#538 - Good Deals, Bad Deals, and Worse

Speaker A: Foreign talk about the things that actually work in business. And today, unfortunately, we're talking about, I'm, uh, not going to call it a scam, but it's definitely a bad deal going, uh, to talk today about when you're running your business, how do you identify the good deals from the bad ones? Um, including a particularly painful example that I came across today.

Speaker B: All that and more is on the show today.

Speaker A: But before we dive in, of course, we have a business that sponsored today's episode. Check out this quick ad and we'll be back soon.

Speaker B: Do you ever feel like your payment processor is robbing you blind? For some of us, it's not blind. We look at the amount of money that's going to our payment processor month after month, and a lot of times we ask ourselves, is there a better way? I'm making good money, yet so much of it isn't actually ending up in my pocket. In the world of payment processing, in many cases, it's a cashless world. So you have to have a payment processor you can really trust. I personally am a fan of Brad Norwood, who's the owner of PrimePaymentsUSA.com Brad's a business owner himself. He knows all the challenges that come with running a business. More importantly, he knows the value of an individual customer. See, some of these bigger businesses, they're all about scale. They're all about bringing in as m many customers as possible. But do they know your name? Do they know your business?

Speaker A: Do they know what's important, important to you?

Speaker B: In many cases, the answer is no. And in worst cases, they're just looking to get as much money from every transaction that you work hard for, which

Speaker A: really doesn't feel too good.

Speaker B: So you gotta reach out to Brad Norwood today and understand how he's doing business and why it can save you money month after month. More importantly, you might even ask him about his zero fee payment processing that he's offering to a select few of people. Go to primepaymentsusa.com and start putting the money that you worked hard for back into your pocket.

Speaker A: All right. Hello, my friends. Thank you for tuning in to the show today. I really appreciate it. I got my coffee and I'm excited. I'm excited. Well, it's bittersweet. Bittersweet's maybe not the right word. Um, I'm looking forward to sharing the story. It is not a positive story, though. It's not a feel good story. It is, unfortunately, something that happens quite a bit in the world of business, and it's rare there's any accountability for this. What I'm talking about today are, uh, not just scams, but people who do business in a way that is pretty scummy and slimy and takes, uh, advantage of people. Um, I'll just share. Uh, sorry, I had to take a good sip of the coffee here. Uh, we're on that Aldi brand right now, by the way. Rocking the Aldi brand of coffee. I'm a big Aldi fan in general. But anyway, here nor there. Um, you know, I. I think back to my early days of good advice eight years ago almost. And, man, was I naive. I've, uh, told the story many times about this marketing guy who, uh, promised to get me to X dollars in revenue, and it was a $5,000 upfront cost. And I remember that was, like, pretty much everything we had in savings at the time. Um, and I remember actually it was my wife's savings account. And I was like, hey, um, you know, the conversation was something like, do you mind if I use this money? And she was like, no, I don't mind, but are you sure about this? And I was like, well, you know, this guy's not going to lie about helping me. Like, you can't do that. Um, well, I never saw a dime of that $5,000 again. Uh, and unfortunately, I'll also add that to, uh, really illustrate how much of a sucker I was in doing business with that guy. Um, and again, this was, geez, inflation is just crazy now. $5,000 almost a decade ago. Um, but to fix it, I guess in his point of view, I ended up needing to spend about another $10,000 on top of that. Um, so basically everything I made, uh, was being part of it was being diverted that first year of business towards Facebook ads and all these different things to make this program work, this marketing program that I had bought. Until one day I woke up and was like, what am I doing? Like, this is nuts. Um, and I think to expand on the story a little bit, my aha moment was this particular person put out a piece of content on how do you win chargebacks? And the linchpin of this whole thing about winning chargebacks was that he had lost his account on stripe maybe, uh, because he had gotten so many chargebacks. And so he had put in all this work and effort into figuring out how to win chargebacks and, you know, was in sharing that information with other people. So I saw this and thought, well, why would someone. Why would someone need to develop a strategy around winning chargebacks? And why would someone lose Their account on stripe for the number of chargebacks. I mean, put. Put two and two together, right? One plus one equals two, right? Um, you know, it was kind of an aha of like, okay, clearly this guy does business in a way that isn't great. I want to talk about that today because, um, you know, this has been kind of a theme of the podcast over the last several years. You know, it's really been sharing that story, trying to help younger business owners, um, understand and be wise and not get swindled or taken advantage of or what have you, you know, and I don't necessarily want to, like, repeat things I've said elsewhere. Um, I will say that doing business is much more nuanced than social media makes it sound. Um, I think it would be a mistake if I was to just say, you know, if someone selling you something doesn't say these three words, run away, or as a reverse, you know, if they mention these three words, do not do business with them. Like, I. I just. I think it would be a mistake to try to boil down the nuance of sales and working with people. You know, as you do business, as you get farther along in business, you're going to. You know, it's. It's not. It's. It really is not always simple. Um, and it is not always tit for tat. And one for one. Some deals you make are lopsided. Some are. Um, I mean, I just. I just talked to a client of mine the other day who, uh, made a $20,000 investment in someone else's business. And I said, you know, what's. What are the terms of, you know, what does it look like for you? And there's not a lot out there. There's not a lot on paper. So this would be a bit of a lopsided deal. And what I told him was, I said, hey, you know, this doesn't mean it's a bad deal. These. There's just questions that you're going to want to get answered sooner rather than later because you've made a sizable investment. And in the same way for our businesses, you know, when you think about your business, I do think sometimes we are, um. Uh, here's actually, like, a pretty good way to think of this. Um, some of the advice that I give from a consulting perspective is money up front. You know, how can you protect your cash flow and get money up front? Can charge the full amount up front? Can you charge half up front? You know, what does that look like? Understand that there are some businesses where that simply does not happen. It simply does not work. Um, I've mentioned before I had an electrician, uh, who, um, you know, he did house calls. You know, he's, he's not going to take the money up front. Now what he does do though, and what a lot of electricians do is, hey, the service call is going to cost this much. Are you okay with that? And so there's an agreement on costs before there's ever an exchange. Um, but part of that conversation evolved into, you know, not house calls. But are there other things you can do that you can take money up front? And what we ended up looking at was, um, uh, is it called roughing? In you guys who do electrical work? I think, would you like wire up a house that they're building? Um, you know, taking the money up front for that or taking 50% upfront for that and then getting the other 50% when it was done. So sometimes the nuance of these conversations is understanding where to apply it rather than does it work or does it not? So, you know, understand that there are deals in your business that other people will say that's a bad deal, but it's actually a pretty good deal for you. Um, you know, other people may not understand the nuance of it. Um, you know, you might be making a business decision that financially makes no sense or, but you are okay with the risk associated with it. Um, I do think much of these conversations do circulate around risk. And you know, identifying a good deal versus a bad deal, uh, is very much around, you know, what is the risk to me, um, is the risk in the form of lost revenue or the lost investment, um, that versus the reward, the upside. And I will also add to this that business owners in general have a very difficult time ascertaining genuine upside, realistic upside. So think for a second, you know, let's say, let's go back to the electrician example. Someone comes along and tells you, hey, uh, the, the electrician industry has such huge, huge upside. You're going to make so much money. You know, if you land one of these commercial gigs, um, you know, you're going to be making 40, 50, $60,000 and you have never sold anything in your life. You wouldn't even know where to begin with the commercial industry. Um, some of these commercial properties have, um, you know, technical systems that you may not be experienced in or they may have long term partnerships with other companies and you have no shot of taking, uh, of getting that contract. So. But what ends up happening though is the business owner gets excited about the dollar amount and they are naively misunderstanding the actual upside in what this can do for you. I will say that people in general seem to be pretty trusting. Uh, they seem to not ask the right questions and they seem to not be deliberate in understanding exactly what this product is and what it can do for you. So I want to give an example today, um, and a little bit unrelated of what I just said. I do want to give an example today of deals that should make you nervous and including deals that are likely scams. So right off the bat, scam deals are almost always where the value is just insanely one sided. And here's what I mean by this. Imagine, uh, that you met someone who said, hey, are you, do you dislike sales? Do you dislike cold calling? Well, yeah, I don't like cold calling. Okay, great. Hey, what if I told you I have a team of expert salespeople and they're gonna be making somewhere between 20 to 40 calls per day on your behalf. They're going to be calling your perfect customer. They're going to be calling people who actually would want to buy from you. Um, great customers with sizable budgets to invest in the service that you're offering. And what if I told you that I'm going to get you those 20 to 40 phone calls a day and of that amount I'm going to have three to five validated qualified leads that I'm going to be sending, sending to you at the end of each day. Uh, and that it's basically going to be easy money in your pocket. Now what if I also said that, you know, how much are you doing per month or how much are you doing per year? And you might say, oh, I do 10k a month or I do 15k a month. And so the person replies with, okay, great. Well, let's say, you know, let's say the average earn on one of these customers is anywhere from eight to uh, $12,000. So if I sent you three qualified leads per day for, we're talking $24,000 per day in potential revenue for your business. So if we add that up over the course of a month, that is, I mean, you're going to be a seven figure earner easily, easily in the next six months. Now, um, are you comfortable with earning that revenue? Are you comfortable with making that much money? And you're like, you know, eyes are glazing over. Oh, of course. You know, that would be amazing. It's kind of like the wolf on Wall street, uh, clip, if you've ever seen it. Of um, Leonardo DiCaprio is trying to. He's trying to pull one over some guy on the phone. And, you know, the guy's like, he's like, you know, what would that do for you? And he's like, oh, that would, you know, that would change my life. And he's like, oh, yeah, that would change your life. Wow. How about that? I knew you would say that. I'm manipulating you. Well, so when I say one way transaction, it is a transaction that is completely illogical. It's completely illogical. It makes zero sense. And here's what I mean by this. It's not even just in the upside. You know, if I told you I was going to do that for you, and then I said, hey, yeah, the cost is, uh, $10,000 a month, you would say, okay, wow. Yeah, I'm gonna have to make a decision about this. I'm gonna have to think about this. I have to value the upside versus the expense to me. But that's not how these conversations go. What ends up happening is someone says, now, you know, I, obviously, I can't work for free, but I'm looking to help you out. Um, I have this amazing team of sales professionals. They've been selling for 30 years. They're amazing. They're great on social media, they're great on AI. I, uh, throw in the AI thing because, you know, people are just. It's such a snazzy, snappy buzzword. I mean, you're seeing businesses that just drop AI into their marketing just to be like, we're so forward thinking and so advanced and, you know, delivering all these results even when it makes no sense. You know, we're an AI driven lawn care company. It's like, okay, uh, what? You know, but anyway, so the person's talking to you and they say, hey, so here's, here's what I can do for you, though, because I want to help. We, um, can offer you this sales team for as little as $199 a month. Or, you know what? If you, if you pay now, if you commit now, I can get you the first three months for only $97 a month. How would that be for you? What do you think about that? Well, you're like, dude, the upside is huge. The upside is huge. I potentially can earn eight grand versus $97. And by the way, this is a very intentional sales strategy. Um, I do not do this at all whatsoever. Uh, because business is unpredictable because you're the one who's growing your business. Um, um, you know, I don't even step into this at all because I think it's very scummy and very slimy and very manipulative. Even though we've seen businesses double and triple their revenue M and significant improvements for their business. Which I will say on that. You know, we'll talk sometimes, whenever I'm in a sales conversation, I'll talk about other customers and I'll point to other customers and I'll give contact information for other customers and say, you know, hey, go ahead and validate yourself. Feel free to reach out, give them a phone call, what have you. Uh, but I do not do, um, the. What's the someone help me. I'm m actually like blanking all of a sudden. Um, uh, when you put two numbers side by side, um, oh man, you guys are gonna have to help me here. I can't think what it's called. Um, it's like a reference number, something like that. I can't remember. But you know, they put the 80 grand in your mind and then they intentionally say 97 later. This is to help you have an emotional connection of well, 80s way higher than 97. So the risk is almost nothing. The problem with this is it is not, you know, a team of 30 years. Like, just think about this logically. The value is one sided. It's nonsensical. When is the last time you were able to hire someone at uh, I mean, just think about it, just think about it. And unfortunately, in the world of marketing, what you see is it's these gurus who present themselves as having like a secret or a hack or like, we figured it out. Like, here's like, how are you able to do it so cheap? Dude, I figured it out. I know the secret. I'm doing something that no one else is doing. I'm not doing it the old way, I'm doing it the new way, you know, and they, and they talk about it as if like they have achieved enlightenment in the world of marketing when really, you know, that team of qualified sales professionals, these are like a bunch of random dudes who, you know, are like, have just gotten out of college and are desperate for a job and you know, dude pulls up on a street corner and is like, hey, do you know how to pick up the phone and call someone? Okay, great man, you're, you're hired. You know, it's just as if this example has ever happened, by the way, in like the last five years. But you get what I'm saying though, of like the way. And here's what's so funny to me. I was talking about this to my wife the other day, and, um, we were chatting about this and I was talking about an example where someone. Someone basically. Someone basically described their team as a really amazing team. And we were talking about it, and he was like, yeah, my senior developer, Yada Yada. And like, yeah, and I have, like, my junior developers and yada yada. Well, we kept talking about it and I eventually was like, you know, um,

Speaker B: tell me about your team.

Speaker A: Like, where did, you know, where did you source these people? Whatever? And he's like, oh, I was. I was talking to someone who is from India who basically said, hey, I know some people in India that I can get you connected with and they're dirt cheap. And so I was like, oh, uh, okay. So the way we talk about it is very different from what's true or what's. I wouldn't say what's true. I mean, these could be phenomenally talented people. Um, the way we communicated it, though, was intentionally framed to obfuscate some details. You know, there were some details that were left out here. So I bring this up because I was talking to my wife about this the other day. We were talking about a similar situation with a marketing company that, um, you know, the way they talked about it was not quite how they did it. And my wife Joy, she was like, well, I mean, you can't do that, right? Like. I mean, you get, like, arrested, right? Like. And I was like, babe, babe, babe. Unfortunately, no people in the world of the Internet can say whatever they want. They can present it any way they want to. Um, and candidly, I see this all the time. I have, like, some networking groups I go to. I have some different events that I go to where other business professionals are there and they talk about their businesses. And I'll go ahead and say, like, 99% of the time, these are, like, amazing people, wonderful people, people working really hard. But every now and then you have someone drop in who you've never seen before, and they get up and they talk about all the success they're having, and it's a big sales pitch. And anyone who's been in business, you know, more than a day knows that that person is not being truthful. It's like the person who gets up and, you know, they talk in front of a crowd of people and they say, hey, it's great to be here today. I'm excited to tell you about my business, Arkansas Lawn. You know, I don't know if that's a company, by the way. I just made it up. Um, and, yeah, you know, we actually are the number one lawn provider or the lawn cutter, uh, lawn servicer. You could tell I am not well read. And how these people talk about themselves. Lawn Mate lawn care company. There we got there. Uh, we're the number one lawn care company. We serve, uh, 8,000 lawns per day. And, um, our revenue is something like, you know, $25 million. I mean, you start, like, you meet this person, and, like, they're wearing flip flops and like a. A some T shirt, and it's wrinkly clothes, and, you know, they just. There's just something about it that you're just like, huh, okay. Yeah. Um, and, like, you talk to people like this, and you're like, so why

Speaker B: are you here again?

Speaker A: It sounds like you're doing, like, really well. Like, it sounds like you're crushing it, you know? And it's kind of like the guy that I got on a sales call with one time, who. He was like, yeah, we help consulting companies increase, um, their revenue to 10 figures. Which I was like, so $1 billion? And he was like, yeah. And I was like, so, like, why are you cold calling? Like, surely you're making enough money, right? And he's like, I'm just here to give back. I was like, okay, okay, sure. Anyway, so all this brings me to the example of. I don't know if this would qualify as a scam, but it is something very slimy that happened with one of my customers. So a little bit of background from, like, a marketing perspective and an SEO perspective. So the world of SEO is pretty wild and crazy. Um, people are gonna. They're gonna say a lot of things, they're gonna promise a lot of things. Uh, they're gonna make some guarantees that aren't I would not call accurate. Um, you know, it just is what it is. But one of the ways that Google, um, which, by the way, I do get inquiries every now and then, I literally just had someone text me about this the other day. Um, people who get incredibly jacked up about, um, their ranking on ChatGPT, and, like, the way they analyze it is they ask ChatGPT, they say, hey, who's the best company for X in Tulsa or in Dallas? And then they look and see, did their company get recommended in the results. Uh, there's.

Speaker B: It's.

Speaker A: So it's not a great strategy. But more importantly, when someone comes to me and they say, it's kind of like, actually, I had someone come to me who asked for help with SEO for one of these smaller browsers not being. Not Google. Um, gosh, dude, I don't remember what, like Netscape Navigator, basically. And, uh, you know, I was like, I want to rank on Netscape Navigator. And I was like, okay, well, you know, it's less than 1% of traffic, so maybe it was like Mozilla Firefox. I can't remember what it was, but I was like, it's less than 1% of traffic. So, like, we could go all in on ranking you there, but it wouldn't be very smart because 97% of all traffic is coming through Google. So our ROI is found in Google. Uh, and similarly, when we talk about these AI platforms, it's something like 2 to 3%, maybe, of search results are coming from these platforms. Now, that's not to say in five years that it may not be higher. It's not to say that the conversation may not shift. And I'm totally comfortable with that. But point being, um, you know, I just think it's interesting that people get really excited. They immediately. I actually, actually had somebody who. They were telling me about this marketing guy who was like, yeah, you can get me in the top results in ChatGPT. And I was like, I mean, cool. You know, if you want to be number one in, like, the Junior League, sure. You know, I mean, just let's think this through a little bit. But point being, um, so the way this all works from an SEO perspective is, you know, Google. Google is going to evaluate the content. You know, rankings are basically just credibility. That's all it is. And the people. You know, what Google wants to do is Google wants to send people to the right website to find the answer they're looking for. And just understand this for a second. It's not hard. It's not a hard concept to grasp. Google wants people to like using Google. Do you guys remember, like, the Ask Jeeves day, you know, where you'd, like, pop in and drop a question and ask. You would ask Jeeves, and you would get your answer. Well, if the answer was always wrong, or they said, oh, I don't know about that. It's kind of like we used to have a Amazon, uh, Alexa, and I would ask questions like, what's the weather like today? And she'd be like, m, I don't know about that. And I'd be like, do you know anything? Do you know anything at all? And we, we eventually we stopped using it. Which part of that was me just being like, I don't think I like this anymore. But Anyway, that's besides the point. We won't, we won't go down that tangent today. But, um, so Google SEO is all about credibility. Google is ranking people, ranking websites according to their credibility for the answer that people are trying to find part of the way they do this. And this is also, by the way, the challenge of like AI content, because AI content just rips from other content. Um, part of this is as Google is evaluating credibility, it's also evaluating expertise and authority and it's, it's deciding who is the best, who is the most authoritative, experienced business to take care of this problem that this person on my platform has. So if someone says I have a clogged toilet, who do I call? Google. Very literally, it's going to have all the plumbing, the plumber websites and it's going to make a recommendation in order of who's most credible versus least credible. And this could be a number of things. This could be like your Google business ratings or rankings, which you've probably heard of before. It could be the length of how long your website's been around. Um, it could be the content on your website that says we do plumbing. Um, it could be how well the website runs. You know, we don't need to get into a deep dive. I think you get it, it's pretty intuitive. Well, one of the things Google does with this is they look at original content. So let's say for example, there is Joe Plummer service in northwest Arkansas. And, and you know, you decide you're going to run Tom's Plumbing Service. Excuse me, Tom's Plumbing Service. So what you do is you've never built a website before, you've never run a website. Um, you're like, I'm just going to emulate what other people are doing. And so what you do is you Google who's the best plumber in northwest Arkansas and you find Joe's Plumbing service. I'm just making this up, by the way. I don't know if there's, if there's a Joe plumbing, Joe's Plumbing and they're awful. I, you know, forgive me, I don't know. But you go and look at the website like, oh, that's pretty cool. So you copy paste everything on the website. And by the way, before you say no one would ever do this, I had this happen to a customer of mine. Um, she was a home organizer, she still is a home organizer. And uh, a competitor popped up one day and literally copy pasted everything from the website. Literally copy pasted everything. So let's say, you know, you're starting Tom's Electric or Tom's Plumbing or whatever. And so you go and you just rip every page that you find on Joe's website. Well, what Google's going to do is Google's going to say, you know what, I don't think you're credible. The reason I don't think you're credible is you're a new website. You don't have any reviews. Um, and the content, by the way, is the same content that I can see on this other website. It looks like you stole that content, it looks like you duplicated that content. This is what's called a duplicate content penalty. Now usually this refers to content on your own website. So if, let's say, you know, you're running Joe's Plumbing and you sir, let's take the northwest Arkansas example because there's so many cities here. So you have Lowell, Rogers, Siloam, Springdale, Fayetteville, Bentonville, et cetera. And on like the Fayetteville page you say, I'm Joe's Plumbing and I'm amazing and we do a great job. And then you take that and you copy, paste it onto the Springdale website or Springdale page and the same thing on the Rogers page and what have you. Well, what Google's going to do is Google's going to say, you know, there's not really anything new, new on any of these pages. And so we're not going to, we're not going to evaluate them all equally either we're going to promote just one of them or worse, we're going to give uh, you what's called a duplicate content penalty for just duplicating content to create fluff on your website. This is by the way, like uh, there's no this, you don't get like a letter in the mail by the way. This is just. People who are experienced in marketing understand this stuff in like I said, it's not like this is hard to grasp. But um, if you ever wondered, you have a penalty again, you don't, you don't get a letter in the mail. They don't say you have a penalty. It just doesn't work that way. It's just, it's, it's all part of this invisible algorithm. Right? Okay, so this is like been my forever long start to the explanation of this example. The one sided, the one sided value propositions that can often be scams but otherwise are just really bad deals. So if you duplicate content, Google is going to count it against you. If you Have AI generate a ton of content, it's going to penalize, uh, that against you. So I have a customer of mine who we were doing some marketing, some SEO for and the customer mentions offhand, you know, we're just talking about like the content on the website and the customer was not, the customer was not being evasive by the way. The customer just didn't, I don't think the customer understood the gravity of this situation. And then I also had never been in this situation before and did not think to get absolute clarity on the content already on the website. And I will say, because of this customer, um, going forward we're going to be doing a deep dive of all the existing content already on the website, um, and making recommendations according to that. This has been a big, a big eye opening lesson for me. So the customer, I ask about the content, customer says, oh yeah, you know, we, um, we've used some other providers, we've used some other marketing companies, yada yada, um, and they've, I think, I think they um, put up some of those articles. And I was like, okay, that's interesting. Cool, got it. You know, whatever. We're not the first SEO company in the world, you know, it won't be the last. Whatever. Well, some time goes on and we're not really seeing a lot of traction on the website and it's pretty interesting. And also like, as we're digging into it, it's interesting that, you know, this customer has um, a few years worth of content. And the way it works from an SEO perspective is you can look up a website, you can see what it's ranking for, and then you can see which page, which webpage, which blog or what have you is responsible for that ranking. So you can see why someone's ranking, oh, it's the piece of content here or what have you gotta yada. Uh, you know, again, I don't want to get super in the weeds here and distract from the point of the conversation. Well, what's interesting is, you know, there's three plus years of content and none of it's ranking. I'm like, this is so strange, this is so weird. And there's also some other things that have happened here. The website doesn't run well. You know, there's just a lot of things that need to be fixed. Well, long story short, long story short, um, I'm talking to uh, a friend of mine who talks about this tool that he has started using, um, that is for plagiarism on websites and I think, oh, this is pretty interesting because this would probably be great for, like, duplicate content. And so we chat about it and, you know, he opens my eyes to, um, what I would call the Titanic of a bad deal in this circumstance. So what this, what this person did, what this company did, is with my customer. And I don't know, the conversation is just my own guess because I looked at their pricing. I looked at the pricing was about 100 bucks a month. Um, what it looks like happened is that the customer was told, hey, we are experienced. We work with a lot of companies in your industry. And what we're going to do is we're going to create a bunch of content for you. We're going to have some really great, great content that we put up on your website. It's going to make you rank better. It's going to get customers to your website. It's going to be really good from a marketing perspective, and not unlike the example I gave earlier. We're going to get all this great content. And the customer says, great, what does it cost me? And the company says, only $97 a month. And so again, you, um, connect these two numbers together. Um, it's really bothering me, by the way, that I can't think of this term. Um, but you put the two numbers out there and the person says, well, yeah, the risk is so small. Like, of course, this is amazing. Well, what ended up happening was we, we looked at this plagiarism tool that shows duplicated content. And I get a spreadsheet that is about 1500 rows long. We run it on the website. And I have occasionally seen some duplicated content within a website. I've occasionally seen like a paragraph or two that the website owner or their marketing team, they're like, oh, yeah, we actually, we meant to cite that. That actually came from this page. You know, it was a list of, like, top five mistakes. And we were, we were trying to link to it. We accidentally copied it over. You know, whatever. I've seen that kind of stuff. It does happen. It's not always, um, malicious. Sometimes it really is just, like, genuine mistakes. So I look at this spreadsheet. Um, entire pages are copied. And it doesn't just show me, like, what's been copied. It shows me all the other websites that uses that content. And for some of the pages on my customer's website, that same page is duplicated across 15 to 20 other websites. In fact, I pull up two of them. I pull up the customer's website, and then another company in their industry's website, it's the same picture. It's the exact same text. It's, you know, which this may not. If you're not in the world of marketing, this may actually not really, like, sound that horrible. Um, but all this to say, My customer has 3 years of content and almost none of it is valuable. Not only is almost none of it valuable, but it is almost all explicitly duplicated, copied content. And, um, talk about a duplicate content penalty. I mean, this is insane. Like, it's, it's, you know, this is, this is a DEFCON 1, DEFCON 5. Which one's the bad one? It's, it's not good. It's really not good. And, you know, point being, um, what this marketing company did, uh, they made a huge promise with huge upside. And in this case, not only was it, it's like David Copperfield's magic legumes or whatever from the Office, which they do nothing. Or like the pet rock, it does nothing. In some cases, these things are actively damaging and harmful for your brand. Uh, which is absolutely the case here. This person now has 110 web pages on his website that are actively working against his brand. And, uh, something has to be done with them. Something has to be done. So, um, you know, it's, it's, it's a lot to process. You know, the bottom line is when you think about your business, you think about these deals. If the, if the deal is too good to be true, fam. It probably is. If the deal is too good to be true, ask yourself why someone is making that deal with you. Why are they offering that? You know, if someone is being altruistic, oh, we'd love to help. We're just looking to help people. We're just looking to give back. I'm just looking to. I'm just looking for five business owners who. I can change their life. Okay, let's. I'm just telling you, I rarely see altruism in the world of business. Um, the only time I really see it is when it's like, legitimately, there's no, there's no request, there's no ask. Um, I had a friend of mine whose website got totally screwed over. He called me and said, hey, can you help? I said, let's do it. Let me give you a hand. And then he said, what do I owe you? And I said, don't worry about it, man. And there wasn't an ask. It was like, don't worry about it, man. It's all good. Like, I've been in your shoes. It's not a big deal. Don't worry about it. So, you know, just be, be mindful. Don't be naive. You know, think these things through and understand that good quality work costs money. Um, and you get what you pay for. You really do. You get what you pay for. Um, so be mindful of that, because chances are you're not going to have the money or budget to have it done a second time and done the right way. Uh, so be mindful and be careful. Hey, that's today's good advice. I so appreciate you tuning into the podcast today. Don't forget, you can always support the podcast and our Patreon for as little as $5 a month, which is so cheap these days. Uh, you can support the podcast on our Patreon. Patreon.com Good advice. And I so appreciate the businesses that have sponsored episodes on the podcast and people who support the podcast on our Patreon. I really appreciate it. Hey, that's today's good advice. We'll catch you later. See ya.