 30 minutes to tell us, like, every stage of the business was wrong. Like, the structure of the team, the name, the brand, the positioning, the pricing. He just told us everything was completely wrong. And it was a massive wake up call to us because, like, at the time, it was like, I think for people. So we had a work, we have a working class background. Our parents, like, my dad worked in a factory, so we'd never seen money at the time we were seeing money. And you get this feeling that you have a Midas touch that like, oh, no, I just post on LinkedIn, we get leads and then money drops in the bank account. Like you feel a little bit on top of the world. And we had this guy who'd been on the journey, he'd scaled social chain, they'd gone public, IPO'd and he was like, yeah, you guys can suck. And we were like, jesus Christ. And then like, it completely reshaped the business, um, and we literally tripled revenue, um, in three months after that chat. Uh, and then obviously the rest is history. Um, and I think two of the biggest reasons was, was like one, a massive humbling. But secondly, I'd never talked to someone who'd been on the journey. I think a massive lesson for any agency owner is like the number one thing you can do to move the agency forward is go and find three people who've walked the path you've walked and just like, find a way to get in contact with them. And I could tell like probably five or six moments of where I've met someone who is 10 steps ahead, 20 steps ahead of me is like completely reshifted the journey. And there's like key moments. If I looked at the revenue of the business, this key inflection point, and every single time it's when we've sat down and talked to someone, um, and it's just like completely reshaped or reshifted the direction we were going.

Speaker A: Nice. What was so off about the brand? And then what, like, were the three biggest levers from the change?

Speaker B: Um, the first thing was Dom believed that we could like 10x our prices, so we may be charging like 1500, 2k a month at the time. And he was like, no, you need to be charging 15, 20k a month. I think there's two price points that work in agencies. I think Alex Holm already says this. It's like your low ticket volume for your high ticket and low volume clients. And he was like, you won't survive where, like, we were technically close to the low volume. But he was like, you won't, like you're, you just won't survive in the middle ground. It was like, and I think you can charge 15 to 20k a month. And he was like, but no brand that will pay 15, 20k month. Will touch you right now. And what Dom understand and what Steve understands so well is his perception. So it's not necessarily about, um, delivering a better service, just seeming like a company that can handle 15, 20 grand a month retainers. And he showed us everything from the pitch decks. He showed us the pitch deck social training for like, Vimto, the UK government. And he was like, this is how we pitched our service, this is how we looked. And he was like, look at the old website. Look how Steve put himself across, like, uh, how we put ourselves across as an agency. And if you look at the social chain journey from start to finish, they just seem like people you can pay money for. And they were getting like retainers, like 40, 50 grand a month in like year two. And the whole reason was to understand this perception of not just being very good, but, like seeming like you can handle that caliber of work. So that was the number one thing. Second thing was like, structure of the team, which is like a little bit technical. Um, we had a pod structure which is actually really popular nowadays. The pod structure, Dom was massively against it. The reason was, was he feels like you can't improve each subsection of the business while in the pod structure. So for example, we had an account manager, a content writer at the time. He was like, your content writers are just like hemorrhaging all their skill set because they're not working. He wanted it to be, uh, like siloed teams. Content team, accounts team massively, um, shifted it. Our accounts team, uh, in particular transformed from that moment on. For example, back then, the accounts team were like, dipping into content, trying different stuff on this because this part is all working on the same clients. So let me just fix this content thing now. Our accounts team have very set targets and they're commissioned and they have different incentives from the content team. And you have this internal competition of like, actually, accounts team are, uh, incentivized for retention. And it's like, I'm not losing this client. Content team is incentivized for retention as well, but also, um, metrics of getting the content to do well. It's like they have their goals, accounts have their goals, and they're technically not the same goals anymore. The account managers don't necessarily care if the content's doing well as long as they're retaining. So they're looking for, like, while the content person is trying to make it perform. So everyone has their own different incentives, but also each person as a team leader who's like, pushing that team on, um, which massively Changed it. From an operational standpoint, I don't think the POD structure is wrong. It just wasn't working for our business and wasn't scaling and like I said, it completely revolutionized it. And if you do look at like um, separate the Internet agencies from the side, uh, I know like, I think it's Freddie Maloof is like massively pushes the POD structure and many others. If you look at like Dentsu, the big marketing networks, like no one function is in a POD structure. And I think that's always an insight to me is like talking to DOM is like there's different games here. I'm trying to play this game. And we would be the only. If you look at let's say 50 million a year plus, there's probably zero agencies that function in a pod structure of 50 million a year plus. Um, and it's like there's something I didn't know, I wasn't even close to that. Which uh, I found really useful as well.

Speaker A: Interesting. That is interesting. I've seen the POD structure work well on some decent sized agencies. So for example saw with us, um,

Speaker B: you might be familiar with Ollie and

Speaker A: I mean they're at over a million pounds collected a um, month at the moment across the group. And at least the last time I dove into org structure they were POD structure. But I think it's somewhat of a hybrid. I think delivery is pod, but then the way the management team is structured is very much siloed and so I believe it's somewhat of a hybrid now.

Speaker B: And that's probably a realistic explanation of what we do. For example, let's uh, say Ben, one of our account managers will work with Sid, one of our copywriters on three accounts. Like each account you could technically argue is in a POD because they have one account manager, one content writer, one GTM person working on it. But the way it's structured from a management perspective isn't so like, and that is the keys. Like there is an account director who oversees the accounts team. There's a content leader oversees the content team. There's a GTM leader oversees the GTM team. Like that's the key lesson. Whereas before it was like the account managers don't have a person to report to, they run their POD and they report directly to me on the results of their podcast. And it's like, well now I'm like, I see the POD results and also there's no one to blame. It's like, for example, the pod's not performing. Does the account manager suck? Does the Content writer suck. Does the GTM person suck? I don't really know because there could be a lot that goes wrong in the pod. Whereas like, I can sit down with my account director and be like, how are Ben's clients performing? Okay, here's the retention rate on his clients. Here's what he's doing, completely separate to the fact of like, okay, now let's look at the Sid's content writing clients. This is what's happening with these stats. I can really clearly see where things are underperforming and it's different for every business. But, uh, for us we wouldn't have got to where we are today. And the way it was all the

Speaker A: team in Manchester where the office is, or are they international?

Speaker B: No. So we could talk about talent for forever because, uh, it's a massive talking point. Right now we have a Manchester office core. Ah, team generally speaking, like accounts sales, uh, customer success, sales, um, and then we have all of the world. We have some team in London who good content strapped upon Avon. But um, then over the gtm, like overseas talent for GTM is like incredible. Um, and then content as well is like, um, not to call it the uk, but I actually think we've got some. Like the um. We're not keeping on a trajectory of overseas talent. It's no longer going overseas is no longer a thing about cutting costs, it's about getting better talent. Um, which is a massive perception shift. Like 10 years ago it was like, go overseas, you'll pay a third of the wage. And now it's like, no, you'll pay a UK wage. That person will be like 100 times better than someone you get in the UK, which I think is like a, a real unraveling that like the big marketing like networks and um, you know, the dentistry of the world, like haven't embraced yet, um, or fully understood that.

Speaker A: I've seen you're a big advocate of agc. So employee generated content, for people that don't know what that is, what is it and how impactful is it for you?

Speaker B: Yeah. So employee generated content is where rather than you just focusing on a founder or uh, a CEO to post content, you essentially encourage or incentivize the employees to do that. There's two ways you can really do it. One, you can pay an agency. Technically speaking, we do EJC for a lot of our clients. We'll take like a CEO, head of marketing, head of sales, and we'll put out content. The reason that is impactful is, let's say I have A founder brand. I might only relate to a subsection of my audience. But for example, Philippa posted today as our marketing coordinator on the Live on Tuesday. Like, she's female, very different character type to me. Like, the content that she puts out will resonate with a completely different audience. So if we're trying to talk to the entire tam, total addressable market for us, it's like, I need females posting, I need different perspectives posting. My brother, um, and co founder posts about like, just like ultramarathons Ironmans. He's like crazy endurance stuff he does. Like, he signs clients sometimes because that's what they resonate with. That was their entry point. I'm much more like, talk about LinkedIn, more technical stuff. That's what resonates with other people. And by doing egc, you get that across the board. Two ways you can do it. Like I said, one, you can pay someone to do it for you. Like just, just post my team. Second way is an incentive structure. So we have an internal incentive structure where, uh, if you hit a certain amount of follow account, you get a reward. It starts with an Amazon voucher and scales up to like a week away that we pay for, all expenses paid. It's probably cost us five grand. Over the last three years, 2025 did 17 million impressions through our team's content. Um, in the early days, we seemed like a rapidly growing or like noticeable brand when we didn't even have that much exposure. But like, our team were posting all the same color heads on LinkedIn. Suddenly you think, God, these guys are everywhere. Um, and that's the feeling that EGC gives you.

Speaker A: Nice, I love that. How was the, the relationship split between your brother and you?

Speaker B: He does sales, I do service. Um, so like completely separate areas of the business. Um, people say, like, don't work with your family. For me, it's like the, the biggest, um, just like positive of everything. Like, I love it. It's like if I win, he also wins. It's like we were like naturally put together by blood. So it's like, he's gonna be with me when I die. He was there when I was born. So it's like, what a beautiful thing that we can build something together and both rewarded from it. The only thing I would say is, like, it's important to completely separate things. Um, it just makes it so much easier. Like, he has his targets, I have my targets. And like, we're both of the same goal, but like, we're in completely different sections of the business. He's even actually in work ironically sits on another table doing sales stuff and I sit with the service team. Um, it's like I'm retaining, he's selling. Um, it's very, very separate which um, I think is like key for any founders in general. Uh, but it's worked really well for us as brothers as well.

Speaker A: Nice. So you are the service delivery team, direct reporting to you. Is there like a middle management in place?

Speaker B: Yeah. So each team has a leader, um, that's like the middle management and then they all direct reporting to me. I'm very hands on, um, I think underrated by the way. Like I think in the world of AI, this is a really interesting thing to say, not to tangent onto AI too quickly. We were a team of 22, January 2025. Now we're a team of 14. Uh, we've actually got three jobs. So we are our team of 17, um, and we've doubled in revenue year on year. We've done 100% growth. Um, so we literally cut our team in half. And our ah, EBITDA margin for May was 47% which is like slightly too much for an agency in general. So experienced agency founders will tell me m that I should be investing in talent and growth, et cetera. Um, don't let them tell you. But the key thing to understand there is that there's been a massive uh, operating leverage added to agencies over the last 12 months where we can now do much more with a big team, with a small team. Back in the day you would need like if I want to get to 10 million a year, I need like 50, 100, you know, 200 staff social chain was like 360 by the time they um, exited. Now like there's no reason to scale much past like a team of 50, 60. You can go very, very far with that team if uh, you understand AI. So literally we literally have a team leader for each organization and I do it. The reason I was going to say I'm hands on is because like we have this ability now where like each person in the business has so much operating leverage that they can do so much more for each client. It's like I can be hands on because I can just go and talk to this person and get involved in these projects and suddenly have this massive impact on the agency. 12 months ago, 18 months ago, if a founder was hands on, it's like such a minimal impact where like they go and work in this department batch, there's 17 different people and it like filters out where it's like I can Work one on one with this person and have an impact with 15 different clients, which obviously like a massive percentage of our roster.

Speaker A: Nice. M. I think it's interesting you say about the 47% net margin, like people other agencies will tell you to reinvest and so on. I think that is true for lots of agencies, but the market is just fundamentally shifting. I'm currently one to one consulting to be careful what I say with one of the big five agencies and it's their division in New Zealand and they're really struggling with the size of the entity, uh, keeping up with like AI driven competitors. The net margin is really small and just like, it's just the manifestation of the old mindset of the way of doing things and they're desperate to like become agentic and so on. Keen to unpack the AI thing and how you're thinking about AI. Obviously lots of what you do is kind of written and so on and so forth. Presumably there's a lot of different ways that you can use it. I know you're using clay and so on and all these various different tools. Um, how are you, how does your mindset shift going from a larger team to a smaller team? Which seems to be a shift that almost every elite should be or has done in the last like 24 months. Uh, yeah. What are you, how are you changing your mindset as you, as you now look to hire and grow? And are you a lot more cautious in building the team now? Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, it's really interesting is that like when you have a smaller team, every person has a big impact and it just means from a talent perspective you have a way high standard. I think you can get. When I had like 22 staff, well, I was a bit sloppy with hiring. It's like they're going to come in, they're going to be in the content team. The content team is like a team of eight. It's like content writer comes in, they're good, the bad, like who cares? Like they're going to have a really minimal impact anyway. And now it's like, oh no. Like, uh, our content team is a team of like three. They work across 60 clients. We do God knows how many posts, uh, a month. It's like if I add one person there, uh, they're going to take a big portion of the roster and can have an impact. But what it allowed us to do is just control quality. It's like the agency game is like controlling quality and standardization across the board. And like obviously a service based business you want to Deliver highest quality product possible and deliver it as standardized as possible for efficiency. Um, and now you're able to do that and like with the AI element, like I said, I'm able to give one person ability and impact on a client roster. It's just expanded. It's like each person now has more of an impact and I can focus on improving that talent. Um, and like I said, just really hone in on who's actually working there. I was at a roundtable yesterday or the day before and there was two agency owners there in particular who one actually founded Dentsu and there was another one as well, incredible operators. And I was listening to them talk about where their agencies are. Um, and there's so much I could learn from them and I think they're fantastic. But I also sat there thinking like, oh my God, we might like eat everyone alive over the next five years because like we, I think I'm behind. Like we sat beforehand talking about Claude Cord. I haven't touched Cold Call. We haven't touched it as an agency. It's like, but like you forget like I can compare that to what you're doing with cloudcore, like, wow, there's so much more to go and you look backwards and you're like, oh, Jesus Christ. The marketing networks are like laying off senior staffers. They can't, their margins are so tight and they're like what are we going to do? You know, someone said at the roundtable there's the highest um, influx of fractional CMOs ever. And you could say it's a trend. The more fractional CMOs. The reality is there's been more senior marketing layoffs at the big networks and the larger agencies than ever. And it's the reason is like their margins are in tight, they're trying to compete and they will never be able to compete with us on um, price quality or anything because we can be more efficient. If they want to drop prices, one, we don't have to because we have enough demand. But secondly, I could undercut any big network. Like they couldn't function. Like they have like five or six people on an account. It's like we can deliver the same work with two people on the account but the main impact is just like efficiency and the standardization that AI brings is just like an absolute no brainer. And the agency model is like it's never been a better time to run an agency. And I think yourself, us as well is like anyone who's like um, at that stage where they didn't get bring on too Many people is like in just like this beautiful sweet spot of like it's going to be really productive next few years.

Speaker A: How do you think things are going to morph and evolve over the next couple of years?

Speaker B: Um, from an agency perspective, I think it's two interesting things that could happen. So one I think like, um, what was the SaaS model? How excited the SaaS model was online is now gone and the agency model will have a resurrection like that. The SaaS model was so exciting. It was like build once, sell a gazillion times, become a millionaire. It's like, well now it's like, well no, you build once and then some kid in his apartment builds again the same day and then another 70 popped up tomorrow and now it's a massively competitive market. On the agency side, it's like, oh, actually I can learn to deliver really good service, have massive operating leverage and scale it to the moon and do like 10, 15 million a year with a team of 20. It's like that's a very different game you can play. Um, the second thing I think that's going to be interesting. I have a mini prediction for in like 5 to 10 years. I'm hoping that I'm uh, either not in the game or we're ahead to do this by then is I think that the ANC model will pivot to be more of upfront fees and lower retainers after it. Very similar like web development of the past. What I mean by that is, for example right now it's not quite there, but let's say as an outbound agency I could probably get very close to having a profit profitable, uh, run system where like someone pays 10, 15k up front for a setup and they actually charge in the hundreds for a monthly retainer. And that's where you get into this interesting model that Alex Hall Morsely talks about where you could do low cost, high volume, um, and it'd be profitable for the first time ever at that scale. Um, so I think the ANC model, some of the ANC models will pivot, um, and need to pivot to being upfront fees, low maintenance and like no labor costs at the back end. So the labor costs are set up then no labor costs in the back end and you just have a small margin on what you're paying for tools and automation. Um, and I think there'll be another subsection of agencies that do still charge 30, 50k a month, but the very boutique one of one creative agencies, for example, um, you know, and I'm separating Off like a video agency that works with M and S. Like ignore that. Like we're not talking about that type of agency. I'm talking about like the other 9 of the market. But there'll still be like a 40, 50k retainers for like one person who's a creative genius, like a Rory Sutherland type character and he will come in and consult for that type of fees. But I think the majority of the agency market could shift to upfront fees and low retainers.

Speaker A: Hmm. So you're, you would to just to affirm on that you think that the majority of the market will move to a place of price reduction because the natural increase in profit margin. So it will drive prices down in a market.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that if someone did that now they could eat up the market. Like the only ah, competitor I would be afraid of would be someone who's in my space who's willing, willing to do an upfront fee and do volume on the back end. And it's very, it's not a bad business model either which is key to understand. Like you, you could still have, you know, 50% margin on low, just have to do volume. But like it's much easier to have someone pay 600 pounds a month and never turn it off. Like no business is going to turn off 600 pounds a month and have, you can have a thousand of those a month. Very different business setup. Um, but like that's a compact I would be scared of. Um, the PPC agencies for example is like we work with a lot of PPC agencies, they're fantastic. It's like, well now I could definitely see a PPC model where it's like we come in, we set it up and like it's just algorithmically doing bidding and like automated reporting goes straight to your email on a weekly basis. It's like, well if someone was able to do that profitably I'd be very worried if I was uh, especially a middle section. So maybe like 5 to 50 million a year PPC agency. I'd be very, very worried about those. And like the 50 million plus are always going to get like um, you know, you don't get sacked for hiring IBM. It's like, so those big people will still be fine. I'm like they're going to go to those, you know, people are going to Ogilvy because they don't get sacked to hiring Ogilvy. But the rest of the market like 50 million a year down. Like I could see someone did it well and profitably eating up the market. Of upfront fees, low but high margin retainers.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I got something really cool to talk to you about that, but I'm not prepared to talk about it. So I will talk about it off camera. Um, but talking of the future and just like thinking ahead, like how do you think that LinkedIn is going to be impacted into the next couple of years as well? Do you see that that's going to evolve quite a lot as well?

Speaker B: It's a great question. So I like to compare the journey of LinkedIn with Facebook and Instagram. So 2008, I think it was Facebook exploded with Organic Reach and you had like King Batch and like, I think it was like Logan Paul and a few of those like posted videos on Facebook and you would go viral. Like the supply and demand equation was similar to what it was in LinkedIn two or three years ago and you could just post it on Facebook and you would go viral. Uh, in 2012, organic reach completely collapsed and all these creators started jumping off Facebook. They realized the platform was dead from an Organic Reach perspective and they introduced uh, like meta ads or Facebook ads at the time. But it was ironically, it was after 2012 where all the money was made. The billion dollar brands, Gymshark, MBMT, Oura Ring, all came after 2012 when organic reach collapsed. If you look at Instagram, it was, I, uh, think it was like 2010, um, organic reach exploded. Like Kylie Jenner would post like a fruit ball and it would go viral. You could just post a photo like now best of luck, like going viral on Instagram with a photo. Um, but it was very soon after that that again, all the money was made. And if you look at LinkedIn's trajectory and very, very similar, where Organic Reach absolutely exploded, it's now collapsed, which we can all admit. Uh, and I think this is where the brands will start to make money. Um, all the real money, I would say. And the reason I believe that is because when the Organic Reach collapsed, you can start to see the actual marketing benefits of the platform. People thought Facebook was great for Organic Reach at first and, and then they realized, oh no, I can just pay to get in front of my audience for the first time ever on a personalized level, exploded from a business from a marketing perspective, Instagram, exact same thing. And now with LinkedIn, I think we'll start to realize people being like, oh, actually this wasn't the social media platform we thought it was. But wow, look at the marketing opportunity, which is I can get in contact with a massively high value audience. Uh, I wouldn't be shocked if billions pour into, uh, LinkedIn ads over the next five, ten years. But, um, in particular, like, the marketing budgets will flood into LinkedIn, in my opinion, over the next two to three years after organic Reach has collapsed. Um, and the whole euphoria of you can go viral on there and people start to understand what the platform actually is.

Speaker A: Yeah. How do you feel about LinkedIn ads in general? Are you running any ads for clients at the moment? And I've always heard that they're very expensive. Um, but I also hear that there's a great ad format. Uh, I wouldn't. You can explain what this is, but there's just a very organic ad format.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a thought leadership.

Speaker A: Thought leadership. That's the one.

Speaker B: Yeah. Um, so we don't do any LinkedIn ads. I think it's a service offering we'll add over the next kind of 18 months. Um, but realistically, it's interesting. So it's a different market that can run LinkedIn ads because they're expensive. So you're selling to a different market and you're selling to real enterprise with LinkedIn ads. We, uh, have quite a few enterprise clients, but, um, not a roster full enough for us to need to build our LinkedIn ads team right now. You can have so much success with the other things where your margin is drastically better. It's an interesting format, I think over the next two, three years. I'm very bullish on LinkedIn ads. Um, I was with Stephen Kenright on Tuesday and he scaled rise at 7. Um, global agency now.

Speaker A: And, um, they were on the board.

Speaker B: Yeah. You had Carrie on the pod. He's co founder. Um, and Steven was. He's very bullish on LinkedIn ads for the same reason that people were bullish on Facebook ads back in the day. He was like, there's no other platform where you can literally reach out per job title to decision makers. So not reach out. You can, um, get in front of. And it's like, yeah. Is it expensive? Well, you're paying to get in front of key decision makers that you want to go after. I, um, think it's been massively underrated. But the attention the LinkedIn's got over the last two or three years will fall into LinkedIn ads. Uh, yeah, I'm bullish on them, but not like personal experience on them.

Speaker A: Okay, interesting. I wonder if it's, uh, if the ICP you're going for on LinkedIn, like the CPM is dictated by the caliber of business you're working with. I wonder if you're paying like a, a similar CPM for an enterprise level CEO versus uh, a home service business, for example.

Speaker B: And I think, here's what I think about LinkedIn ads and why I think they're valuable is it'd be like going to a conference and you go into a room and on Facebook you've got all these people and you can judge them by interest or do lookalike audiences. Great. But generally speaking it's like the broad audience and there's just like a room over there with all your target audience and it's like, yeah, you can go in there, but it costs like 20% more than just sitting in here. Everyone would just be like, yeah, no worries, I'll pay the 20% more the premiums. Just go and sit with my target audience. And that is like my uh, argument for LinkedIn ads is like, yeah, meta's cheaper. And uh, I'm not saying it's less effective. Obviously for DTC, everything else is great. Like for B2B, when you have to get in front of the right people with that right job title, it's like, well, the only platform I can do that is on LinkedIn. And is it slightly more expensive? Yes. Uh, and the only issue with that is the budget that has to be available to do that. Like, it's almost like there's a barrier to entry with LinkedIn ads where Facebook ads, especially back in the day, um, there's a massive push for people to spend 500 pounds a month. It's like you might as well post a video on LinkedIn if you're setting 500 pound on fire, do you know what I mean? And that will get you in front of you target audience more than the 500 pound will. Um, whereas like, so there's a bit of a barrier to entry where you need thousands to get in. The LinkedIn ads game versus Facebook ads, you can scale up, especially back in the day, incrementally scale up from very, very low budgets. Um, but with the cost on LinkedIn you need to start a bit higher.

Speaker A: Yeah, I suppose anything that matters is the customer acquisition cost, if they'd be interested. I haven't seen a study of CAC on meta versus on LinkedIn. But yeah, it's kind of irrelevant if you're, if you're paying more to reach a thousand people, but those thousand people are five times the quality.

Speaker B: And where that really starts to kick in is like if your average order value is 250k, like suddenly LinkedIn ads like probably 6% of our roster will have an average order value of over a, uh, quarter of a million pound a year. Like an engineering firm, big contracts. Suddenly you can start to be like, one minute I can spend 200k before I get one customer acquired. And it's like, that's very different. And that's why, like, the LinkedIn ads market hasn't massively exploded because, um, for a lot of companies, especially the people who, you know, if I looked at 60 to 90% of the people who run meta ads probably wouldn't be suited to running LinkedIn ads. So there's still a bit of a divide in the market and because of that, the ones who would benefit haven't really caught on to the opportunity there, I don't think. Um, but I wouldn't be shocked if they do catch on over next two to three years.

Speaker A: Yeah. So you've obviously built loads of followers on LinkedIn organically. If you were to get rid of all of those, you had none anymore. How would you do things differently if you're starting again today?

Speaker B: Really good question. I'd be upset if I lost them all. Um, I think I would care less about, um, the followers and the issue is if I lost my offline reputation to be a slightly different story, um, what I would do if I was starting again, ah, from zero and it was still me, I would focus LinkedIn purely on just ICP and forget impressions completely. In fact, I would maybe even purposely like go with LinkedIn and YouTube just for me personal preference. Because, like, I still want to build my personal brand, but I'd want to separate what I'm doing on LinkedIn from it. Like, I want to be like, no, this is a marketing channel and if I want to build a personal, I'm going to do on another channel. And I would do that literally, just like a mental separation. But if I didn't care really about the brand, I would really focus on, okay, what's the market I'm going after? I'd reverse engineer who my ICP are and then I'd literally position myself directly for them. Like, it's simple of like, what do they want to see, how do they want to be positioned? And I would build my profile to be that way. Then, uh, I would start posting content and I would just focus on my unique experiences with that target audience, working with them. I've got the data I've got and I would just share like high utility content. High utility content is just like, how useful is it after reading it in the next 60 minutes? If it's really, really useful, it's high utility. Um, I would do that and then I would just simply set up outreach campaigns to just add my ITB to my network and start conversations with them. And I would just do that at scale. I would just constantly a b test the campaign and I'd be off to the races. I think very quickly, even though I wouldn't gain the followers back to the level I have, um, I think I'd be very quickly making a similar amount of revenue to what we're making through my LinkedIn profile.

Speaker A: Nice. Love that. So that's what you would do. What do you think is the, the big mistake that most people make when they are just starting out right now?

Speaker B: The number one thing is like they, um, I was listening to the pod with Lara on the train down and ah, she joked with you that like, you, you got your post, she forced you to post and then you didn't get many impressions or something. And um, you're like, LinkedIn sucks. And um, I think that is a mistake that people make is like they're told by these people that like, all you do is post and you'll go viral and then you post, you don't go viral and you're like, well, this doesn't work. Do you know what I mean? It'd be like someone's like, press a button and this happens and you press it, nothing happens. Like, well, the button doesn't work anymore. Um, when it comes down to understanding what they do, it's like when you start from that perspective, it's like, okay, I'm just gonna, um, no offense to the ghostwriters or anything like that. It's like, I'll hire a ghostwriter. I'll just get them to post and 1 minute the stats. Why are we only doing 10,000 impressions a month? Well, we're doing the completely wrong thing here. So the biggest mistake is just like fundamental misunderstanding. Like I said, if I could have a button, one button on LinkedIn that Benefit everyone, it'd be like a button to turn off impressions and likes. And just from a strategic standpoint, everyone would win more on LinkedIn because they'd start to think, one minute, actually this is just purely a marketing channel. It's purely in front of my icp. Like, ego aside, I'm just going to share what I think is useful for them, add them to my network, game over. And that'd be, it's um, just not another platform that can do it for you. Let's say you're targeting agency Owners even for this pod for example that you could literally set up tonight and be like I'm going to post content for agency owners and then it's going to go on LinkedIn and like even free tools if you want to do it manually, you could go on sales. Now it's not free actually. It's like 80 pound a month. Um, I could build a list of agency owners and just be like just going to add them to my network, post content for them and just do that again and again and again. It's like, like I said if any other platform added the connection feature like people would pay thousands every month. If I could add people, I don't do Instagram, I was building an Instagram following. I could add connections like to follow me. Like I'd pay probably 10k a month. But LinkedIn is just free and like no one talks about it.

Speaker A: Yeah, interesting. You're going on the basis that you've already got some kind of uh, something to talk about. You've got a business, you've got all this if you didn't have that. And there'll be lots of people that are watching this thinking that I just don't know what to talk about. I don't think I have got a unique mindset and anything. Maybe, maybe they're not deep enough into business to be able to do that. Like where does someone start to like come up with ideas and, and, and.

Speaker B: Good question.

Speaker A: Find a voice.

Speaker B: Um, my initial thought was get a job. When you say but I think that's um, that's unfair. Um it's like a, there's a one thing to say but I think that's true. You know I'm a big fan of Daniel Priestley. I uh, got to have dinner with him in Belfast a few years ago and like one thing he talked about constantly when we were getting dinner is like the impact that had he had by just like getting a job when he was like 21 and working for something else. I think he calls it like an entrepreneurial internship or something like that. And his idea is should go and work at a small company where you have one to one contact with the founder or CEO um and just sit there and learn and get your opinions. I had that at 19. I went to work a personal branding agency. I got one to one contact with the CEO. I'm now good friends them afterwards. Uh, in the early days when we're setting up I would like constantly jump on calls with him. He showed me what a CRM was afterwards. Um and even since Then like I said, I'll still Talk to people 10 steps ahead of me. I think that if you don't have an opinion, just go and do things and just develop that. Even our stage, we're a team of 15. If you come and work in our Manchester office, you would sit across the table from me. You'll see exactly how I operate, the systems we use, how we sign clients. You'd hear Morgan on sales calls, like, you will very quickly get a deep understanding of how an agency runs. Um, and that's what I would do is like, if you people, like, I hate this push to, um, start businesses for everyone. I think it's. I think entrepreneurship is amazing. It's changed my life. Um, but generally speaking, you should probably, like, do one to two years and then do it. I mean, like, start the business when you, like, have a general understanding of how things are going and just like, do 12 months. Just commit to it. Like, I'm going to get a job for someone who's doing what I want to do to spend 12 months learning. And, um, I'd say this as well. One of my biggest regrets is not spending more time in the job. If I started the business, I could have skipped. The first two years of the business were an absolute shit show. Like, just, like, terrible. I had no idea what we were doing. We made so many, like, stupid mistakes. And we always joke that, like, if I had my knowledge now and I could just go back two years ago, like, we would be like 10x ahead. And it's like, the only way I could have got that, uh, is going, like, and working in agency. You had Carrie Rose on the podcast. Carrie Ross was, um, sitting in Branded three the Inter with Ken Wright for years before she started rise at 7. Mitch M. Clayton and Ash, who run Floed, um, who are also on the podcast, like, they worked in a sales team in Manchester for like five years before they started Floor. Like, if you look at anyone's success who had rapid success, it wasn't because they randomly started an agency and just explored it. They just like, learned from good people and then. And then built off the back of that. And there's unique cases. Stephen bartlett, who was 18, started sorted, chain Exploded Dom as well. You know, there's unique cases like that, but, like, 95% of people, like, I think you have to realize that, like, you're probably not that unique Edge case and like, just go and get a job, learn from someone and then go on the entrepreneurship.

Speaker A: Great advice, man. I completely agree with that. Yeah, I completely agree with that and someone I preach about all the times like that that the business started when you were in that experience having that job. Yeah.

Speaker B: Just learned everything. I learned how to onboard someone, how to have a sales like it's impossible. And I said I wish I would have done, if I would have done three to four years I would have just like I wouldn't have put me behind in life because I would have leapfrogged over the first year in business, the two years of lessons and it's like. And you can't. When you first start a business, you can't get access to the John McGregors, the Stephen Kenmatte of the world. I got access to them two years in, three years in when you start to uh, be a caliber person agency that they're willing to talk to and have a conversation with and the only way you can get access to that level of people are just working for them originally. Which I think is just so underrated.

Speaker A: Yeah, nice. What's the long term vision? What are you working towards? Are you building to exit or what's um, good question.

Speaker B: Um, my like top level goal is like generationally uh, change the tax bracket my family are in. Like I grew up working class. I uh, think my mum did absolutely everything she could to like give us a chance to earn a living and I want to like do the 10x that for like my kids. Like the experiences that I have been able to have of like flying business class, being in a lounge at airport, not caring about getting an Uber. These are things that I couldn't do when I was a kid and that'll never be a problem for my kids. Like generational wealth change is my number one top level goal from an age perspective. We want to take over Manchester. I want to be the number one B2B agency in Manchester and then the north of England. I don't care about London Footland to the side. Um, but that's what I want and I want everyone who touches our company to have our name as like goldust on their CV. There's this social chain effect. Now they have a PayPal mafia and we joke in Manchester there's like the social chain mafia. If you look at the people who came from Social Chain, Social Chain is like this golden fucking letters on their CV that changed their lives. Ash Jones started great influence. Don McGregor M now run league co founder Social Chain but now runs real estate ventures. Nick Crompton went to work with Jake Paul um, in the us Katie Leeson became CEO of Relentless Group. Um, probably a million More I don't even know. George Mack came from Social Chain now obviously viral on Twitter, London or some agency. I don't know if you stepped away actually, uh, multiply. It is like a social chain mafia. And all of them have this weird thing coming into the CV of Social Chain. And I want everyone who touches our agency like their careers to absolutely skyrocket because they came into it. And there's two really simple things we can do that is like we can be successful and we can be well known. Uh, and that's like the next five years to be the most well known agency in the north of England, but also the best B2B agency in the north England as well.

Speaker A: Nice man. What are the practical steps you're gonna

Speaker B: take in order to get there? A, uh, lot of work. I uh, posted on LinkedIn this morning that like on online it's like uh, entrepreneurship is all like Lamborghinis, Gold watchers and mojitos and like my life is like last night I got like 7:15, went to the gym for like 30 minutes, like went to bed and I was like, might be the most mundane day you'd ever see. Um, and that's the reality. So a lot of like long monotonous days which I enjoy. Um, but that's the reality. Um, and really pushing on the brand side. Um, we're very, very passionate about being well known. I think it's a really underrated objective to have as an agency, uh, where we're doing in person events in Manchester, um, and getting well known and obviously just living for clients. AI is a massive advantage for us. We have an advantage of being young, agile and I believe that we're going to like us and anyone else at our stage is embracing innovation and eat the marketing networks alive. There's never been a better time to run a small marketing agency. Um, because everyone above you is dying and not willing to admit a year.

Speaker A: Agree. Do you write your own content then? So you're sort of running.

Speaker B: Yeah. Right now I do. Philip M. A health marketing ah coordinator for a time. Like there was like three months of this year I didn't write one piece. Uh, now I'm like raw dogging it on the way to work. Um, which I think is like the underrated lesson as well is like everyone thinks everyone has like a secret system for doing things. Like I wrote my LinkedIn post this morning on the train on my phone yesterday. I wrote it walking to the office. Like it's like um, you always think someone's, it's like random Silver bullet. And the silver bullet is that there's no silver bullet.

Speaker A: Nice. I've got some rapid fire questions.

Speaker B: Let's do it.

Speaker A: Classic podcast. Um, one brand that you'd love to work with or one creator you'd love to work with that you haven't yet.

Speaker B: Oh, God. Really good question. Um, one brand I'd like to work with. I don't want to be like, generic. I'd love to work with like, Fly Story or a Stephen Bartlett Co. Uh, just because he was a massive inspiration from the start. I, um, just think that's like a really. We could probably do good work for them. Um, and something that like, for me would be like a box checked not to be like a generic Englishman and rim Steven's ass.

Speaker A: Nice. Um, one book that every agency owner should read.

Speaker B: One book every agency owner should read. It's a really good question. Um, do you know what I think sometimes is, like, I read. I used to read a lot of business books. I, uh, probably read all of them, uh, that you could do the generics. And I think that, like, one of the biggest underrated things I've done recently. Start reading, um, non business books. And the reason I say that is as a business owner, it's very easy to think that, like, all you need to do is like, just read more and consume more. I think like, an underrated thing that you benefit from an agency owner is, um, to actually just like, read like a fiction book or a story that's unrelated to business and like, just take 30 minutes at night to like, be away from it and completely disconnect. That's not watching Netflix. Um, American Kingpin is a book about, uh, Russell Brick, who built the Silk Road. Um, and I think that's an incredible book that I would genuinely recommend where, like, I think a business owner would enjoy, um, it because, uh, it's a story of someone building an illegal business, but also it's like an amazing storyline. I think a lot of entrepreneurs would benefit more from just like taking 15 minutes to read a fiction book at night than read like Daniel Priestley's 24 assets and start to think about, like, how you need ip. Yeah.

Speaker A: And then get out of bed and quickly jot down.

Speaker B: Oh, I just need to. Yeah, it's like 30 minutes at night. Like, the best thing you can do is just decompress. Like, you don't need to learn anymore. You've done it all day. Like.

Speaker A: Yeah, Uh, I feel that, um, one thing that, uh, every agency owner should. Or. Sorry, one LinkedIn account, every agency Owner should follow.

Speaker B: Nice. A good one to start with. Um, another one I would follow, I think. Um, who I'd study. I'd study Stephen Bartlett. I think he's always ahead of the trends. I think he was posting viral LinkedIn content when it was right to post Survival. I think now he's switched. I think Black wants to study one, um, to learn from. If you're interested in LinkedIn, Ash Jones is fantastic. Doesn't post often, but, like, really unique perspectives. Um, that's. I would go with. I wouldn't touch anyone. This is an underrated lesson not to offend. No offense to anyone who has hundreds of thousands followers. I, uh, wouldn't touch anyone who has hundreds of thousands of followers because they are gaming the system, not trying to share unique insights. And there's nothing wrong with that. Um, but there's a different game to play where, like, Ash Jones has maybe 60,000 followers and he posts when he has a unique insight that he wants to share on LinkedIn or personal branding that he's learned. If I have 200,000 followers, I have a content schedule where I'm cranking out because I need to grow my account because that's the game. So, um, there's nothing wrong with that. You can be inspired by it. If, uh, I was an entrepreneur, I would avoid that, um, just because I don't think you'd get as much useful information out there.

Speaker A: Nice. You kind of just answered my last question. Um, you might have a different one. And that was one thing that people should stop doing on LinkedIn.

Speaker B: What things should be able to stop doing? Um, posting for impressions. Um, and thinking it's a content platform. Content is one factor. Social media is one factor of LinkedIn, but it is naturally a networking platform. It's a Rolodex of the people you know, um, and it's the biggest open database of working people. And that's what you should be utilizing it for.

Speaker A: Nice. Thanks so much, man.

Speaker B: Awesome. Thanks for doing this. I'm really excited.