Navigating Agency Growth Challenges With Gilad Bechar

Speaker A: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast where we have top leaders and founders of agencies sharing wisdom on how they built their company.

Speaker B: Hi there, I'm Kevin Horrigan. I'm host of the show where I feature inspiring agency leaders and owners who are willing to share their insights and stories. Today's podcast is brought to you by Spiny Tech A Lot At Spinny Tech, we help middle market larger companies get more leads. Who doesn't want more leads? Right? At Spending Tick, we take an end to end digital approach, starting with your website and making sure it's the right aesthetic appeal and convincing content to convert visitors into action. Then we look through all of your digital marketing tactics such as SEO, paid search, organic and paid social media, email marketing and more. With the correct website and optimized digital marketing campaigns in place, we help our clients grow. To learn more, go to www.spinyutech.com. that's spin the letter utech.com. well, today's guest is Gilad Becker, founder and CEO of Moburst. Moburst is one of Adweek's fastest growing agencies for three years running with a client roster includes Google, TikTok, Uber, Robinhood and YouTube. Galad himself has 14 plus years of experience in mobile marketing and scaling agencies. He's also written for TechCrunch and entrepreneur mentored in the Microsoft accelerator. And as a sharp point of view on building sustainable growth in today's digital world. Gilad, welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast.

Speaker C: Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.

Speaker B: Yes, and glad I have to give a shout out to Olivia Kitcaster for uh, getting us connected.

Speaker C: Yeah, for sure.

Speaker B: Glad. Ah, the audience going out. Tell us a little about yourself. Where did you grow up? Where did you go to school? What, what did little Glad want to do when he had to make a living? Tell us a little more.

Speaker C: Uh, for sure. So I grew up in Israel, um, and I basically lived there till uh, probably around 10 years ago. Then I moved to the, to the US to actually lead the US branch in New York again. Being on New York and New Jersey, trying to kind of see how we help our clients to overachieve their growth goals and kind of taking the agency from a small Israeli agency to kind of a global player. Um, in when I was growing up basically I was doing many, many uh, things. I wasn't, uh, a great student. I was very, very busy, uh, uh, when I grew up, um, kind of leading many, many type of groups, uh, youth groups. In Israel it's very common thing like the Boy Scouts and things of that nature. Um, And I was there later on in the army, in the Israeli army. You have to go there whether you like it or not for three years. I've been there for five years. Uh, I left there as a platoon commander and basically went into the marketing sphere, um, on like uh, the Israeli Telecom, uh, uh, like satellite organization, things of that nature and started to kind of learn and much more adjusting to the marketing world and the new marketing, new social type of a world. So that's kind of how I got into this type of a space from the get go.

Speaker B: So you know you kind of talked about it though. Tell us a little more specifically what made you decide to get into agency ownership and leadership?

Speaker C: Uh, so I have to say I got there by mistake and I'm not really sure how I actually got exactly to there. I was in a few different roles in the agency world as kind of a VP and then a CEO and co founder of another ad network and then I was a VP of marketing, uh, uh, in a really interesting startup. So I felt like I seen lots uh, of different types of things about what works and what really fails miserably. Um, and I had the experience from working in the brand side, working on the agency side, working on the ad network side. And then later on on the start I felt like I saw 360 of how does it mean? Like from each and every one of the sides of the marketing sphere and the mobile marketing sphere specifically. And I felt like there are many, many, many broken things about how agencies approach mobile marketing and social media and things of that nature. And I said like I need to start fixing that. Um, and when I tried to do that I started as a freelancer and kind of got myself into selling hours just like most freelancers do. Uh, and I got, I got into a place where I sold like 250 to 300 hours a month and I said okay, okay, it's not scalable. Like it's insane to go to a vacation. Like the vacation itself cost me half of uh, the cost of actually not selling those hours. I need to see how I can, should he scale that in a more efficient way. And then it got me into the agency world and actually establishing an agency with a co founder.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's, that's a great story. And I think many of the agency owners who are guests here on the marketing podcast, their answer about how uh, did you become an agency owner? You know, accidental or not intentional is a common answer. I think that there was an opportunity that they saw that they had an education that they thought they could provide more value to themselves and maybe more value to people who they serve and saw that them founding an agency, you know, was something that they didn't necessarily initially thought that that's what they would do, but the opportunistically found themselves in a set of circumstances where they felt they wanted to take that risk. And um, you're common in those who do that. Um, since you become an agency owner, what, uh, have you found has been the most fulfilling thing being an agency owner?

Speaker C: Wow. Ah, this is a great question. I think that um, when you're thinking about the fulfilling, um, I always trying to see, not how I'm optimizing, um, you know, another 5% here, another 10% there. Always when you're doing an a B test and you have a hypothesis and you have an idea and you really tried to push that idea through and you had a lot of objections and political stages that you need to go through and many, many hurdles as part of the way. Um, these, these are the things that are not as rewarding, but once you actually see the before and after, once you actually see how those results actually scaled or where you started with a client in a very early stage and then got them into round A, round B, round C, round D, actually going through an IPO or something like that, and you actually look on the journey back then saying like, you know, at each and every one of those fights were kind of justified fights and we had so much, uh, things that we agreed on and also things that we didn't agree on and kind of going through all of those hurdles but looking on the bigger picture, which is not something that you, uh, do every day, um, usually you are in the weeds and saying, well, this doesn't make sense. This is not best practice. This is not something that I feel like the approaches will take. You need to go right or left or all of those directions. Um, and I feel like when you're kind of looking on hindsight and actually see how you started a process with a brand that was almost non existent and then two years later they managed to raise $135 million and actually launching successfully in eight markets and actually getting tens of millions of dollars of revenues, you're saying like holy crap. Like it's, it's, it's me and my team that actually managed to build those things. So I feel like these are the happier moments. Obviously when a client is renewing and kind of doubling the budget and things of that nature. It's not just about the budget. That is now coming, it's much more about like they manage now to commit on double or triple of the first sow just because it works for them, it prints money for them. We actually generated new value for them and we help them to do something that four other agencies failed to do. And that's something that we are obviously very, very proud of. But the day to day is, is usually about grinding. And you're not really seeing that and you're not really capturing those moments, uh, unless you're actually stopping yourself and making yourself, wait a minute, where did we start with them? Where they are today. And then, okay, we are doing something right, like it's all worth it.

Speaker B: Yeah. That was a, that was a very passionate answer. The way you explained that, you could tell, uh, the proudness you have of. That's, you know, what's been most fulfilling is, is watching these brands that you've been executing for, for a while grow and be successful. And like I said, every day in the journey might not thought that way, but when you look in the whole picture of everything that you've done and watch the success one in ipo or their business is growing year over year and all those types of things. Uh, you said that, you said that in a very compelling way. But it begs the next question. What has been the most difficult or frustrating components of your agency ownership? Wow.

Speaker C: Um, so I think that we, we were in a very unique trajectory. Like, uh, the company raised capital very early on, not because we wanted, but because we had an amazing opportunity to grow faster. Um, and in 2014, basically an investor of one of our clients came in and saying, well, I saw what you managed to do for them for in three and a half months. I know that they worked with God knows how many agencies before you guys. It's like that's the type of quality that I was looking for. And basically offering us a check that we couldn't refuse with terms that were unbelievable. And we said, okay, of course, let's, let's definitely do that. So it took us to a journey where 2014, 15, 16, 17, we grew without being even even. We didn't really care if they're profitable or not. With all of the new accounts that came in, we just care about, let's put their foot in the door and show companies what we managed to do for them. And I felt like that was a very tough moment for us in 2017, um, asking ourselves like, was that the right strategy? Was that the right way to go? Because, uh, we needed to let go of many really talented people back then and we needed to basically get, make a very hard decision like do we want to raise more capital, um, or do we want to basically go back to basics and just make sure that we are not serving clients who are not profitable for us. And back then we worked with the biggest and the most famous clients that you can think of like Uber and Google and YouTube. You've been prom, Search, Gmail, like a uh, really fantastic brand, Samsung and many, many others. Um, but the company wasn't profitable. The company bled money every single month because we over service those clients and we didn't negotiate the right type of terms when we got uh, on board with them. Um, and I think that that was probably the hardest moment of the agency is to say like do I want to continue raising more capital and then be able to continue staying not profitable or do I want to go back to basics and saying like if we know how to do the work and we have already the best brands in, I don't need to prove myself to anyone anymore. I have the brand names. Initially you're taking whatever you can to just build yourself a brand, references, what have you. Um, and then we saying, you know what, why, why wouldn't I be profitable if I'm working so hard and sweating so much for every single one of those engagements? Why shouldn't I be able to pay, you know, the standard salaries for my employees and my talent and everything? Um, and that was a very hard moment where we actually let go of around 30 staff members. It was a big move for us. I moved back to Israel for nine months to make sure that the team that we didn't uh, let go of, uh, will still stay with us to stabilize everyone and saying hey, I'm doing it my own in my own hands. I'm coming back to reports, I'm coming back to the optimization, I'm coming back to every single one. I'm not a big leader that sits over there and just doing all of those no hands on, on each and every one of those steps and we will get through that together. Um, and again nine months later the agency was skyrocketing and it was the best year of the, of the life of the agency. 2018 was amaz. Um, in 2019 we started with doing our own acquisitions because of the success that we managed to get from that move. But um, I have to say that that was a very, very tough decision, very unpopular decision. The investors basically said if you are letting go of some of those clients that are, that other agencies will kill to get um, you're basically shooting yourself in the leg. And we don't believe in the company anymore. Um, obviously now when they're getting pat dividends, they're very happy and saying, okay, it was an amazing, uh, uh, decision, but back then it was very, very unpopular. And we just said, we don't want to do that this way anymore. I don't want to continue raising more funds. I don't want to go in this route. That is not the standard agency route. I want to make sure that if we are serving a client, we are profitable for that account. We are measuring profitability like we should. We are actually making sure that every single one of those things that we do are, uh, making sense. And it's a win win. It's not just a win for the client, it's also a win for us. Uh, and basically that was a big, big change from the way that we operated in the first four years.

Speaker B: Yeah. What a journey. What a journey. So you have rapid growth, but you were over servicing clients that didn't have the right terms and conditions, so you had to do a reset.

Speaker C: Exactly, exactly. And that was, that was not an easy move. But I have to say that ever since doing this move, the growth trajectory almost rippled. Like the things that we managed to do were, uh, uh, really, really different. So I felt like it was very much necessary. And, um, you have to listen to your own instincts, because if I would listen just to the investors back then, take some more capital, pour some more money into that and it's going to be okay. And, and, and again, it didn't feel right. And, and uh, me and my co founder got, uh, a very hard decision back then. What Much more unpopular type of a decision, and it definitely was the right one for us to get.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, absolutely, Absolutely sounds like it. So you're talking about you've had an opportunity to like, get a lot of clients pretty quickly. Can you tell me, or can you tell the audience, you know, who's your agency's ideal customer profile? And how do you, how do you go out and acquire new clients who are that ideal customer profile?

Speaker C: Um, so I have a very, very unique type of a case where I have 27 different business units in the agency right now. Um, so my ICP is very, very wide. When you're thinking about a company just for example, that needs to build a new website or build a new application or things of that nature. We have a team that knows how to do that. We have teams that knows how to do media buying and influencer marketing. And PR and podcasting, for example, we have another team that knows how to do creative and video productions and like many, many other things on that side. So usually the type of ICP that we are working with is uh, really depending on the service itself. We have clients that are working with us, um, um, you know, in a very specific vertical. It could be a dating client that they have an app and they need everything we do. Uh, it could be um, you know, one of the Fortune 500 companies that needs us only for a very specific nich, only do apps optimization, conversion optimization and some creative production on that specific unique set of skill sets. And I have others that are kind of doing everything with us, like 20, 25 different services every single month and we have the One Stop Shop for everything. Um, so I feel like um, our ICP is also like very uh, kind uh, of differentiated and we have units that are only dealing with startups, kind of very early stage startups. And we have other units that are kind of for more, for the enterprise level. And it's much more like uh, you know that, that type of a process when you are uh, submitting a new set of creative and it needs to go through 13 decision makers to give you the stamp of approval to get something live. So it's a very different way of how we are operating with those uh, different units and we really understand like what are the things that they need the most and what are going to be the process that they need in order to get something live and doing it successfully with them.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So it sounds like very, very diverse customer base. Um, are you doing any marketing to get that client base? Are you doing any sales outreach or is it basically referral based? How are you, how are you actually getting the opportunities?

Speaker C: So it's, it's very interesting because our website is ranked extremely high for many, many, many, many different search terms. And again we invested in SEO for many, many, many years. Um, so we get between right now this like in the month of April, we got more than 600 leads coming and knocking on our site and basically saying we want to walk together. Uh, how many of them are qualified, how many of them are actually relevant for us, how many of them actually have the budget to work with us. And all of those things obviously are skimmed through the sales teams, uh, and kind of the marketing team to try to understand how we are doing it in the most cost effective way and only bringing on the right type of clients. I think that another thing that we are kind of struggling is that a lot of uh, our clients coming and asking for the wrong service. Which is another thing that we saw over and over again that it could be like a hyper local client that wants to go through uh, influencer marketing. That doesn't make any sense because 97% of the audience of those influencers are scattered all around the US or scattered all around uh, the world. And they only want in New York City or in San Francisco and the surrounding area. And there is no such thing to uh, do that with influencers. You can do that with content creators and then boosting that, but it's not using influencer marketing. It's like a different method. So a lot of times you need a lot of education to try to see what do they actually need for success. And unlike most agencies, like we hate selling retainers. I telling a lot of clients like, I understand that this is what you are asking. This is the wrong product for you. I would love selling you a retainer. Don't get me wrong, that's, that's the agency model, right? But at the end of the day, um, I need to make sure that I'm setting you up for success and if I'm selling you what you are asking, so to speak, in three months, you will not be happy. And if you weren't going to be happy, I'm looking for a very long term relationship. So a lot of times um, if they are super adamant and saying this is the only way that we want to go, okay, probably one of the good, the right fit for you. But if you are looking to actually overachieve your goal goals and helping us to build the next level of foundation in your company, the why the right way to do that is actually going through these options and not those options. So um, I feel like that's something that is pretty unique with how we are servicing our clients. Uh, we're not just uh, that telling us jump and we're asking okay, how high? Like we are much more about like being much, much more strategic and making sure that we are setting you up for success with like the right methodologies. And because I have 27 different business units, I can uh, uh, kind of transform between different things. We can start with PR and if we see that we don't manage to get you good enough results again, we can shift into other things and actually being much more nimble rather than saying, hey, here you go, sign here for six months or 12 months and you're just locked and that's it. I feel like we are much more nimble and agile to try to get our clients to product market fit in the most cost effective way.

Speaker B: Very, very well articulated. Um, switching gears, hot topic today around agency um leadership these days is how are you using artificial intelligence and how is it benefiting your clients? How is it benefiting your coworkers? How is it providing more effective results for your company?

Speaker C: Yeah, we take AI very very seriously. We appointed the VP of AI uh, I think in the beginning of the year, um, and she has 12 champions within the organization that are in charge of implementing AI in every single business offering that we have, in every single department that we have. So it's not just like saying yeah, it's another tool, why won't be leveraging it. It's much more about like how do we um, basically build the agency of the future? Um, because to be very honest, um, if we weren't going to make those transitions in two years we weren't going to be relevant. Um, the amount of things that you can do on the creative side, on the video side, on the media buying and so many different initiatives that you're doing. There are so many things that are labor intensive that don't make any sense anymore. So many things that are done manual and there is no reason to do that manually if you're using the type of tools. So we have custom GPT for every single client of ours to really leverage. What type of feedback have they provided us uh before and will that asset take that asset that we are about to send them? What do you think based on what you know about the client, based on all of the previous interactions, if what they would say to us about this uh, this asset and if it's fully aligned with their brief and expectations and things on that nature and everything related with uh, uh weekly uh summaries and all of the different reports and all of the asana tasks and everything related with the task management and reporting side and like automated reports and automated alerts and like so many things that you can trigger within the organization doing smarter outreach, uh, type of programs, uh, ah, kind of refining every single one of the deliverables to make sure that it's spot on and the highest uh value that you can thinking about creative approach for example. So we used to draw many, many things by hand to actually explain a concept and nowadays we are showing them how it can actually look like using AI images just to have them better envisioning what we think that it can actually become. This is obviously not the final deliverable but this is something that's saving us a lot of time on Trying to describe it and sell, so to speak, what type of a concept that we feel are going to be best, uh, performing for them? Uh, lots of, lots of things related to data. Um, when you're thinking about analyzing 2000 or 3000 type of, uh, videos that the client was using before actually engaging with us, they're saying, hey, this is the library of everything that we tested. Uh, and we are looking saying, okay, usually an agency takes the top 5%, saying, okay, let's just continue running with that and do more of those. But trying to break it down to pieces and thinking about what are the common things about the things that work best, what are the common things about the things that didn't work? And then how do we actually create more of those assets and giving it a score based on males and females and age groups? And did you have subtitles? You didn't have subtitles on all of those assets. Did you have. What was the pace of the video? What was the call to action? For example, you have so many different things when you're thinking about the video component that you can analyze probably more than 40 to 50 parameters very, very easily, um, to try to understand based on the common things that work for us, based on the common things that didn't work for us, what are the learnings, what are the insights? And if you are putting all of that into, um, uh, any one of those AI tools, whether it's ChatGPT or Gemini or Groq or any one of those, at the end of the day, it knows how to give you insights that for you as a human will be harder for you to digest and harder for you to grasping that. And even if you're trying to do that manually, it will probably take you a week. And if you're just adding it into an engine and poof, you have the insights. And now, okay, let's verify, let's see that it makes sense. And look at that. Now we have insights that are much more tangible about the structure, about what needs to be in the second second into the sixth second of the video, and so many other things. So if you really leverage AI, not just fix a hole or doing one thing of automation, but actually rethinking about every single service, uh, whether it's writing code, whether it's about, uh, creative or media reports, whether it's analysis before and after analysis, and so many other things that you can actually use it, um, you can really leverage technology to do so much more for your clients and being so much more effective on every single service line. That you're offering. Uh, and we are truly believing that we are investing a ah lot on that. Having a VP of uh, of AI was not an easy decision these days with everything, you know, on the, on the stock market going against and like many, many other things that are not as easy. But I think that it was a brilliant decision that we've, that we've made and we see amazing dividends coming out of that by, by efficiency, by quality of products, by how to leverage um, things that can actually save us so much time on things that no one wanted to do but we have to do because it's part of a service and we can just do that much smarter because we use the most innovative tools out there.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great, great, great response. Uh, glad last question for you. Have you had any mentors in your life and if so how did they influence you?

Speaker C: Um, sure. So absolutely. Um, I had a very, very smart mentor in the, probably 2015 to 2017 we brought him as a chairman of the company. Uh, he was ten and a half years a partner in McKinsey London. Um, so McKinsey obviously one of the biggest consulting companies on earth and basically um, we wanted to learn from him about methodologies for scale, like challenges that we will be facing, how to actually build the different teams, uh, how to evaluate employees. I think that what we took from him and still stayed very, very dominant in our company is the 360hr evaluation that we do for every single employee of ours. Like the ah, feedback loop that you are providing and kind of talking with like six or seven people to actually get 360, uh, overview about your performance, what your clients are thinking about you, what your colleagues are thinking about you, what your, your uh, employees are thinking about you. To provide you real actionable feedback about the three things that you do really well that you excel at and the three things that are not quite there yet or you need to actually work on. Um, and really providing you this type of a mirror in front of you to try to provide you a feedback that um, we got kind of feedback from our employees saying, you know what, I worked in other companies for 15 and 20 years. I never had this type of a session in any company that we worked at before. And I'm taking that for life. It's not easy to hear, it's not as, you know, it's not as fun but it's very meaningful and you're actually helping me and I'm looking at it like as a coaching opportunity for me on how to do better in also my next places that I'm going to be walking and in my career in general. So I think that uh, uh, those type of processes that are very meaningful to actually make an impact on an employee's life. And also for me, you know, as the leader, it's never easy to hear about what people are thinking about you. 360 sometimes, you know, uh, some of the people love what you do. Some of the people have a lot of critics and have a lot of things that they think it does make sense this way. This should be changed, this should be altered. But I feel like how to get all of that in perspective, especially when you're managing more than 100 employees every month. It's important to get together.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: Not all of the decisions will be popular. Not all of the things that you're trying to move the organization right or left will make sense for every single one of those employees. You want to be transparent, you want to be direct, you want to uh, be uh, uh, respected obviously. But sometimes people will not like all of the decisions that you make. And that's okay. It's part of the profession and it's part of what you need to, to cope with as a leader.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think very, very well said. And uh, um, you know, those 360s, like I say, they can be tough pills to swallow, but all it's trying to do is help you round yourself and round your team to just be better at what they do. So, you know, very, very, very valuable and I appreciate you sharing all of that. Um, well, glad. Thank you so much for sharing everything you did today. If someone wants to reach out to you based on what they hear today, what's the best way for them to connect with you?

Speaker C: Amazing. So the easiest way is mobus.com that's kind of our website. Obviously you can find me also gilad beshar on LinkedIn if you'd like to uh, to chat privately or giladobers uh.com that's another way. Email side. Um, and again would love to help on any growth initiative or any, you know, even if it's just an owner that is now not in the best place and want to have, you know, just a quick chat. Um, it's something that I think that we all seen these crazy roller coasters as part of the career. Um, and at the end of the day just uh, knowing that you have other agency owners that have gone exactly through that and actually came on the right spot on that, I think that this also can be very encouraging.

Speaker B: No, absolutely. That's exactly what the Marketing Leadership Podcast is all about. You just summed it up right there. Just helping each other with our insights and experiences so we can all get better and our industry continues to improve and grow and provide more value to our clients and our co workers who serve with us. That's. That's great. Um, glad. Congratulations with your success with Mober. Sounds like you've done a great job with that, optimizing that. Thank you so much for sharing your insights, uh, your time, and we wish you continued success on your journey.

Speaker C: Amazing. Thank you so, so much.

Speaker B: Have a great day.

Speaker A: Thank you for listening to the Marketing Agency Leadership podcast powered by Spinutech, and you can learn more@spinytech.com that's s p I n u t e c h dot com.