Podcast Transcript

[00:00:00] Sean Steele: All right. Welcome back to our regular listeners and to anyone joining us for the first time, we are thrilled to have you. My guest this week is Ryan Jenkins from Digital Marketing Agency, the Hype Society. How are you today, Ryan? 

Ryan Jenkins: Wonderful, Sean. How are you? 

Sean Steele: I'm very good. I'm very good. For a bit of context for our audience, you and I worked for the same company. I actually don’t know how long ago, but it's like 15 or 20 years, which is really scary and it doesn't compute for me because you still look like you're in your late 20’s and I probably look like I'm in my 50’s, even though I'm only in my mid 40’s. So, I don’t know if you found some like fountain of youth or maybe you're drinking those prime drinks or something and you're reversing in age. 

[00:00:38] Ryan Jenkins: I started at Sensis at a very ripe old age of 20 years old.

[00:00:41] Sean Steele: Me too. Anyway, there was some crossover and some overlap there somewhere, unbelievably, I saw a paid ad for Yellow Pages online the other day, which I did not even know still existed, which absolutely amazed me that it's still alive in any way. But anyway, I've been looking forward today, and I love interviewing Founders who are still scaling. And so you know, what I mean by that obviously is not startups, scale-ups; they're on the way, they've got a good bus business model that's working, they're acquiring customers, their team is growing. And you've got a super interesting business, and I want to unpack some of the journey that you are taking it on. But I also want to get as much of that marketing knowledge out of your head as possible to help Founders who are typically in that 2 to 20 mil rev stage on this podcast, so they can go out and leverage that straight away to improve their marketing and customer acquisition strategies. How does that sound to you? 

Ryan Jenkins: Sounds great, mate. 

Sean Steele: Super. So, could you just kick us off with a bit of an overview, I guess, of your career to date and how you ended up co-founding the Hype Society?

[00:01:44] Ryan Jenkins: So sales, I suppose, what I learned early days runs through my blood. I left high school as an 18 year old and had no clue what I wanted to do, and ended up moving into a full-time retail sales assistant role with Footlocker, which was, I think, a really good test bet for me to really understand that sales, that connection between product, value, trust to a conversion mechanism. And I learned fast even back in those days, how leveraging trust and value in the conversation could leverage performance outcomes. And I was fortunate enough there to, you know, get promoted a few times and end up meeting a couple of stores in one in Dandenong and then into Southland location. And then after that, there's no money in retail. I worked that out pretty quickly too. So, lots of responsibility, lots of hard work and, and lots of hours without the financial outcomes, so decided to look for a sales exec position. And I was fortunate enough to land one at Sensis that's in Vic Street in Richmond. And I was again, really fortunate there to led multiple sales teams and, and got promoted eventually after seven or eight years into a Sales Director role. And then I witnessed what I call the Titanic heading for a large iceberg, and just sailed right on, sort of in to it with Google and Facebook and some of the other online platforms in their infancy stage. But we were losing market share fast so that traditional directory model of printing online, it just wasn't evolving fast enough and moved into a Sales Director Role - Sales Operations Director role at a company called Easy Weddings, which was a two-sided directory platform connecting brides; mostly brides with weddings suppliers. Had a great time there. We had really strong revenue growth. We've launched it into the UK. I think we sort of doubled the business over the time that I was there, both with acquisition of new customers, but also the average cost or average spend per advertiser. So, I learned quite a lot about digital strategy, Facebook ads, you know, cost per lead, the real functional sort of performance-based metrics. We also did a lot of Web Work, so I understood sort of websites, WordPress landing pages, user generated content through reviews. So, that was really where I got the thirst for digital marketing. I loved the strategy and seeing that come to a fruition really, really fast for appetizers. After that I went and worked with Alchemy. So, they were a sales and marketing agency and that was also powerful for me to then see full end to end marketing strategy into lead, inbound lead and then into the sales conversion. And then taking customers on a rapid sort of growth expansion of their business. Predominantly spent a lot of my time in education and finance. So, back in the days where some of the fee for service education, And the government funding was right for growth. And had a great time there. And then that led me to start my first company, which was called Digital Eagles. So, I founded that in 2014 I think it was, or 2015. And it was again, what I sort of reflect is we are a digital marketing gun for hire. So, customers would come to us or we would go to the customer and really ask them what are they trying to achieve, and then we would prescribe the digital marketing strategy to deliver their performance outcomes. So, I ran that for five years. We had some rapid growth. We had, I think 350 or 400k worth of recurring revenue at the time, and a couple of hundred clients on retainer. So, it was, it was a large agency, and the vast majority of our clients were sort of in Melbourne and had some Auckland, and then to the Hype Society. So, I exited Digital Eagles a couple of years ago. In fact, next month it'll be two years. We had the opportunity to, well, I had the opportunity to sort of sit back and reflect on what the market actually really needed. So, I did a lot of survey work. I called about 50 or 60 clients that were in our type of market and really tried to reverse engineer what the market requirements were, what needs weren't being met, and what we could do at the Hype Society to help meet the needs of what we call mid-market business owners. 

[00:06:58] Sean Steele: And what do you consider mid-market, Ryan, because everyone defines mid-market a bit differently?

[00:07:03] Ryan Jenkins: So, two mil would be kind of the entry point for us. And our largest client is generating sort of 200 million. So, it's a large scale, but we sort of say mid-market because we don't really want, and we are not really set up to help startups. So, we're not really set up to help soul traders or real small sort of SMB based businesses. The way that we've constructed this business is to have access to the best talent. The best talent requires decent investment on our side. So, it doesn't help us structure the commercial welfare for businesses that don't have the budget. 

[00:07:39] Sean Steele: Really small ones. And so just can you give us an insight into what services are you covering for those kinds of clients?

[00:07:48] Ryan Jenkins: Yeah. I'll talk to you about the business model first, and then I can sort of talk about what that means in terms of services. So, the Hype Society's essentially got three rings. Which is why we call it the society. So, the core is our core creative and digital team. So, we do things like SEO, Google ads, Facebook ads, email automation, TikTok ads, LinkedIn ads, content SEO. So, the functional execution of digital marketing is all done in-house and all done locally. When I say locally between Australia and New Zealand. And then we have our creative department. So, we've got digital design, graphic design, brand development, brand comms brand strategy, which is also done in-house. And then we have our web team, which is our web design, web development. And sort of e-commerce and, and sort of WordPress team. And then on the next layer is what we call our contractor or partner community. So, we have a whole range of 30, 40, 50 different contractors that have specialist areas of expertise. So, depending on the customer's requirement, we'll bring in those specialists to do things like custom integration or app development or you know, Shopify app development or you sort of customised requirement that we don't sort of have in that sort of core service offering inside the Hype Society. And then the third ring is our external community. So that's where we leverage software partners. We leverage sales as a service, appointment setters, and you know, trainers, sales enablement specialists. So, it's that community of people and specialists and companies that sit around the hype society to partner in service. So, we aim to be that sort of one stop marketing shop for all of our clients. So, if you've got any sort of marketing need, then we'll be able to connect you with the best in the business no matter what your requirement is. And that's really how we've built the business and how we also plan to scale the business.

[00:09:49] Sean Steele: Got it. So, for a client, it's fundamentally single point of accountability, and your job is to make sure they've got the right skills at the right time to solve the problem. But you retained that corporate knowledge, you retained that accountability. Okay. Yep. Makes a lot of sense. Talk to me about what your “Why” was, what was your “why” for Hype Society, and how has it evolved?

[00:10:11] Ryan Jenkins: My “why” is to fundamentally help and support. Business owners and marketing specialists to have the confidence and trust that this can be done properly. There's a lot of marketing people, agencies that are out there that… we're an unregulated industry, so we don't have any guidelines or any sort of regulatory bodies that are assessing or holding us to some sort of professional code or standard. So, I've seen a lot of business owners and a lot of marketers that have had terrible experiences with, under promise, under delivery, or overpromise and under delivery or a combination of both of those. So, really that single point of relationship and single point of contact. So, business owners and marketing managers feel that they can come to one trusted source that can connect them with whoever they need whenever they need it based on the two decades of experience that, I have personally, but also my team has multiple decades of experience to help those customers connect with trusted advisors and trusted partners to deliver on their service requirements. 

[00:11:28] Sean Steele: Given you had digital eagles, what did you take as learnings from that experience that then informed how you built this business?

Ryan Jenkins: So much.

[00:11:40] Sean Steele: Just what would be like your top couple? 

[00:11:41] Ryan Jenkins: The top couple would be to really fundamentally help your target customers, like my type customers, understand exactly what they think they need. But also, what they actually need to be successful. So, we have a really high focus on strategy where I had very little focus on strategy. If the customer wanted SEO, we'd give them SEO. If they wanted Facebook ads, we'd give them Facebook ads. That gunfire analogy that I sort of was talking about before we take the time now to say; I know you think you want that, but here's why it's really important to start here, and then we can move through to the thing that you, you say that you want the need, which is the outcome, but to get there, let's do the right work upfront to make sure that the business and the marketing is actually able to get you what you need over the predefined time period. The second thing I learned was that investing in the right talent, like we're a labour hire company, essentially, you pay us to deliver a service, so we invested and involve our team, like they're our business partners. You know, we support them, we engage them, we give them the access to education. We give them the autonomy, but also the support, the respect that they need to be the experts that we hire them to be. We invest a lot of time and a lot of money in our culture at the same time, we are very transparent about our core values, you know, as a business and we constantly help our customers and also our people know what it is to work and deliver the essence of those values to our customers and partners. I think they'd be the top things that I learned. The other things would be around just the volume of information that needs to be transferred to the customer as well. Like we're a high touch business. We're almost whenever you need us, just slack us, email us, text us and we'll respond to that. And our job is to know when things are going wrong way before the customer knows that that's going not as planned as well, because managing those expectations and getting the customer onto the same page as us and, and collaborating to achieve the outcome is critically important to long-term sustainable growth relationships. 

[00:14:22] Sean Steele: Yeah. It's interesting when you think of, because some of those things sound very common sense. Don't they? Like to make sure that if you want to have a long-term sustainable business to actually work back from the objective of the customer, but also to manage their expectations. So, when they say; Hey, I want to get to this thing, and you're like, you do realise you've actually got a whole bunch of foundation work and some people just out of desire to just get the revenue in a hurry and get it started without thinking, well, this is a part… if you're going to be in a partnership. At some point, there's going to be some resentment if you've actually created the wrong expectations up front. And so you're going overboard to stack the deck to make sure that everyone's kind of aligned on the same page and maybe sometimes hearing things that they don't want to hear. But it's just the reality, and the brutal facts that you need to face together, which builds a lot of trust. 

[00:15:10] Ryan Jenkins: We also have a rule to help our customers pick the lowest hanging fruit in the shortest possible amount of time as well. And sometimes, that's not necessarily, taking their money right now, it's giving them some actions, to go away with and help them pick some short-term fruit that we can advise them that that's hanging. And then once that's happened, you know, then they're closer to the start line.

[00:15:33] Sean Steele: Okay. So, can we talk marketing? Because there is no business in the 2 to 20 mill range that typically has, particularly in like 2 to 10, like they rarely have a senior marketing person. So, a lot of them are using agencies or kind of making it up as they go along with internal people who may or may not have that sort of skillset. And of course, you can never have any one person that's got all of the skillsets in marketing because there's just so many verticals of expertise. You guys, of course in that range, you know what I imagine one of their biggest goals is to either build a systematic way of acquiring clients or if they've got a systematic way of acquiring clients, but it's too expensive to materially find a way, you know, to find a way to reduce that cost of acquisition so they can reinvest that money into accelerating their acquisition plan. Could you give me an example and just walk me through something that you've done to either reduce their cost of acquisition or expand their volume of sales, or both that has happened together. 

[00:16:33] Ryan Jenkins: That's what we do all day, every day. So, we have three types of customers. The first is the business owner persona. So, we work with a large plumber and they were working with an agency that wasn't getting them the volume or the cost per lead that they're looking for. It's one of the most competitive environments there are, that emergency, sort of 24/7 sort of plumbing space. It’s incredibly competitive. What we did was helped the customer really understand where their highest margin products were, and also where their highest ticket items were. And then really understood the pain points of someone looking for one of those particular products or services. Once we did that, we built some landing pages, some high conversion direct response landing pages. We set up things like phone tracking, some popups. We had specific daily offers that would transition through those landing pages depending on the day, we would test a whole range of different offers. We set up a detailed call tracking aspect to the campaign. So, we didn't just have attribution on phone number clicks or form fills. We had conversion down to the keywords that were driving the phone calls on those particular days. And I think we've grown them from 2 or 3 calls a day to sometimes we're getting 15 five calls per day. The cost per has gone down by almost 70%. 

[00:18:02] Sean Steele: Wow. Give us a sense of like, what would be a cost per lead in that industry? 

[00:18:08] Ryan Jenkins: So they were looking at sort of 250 plus 

[00:18:10] Sean Steele: Wow. And what's their average sale value? 

[00:18:12] Ryan Jenkins: Yeah. It depends. So, an emergency after hours call out is decent. It's lucrative. It's the ones that come through that don't fit that criteria. So, if someone's got a block drain, for instance, then that's where you've got to make it a little bit more cost effective for those outcomes. So, we have different bid strategies at different times of days that we're prepared to pay higher for a click after hours versus the alternative.  We look at remarketing and re-targeting those customers really aggressively over a 24 hour period, just in case they haven't made that decision yet.

[00:18:46] Sean Steele: And so what are the overall cost of, do clients tend to work with you most on a cost per lead, or do they tend to include their sales cost and you work on a cost of acquisition?

[00:19:02] Ryan Jenkins: Either. So, sometimes we, in fact, often with our more enterprise clients, we look at our cost per lead and forecast of conversion rate, but we also overlay their sales figures. So, we work with a tier three energy retailer, and they're getting about four or 500 leads up per week. And we have a cost per lead, uncapped cost per lead. We have an uncapped budget as long as we're achieving their cost per lead. But every week we also overlay their sales numbers to make sure that we're within our cost per acquisition cycle for that week as well.

[00:19:37] Sean Steele: Yeah. Okay. And so for those who haven't spent any time playing with cost per lead and cost of acquisition, you know the difference is if you, well, if it takes you a hundred leads and to get 10 sales and you've got a 10% conversion rate, while your cost of acquisition's going to be the cost of those a hundred leads, Usually plus the cost of the sales people and their time, their salaries, and so you've got a fully loaded, how much did it cost me to get one customer? What's the marketing cost? It's any marketing resources. It's the sales resources divided by the number of sales you've got and other. And a lot of people, you know, I'm sure you've experienced it. A lot of people don't love to fall in love with a number I guess, especially if they have a role inside a company where they're trying to look good, you know, they're trying to, not trying to manufacture the numbers, but they will conveniently leave out things like, oh, like the sales headcount cost. Or like, there's a whole bunch of costs that go in with this whole thing until you fully load that all in and then divided by the number of sales, you don't truly understand how much it costs you to acquire a customer. And then you've got to ask, well, what's the gross profit I get on that customer? Because that dictates, after your Opex, how much money you're actually going to make. You know, lots of people chase growth and it's not profitable at all.

[00:20:52] Ryan Jenkins: Great. And to be honest, that's why. I personally love working with e-com companies because it kind of takes out that middle man. It's the website traffic over the conversion rate versus under average cart value. Yeah. And then that gives you super-measurable and then it's up to them to manage. And then we hopefully will then take a percentage of sales revenue to then reload back the marketing process. The flywheel effect that we're totally in control of, but then we've just got to make sure that they have enough stock. 

[00:21:23] Sean Steele: Yeah, so they can service it. 

[00:21:25] Ryan Jenkins: Logistics and all that sort of stuff.

[00:21:26] Sean Steele: One of the things I noticed, Ryan, on your website actually, sorry, before I ask you that question, can you just give the audience just a sense of what is the current scale of the business in terms of people, revenue, customers, however you would like to share? 

[00:21:39] Ryan Jenkins: Customers, we've got about 65 customers on retainer. We've also got anywhere from sort of six to seven brand projects at any particular given time. So, we take on four to five brand projects a quarter. We do about six to seven websites a month as well. Like this project websites. In terms of the team, 15 FTE, and then we have another five or six, either permanent casual or permanent part-time stuff. The turnover will be, somewhere around 2.3 to 2.4 mil at the end of this financial year off our first year's earnings of 1.3 million last year. So decent growth. You're not going to hit target, but decent growth year on year. 

[00:22:30] Sean Steele: Absolutely. You're two years in, right?

[00:22:33] Ryan Jenkins: That’s right. It'll be two years in 20th of June. 

Sean Steele: Fantastic. No, look, that's a great gross trajectory, and you've learned a lot from your previous gigs to be able to apply into this one. One of the things that I noticed about the Hype Society is that you have a belief in challenging the status quo. And sometimes when I see that in people's values, people often haven't, sometimes it can be not very tangible and people find it difficult to know, well, what does that really mean? Can you give me some specific, either unconventional, perhaps, strategies or tactics that have that challenge the status quo that you've used with your clients to help enable growth that you think Founders should know about?

[00:23:14] Ryan Jenkins: So, I'll give you an example of one that we're working with now. So, we have a customer that only accepts online signups. So, their business model is pure play online. Find us online, research online, sign up online and we'll search online. Through a series of conversations with their leadership team, we were able to show them that they are missing potentially over 75 to 80% of their total market opportunity with some other access to information we have. So, we've been able to partner with a sales enablement company to now build them a proof of concept to outsource and run a sales pilot. So, we're going to be generating leads into a sales team. We're helping them with script development. We're helping them with their marketing key messages. We're helping them with the technology that they need to be able to service. We help them with the technology that they need to be able to understand and fit into their compliance regulations. And we'll be providing external partnered support and reviewing the quality of those leads, but also the quality of experience to make sure that they have a new part of their business that can really drive the exponential growth numbers that they're looking to grow through understanding where the blocks in the sales process are. And they're not just identifying those blocks, but taking the initiative to find partners and be involved in the process to help them almost create another new part of their entire business that will, I think unlock huge growths.

[00:24:59] Sean Steele: A lot of value. Well, that's super interesting. Cause if you think about a traditional agency, most of them aren't touching anything to do with sales with a 10-foot pole. And I guess you've obviously got a lot of background there, but to your point, it's like, well if you can prove up the cost of acquisition in that model based on the yield that they're selling for, why wouldn't you explore a external sort of outsourced third party channel that's going to help you convert more as long, and I expect they'll probably learn a hell of a lot more about their customers because they're having the actual conversations that they can feed back through into improving their online only self-service type experience too. 

[00:25:37] Ryan Jenkins: And part of their core values that we understand is to be obsessed about their customer. So, obsessing about your customer, having a really strong sales process to even drive future, or sort of further engagement to reinforce those values, we think will also really help capture a lot of the market that they are missing. 

[00:25:58] Sean Steele: What about a marketing mistake that you have made, that might have been in hindsight, a blessing in disguise, or maybe it wasn't, but, talk to me about a marketing mistake you've made.

[00:26:09] Ryan Jenkins: Marketing is really hard. I wish there was a perfect science. I wish there was a hopscotch style matrix where you could just 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and, you know, everyone, we could hold hands and, you know, sing Kumbaya and through the chops and celebrate success. But the reality is that it's a calculated guess based on previous experience; based off previous customers that we've worked with previous case studies. Them understanding who their personas are, them having access to great content. Us having access to their team. Like, there's so many different variables that go into a good marketing success pie. And it sometimes takes time. And sometimes we're also fighting with one or two hands tied behind our back. Like, we can do the best marketing in the world and get a great clickthrough rate on ads and send them into a website that's not converting and then get the blame for the revenue or the leases not coming through. So, it's really understanding the whole customer journey, being transparent and proactive about identifying the blockages in the marketing funnel. Taking as much as we can off their plate as well, so we're not reliant on the customer to have to do too much work. And again, we can take almost everything off their plate; from video creation to design, to planning pages, to dev to integrations like, and that's really important to us to make sure that when we do highlight an area that is a challenge, that we can actually do something about that. One of the challenges also, and one of the mistakes I've made sort of recently is really, not understanding competition in a marketplace. So, and also the power of brands and how much that can impact on...

[00:27:57] Sean Steele: What happened? Can you give us the example what happened in the competition?

[00:28:01] Ryan Jenkins: So, a client came to us, they had a solid website. They had Okay revenue, but I thought they were past the point of product market fit issues. Turns out they weren't, turns out we couldn't actually scale that particular campaign. We tried almost everything, you know, our most overservice customer for months on end. We tried automation. We tried UGC, we tried different… 

[00:28:30] Sean Steele: What’s UGC, Ryan? 

[00:28:30] Ryan Jenkins: User Generated Content. Getting content from their customers to talk about how good their product and their service was. But almost everything that we tried didn't work, uh, you know, to the point where it became non-commercial for both parties. But you know, those types of things are like daggers in the heart for me. Like we pride ourselves on getting it to work at almost all costs. So, chalking that one up was quite painful. Not just for me, but also for the client. They put a lot of faith in us and our team and they, I don't think, and again, they would be happy with the effort that we put in, I don't think they'd be happy with the outcome.

[00:29:09] Sean Steele: But you said that's a product market fit problem. So, fundamentally, there was actually a sale, there was a value proposition connectivity problem between what the customer actually wanted and what they had to offer? 

[00:29:20] Ryan Jenkins: We just couldn't get access to enough traffic at a cheap enough cost either. So, we looked at so many different ways to get that traffic and the conversion on the site was in line with, you know, what I would call e-commerce, not best practice. But you know, the conversion rate was okay. And I didn't see that to be a problem. What was the problem, was getting that huge traffic that previously non-exposed traffic to a point of conversion rate at the right cost. And the basket size on average wasn't high enough. That's why it didn’t function.  

[00:29:53] Sean Steele: You would've learned a lot in the last however long, given the businesses you've been running about, what Founders can also sort of do on their own, like what do you think are the most insightful takeaways? What were your sort of top five takeaways for how to reduce your cost of acquisition? I know that's broad and I know every business is different, so that's a very hard thing to answer. But what are the some of the big takeaways around how you think people should think about reducing their cost of acquisition? 

[00:30:21] Ryan Jenkins: Having a really well thought out digital content strategy. So, that is everything you do on email, everything you do, on any advertising on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn, everything on your website really truly reflects the type of brand and business that you want to be. Don't think that you can half ass it and get through. Otherwise, you're going to have to rely on a direct-response sales, cold outreach rather than marketing to get the value proposition across. I think that's probably the biggest thing that I see with our prospects when they come to us they've ticked the box, but they haven't done the work to really understand the journey that their customers go on, by that first point of exposure, through to the point of conversion and what that would like that process to be, because that should be what you focus from a marketing perspective as much of time as you possibly have on that journey. And then also understanding where your customers truly see your value. So, whether it's through surveys, whether it's through reading your reviews and what your customers say, it's picking out those little nuggets of gold that you can then use to create new customers from. Sometimes it's not what you think it's.

[00:31:47] Sean Steele: Yeah, exactly. I was going to say like sometimes you think, you're selling X, Y, Z benefit thinking that's the most valuable thing in this thing. And they're like, that's actually not what I like, that's great, but actually it's this that I get out of and you're like; huh, that's interesting. Like, I'll give you an example. 

[00:32:01] Ryan Jenkins: I reckon 1% of the general market surveys, that customer actually gets any sort of sentiment from them proactively that's not out of a review request. It's like there's a lot of customers generating reviews, but no one really goes into detail with their customers around, that next layer down of sentiment analysis and getting that direct feedback from the customer.

[00:32:24] Sean Steele: Remember reading this an article ages ago of this marketing director had been quite successful in a lot of roles. And he said, well, the only reason is the first two weeks of every job I tell the CEO that I will do will be doing absolutely nothing in those first two weeks. Because I will be in the office and I'll be calling, I'm going to attempt to call, you know, several hundred customers and that's all I'm doing for the first two weeks. And I guarantee I will know more than every single person in this business about actually what the real problems are, where the real value is, what's wrong with our marketing is like, how can I possibly build a strategy until I've talked to as many customers as possible, and I think it's very easy to forget that also, customers need some preferences change the way they think about your product changing, maybe there's new competitors in the market. Like, if you're not doing that sort of stuff regularly, it's pretty hard to know where to focus. Right? 

Ryan Jenkins: Totally.

Sean Steele: Okay, so what tips would you give to Founders who, let's just say they've done the work and they've got a good, they're converting well, they've got a good offer, it's compelling. People like it, but actually they just need to increase lead volume. What would be your sort of top five tips for increasing lead volume?

[00:33:32] Ryan Jenkins: Increase your conversion rate, buy more traffic, do what you're currently doing and just do more of it. There's only a few levers to pull when it comes to you are either putting more ions in the same fire, or you are getting one of those ions to work harder for you. 

[00:33:56] Sean Steele: Okay. So, what do you mean by that, can you give me an example of what you mean by that?

[00:34:01] Ryan Jenkins: So, you can either build a multifaceted funnel, right. So Google ads, you know, plumber, 24/7 plumber, whatever it is, getting them into a landing page, retargeting them, remarketing them through, your unique value set. And then the bottom of funnel is giving them an offer or some point to transact. So, you can either do more of that or you can use your existing customers to go and find you more customers. So, it's referrals, it's using your customer data to build lookalike audiences. You can buy data, you can do sort of cold outreach to build your audience. Like, there's so many ways to answer that question.

[00:34:47] Sean Steele: I mean, this is a super interesting time for digital marketing agencies, right? There's a lot happening in AI. It's evolving every 24 hours, two minutes, whatever you have when you think about it. And of course, there's plenty of people that are worried. There's probably plenty of people that should be worried. But there's also plenty of people that are trying their best to formulate their view on what does this actually mean. in your kind of business, I guess it's also what it means for your team, but also what it means for your customers. How are you currently thinking about the implications of this sort of generative AI over the next 12 to 18 months? Based on what you can see now. Obviously, it's going to continue to evolve, but based on what you can see now.

[00:35:30] Ryan Jenkins: I think that it's the most exciting and also the most petrifying time in human history, and that's a big statement. But it truly is moving at a pace that people, unless you do your research, have very little understanding. So, we're using it and it's providing a lot of efficiency gains for things like reviewing content, generating new content, inspiration for things like, social media ads. We're getting AI to generate examples as inspiration based on a brief, obviously using chat GPT to review documents, to do research for us, there's a whole raft of different tools that we're using to help us be more efficient and more effective. Because as I said, I said before; the more we can get out of tools, the more our customers can get out of us. So, it's taking a lot of that grunt work away so we can be more focused on the strategy, the optimisation of accounts and strategy and servicing our clients rather than doing a lot of the grunt work that we used to have to do. So, that's amazing. Where it's going is in, not from a marketing perspective, but it's really industry. It's having, I think I heard last night that AI's going to cost 89 million jobs, but it's also going to create 93 million. So, you know what it's taking, it's also going to be giving, so it's really important to understand the areas that are the most right for disruption. And then also, you know, keeping your finger on the pulse as much as you possibly can with what is happening with AI. Because it can be amazing, like Chat GPT4 can help you write a legal argument so it can save you legal costs. Like there's doctors, you know, if you can put your symptoms, it can tell you within reasonable amount of accuracy, what's most likely to be wrong. Like, there's so much it can do. I think, the other day, just off the sound of your voice, they can tell you what your risk of having Alzheimer's is for the future. Like, it's crazy. Like there's so much with AI, and it’s just tip of the iceberg.

[00:37:54] Sean Steele: I feel like, you know, people will have heard the idea of those people that spend at least half an hour a day on their professional development and their learning, are the ones who are not ever going to have any risk of being overdone and or being left behind or whatever. But if there's ever a time that you need to take that half an hour, I mean A) Make that a minimum, B) Maybe jack it up to an hour is now, and to be spending at least half of that time on anything that is changing in general. Like find good sources of people who are doing great summaries of what's changing rapidly, we're actually looking at putting together like a sort of a live advisory board style model for a cohort of Founders because so many Founders, business models are going to be turned upside down to bring a bunch of AI experts in and have cohorts of Founders who then can actually have live advisory and also learn from each other's businesses because they're all different and they're all impacted in different ways. It's rapidly changing, and I look forward to seeing, you know, how it evolves from a marketing perspective. I guess just in terms of thinking about where you are heading next, and just a few reflections on your journey so far, and I really appreciate you sharing some of your wisdom there, Ryan, if you were going to restart, I mean, you've only restarted this sort of, I guess, started this journey two years ago, but if you were now going to restart hype society from scratch today, even though you're only two years in, what would you do differently? 

[00:39:18] Ryan Jenkins: I’ll do exactly what I've advised my customers to do, which is be ruthless in your customer journey. So, I would probably, and we're looking at doing it already now, is really having a good look at our website, is really having a good look at our communication practices with our existing customers, it's also prospects and making sure we've got the right nurture streams to continue the communication, from consideration to engagement, to conversion. It's having a really strong content strategy for the Hype Society. From a business model perspective, I'm pretty happy with how we've developed our business model. I didn't expect the creative side of our business to be anywhere near the size it is, to be honest. So, I will probably put a little bit more time into considering the commercials and how we're structured that side of the business. Like we're even looking at things like creating another P&L for that side of the business potentially as well, because they are so different. Digital marketing is very different to brand content web. Like if not project based revenue versus recurring revenue. So, they're very different. Resourcing. We would probably have tweaked slightly, but again, I'm reasonably happy with how we've resourced the business. We would probably do more work upfront surveying our customers. Like we're only just sort of really doing more of that work now that we've... So, we were sprint hard. Like year one was like, run as fast as you possibly can, and don't look behind you. Year two was about sustain, sustaining that growth and being aggressive, but building the system processes. I think next year for us is really embedding those systems, embedding those processes, reflecting on the previous two years and making whatever tweaks we need to be more efficient and more effective at those things. Doing more research around AI, like I think it really is, and as you say, half an hour to an hour a day is probably what I spend at the moment. You know, I've got a gentleman, a colleague that I work with who did an hour a day and he's about to start a brand-new business, combining a whole range of different, generative AI platforms to build this amazing tool just because…And he's only been doing it for 60 days, so he is done 60 hours’ worth of research and he's now at the point where he can plug all these things together to do something that's never been done before and getting funding like it's just, there's so much available and it's so powerful and that that'll be a big part of what we focus on for the future as well.

[00:42:15] Sean Steele: That's exciting. Well, speaking of the future, what do you hope Hype Society looks like then in three years’ time? 

[00:42:23] Ryan Jenkins: So, three years, I think we're revenue wise around that sort of 10 mill mark. We’re in three, if not four countries, so, you know, we're about to launch, uh, properly in Auckland in the next month or two, we'll then be looking to go into another country after that. So, I think within three years we'll be in. Australian New Zealand one, if not two more, depending on how that sort of global expansion goes. I've got a really unique operating model that I'm keen to protest, so I think that we'll have people all over the world, which is really exciting for me. And we'll have this global service engine that's bringing the best IT market to our customers no matter what country that they're in. So, I think that's exciting for us to road test. We'll have a very, very sound CRM and customer management platform that will have integrated and embedded into the business that will be giving us really sound information about our retainers, about our service model, about hours, about outcomes. Like everything will be fully integrated, which is not at the moment, which is painful for the crew. They're looking to solve that problem. Yeah, that's probably the, the big picture. 

[00:43:46] Sean Steele: Plenty to do. And, very exciting times ahead. Ryan, thank you so much for your wisdom and your insight. We really appreciate, and I would love to be able to stay in touch with you and follow along with the journey and, you know, maybe bring you on back every six to nine months or something and hear how things are changing because I always love watching high growth businesses. If people wanted to get in touch with you or to follow along with the Hype Society journey, where would you send them to?

[00:44:13] Ryan Jenkins: Yep, www.thehypesociety.com.au is our website, check that out. We're on socials. I'm predominantly most active on LinkedIn. My marketing team are pretty active across, sort of LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook. So yeah, most of the platforms you'll be able to find and connect with us. If you need any help or have any questions, you can email me or call me, details will be easily accessible.

[00:44:40] Sean Steele: Beautiful. Thank you very much, Ryan Jenkins. Folks, I hope you enjoyed today's show. Just so you know, when I'm not hosting this podcast, I run ScaleHQ, where we help seven figure Founders like Ryan actually, scale their business up to fulfill its potential step back and install management sometimes to help them create space to focus on the things that they want to do outside the business or prepare for a payday through an exit. And we do that through Founder mentoring, through advisory boards, and also through courses on scaling. And very soon actually, Founder Mastermind groups. Kind of like a peer advisory board model, which is pretty fun. So, if you want to know any more about that, you can head straight over to www.scalehq.com.au to learn more or connect with us through LinkedIn. Thank you very much, Ryan Jenkins, from the HypeSociety, it's been great to see you again, mate, and yeah, really wish you all the best in the future. Thanks for your time today.