#73 Phillip Rivers Talks Marketing Strategies and Talent Acquisition

Hello, and welcome back to the Attribution Marketing Podcast powered by LeadsRx. On today's episode, we have Philip Rivers, who is an expert and has a long and storied career in marketing and sales. First started out in fashion, it sounds like, with T-shirts and shoes. But before the internet revolution, before the digital marketing revolution, Philip was able to launch and grow several different projects and businesses.

And so we are lucky to have him on the show today. Hey, Philip, how are you? I'm good. Good afternoon.

So our first question is typically, man, tell us about the career arc. How did you get in this position and walk us through, if you would, your steps and what led you to the podcast today? Go ahead. Dude, just listening to the bio made me feel dated, old, so web 1.

0. But back in the early days, I was in school. I was very entrepreneurial since I was a kid. And I had this roommate that I met on Craigslist.

And he was really good at art. And I was like interested in the internet. And I was like, dude, why don't you design some shirts and let's sell them? And the idea that we cooked up at the time was we're going to design t-shirts that coincide with the releases of Nikes.

And we're going to sell the t-shirts on message boards. Back then, that's like all that there was. This is 05. Yeah.

And it went well. So much so we built that into a company that like a clothing brand. We were in 16 stores throughout California. We got all those accounts by carrying a cardboard box into stores.

Be like, yo, we made these tees. Do you want them? The brand was ultimately called 24K Gold. And then we were just like two kids that didn't know anything.

And it just fizzled out, fell apart because we were not professional or anything. But it was a good learning experience. And we cut our teeth on selling in person and building a brand and dealing with invoicing and payment terms and all that stuff. And then after that, this is maybe a couple of years down the line, graduate school.

Another buddy of mine, very creative, we're like, he's in the jewelry game. And he's, yo, we're like, what if we make the Cartier bracelet out of rubber? And this was, again, very Instagram 1.0 at the time.

there were no even dms i think in on the platform and we started the cost of goods on that was like crazy low and so we started flipping these rubber bracelets that were influenced by cartier and then that was going very well ultimately we got a couple cds from them even though as you should that means you're doing something right yes for sure and then so we changed the mark kept it going and then they actually got through their i know they're clever because they have a lot of money then it was black friday we were our plan was to shut it down after that holiday season i can't remember what year this was dude like maybe 2015 2014 and the day that black friday gets they sent to cnd to shopify to take the products down and shopify didn't even do any investigation or ask us any questions even though we weren't infringing on any of their marks anymore and they just took it down so we're like all right this is a sign let's just turn the page and move on and then i started i started the agency shortly thereafter really focused on email marketing for brands predominantly, but also, I don't know, people sell it.

The way that I look at email as modality is you're just communicating with humans to buy something somewhere that could be in a card that could be buying over the phone doesn't really matter. And most of our clients were brands, but also work with people selling information services. Like the most boring thing that I sold via email was a company selling cloud hosting solutions to law firms. I don't know how I did it, but it worked.

And so ultimately sold the agency. And now I'm helping, I really got good at evaluating finding talent into operating their like performance environment and so now that's what i'm doing just recruiting overseas talent for companies but that's the super abridged version of the bio dude sounds good everybody's got a super unique path and i think it helped set the context for what their knowledge base is and what they're comfortable sharing so talk us a little bit talk us through a little bit more about the email marketing channel specifically what i think is interesting about email is if we go way back, you had MySpace come and go and you had other channels and other platforms, other things come and go.

But email still, at least in my opinion, has been around the entire time and is still arguably the most important marketing channel to stay connected with folks. Sure, SMS is important, but people feel a certain way about SMS versus email is an acceptable and agreed upon mechanism for communicating with folks. and monetizing. So it sounds like you had tons of experience in email.

Curious to hear your perspective about maybe what's changed over the past 10, 15 years across email and what's still working today. So do a deep dive on the email channel for us. Yeah, man. So I would say email is one of those unique things where it's like, it's as old as the internet.

It's the oldest modality that we have online. And, but oddly enough, it still gets, I don't know, table stakes with respect to everybody, everyone looks at it. Like it's never, it's seldom prioritized, often overlooked and cast aside. But it really is like the constant that remains.

And I've yet to see one business that allocates resources to it, not client success. Because the interesting thing about it that not many people realize is that it's downstream of wherever demand is coming from. So like any business, they're generating opportunity volume from paid organic channels, right? I know a lot of your clients are doing things like on radio or more analog stuff, but everything where traffic comes from a variety of places, they have to go somewhere to give you their email in the first place.

And so, and because it's downstream of it, it's like a lot of the risk is taken out because people are raising their hands saying, I want to hear more about whatever you're selling. Again, cloud posting solutions to law firms or SOX or anything. And so because of that, it's particularly unique. and from my standpoint dude i would say across all the industries and categories i've had exposure into over the years in their marketing channel the the sort of like constant that i see from a like performance standpoint is like whatever your conversion event is in the business again if they're buying in the cart or they're buying on the phone or what have you 30 of it should come from email and that's like a very good barometer to know if you're like at kpi and doing kind of what's expected from an output standpoint with email or not.

And if it's a lot of people aren't even tracking it or don't even know, but that could be a little care for folks that are listening that do send some emails just to go check on whatever their conversion event is. Does email drive at least 30% of those every single month? And that'll pretty much tell them if they need to give it more attention or not. So walk us through to say you run into a client whose email conversion rate or source of revenue, let's say attributed conversions is 15% coming from email.

How do you diagnose it? What are you looking at to improve that? Take us through some of those initial steps when you find somebody who needs to get more out of email. What do you do?

It's threefold. It's actually very straightforward. So the first thing is like, for you to be able for you to email people, they have to be on the list in the first place. So how effective are you at capturing the leads or the intent from the traffic that you're getting that's seeing the modal where they can give you their email address and giving it to you, right?

And then is that above or below KPI? So the reason why I start there is because even if you just focus on improving this one metric, even if none of this stuff behind the scenes gets improved and it's still messed up, you'll get more opportunity volume out of it just because you're more efficient at capturing intent from the people that are giving you their email address. So that's the first piece. And then after that, it really just comes down to the automations.

So like automations are people that qualify to receive messaging based on their behaviors or lack thereof. So for example, a common one would be the person who's gave you their email address and is identified is on a page where a conversion event happens, but they don't complete the action. So it could be in an e-commerce landscape, they view the cart, but they don't complete the purchase. If it's a scenario where they're booking a telephone call, scheduling a call, they look at the calendar, but they don't hit the confirmation page and actually book the call.

So that's a common sort of like lifecycle stage for any business. And so generally speaking, an email automation should be triggered at that point if they meet that criteria, at which point it gets them back to the paid to complete booking. Right. Gotcha.

And then the third element is the broadcast or the campaigns. Right. So what emails are sent to like the subscriber base at large on on what schedule of a basis? And what does that do from an open rate and a click rate standpoint?

And that really just comes down to, in terms of its effectiveness, what's the audience or segment that it being sent to and how regularly is it cleansed What the hygiene of the audience For example if someone opted in two years ago and they haven opened any emails they probably shouldn be receiving any more emails from you But a lot of people don't do some of that one-on-one stuff. And that, as a result, lowers the ceiling on the open rate and the click rate just because there's people in the audience that shouldn't be receiving the stuff.

And in order to get into making whatever their earsets, whatever they're sending more compelling or increasing the frequency or decreasing the frequency, it's really just like keeping the house clean for a sec. Cool. But those are the three places that I would look and that all the answers are right there. Cool.

And then how do you think maybe that email content, the body itself might have changed over the years in terms of the subject lines, what's included? I always see folks that are basically, sometimes I see people that are trying to sell the widget in the email itself rather than selling the click to go to the page where the widget is presented. How do you feel about those two strategies? Is one better than the other?

Talk us through that. Yeah, man. So if you distill it down to first principles like no one you can't buy within the email right can't right and so then it becomes email sole job to get the collect and a lot of people get it twisted to your point yeah you're right they and they still they what they do is they pack a bunch of stuff in the email trying to communicate the whole value proposition and get you to click buy but the problem is you can't do it so you it requires them to go to another page which adds friction and really that the page is meant to close the sale not the email was about to the emails objectively is how do you make it as salacious as possible that they're like oh i need to click this link so i could do the thing yeah i think people really miss that a lot of times we see folks that are they're very concerned about explaining sort of themselves in the email my product does this it's amazing rather than focusing on the problem that the recipient might be facing that your widget solves and we always try to help folks get that click and really get the sale done on that page that comes after the fact.

So my guiding sort of principle on this is any email should only have one angle, one offer, one CTA. So if you're trying to talk about more than one thing, it's already three strikes in your app. If you're trying to sell more than one thing in there, three strikes in your app, or if you're linking out to different things. So I'm not saying a CTA that go, two CTAs that go to the same place.

I'm saying two CTAs that go to two different places, start three also. And if you just put yourself in a box it becomes really easy to like, okay, to conceptualize and draft and send these things because you're not trying to pack 18 things into one. Talk us through, I think, two things that are maybe a gray area of what folks either think is a good or bad marketing tactic. So the first I'd say is cold email.

And the second one would be basically like buying a list of targeted recipients and then just going after them. Talk us through your experience, the efficacy of those two strategies if you have experience in it and what you think about folks that might be considering adding in cold email or blasting cold a cold list go ahead yeah man the email marketing cold email are two entirely different things even though they operate within the same modality with cold email like i think that is it b2b i'm all for it like it's people been using it for a long time and it can work it's because it's become very much a red ocean like bear it's always been competitive but i I feel like in the last 18 months, it's been gotten even crazier from a competitiveness standpoint in terms of the people that are trying to get in front of buyers and show whatever offers that they have.

But it does work. And especially in the B2B landscape, I'm all for it. The second one that you said of just buy a list or commandeer list from somewhere and drop them onto a newsletter per se, like that really becomes gray area. Yeah, black cat.

Yeah, but it's still cold in a way. And I think that, again, if it's to a consumer market, I would avoid it like the plague just because the risk isn't worth the reward. If it's for a BDB market because it's still cold email, just the optics of what you're sending them are different than a traditional direct response cold email. I'm not necessarily against it.

I just think it requires some sort of thought and creativity. and I would say pair in terms of, by creativity in terms of what you send them, but also care about thinking about, okay, how many people are you adding to the list that you're sending emails to that are net new addresses? Because that's where everything can go off the rails. But if you do that in a calculated conservative way, it can be very successful.

But if you do it, you're just aggressive and throw caution to the wind, it usually won't work that well. Yeah, that's why at least all the cold email I get comes from like a burner domain. And it seems pretty obvious, but I think I'm more attuned to it. So I know what I'm looking at versus people.

They might not notice it. Moving on. It was something that I often find myself when I chat with marketing clients or folks that are looking for help with marketing is if you can't get a dollar, I basically try to suggest people to try to get an email subscription or at least get an email opt-in. If you can't get an email opt-in, the next best thing after that would be like a social media follow or a connection.

Do you agree with that? Or how would you rank those in your opinion or experience? Are you thinking back through the lens of cold email or just broadly speaking? Broadly.

Yeah. Like the going straight for the sale on whatever the thing is, get the dollar. Yeah. It's the highest value thing.

I think like power laws apply in the market at any given time. If you're like only two, three percent of the market on any given day is ready to buy any anything. Yeah. And so I just think it takes some sort of situational awareness to be like, okay, this email or this campaign, whomever it's going to, I guess if we have their email address, You don't need them to opt in.

But point being is that like only a small percentage is going to give you money that day. And so then it really becomes, that's why I find the email address so valuable. Because once I have that, I have the ability to, assuming I'm treating the audience with respect, etc. Let's just take those as a given.

To share with them offers on a consistent different variety of offers over a period of time. Because they're going to be in that 2% of the, they will be in the pocket that is ready to buy on some day. than if a company has a responsibility to stay top of mind. So I wanted to just ask, I think over the past couple of years, you've seen a lot of people, or a lot of tech companies, martech companies, I should say, as well as regulators and CCPA and GDPR and these things, the deprecation of cookies.

And so my question to you is somebody who's seen quite a lot of campaigns. How are you measuring or attributing conversions accurately? And now let's expand past email. And I know you have experience across the board.

But when you look at a particular client or a project, either for yourself or someone else that you're helping, how are you recommending to measure and attribute conversions in a world where Facebook isn't really going to communicate with Google in terms of the conversion share that they get and vice versa? Google won't communicate. Apple is obscuring open rates and they're not really, they present back to you that every email was opened. You don't know who is or isn't opening it for those Apple devices.

And so I'm just curious if you have experience in that and how you are working with clients who attribute those conversions across all the various channels that exist. Yeah. So let me unpack the email, Apple, the Apple iOS 14 stuff first, and we'll go to the other, like the broader attribution second. So on the email one, yeah.

So Apple rolled out iOS 14 and a half or 15, whichever it was, and they started auto opening all these emails. Every email you send, when it lands in the inbox, they'll auto open it with the pixel. And so we lose visibility into from an open rate perspective, who's opening it. And if they're truly engaged from that standpoint, right?

Which is like you look, optically, you look at it outside looking, oh, that sucks. That's a bad thing, right? But it's actually not that bad of a thing. And this is why this is how I look at it now.

So if the only emails that Apple is auto opening are the ones that go to the inbox, they're not doing that for the ones that go to spam. Right. And so if I'm, if my open rate is high, like across accounts, open rates are elevated since that rolled out a couple of years ago, whereas what you saw before was on average 30% open rate or 35. Now you see 50.

So I don't like, yes, it doesn't, we can't use that metric from open rate standpoint from are these people engaged or not, but we can from like an initial thumb on the pulse read of, are we getting good inbox placement? Right. Which is super valuable. And so it's just, I don't know the saying, I always ruin the saying, but it's half a dozen in one way, the biggest doesn't other, I don't know, where's language setting last source, but it's a different perspective on the same thing.

And so that's how I look at the open rate thing. I'm not really concerned about it. It is what it is. The state of play changed.

You have to adapt, right? Yeah, exactly. And so then it makes the downstream metrics more valuable, like the click rate, right? Are people clicking the emails And the people that you sending emails to are they active on the site And then you can use that to infer how engaged or non are they You know what I saying Yeah Makes sense On the attribution side from a performance standpoint like it gets hairy It gets difficult because if you think about the average, like, the average company, they have an agency or a couple of agencies doing different things, right?

Or platforms doing different things. They all want to take their own credit, right? Yeah. And so historically, Facebook double counts conversions all the time or misattributes things that they shouldn't.

And then whoever's running the paid media is saying, oh, look how great we are because for sure Facebook misattributed. And whereas like me and the email modality, when I would work with clients on that front, it's like Klaviyo was predominantly the platform that most of the clients used. And there's, but like in their backend, the default attribution window for conversions is five days, whereas Facebook is seven days. So then it's already you're looking at things from a different perspective.

So to keep it simple, the way that I always think about it is like there can either be one central source of truth. Right. That could be GA, for example, Google Analytics. And it's not perfect.

But if we can all agree, we're looking at the same numbers to determine who wins. Right. That. And sometimes without that, it's just like I had a client and email is my sole responsibility.

And I don't touch anything before or after it. All I'm looking at is what is the attribution window in the tool? again yeah it's not perfect but at least it's in a marker that we can all agree on that sure i think things are going trending going well or trending in the right direction yep so that's how i think about it knowing that it's an imperfect science and whoever does figure out the attribution piece is going to be super rich dude and working on it it's about my pay rate but i yearn for the day yes i think it's we unpacked it well so we might not need to spend too much more time on it, but I think it's the ground in which digital and traditional marketers are standing continues to be eroded out from underneath them.

The cookie reigned supreme for a very long time. And so everybody agreed upon, I was go ahead and just track Philip's behavior on my website and then what he did on social and then what he did on email. I know exactly who he is, where he is, the last actions, the pages that he spends most time on. So I'm going to hit him with this offer at this time.

But even in GA, and a lot of this changes in real time, but at least from my understanding of the current landscape, you're getting this blended average across all people. It's not about Philip. It's about there's a thousand people that are similar to Philips and 36% of the time they look at this page and 24% of the time they care about this page or they take this action. And to me, although that's arguably better for the consumer, let's say, It starts to break down the marketer's ability to get the right message at the right time to those folks.

So I'm curious if that you can only control what you're able to control. And that is outside of the marketer's control. But I'm curious if you've pivoted any of your campaigns or methodology to try to handle that situation any differently so that you're targeting and your messaging is the best fit. Right message, right time.

What do you think about that? So a couple of things I would say, like you mentioned, like better for the consumer. my my sort of like counter to that is is it better because like oh it's like everything is everything is co-mingled together there's no there's no like specific i agree with you and so i'm like apples they do it the apple did some of the guys of protecting people but really all they did was embolden themselves to control the data and use it at further on benefit and the smb the smbs are the ones that get hurt the most so i think so that sucks number one and then in terms of like how i've adapted not really there's some like attribution tools like there's high rows and Northbeam and a couple of others that are like better than nothing.

Right. But those are a certain segment of the market that like are pumping enough volume and can afford it. And so I think like at the end of the day, it's just there's, I think Google came out and said that they're either delaying or not deprecating cookies altogether. Right.

Three times in a row. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know, I guess that's, I try not to think or worry too much about all the stuff I have no control over.

And it's just, if I'm running media paid, if I'm running ads or if I'm running email or combination, thereof is just again what's the information or the tech stack that i have access to and how do i use that to influence my decision making and not yeah yeah because at a certain point that the like worry and and like trying to figure it out there's diminishing returns you know what i'm saying just the energy alone so i'm just like screw it do like this will get solved and then i'll figure it out once it's presented to me you can only make your sort of like scientific meets creative decisions based on the information that you have so to worry about what's obscured from you really is not helpful there's nothing you can do about it i'm also pretty unique in that like i'll always index were like radical simplicity so how can i make this as simple and steadfast as possible um and just because i used to be have you ever seen that the midwit meme where there's like the mouth breather on the left and the jedi on the right and then there's the guy at the top of the bell curve that's like doing all the all the stuff right yeah and so i used to be like when i was the noob i didn't know anything and so i didn't know what i didn't know and then i learned all the stuff and i'm at the top of the belt curve i have to have all these very specific media and all this overlapping and then i become the jedi and i'm like dude that stuff is a waste of time i'm just wasting time typing keys for naming conventions and i just go back to doing it the way that i did before i knew anything i just know more now and so yeah yeah that's in my evolution and how i tend to approach it is just i know generally speaking how to run it and what works and i try not to worry about all the the little nuances because it it's does more harm than good usually Totally.

And I think that's something leads our ex we communicate a lot that's like, actually measuring it incorrectly, and getting bad data, and then putting it back into your decision making is actually worse, usually, than what like a seasoned marketers hunch is. So if you have 60% chance that you feel confident about this, but the data comes in that you believe is done in a perfectly scientific way, and it leads you to go left instead of right, you might have just hurt yourself when the 10 humans in a room would be like, we should pretty much be going left here.

or we all feel we should go this way. The data is sending us this way. We got to trust the data. But if your data is downstream from what Apple, Google, Facebook is willing to share with you, it can be very distorted.

And with people that have IP blockers and DTNs and things like that, there's a battle that you're not really going to win against some of those folks. And so at the end, you need to just go with, I don't want to say your best guess because that's oversimplification, but you got in one hand hard data, of the other hand like your intuition and experience as a marketer and you got to weigh both those things and put the best kind of content and effort you have out there at any given time 100 dude 100 people get really tripped up and they like hard on data ignore like the human element expert on the whole sub just knowing what the right move is yeah it's like flying an airplane with instruments only sure because you can't look around and so or excuse me with no instruments You just have to look and feel and navigate like the old fashioned way.

But yeah, I think that people definitely lose sight of that or overcomplicate it more than it needs to be sometimes. Got it. So let's change gears here. Talk a little bit more about what many folks call performance marketing.

And it sounds like that's something that you've been pretty experienced with and have a lot of experience in. So what kind of channels are you looking at or what's almost that new shiny object that seems to be performing well now? and that could be a strategy, it could be a channel. Just talk us through maybe even your definition of what performance marketing is.

And I'm happy to clarify that if you need. But more or less kind of seeking from you, what is your expert opinion of what's hot right now and people that want to move the needle for revenue or conversion rates that if they haven't been paying attention over the past six months, like they missed it or they're not deploying it. So talk us through maybe the cutting edge of what folks are doing today. I feel like the, I don't know, dude, I'm like slow to adapt to like the new cool thing.

okay and so i guess i'm pretty conservative on that side like i know meta and google work right and i'm just gonna keep running i'll just run it on meta google till it doesn't work and so i distill it down to be pretty simple and it's just like a paid channel and email and i'm good the obviously the hottest thing in the world is tiktok and but i'm also like i spend time on it because i want to understand it but i also like from a performance standpoint i haven't spent enough time on it to actually talk about it in any reasonable any valuable way on it but to be honest with you and that's one of the things i'm like yeah yeah i want to sharpen my sword but i got all this good stuff over here if it ain don sit and there only 24 hours a day unfortunately but tiktok is the thing dude and i don know like different companies utilize it different ways But it is from my experience or from what I seen anecdotally outside looking in and talking to people that I know that run stuff on that platform It does really well for, I would say, down market offers.

Sure. But I have yet to see anyone. I have yet to see anything being sold that's, I don't know, I considered high ticket or anything on the standpoint. Yeah, fair enough.

And I agree with you. I think just from the paid media side of things, I often look just for the rate of the auction. So if I'm targeting a 40-year-old male, probably not the best example for TikTok, let's say 20-year-old male, and I can get a click from TikTok in my geographic region for 50 cents, but Meta's 75 cents and Google's 80 cents is tough for me. Even without knowing the intricacies of the platform and how it's going to perform, I at least find myself saying, I'm going to throw into the mix those more affordable clicks just because you get the experience.

My experience with it is the new kid on the block, the new platform at least is the most surprising. Yeah. And they're the most like favorable to, you know, come advertise with us and they pay the creators to make that they're still in growth mode and they're probably burning cash and losing money versus the legacy players are like extracting money from the advertisers and have positive earnings on their stock calls, things like that. So I think as long as that situation exists, you got to consider it.

But yeah, I personally, I just think I'm a little bit, maybe too old or too. It just doesn't appeal to me to spend time on TikTok. So don't do it personally. Therefore, my brain's not wrapped around it.

But if I sneak in the back door on the paid media channel and just say, hey, look, I'm targeting this. You allow me to target it. And a lot of their rules are the gray area stuff of weight loss and supplements and download my course and get rich quick schemes are OK over here. but Google and medic, you know, limit you a little bit and protect their customers.

Let's just say, so agree with you and think that's something that depending on the offer. And I think downstream is a very easy way to put it or down market is what you said, you know, that might be the place for you. And I think also, like I think about new channels is, you know, it's easy to get like, this is the new show or anything I want to do it. But what gets lost a lot of times on folks is like, what's the bandwidth to test something new?

And what's the budget you're going to allocate to test it? And what is, you're taking the budget away from somewhere else. and so a lot of people like they don't think they don't think about like i'll use the term consequences there but especially just from a bandwidth standpoint like what's required to put this new channel you're going to test in a position to be successful money for money right yeah and do you have the bandwidth to do it other are you just trying it because it's you're it's feverish and you just have to try it because everyone's trying it in that regard is probably a mistake totally let's shift gears again final topic here so i know you're in the recruiting space and you're helping folks get access to talent.

So I think two-part question, tell us about what you're working on in terms of helping folks get talent for their marketing department, let's say. But maybe in a broader question, what type of roles, what type of people do you think are like almost the most valuable? Even for folks that are trying to get these skills and get into the marketing employment space so that they can get plugged into campaigns, what's the hot ticket item in there? What are people looking to hire?

How does your company help? And tell us about it. No doubt. So I would say, so let me rewind real quick.

When I was building the agency, when I was building my agency before selling it, the, just like when I first started, I know outsourcing has been a thing for a long time, especially like the Philippines and stuff and the arbitrage of domestic people versus overseas folks. But at the time, I was like, this is back in 18, 2017, 18. I was like, yo, America needs jobs. Americans need jobs too.

And I still obviously fundamentally know and believe that. But I was like, I'm not going to do the overseas thing. I'll take the margin hit and build the team state sign. And then the team was small.

So the top line was nothing crazy. The overhead wasn't crazy. And the bottom line wasn't great. And then that wasn't crazy.

Then as the business started to grow, I'm like, it's starting to get more intriguing going out for certain roles. Right. You capitalist. And then especially when you layer in just like the red tape that we have here with folks, and then I'll say like the entitlement that comes with some certain generations.

It's when you look at it side by side, it's actually quite promising going elsewhere. You obviously have to sacrifice things. You have to make sacrifices no matter which way you go. So anyways, long story short, I just got to develop a process for recruiting and vetting talent, specifically overseas.

and as I after I sold I'm like I could do the marketing agency thing again and that's appealing on the one hand but not because it's also like boring I've been there done that doing it for a long time like over it and I was like I've sharpened my sword quite a bit on being able to recruit that talent and that's a weakness that a lot of people have not to mention that it's below the pay grade for most entrepreneurs that are running their own business to like take the time to run the process when they all don't have to run it that often so they're not that good at it.

And it's just, if you look at the time, the value of their time, if you did the math on what's spent to do the recruiting, it's really not, it doesn't make mathematical sense. It's like a distraction for them. And so anyways, I was like, this is the next thing I'm going to do. So I essentially just formalized the process to do it for other people, as opposed to just do it for myself and build out all the communications on the talent side, on the client side.

And now just focus on recruiting specifically, I would say marketing support talent in South American countries for Americans, for American companies. And really, the opportunity that I see is the Fortune 500s have been using overseas talent since the 80s. But the capital to invest there. So like for them, that means building offices, training a whole staff.

And for small businesses, they don't have that luxury. They especially didn't in the 80s. But now more and more with the proliferation of the internet and education, like the education got closing in other countries relative to here. right now it's actually like a very viable option for small medium businesses to go get talent overseas and plug them in to whatever their execution is in here and so like where i'm like carving my line in the sand if you will is i would say manager level talent and below so okay so if it's like a director and above director vp president i don't know you could still find good people there but it's really hard with the cultural thing and you know the stuff to outcourse that side so manager level and below, they can really do like the blocking and tackling on a lot of stuff to free up the people that you hire stateside to do the highest leveraged activities that their role really requires.

I'm sorry. Okay, fair enough. It does. Yeah.

And I think your point about the Fortune 500 level companies, basically like in-house outsourcing, like there's an office in India. So you've got a couple in-house guys managing all the outsource team and you're like arbitraging the tax implications and employment, et cetera. Yeah. It's just, you're getting the same thing, or let's say 90% of the same quality, even 80% of the same quality, but 20% of the cost.

So they're going to make that choice every time. So even more, even more on the cost saving side, a lot of times it could be 60%, 70 even dude. I think I said the number backwards. What I meant is it only costs you 20% of what you would have been paid.

Yeah. So it's pretty substantial, So especially for, I would say, the bottom of the least skilled workers, you can get people to crank out content or manage a website and do certain things like that, that I think is easier to outsource. Less creative, less decisions to be made and more blocking and tackling, like you mentioned. So for sure, look, for anybody in that space that's looking to hire talent, tell them where they can go find you, follow you or get in touch with your company.

Go ahead and give yourself a plug here about how folks can get in touch with you and build out that overseas team for themselves. Thank you, sir. The website is talenthq.co, talenthq.

co. And I spend a lot of most of my time on the internet on Twitter. So twitter.com forward slash d phil rivers.

That's it. Twitter. What's Twitter, man? X.

My apologies. Fair enough. Awesome. Hey, Philip, thank you so much for the time today.

For anybody who wants to get more out of their marketing and advertising spend, definitely go check out Philip and what he's got going on at Talent HQ. There's always more to do, always more content to make. And you can probably tap into some of those channels you're not quite exploring yet with some help from Philip and his team. So this is the Attribution Marketing Podcast, signing off.