Dennis Yu

Beyond the Smoke and Mirrors: What It Really Takes to Build a Successful Marketing Agency

Growth Mindset, Business, Client Management, Communication, ethics, Featured, Guest Posts, Hustle, people management /

This is a guest post by Nick Jaworski of Circle Social Inc. Owning multiple 7-figure digital marketing agencies, I never found the typical social media crowd very helpful. There are a lot of smoke and mirrors in the digital marketing world. Fake gurus are everywhere, but even the bonafide have never appealed to me very much. When I started my agency, I wanted to build something meaningful and impactful. And one thing I learned about impact over the years is that the bigger you are, the more impact you can have. I quickly realized that the majority of the experts out there were one-man bands. Maybe they had a couple of VAs or a Community Manager helping them out, but they’re not what I would now consider to be a large or scalable business. As I’ve learned over the years, that’s about as far as most people want to go. Whether it’s fear, lack of know-how, or just no interest in taking on the huge amount of work and responsibility that comes with growth, most agencies don’t make it past the 3-4 person stage.  I’m a big admirer of Dennis and all the work he’s put into helping young people and really having an impact on the world by sharing his knowledge. He also knows what he’s talking about. When I first started my agency, I had so much to learn and, like many in the same boat, scoured the internet for people to learn from. However, all I ever heard were platitudes like “content is king,” “marketing is about building relationships,” or “tell your story.” From the get-go, my agency was focused on return on investment. What really attracted me to digital marketing originally was the data. The fact that I could tie our work to real ROI, where I could prove our value to our clients. This is where Dennis stood out. I could tell from reading his content that he had true expertise in helping real companies. That’s why I was very interested in sharing my experiences on his blog as he’s the real deal. When I entered the realm of digital marketing, there was something glaringly missing from me in the world of social media and marketing influencers I found online. None of them owned large companies with a lot of staff.  Instead, as I started to network and get into the world of business, I saw all these people running 8 and 9-figure companies, but I never saw these people online. These people led or had built huge companies and most didn’t even have a Twitter profile. More than that, many of their companies didn’t either! That told me that following the online social media crowd was unlikely to be the road to success. Speaking with Dennis, I wanted to share a real story of what it truly takes to grow a successful agency. I registered my business in 2016 but didn’t actually launch it till late fall, so almost 2017. By the end of 2020, I had scaled it to a full-service agency with a consulting wing, marketing wing, over 20 full-time, W-2 staff, and a national reputation as the foremost expert in our niche. Our largest client does over a billion dollars a year in revenue, while most land somewhere in the $10-300 million range. That’s a pretty cool success story, but the reality is that it’s extremely rare and it took a tremendous amount of effort, risk, and investment to get where we are today. This article is not going to feed you a lot of BS about overnight successes and “passive income.” It’s going to talk about the never-ending real work and sacrifice that goes into it. Unemployed and Starting the Business I had been a teacher and, eventually, a school administrator ever since I left university. I had developed a reputation as a turn-around guy for schools, someone who could come in and fix failing programs. This led to me being called in by the largest daycare operator in the US to fix one of their most troublesome schools in Indianapolis, IN in 2015.  That turned into a nightmare. It was in a low-income area with lots of drugs and gun violence. We had just had a shooting at the school less than a year before and now the program was on probation by the state for the third time in less than 4 years and was going to be shut down. My job was to come in and turn it around.  After a year of 80-hour work weeks, no organizational support, and the challenge of finding quality teachers willing to work in one of the more drug-infested, violent areas of town for $8 an hour, I finally got the school re-licensed by the state and on track to national accreditation. It was an amazing accomplishment, but I didn’t want to be there. It’d been hell, so I asked for a transfer to a new school. Instead of transferring me, they told me that, since I clearly didn’t want to be there anymore, they no longer needed me. I was let go that day. That was the last straw. I’d been in education and working for other people for nearly two decades. I was burned out. So I decided to start Circle Social. I started it out of my house in-between caring for my daughter. We had just $2,000 in the bank and my wife was only making $10 an hour, so we couldn’t afford daycare. Circle Social was off to a pretty inglorious start. I was writing 1,500-word blog posts at $10 a pop under the company moniker, but really I was just a freelancer since it was just me and these were piecemeal projects. You see, nobody starts a business charging high fees. Most who do are quickly realized to be frauds by their clients. Their business may limp along for even a couple of years but eventually folds. To succeed in business, you have to charge

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New Zealand a while back

Leave a Comment / Gratitude, people management, team management /

As amazing as it was, I learned that: However, people look, wherever they’re from, no matter how successful they appear, everyone wants the same thing… To be loved and appreciated… and even if they think or pretend to be logical and rational, underneath… They are highly illogical, emotional creatures that are beautiful and worthwhile… If you take the time to peer beneath the tough exterior and successful image… Past their anger and mean behavior to discover the vulnerability and warmth they need your permission to express… To find the loyalty and joy that was there all along from those around you, if you only realized it was there all along… In whatever situation you’re in, to be able to tap into an infinite reservoir with only a tiny shift in your attitude.

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What to do when a co-founder leaves you

Leave a Comment / Communication, people management, social media /

Many of you know that Logan Young left us to go work for a client, Tuft & Needle. This move would have destroyed our company since we built Content Factory around him– the speaking, training, and major relationships. Whether or not you agree with the ethics of that, you should already have a plan in place should this happen to you. You have to keep the ship running, which means you need a plan in place BEFORE it happens. My mentor, Al Casey, who was CEO of American Airlines, told me that the FIRST thing he did when taking on any job, was to look for his replacement. Well, that’s quite pessimistic, I thought– but really, it’s smart. You want to always be replacing yourself and make sure everyone else is replaceable. This is a plan I wrote over a year before Logan actually left. I had an inkling that he would do this since Ajay Kandala had tried to poach him before. But I bought him a brand new Chevy Silverado and two jet skis to stay 24 months– and I assumed he would honor that. In case he didn’t, this is the plan we had in place to protect our company. The lesson here is “hope for the best but prepare for the worst.

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Want to unlock awesomeness in your business? Promote your winners

Leave a Comment / Facebook Advertising, Featured, people management /

Man, have I ever been so guilty of focusing on the troublemakers– the people who just can’t perform and projects that are failing. This means I neglect the performers since the “squeaky wheel” gets the attention. I’ve lost some good people because I was so busy helping the stragglers that I unintentionally ignored my top performers. The unintended result of my actions as a novice manager was to punish the performers and reward the troublemakers. Have you fallen for the “squeaky wheel” problem, too? The right answer is to spend 80% of your time with the 20% of your team that is kicking butt. You’d do the same with your boosted posts. And even if you’re not managing people, you can prioritize your projects in the same way. The Pareto Principle is also known as the 80/20 rule– a way to focus on what matters. Of course, you say– make the good things better. Who wouldn’t agree with that? “One way I exercise the Pareto principle in my work is to LIMIT the number of hours I work in a day. This drives my efforts in two ways. First, limiting my working hours forces me to focus only on those things that are the most important. I have no choice but to focus on the 20% of activities that drive 80% of the result. Second, limiting my working hours frees me up to focus on the most important assets I have, my health and my time.” The reason people don’t do this is because we all care for the underperformers. We want to help them– and then we end up continuing to help them more than we intended. And pretty soon, they have sucked up your time. The good-natured attempt by you to help has backfired, creating entitlement instead of improved performance. You’ve set an ugly pattern, since now they know they can cry wolf and you come running. Perhaps you’re like me, and your people have realized that you will let people get away with things since you don’t like to fire people. My mentor, who was CEO of American Airlines, told me that there are 3 types of managers: Those who are loved. Those who get results. Those who are loved get results. You’ll see 99% of managers in the first two buckets and 1% in that last bucket. The managers who are loved are kind to their people at the expense of getting results– this is the majority of managers. The managers who get results are called 4 letter names for being “bossy” since they don’t have patience or empathy– they want stuff to get done on time. The last bucket of effective and loved managers is rare because high-performance situations are possible only when the entire team is high-performance.  All you need is one freeloader, naysayer, or rebel (Leroy Jenkins!) to destroy the team culture. The most effective manager of all time, Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric, embraces the “up or out” management philosophy. He says you should promote the top 10%, ignore the middle 80%, and fire the bottom 10%. Sounds like a professor grading on a curve in school, right? This works because, in any group of people, you will statistically have some poor performers, mediocre players, and stars. The grossly incompetent ones are easy to identify and remove, but it’s the mediocre ones that could kill you. Especially true if your company is young and growing. With Facebook ads, you know to allocate your budget against winners, instead of putting the same amount on every post. Or worse, we’ve seen “gurus” recommend that you put even more money on losing posts to “average things out” or “help their performance”. In the same way that you should put more dollars against winning ads, why not do the same with your people and projects? We believe in equality of opportunity, but not equality of outcome. Everyone deserves a chance. We’ll coach them, but not babysit– there’s a difference. I’ll end by saying something successful entrepreneurs know, but don’t want to admit. When looking at the performance of a group of people, especially in a start-up or less structured environment, you’ll find that the stars are not just 20% better than the “average”, but are usually 10-20x better. It’s not that they work harder, attend more meetings, or write 10X more code. Rather, their efforts make a 10-20x impact. “As an amateur swimmer, I used to mistakenly believe by kicking my legs harder and using more force on my stroke I could cover more distance. I was really just flailing and making a big splash. A pro swimmer covers great lengths not by exerting herculean effort but by having an efficient swimming stroke. As a manager, it’s easy to want to play the role of “lifeguard” and “save” those making a big splash and commotion. But your time will be better spent coaching up and rewarding your proficient performers.” There are millions of engineers who have built or tried to build mail processing systems. But there is only one Paul Buchheit, who created Gmail all by himself as a side project at Google. There are many who claim to be Facebook ads experts. But there is only one Logan Young who has experience optimizing across a broad range of massive companies. Where are the winners in your company and are you doing everything you can to promote them, encourage them, and spend time with them?

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6 things you should NOT ask me

Leave a Comment / advice, Economics, people management /

I like to consider myself a generous guy and am always delighted to help others however I can. But there are 6 major fouls in my book that happen more often than I’d like, such as: Asking for money. I will “loan” money only to friends, which means I don’t expect it back, but am delighted if repaid. Earn my trust, or else learn from the guys on the sidewalk holding cardboard signs. At least they are clever about it and have a higher conversion rate than you do. Asking for Warriors tickets. People I’ve never met expect me to jump through hoops to hook them up with tickets, ahead of our team members that work hard to earn their way to a game. Some of these strangers even specify where they want to sit and how many friends they would like to bring along. For my time to “pick” my brain. I’ve said enough about this. Whatever you do for a living, do you do it for free all day? The exception is young adults that have earned their way to progressively unlock training and work opportunities. Same for university partners, since they’re part of our core mission. A “quick” favor. It’s never just 5 minutes, as I’ve learned from the thousands of these sessions that I’ve done. I appreciate the hustle. If it’s someone I know well, I’m glad to help. My friends understand and practice the rule of giving first before asking. Verification on Facebook / An Introduction to Mark Zuckerberg. For the record: I DO NOT work for Facebook! I can’t make these two requests happen. That blue check mark next to your name or business is cool to show off to your friends. But you have to earn it. We have articles on how and even offer packages to help you get those components in place. For 20 minutes pitch me your marketing or IT services. The fact that you’re cold emailing or calling me without an appointment means you already don’t understand inbound marketing, which leads by expertise as opposed to spamming me to death. If you want something from me, first demonstrate you know I’m a human and get to know what I care about. Show you have done your homework by making one-minute videos on these topics, so I can get to know you, too. Outside of my actual friends and family (being a Facebook friend doesn’t count, unless you’re someone I’d actually want to hang out with), you’re either a student, client, or partner. We have qualifications for each. And you should, too, so you can control your time. You don’t have to say yes to every single person that wants your precious time, even though it “might” be something. Gamble with your money, not with your time. One of these you can make more of, while the other you cannot. When you say yes to one thing, consider what you’re saying no to your family, your God, your teammates, and whatever is your priority. Kill interruptions, which trade the important for the urgent. Hint: don’t fall for the urgent, non-important things. Focus on the important, non-urgent things. As the great Nancy Reagan said, “Just Say NO!” And you can do it politely, yet firmly. The people who respect your time, outside of actual friends and family, gladly pay for it. Don’t be afraid to charge for it and don’t fall for the trick of free consulting sessions with the lure that they “might” hire you. If they’re not actually a friend, don’t be guilt-tripped into helping them, as mean as they make you seem. The reason the airlines have you put your life vest on first before helping others is that you can’t help them if you’ve already passed out from lack of oxygen. Are you struggling with your business, your time management, and other issues? You can politely decline requests by saying you, yourself, are trying to get things in order and to learn. Point to someone who is better. Don’t confuse this with the abundance vs. scarcity mentality. TIME is what’s limited- protect that. Give money and knowledge instead. Share those freely for all to benefit via your blogs, Facebook videos, and whatnot. You can impact thousands or even millions, but time you cannot scale.

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Nobody wants to admit this, but good people are the ones who kill startups

Leave a Comment / advice, people management /

You keep your great people and terminate the bad people- we all do that. But it’s the merely good people that will kill you. “Steve is a good guy”, you tell yourself. He didn’t do anything so egregious that he deserves getting fired. And maybe his performance will improve if you give him more time. After all, he’s relatively new and you feel guilt from not having as much time as you’d like to answer his every question multiple times. Perhaps Steve is friends with another teammate, which creates an awkward situation. Maybe he has a new wife or has a kid on the way and you know they need the money. Or it’s Christmas. Nobody gets fired during Christmas, right? But the trouble with merely good is that you’re spending so much time on them while neglecting your star performers. Because the squeaky wheel gets the grease, you’re penalizing your best people. Unless your company or group doesn’t have to be efficient, you should be spending at least 50% of your time on the top 10% of your people if you want to maximize productivity. That leaves no room for the “good” people that you’d very much like to keep around. It’s not that you’re a heartless manager or don’t care– see it as you stealing time from those who deserve it and have earned it. My mentor, Al Casey, who was CEO of American Airlines, taught me that there are 3 types of managers- those who are loved, those who get results, and those who do both. 95% of people are in the first two categories. The loved ones are pushovers who don’t enforce the rules, so their teams don’t feel any discomfort or need to improve their performance. The results-oriented managers are often taskmasters- the bosses mocked by Dilbert and Office Space. But the managers who are loved and get results are those who have high-performance teams to start with, then have clear standards. If you are frustrated with the merely good people, I assure you that you aren’t keeping or attracting the high performers, as they see they aren’t getting love. A great team member is not just slightly better than a good employee. They are TEN times better or more. One of our star FB ad specialists, Jason, might cost double what a good employee makes, but their output is 20-50 times better. We don’t have to hold his hand, he achieves stellar results in an hour that an average specialist can’t do in 50 hours, and is better all around. Have you identified Jason and Steve? The longer you wait, the worse it is for morale.

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How to scale up your agency: a fresh approach

Leave a Comment / affiliate marketing, finance and economics, people management, promoting yourself, social media, Stand Up for the Little Guy /

A colleague and I were discussing “leadership” and what that truly meant.  We came up with this analogy, which I hope you’ll enjoy. Imagine you move rocks for a living.  The more rocks you move, the more you’re paid.  You don’t move rocks, you don’t get paid.  Thus, you understand the direct linkage between putting in time and compensation.  This is the hourly wage model– some rock movers get paid more than others, whether flipping burgers, working in a big corporation, or drilling teeth. The more teeth you can drill, the more you’re paid.  Are you a corporate wage slave or someone who is paid piecemeal?  This was me for twenty years of my life– a prostitute selling my time for money. Whether I billed $5 per hour or $250– it was the same thing. One day in the proverbial quarry, you decide that moving more rocks to get paid more was not the right answer.  At best, you might move 20% more rocks than the other guy on a particular day, but it wasn’t sustainable.  So you leave the quarry for 7 days, much to the surprise of your fellow laborers. In that time you move no rocks and make no income. THE SHIFT But when you come back, you are driving a bulldozer.  Now, in one day you are able to move 100 times what a single laborer can do. But to get that bulldozer, you had to temporarily earn nothing– plus spend money to buy the vehicle and spend time learning how to drive the thing.  Your fellow laborers, noses down, continue to keep moving rocks— they don’t look up to see you in the bulldozer. They have heard about bulldozers in magazines, but never thought it was something possible for them. You hang out with the other guys driving bulldozers.  You have newfound wealth, which is fleeting since the crowd you run with also enjoys the same standard of living.  You’re right back in the middle of your peers.  It feels great to be 100 times more productive than you were before, but you’re not quite fulfilled. ANOTHER SHIFT So you leave the quarry again and disappear for 7 days.  In that time you move no rocks and make no income.  And when you return, you are back with 100 bulldozers and 100 other eager new bulldozer operators. You’ve opened a bulldozer training school!  Flocks of manual laborers who used to move rocks now come to be trained by you.  And you make a commission on the rocks they move since these laborers didn’t have enough money to buy their own bulldozers.  These laborers are now moving 100 times what they did before, but given the costs of training, equipment, and profit, they only make 10 times what they did before.  Still, they are happy. And you are temporarily happy.  With 100 bulldozer operators moving 100 times as many rocks as a single man can do, you’re at 10,000 times your earlier productivity.  Your lifestyle has changed, too.  You have a Granite Card from American Express and have a new mansion in Boulder. People admire you–you’re a ROCK star. They think that the secret to your success is getting stoned. But it’s not enough– something inside you is not quite satisfied.  You can only train so many new bulldozer operators per day.  You’re still moving rocks in a sense, just mass quantities. Growth in your bulldozer school is directly related to the amount of time you’ve put in.  So one day you close the bulldozer school.  The press thinks you’ve gone mad– that you’ve lost your marble. SCALE UP AGAIN You disappear for 7 days.  And when you return, you’re holding a brochure in your hand– “How to Open Your Own Bulldozer Training School”.  You’ve created a franchise model, where you are training up other school owners. You have first-hand experience in training new bulldozer operators, so new school owners can rely on your experience.  You now have sold 100 franchises, each one with a happy owner training 100 bulldozer operators, who in turn do the work of 100 laborers.  That’s 1 million times leverage. THE LESSON You would not have been able to pull this off unless you had personal experience moving rocks, driving bulldozers, training bulldozer operators, and running a franchised business.  You were able to take your knowledge and multiply it.   If you didn’t intimately understand each aspect of the business, scaling up would have just multiplied losses. Now examine your life and what you do.  Are you moving rocks or are you multiplying? Writing software is a multiplication process.  You can write one copy and sell it an infinite number of times.  You could hand-build a single PPC campaign for a client or perhaps write a campaign management tool that can do it over and over in an automated fashion.  But just like the rock-moving analogy, if you aren’t a practitioner with hands-on experience in managing campaigns, your automation won’t be effective.  There are lots of guys selling software that builds websites, manages PPC campaigns, creates SEO reports, sends out emails, and does a variety of tasks. If you want to create massive value, consider the rocks that you are moving. Can you write software or processes that can make life easier for others– or perhaps do some task faster, more effectively, or at a lower cost?  Everyone has something they know exceedingly well.  What is that skill for you?  You don’t have to be able to write code.  Software is nothing more than rules for machines, just like processes are rules for humans. Mcdonald’s is a software company that just happens to make burgers.  People go to Mcdonalds’ not because it has the most delicious burgers, but for the consistency of the food and the experience. You can take pimply-faced teens all over the world, minds distracted with their latest relationship dramas, speaking different languages, skilled or not– and still turn out that same value meal each time. That’s a

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As an entrepreneur, you face the most concentrated of unspoken evils.

Leave a Comment / Entrepreneurship, Featured, people management /

Yes, you’re busy. But go watch this video right now, anyway: It’s 48 minutes of encouragement and perspective for entrepreneurs with Elon Musk. If you’re still reading this, go back and at least watch from 34 minutes onward. As an entrepreneur, every problem in the company is brought to you, so you end up spending most of your time doing stuff you don’t want to do. Elon Musk calls it staring into the abyss and eating glass– to continually be on the verge of extinction and have a high tolerance for pain. It’s a lonely place and something we’re not supposed to talk about. So keep on pretending. Whether people admit it or not, life is hard. So be kind to one another. Elon poured half of his gains from PayPal into SpaceX, being fully comfortable that it might be a complete loss. And even though he’s been quite successful– commercially to deliver payloads to the International Space Station and send satellites into orbit– he still predicts 13-14 years to even achieve his goal of sending a mission to Mars. He’s been at it since 2002, so he’s already a dozen years into it. And he’s got the same trajectory for Tesla, which will also take at least a dozen more years to get to where half of all cars in the US are electric (made by Telsa or not). It takes 10 years to become an overnight success. Ask Facebook, Google, or most of the businesses you know, technology-related or not. The most important causes take a decade to realize. And for a founder to be willing to eat glass, it better be a cause of that magnitude. Are you working on something that’s truly worthy of your time? Is it the kind of mission that inspires others to join in your WHY? Are you looking to get bought out by some other company or do you want to grow to where you can buy out others? Alex Houg and I have been working on Content Factory for the past few years, but it’s been an idea incubating for much longer. We’re long-term believers in changing how students transition from K12 to the workplace and we’re building these connections with businesses. Khan Academy gives away their online education for free. They believe knowledge should be free.  We concur and go one step further to say that job support should be free, too. Next year will be 10 years since I left Yahoo! to be an entrepreneur, so my hope is that the time I’ve put in will truly start to pay off. If failure is the best teacher, then I’m one of her most familiar students. My hat’s off to anyone who is trying to get their business off the ground, make the next round of payroll, or take their mission to the next level.

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My favorite trick for weeding out unqualified job applicants

Leave a Comment / Business, people management /

You probably heard of Van Halen’s 53-page contract rider and how it required a bowl of M&M’s backstage– brown ones removed. It’s not that brown M&M’s are necessarily bad. Rather, the band was checking for attention to detail. If there were brown M&M’s there, they knew to expect sloppiness in the lighting, stage set-up, and other details. So we’ve been following a similar strategy in our job postings. In this particular one, we asked the candidate to say “INCEPTION” in their response. We find it’s a good proxy for whether they will be sloppy when hired. You don’t want people messing up on your projects now, do you?

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