Podcast With Ben Heath

How Ben Heath Built a 7-Figure Agency from Scratch 🚀

Show Notes

Discover how@BenHeath built a 7-figure agency from scratch and became a personal brand powerhouse on YouTube! 🚀 In this episode of The Agency Insider Show, Ben shares his incredible journey—from struggling to make revenue for three years to leading Heath Media, a thriving 50+ person agency. Learn his secrets to scaling operations, mastering paid social strategies, and building trust in today's competitive digital landscape.

Have you wondered how to transition from freelancer to agency founder? Want to know how personal branding on YouTube can generate leads and authority? Ben reveals actionable insights on attracting world-class talent, navigating AI-driven changes in marketing, and creating winning Facebook and Google ad campaigns. Plus, get his take on avoiding common agency mistakes and adapting to rising ad costs in 2025.

Whether you're an agency owner, digital marketer, or aspiring entrepreneur, this episode is packed with value you can't afford to miss. Tune in now and get inspired to take your business to the next level! 🎯

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction

00:32 - Early Hustles & Agency Genesis: What sparked your journey?

02:26 - Surviving 3 Years of No Revenue: How did you stay motivated?

05:22 - Building Grit Through Failure: Did setbacks strengthen your resolve?

06:55 - Unlocking Rapid Growth: What strategies scaled your team to 50+?

09:57 - Breaking Out of the Freelancer Phase: What advice do you have?

14:03 - Attracting & Retaining Talent: How do you find top performers?

16:42 - Common Scaling Mistakes: What do most agency founders overlook?

18:41 - Changes in the Agency Landscape: How has AI impacted your work?

23:34 - The Power of Personal Branding: Why is it crucial for agencies?

28:44 - Balancing Personal & Agency Brands: How do you manage both?

32:04 - YouTube Commitment: How many hours do you dedicate weekly?

33:20 - Starting a Personal Brand: Is it too late for newcomers?

35:26 - Misconceptions in Personal Branding: What do people get wrong?

39:50 - Generating YouTube Content Ideas: How do you stay inspired?

41:40 - Mindset Shift for Leverage: What’s the key to effective marketing?

44:45 - Facebook Ad Campaign Failures: Why do most campaigns not succeed?

47:28 - Common Mistakes with Ads: What do brands often get wrong?

51:40 - Good vs Great Ads: What distinguishes them?

52:35 - Testing & Optimizing Ads: How to avoid data overwhelm?

54:25 - Creative Testing Approaches: How has your strategy evolved?

59:44 - Maintaining High Creative Output: What’s your secret?

1:04:15 - Opportunities for 2025: Where should agencies focus next?

1:08:15 - Cultural Shifts in Your Agency: What was the biggest change?

1:12:01 - Mentoring Media Buyers: How do you train your team?

1:14:07 - Defining Your North Star: What’s your ultimate goal?

1:15:20 - Rapid Fire Round: Quick insights and fun questions!

1:17:47 - Advice for Young Marketers: What’s your best tip for newcomers?

1:18:20 - Outro: Final thoughts and takeaways.

Transcript

Introduction

0:02 all right welcome to the Agency Insider Show i'm your host Nabit Koshel and today we have someone who's not just

0:09 crushing it in digital marketing but reshaping the way agencies build trust scale operations and master paid social

0:17 he's the founder of He Media and a personal brand powerhouse on YouTube Ben Heath ben welcome to the show thank you

0:24 very much that's uh that's quite the intro that's very nice of you to say i'll try and live up to the billing

0:29 there yeah so let's try with your early hustles and agency genesis now your

Early Hustles & Agency Genesis: What sparked your journey?

0:35 journey before head media is full of trials from app develop to developer to

0:41 network marketing what clicked differently at 23 uh yeah it's a good point because I had

0:48 six years before that of things not working um I think the biggest change

0:53 that happened for me was not trying to do it all in three or four months i think before that I've been trying to

1:01 pick the lock to success instead of just laying the right foundations and and doing the right things i've been trying

1:08 to sell all sorts of products like you said network marketing just jumping on different things different trends trying to get them to work and basically no one

1:16 ever achieves a lot in a 3 to six month time period and I think when I finally

1:22 got to the point with my starting my marketing agency I had run ad campaigns for my mom's business as a trial but for

1:30 18 months 2-year trial to really make sure I knew what I was doing and I could see that the progress I had made on that

1:37 over that length of time and I remember thinking at the time right I'm not I'm not trying to conquer the world in six

1:44 months i'm gonna be much more realistic i'm gonna lay good foundations i'm gonna do good work for clients i'm going to do

1:50 things properly i'm going to work really cheaply at the beginning so that I can get testimonials and reviews that I can

1:57 then use to to talk about and get more customers and um taking a longerterm approach alex is brilliant at talking

2:03 about this he says if you're trying to build the tallest building you can build in an afternoon you're going to build

2:09 that very very differently than if you've got a month to build it and you're going to build it differently still if you've got five years to build

2:14 it and I think that's I that finally six years of failed attempts at message finally uh sunk in right I need to do

2:23 this properly okay now uh I mean uh uh I also came

Surviving 3 Years of No Revenue: How did you stay motivated?

2:30 across that there were three years of making zero revenue when uh you were that stage and how did you mentally

2:37 survive and not pivot away for those three years yeah so when I first started my agency yeah three years so wasn't

2:44 three years of no revenue but definitely three years of no profit um so I had you know a bit of client work that could

2:51 that could generate a bit of money well for me I think I had no alternative really i had dropped out of a very good

2:58 university i didn't have a degree and I did that at the time knowing that that

3:04 was my version of burning the boats you have to take the island if you burn the boats there's no alternative so I knew I

3:10 couldn't go and get the sort of job that all my friends were getting i had to

3:15 find a way to make it work so I worked full-time alongside those first few

3:20 years where I didn't make any profit and couldn't pay the bills and I'm actually really glad I was in that situation

3:27 because I think had I had the option of the easy out to go and get the good job to join a graduate scheme like all my

3:33 friends were doing at the time I might have taken it but uh that kept me going and uh very glad that it did it worked

3:40 out in the end but it was it was definitely hard i naturally as a person

3:45 have quite a lot of perseverance i was always into sports as a kid was always

3:51 wanting you know yourself what your strengths are what your weaknesses are and I know that when I was playing

3:58 football with my friends I was willing to run longer than everyone else just always since I could remember that was

4:05 part of my personality and that absolutely helped when it came to those early days of running my business of

4:11 constantly thinking okay I've tried this this hasn't worked tried this this hasn't worked how can I get this to work

4:17 this thing has worked a little bit so I was constantly assessing and and looking to improve things I don't think that you

4:22 need to see a lot of success for that to really help mentally for you to keep

4:29 going what I think you need to see is progress address so I say that to my team all the time like recently I've

4:36 just started a new Tik Tok account haven't really done anything on that platform before and I'm working with my

4:41 team on that it's very new and the new follower numbers the view numbers that

4:46 we're getting there in comparison to other platforms are tiny it seems you know you might say what's the point in doing this but as long as I can see

4:53 progress as long as I can see that our follower numbers are going the right direction view numbers are going the right direction I know that compounded

4:59 over time that will get somewhere important so even in those early days if I went from generating £1,000 a month in

5:08 client work to £1,200 a month in client work wasn't going to pay the bills but

5:13 it was progress and I could extrapolate from that and go okay if we keep going here this is going to become something

5:20 okay yeah that's a good thing now uh what did what role did failure in

Building Grit Through Failure: Did setbacks strengthen your resolve?

5:26 early ventures play in building the grit needed for health media of course you mentioned you already had the grid but

5:33 did these failures uh build more

5:38 i'm not sure they did actually honestly I don't think I became more resilient

5:43 from failing i think I had a desperation is a strong word but it's

5:49 probably accurate a desperation to achieve some level of success and make something i'd made this big gamble i've

5:55 decided I didn't want to go work in the business world in the corporate world i wanted my own business dropped out of a very good university and I felt like I

6:02 had so much sunk cost i was going to keep going and try and make it work no matter what what it did teach me was

6:09 more on the strategic level of what does and doesn't work and anything that looks

6:16 like a shortcut almost certainly doesn't work that was one of my big takeaways from from early failures i mean the

6:22 whole reason why I got into marketing in the first place was because I was trying to sell my own products to people with

6:28 these various little side ventures and funnily enough no one was going to buy if I didn't market them so I had to

6:34 learn marketing and educated myself and then found I developed a skill through that that I could then sell to other people so I think going through that I

6:42 picked up a lot of strategic understanding just

6:47 experience that was really beneficial later on as opposed to necessarily adding extra grit i think I had that

6:53 anyway all right now uh you have scaled from a

Unlocking Rapid Growth: What strategies scaled your team to 50+?

6:58 solo venture to a 50 plus person team so what were the pivotal decisions or

7:03 strategies that unlocked this rapid growth so for me it was keeping the most

7:10 important thing the thing that I spent my most time on so I think a lot of

7:16 particularly in the agency world because agencies are very busy they're very chaotic they're very time consuming it's

7:22 easy for people to work on the urgent and not the most important so relatively

7:27 early on I knew that building my personal brand for the overall success of the business was the most important

7:34 thing because if I had enough of a following if I delivered enough value to people in this marketplace if I made a

7:41 name for myself I would have enough demand coming in from clients that I would then be able to use that demand

7:48 use that revenue to solve other problems my business had so use the revenue to be able to hire great people to deliver a

7:53 fantastic service and all those sorts of things so it had been very easy when things got incredibly busy and I was

7:59 trying to make content and I was also doing the sales calls and I was also doing the client deliverables and I was

8:05 also doing my bookkeeping and people very familiar you're doing all

8:11 the roles and you might have one VA for example to help out but you're doing all the roles it would have been very easy at that point to drop the content and

8:18 just go I've already got loads of clients i don't need this and I I knew at the time that the people who were at

8:24 the top of this space who were where I wanted to get to they all had substantial personal brands so I knew I

8:30 had to always keep going with that so I would make sure that my most productive hours of the day was content creation

8:37 and then I would fit in the client work later on in the evenings let's say

8:42 weekends make sure I always got it done i wanted to do a good job um for my clients and

8:47 then once I had that revenue coming in once I had enough sales coming in I was then able to afford to hire great people

8:54 in the end I ended up partnering with someone I wouldn't have been able to partner with of a level if I hadn't have

8:59 the personal brand and wasn't able to bring the lead flow to the table so that was one of the most important things

9:06 that I did was was that and then speaking of other important things that was another decision there was

9:11 recognizing what my core strengths are and what I'm weak at so I'm good at building a personal brand i'm good at

9:17 content i'm good at creating ads and running ads and that's how I generated most of my initial clients that's how we

9:23 got good results for clients but I'm not a natural operator so I find it difficult to manage large groups of

9:30 people my small content team fine it's something I know I can get better at but I've partnered with someone so I have a

9:36 business partner who's a brilliant operator so he manages the team that

9:42 handles all the client deliverables he manages the sales team all of that and allows me to focus on what I'm best at

9:48 which is content creation building a personal brand creating ads for my own stuff to grow the brand and grow the

9:55 business okay now uh many agency owners struggle to break out of the freelancer phase

Breaking Out of the Freelancer Phase: What advice do you have?

10:03 what advice would you give someone stuck at that stage so you have to find a way to stand out

10:10 from the crowd and that sounds like advice everyone's heard before and I'm sure many people ah whatever roll their

10:17 eyes and move on but it is true in the marketing world in the agency world

10:22 there are hundreds of thousands if you're a freelancer in this space there are hundreds of thousands of people just like you so you have to find a way to

10:30 differentiate yourself from the competition so I did that with a personal brand and that is absolutely a

10:36 very effective way it will take five plus years to fully do that and to build

10:41 a name these things are difficult to build they are incredibly valuable once you've built them that's actually one of

10:47 the upsides of something being difficult to do is that if it's hard to do other people won't do it it protects you i

10:53 speak to people all the time at say marketing conferences who will say "I'm making content i want to build a personal brand like yours." And my

10:59 response is always like "Great i'll see you in seven years time and then uh I know that the vast majority of people

11:05 won't follow through with that the few that do will go on to become names and have a lot of success so that's one way

11:11 to do it is to differentiate that way there are other ways can you differentiate yourself by

11:17 establishing incredible relationships with a certain key referral partners i know of agency owners that have

11:23 succeeded that way they have approached much larger agencies and done very

11:29 favorable to that larger agency deals where anything that comes through to them that's too small this business will

11:35 then handle and that produces a ton of of lead flow ton of workflow that's difficult to do there's lots of people

11:42 that want to fill those roles that want to build those relationships that want to have those connections but that can work really well i've seen it with other

11:47 types of referral partners not just bigger agencies but perhaps um tangential businesses that are

11:54 related to whatever it is their their core thing is so that could be another way of doing it another way is to

12:01 operate in a really really specific niche so that you can become the name in

12:07 that space that does cap you in terms of scalability at some point but to get out

12:13 of that freelancer role that's absolutely a way to go so you could specialize in something very specific

12:19 all your marketing your website your branding your socials everything is geared up for it take my example like we

12:26 run Facebook ads but it's for um dog walkers and that's it just just

12:32 operate in that very specific quite small niche and then that makes it much easier for you to be referred for you to

12:39 acquire customers because of your specificity and then once you've gotten to the point because even in that space

12:45 you could still have a a medium-sized business that's very successful delivers fantastic lifestyle gets you out of that

12:50 freelancer role then you could look to spand out and expand out into other verticals but that would be another way to really differentiate but you have to

12:57 find just this I'm another one of these I do good work so does 100,000 other

13:03 people right i I can completely vouch for you i've been uh in this space for

13:09 last 23 years now so so initially it was difficult but but at least in India I

13:16 created a personal brand and I I still keep on especially when it comes to the

13:21 SEO part I I did a lot and yeah I agree it's not the easy it's constant

13:27 visibility and it's constantly it's it's it requires dedication and it requires constant efforts

13:34 it does but the leverage you get on that can weigh way can massively outweigh the

13:40 effort eventually not at the beginning not at all not for a long time but eventually it can be massive leverage so

13:47 I can make a video now and we might get 50 leads from that one video and that seems like an amazing return on the

13:53 effort return on the on the cost but it took almost a decade of audience

14:00 building to be in that situation right now uh how did you attract and

Attracting & Retaining Talent: How do you find top performers?

14:06 retain worldclass talent as your agency grew yeah so this is something that's a

14:14 challenge that my business faced because of where we're located so we're based in the UK we're not in London we're not in

14:21 Manchester we're not in one of the the major hubs where you would be able to find um existing talent so we're based

14:28 in the west of England we sort of had two offices and ruralish not massive population

14:35 centers not hubs for marketing or agency talent so we've managed to attract a few

14:41 people that already had skills when you're one of the only big players in that area when it comes to marketing

14:47 agency wise that that becomes easier but we have really struggled to attract

14:52 world-class talent so what we've done instead is we've hired people with fantastic attitudes amazing work ethic

14:58 and we've trained from from ground up that takes a lot longer and it's much

15:03 more difficult to do from a planning standpoint because if it's going to take you six to 12 months to get someone

15:08 ready to even start working on a client ad account alongside say a more senior media

15:14 buyer well that takes six to 12 months it's really difficult to predict exactly what your demand will be in that time period so you kind of have to make a

15:20 leap of faith of right we're going to onboard another four people now we know they'll be useful in nine months time

15:27 and they'll be fully ready to go on client ad accounts in 18 months time these are long time periods for them to

15:32 develop the experience and expertise to be able to deliver great results but that's something you have to do and

15:38 because my personal brand has continued to grow we've had the demand to to justify that um but that is difficult to

15:43 do the plus one of the big plus sides to that is that your talent is initially

15:49 cheaper because they come in not experienced so you don't have they don't

15:54 command the same price as someone who's been doing this for seven eight years so that that helps uh from a cash flow

16:00 standpoint from a cost standpoint early on during that process and also because of where we are and almost all of our

16:06 staff have hybrid contracts as I work partly in the office partly remotely so they need to be somewhat nearby not all

16:12 of them but the large majority are under that it means that retaining that talent is also easier because if we're based in

16:21 London people it would be far easier for them to jump across to another big agency based on the experience that

16:27 they've they've got with us that's more difficult for our staff to do so it's kind of like the same logic of building

16:32 a personal brand it's been more difficult for us to find talent because

16:37 of where we are but actually easier to retain and can work out really well over the long run

Common Scaling Mistakes: What do most agency founders overlook?

16:43 right now uh what's one mistake you see most agency founders making when they

16:48 are trying to scale i think agency founders and this is this is true for

16:56 lots of different business owners I see but definitely true in the agency space is they spread themselves too thin and

17:02 they try and do too many different things they try and offer too many different services some of which they

17:07 may not actually have enough expertise in that creates a really difficult business operationally because you you

17:15 or your team need to know a bit of this and a bit of that you don't get those efficiencies for people doing the same thing or very similar things again and

17:21 again and again and getting really really good at it and it also makes it more difficult from a marketing

17:26 standpoint because if you are a specialist in something you can plaster that all over your me website all over

17:32 your socials and people understand exactly what it is that they're getting so my agency we specialize in meta ads

17:38 and Google ads and that's what we do for clients now some existing clients we might add on some auxiliary services but

17:44 we we don't market ourselves as anything else meta ads and we do Google ads veryv

17:50 specifically um so that helps operationally it also helps from a from

17:56 a marketing standpoint so I think that's that's probably one of the biggest mistakes I see very often they they will

18:01 and and then you can apply that to many different places so you can apply that logic not just to services provided but

18:07 the marketing activities that an agency will engage in so a lot of agency owners and I did this at the beginning they

18:13 will try a little bit of everything i'm going to do a bit of networking i'm going to do a bit of content i'm going to run my own ads i'm going to do all

18:19 sorts of different things try and get a few referral partners but there's almost certainly going to be one of those that produces much better results than the

18:26 others for your business so just cut the others even if they are generating clients and rededicate all those

18:32 resources that time effort and money to that thing that's working best put just keep putting more and more into that letv

18:38 that compound get better at it I think you'll be in a much better situation all right now in your experience how has

Changes in the Agency Landscape: How has AI impacted your work?

18:46 the agency landscape changed in the last couple of years especially with the rise of AI and automation

18:54 yes it's interesting so the five years ago there'd be lots of

19:00 people selling online start a marketing agency people selling courses that idea in content start a marketing agency

19:06 marketing agency was always the the terminology and now it's not it's an AI agency even though these businesses um

19:13 from the look of it do very similar things that are designed to do very similar things I think there is a large

19:19 opportunity for people in this space to take advantage of the fact that

19:27 they know or can learn how to use AI to automate tasks to get things done really

19:32 quickly that regular business owners that would benefit from the service don't know so a classic example might be

19:40 let's say someone is trying to build a following on LinkedIn a B2B business

19:46 they want to follow on LinkedIn so that business owner is writing all sorts of

19:52 posts and putting out content and things like that it's if you're in this space it sounds

19:58 silly that someone wouldn't be using chat GPT or some an equivalent to write those posts and do it a lot faster but

20:04 there'll be lots and lots of people that aren't that are doing that themselves manually they're just not really

20:09 familiar with it or comfortable with it now that might be taking that person hours every week and that's a service

20:14 that someone else who understands how to use these things could automate for them probably with 20 30 minutes a week put a

20:22 little bit of input into these posts but allow AI to do to do the heavy lifting so there's a there's quite a value

20:27 exchange there where you're going to save this business owners hours every week you're going to probably deliver

20:32 better results because good chance that something like CHBT will write better posts than than they will so they'll get

20:38 better results as well and and there's a value exchange there so that has been going on for a while i think that's

20:45 going to continue i do think that businesses want to be careful branding themselves as an AI agency because if I

20:53 think about that from the customer's point of view most businesses won't think they

20:59 need an AI agency they're like "What for what do I need this AI for?" Whereas if

21:04 you brand yourself as something else but use AI you can make yourself much more

21:10 efficient operationally get a lot more done but

21:16 you're making it clear to the customer that you're getting them what they want so for example we're a email marketing

21:21 agency now you can use AI to write most of the emails and do most of that stuff

21:27 but if you brand yourself as an email marketing agency a business can go great that's exactly what we need we have an

21:32 email list we want to build an email list we want to get get more sales from it we feel like we should be doing more from it that's exactly who we want to

21:37 work with so that's how I think people can position themselves a little bit cleverer from the thinking about it from

21:43 the customer's point of view the potential client's point of view and um and use that i think

21:49 that AI any improvements in technology they make workflows more efficient that allows more to be done right but only if

21:58 you know how to use it so I think the people who are going to really benefit from that most are people like myself

22:04 it's agency owners we can get more done now with one copywriter who's properly

22:10 using AI for for ads for clients than we could seven or eight years ago with

22:16 three or four so that's a massive costsaving for us as a business i mean we've expanded so we haven't you know

22:22 downsized but I think that will be happening in the agency space a lot we haven't had to do that because we've kept expanding kept getting more clients but it means we haven't had to hire as

22:28 many extra people as what we otherwise would um but yeah I think I think the

22:34 expertise that agencies can provide not just AI related but also

22:40 wrapping that up in a whole marketing bundle is still really valuable to clients so I see very few scenarios where potential clients or clients are

22:47 going we're not going to use our marketing agency anymore we're going to just use AI ourselves that I haven't

22:52 come across and I think there's some theory of that within the marketing space because I think there's a knowledge gap there but it does mean

22:58 that agencies are more efficient and can get more done one knock-on effect of

23:03 that might be that agencies start dropping their prices because they can get more done so they can offer it for

23:09 less and that can create a bit of a race to the bottom price wise so we might see that average monthly fees coming down

23:17 but at the end of the day if you can generate leads you can generate sales for businesses that is an incredibly

23:22 valuable thing it's one of the most valuable things you can ever provide a business is that ability so people are

23:28 always going to be willing to pay for that even if it is more than they they would like to right right right now uh

The Power of Personal Branding: Why is it crucial for agencies?

23:35 let's talk about a little bit more about the power of personal brand now uh you

23:40 said in a previous talk that uh 26 was the year you went all in your personal

23:46 brand now what made you pull that trigger so I one of the ways I was experimenting with generating clients

23:52 for my own agency initially was I was creating videos to run as Facebook ads

23:58 to get Facebook ads clients and they kind of worked the videos weren't that good looking back now um this is seven

24:05 years ago or so they kind of worked but what I also did was I had these video

24:11 assets and I thought why don't I pop these up on YouTube because I already have them how can that hurt and I

24:17 remember one of them got a couple hundred views and it got say three leads from it and like properly interested

24:24 businesses and I thought that was really interesting i thought okay I've got 200 views and three leads i think I maybe

24:31 closed one and ended up doing some work for one so I had a look at what did the most popular videos on YouTube get

24:38 viewwise in the Facebook ad space at the time it was about 40,000 and I remember

24:44 sort of I barely slept that night when I was running through the numbers thinking okay if I got three leads off 200 views

24:50 I'm going to get thousand leads off a 40,000 view video or hundreds of leads at least and I felt like I had enough

25:00 evidence just from that to extrapolate and go if I can get

25:05 my views to anything close to those numbers I'll have all the leads I ever want so then I worked on

25:11 okay take a look at the best performing videos for each sort of subtopic within the Facebook ads world is where I

25:18 started creating content i think this video did this well this video did this different thing well none of the videos

25:24 have mentioned this other thing that I think is important let's combine them all and I'm going to create my own version and do my best and try and get better and better and it takes a long

25:30 time to do that to develop the skills and then build up that view count that subscriber count to the point where you do get uh massive views and the ratios

25:38 didn't exactly apply it's not like I get three leads for every 200 views that I generate now they they certainly drop

25:43 off as as you achieve larger scale but the basic logic of if I get videos with

25:50 these sorts of view numbers will it generate more leads than I can handle

25:55 absolutely that was true and actually the space grew a lot so whereas the most popular Facebook ads related YouTube

26:01 videos got 40,000 views then now I've got videos with more than half a million views like the capacity um expanded and

26:08 then I just since then I just kept doing it and then it kept doing it kept doing it and whilst other people who were

26:14 creating content in that space went off and did different things um I just kept at it and then all of a

26:20 sudden maybe three or four years ago I've got the largest YouTube channel related to Facebook and Instagram ads in

26:25 the world and then it just keeps going and then it's the largest by two or three times and you establish it's like

26:31 I I was just head down focused on that and all a sudden I just pop my head up and be like Oh I think I might have the biggest personal brand in the Facebook

26:38 ad space like this is this is crazy and then now I work directly with Meta i'm one of their megaphone partners with

26:43 basically like a brand ambassador for for Meta ads because they see that and they reach out and they want to you know

26:49 give me special access and all that sort of stuff so um so I can't exactly remember what your original question was

26:54 but that's oh doubling down on going all in on a personal brand that was that was the story i had I had just enough of an

27:00 indication that this could work and I also looked at I think this is a really important thing look at the people who

27:05 are where you want to be in 3 to 5 years time what are they doing not necessarily what are they saying because I think

27:11 sometimes in the online content world you need to be a little bit careful about that but what are they doing okay

27:16 they're doing this and they're doing that and in my case it was you know they're making YouTube videos and then since then there's been a lot more at at

27:24 the time then that was the place to make content now all of us make content on

27:29 Instagram and Facebook and Tik Tok and LinkedIn and everywhere right but then it was very much YouTube specific so it

27:35 was those two things really an early indication from a trial it's why it's important to test things and then looking at the people that were where I

27:42 wanted to get to so still YouTube is your number one channel still i mean

27:47 despite having all these different channels yeah YouTube yeah YouTube's the my largest social following so across

27:53 I've got two channels i've got one for Facebook ads and one for Google ads so I've got across the two something like 430,000 subscribers with the majority

28:00 like 360,000 of those being um the Facebook ads channel and I've got um

28:06 just over a million followers subscribers across all socials but

28:11 YouTube's going to be most important with Facebook being next and then it goes on and on and you still put your

28:17 most effort obviously in YouTube itself only yeah yeah that's where that's where

28:23 most of my content creation time goes we then repurpose clips from it for the other socials a lot of my other social

28:29 stuff I will so we'll take clips from whenever I'm talking at a marketing conference we'll take clips from a

28:35 podcast like this and we'll repurpose a lot more whereas YouTube is going to be more purpose recorded so yeah okay now

Balancing Personal & Agency Brands: How do you manage both?

28:45 uh so how do you balance building a personal brand with building your agency's brand any conflict or

28:53 synergies no I don't feel like there's any conflict we haven't really done anything to build the my agency's brand

29:00 in and of itself it's very much just been we've built my personal brand and then I say

29:07 this is my agency so I can guarantee that amongst my following far more people know my name than my agency's

29:13 name now it's got my my agency is called Heath Media that's part of the reason why we called it that was to put my

29:18 surname in there and there are some downsides to doing that so my business

29:24 because it's so focused around my personal brand in terms of the lead flow the deliverable is not we have a team of

29:30 we've just crossed 60 people actually to be able to deliver but the the lead flow is is very much around my personal brand

29:36 it would make selling my agency very difficult i'd probably have some sort of ownorous earnout where I'd have to make

29:41 content for five years that sort of thing so that's a a huge potential downside exit can be a challenge exactly

29:48 but I think on the plus side why if I had to do it all again I would still go

29:53 personal brand first is because people connect with other people so much better than they connect with a brand name yes

29:59 and having that connection is where all the value of the personal brand is in it's in the trust it's in the this guy

30:06 gives me value i want to I trust him i trust that he will have made sure that his agency is going to do good work for

30:12 my business because I've watched him for many videos he seems like a like he knows what he's talking about he's demonstrated loads of evidence that they

30:18 get good results for their clients like this is who I'm going to trust my what is in a lot of cases business we work

30:24 with are really but one of the most important things to their business they're going to entrust that to us is

30:29 is their customer acquisition so even though that has those downsides

30:36 I'd still do it again and I also think that despite the downside of it being

30:41 very difficult to sell if we make it big enough that becomes less of an issue so

30:47 the great example of that would be Gary Vaynerchuk with Vayner Media that's absolutely wrapped up in his personal

30:53 brand it was built off the back of his personal brand in the first place but I'm pretty sure he could sell that

30:59 business and not have any issues and you could go outside the marketing world like Elon Musk going to be able to sell Tesla even though the the two are linked

31:07 so yeah it's not some it's not something that worries me but I do recognize that

31:12 there are definitely downsides and not at my level because I'm just not famous

31:17 enough but I know people that have taken that step um from where I am to say 10x

31:23 the following and then that starts to present some challenges in their regular life people know them you lose privacy

31:30 try and go out for dinner people wanting photos i get that at a marketing conference and a marketing conference only it's really quite nice like I get

31:35 to be a celebrity for like two or three days marketing conference just go home to my regular anonymous life and go

31:41 about in the world and I get stopped in the regular world maybe once a month maybe and so that's not something that

31:47 negatively affects me but build a personal brand big enough we talked about Kay Vaynerchuk i'm sure he has I

31:52 think I think he's perfectly happy with it but someone in that scenario he probably finds it quite hard to walk down busy streets in many places because

32:00 he's going to have lots of people that want to bother so that's another potential downside if you get big enough now uh how how many hours uh on an

YouTube Commitment: How many hours do you dedicate weekly?

32:07 average you spend uh per week on creating YouTube content

32:13 youtube content's probably going to be about 20 hours a week I would say so

32:18 probably close to half my working hours is going to be spent on on YouTube content probably another 10 hours a week

32:24 on specific other content and then probably 10 hours a week on the other

32:30 things that just have to get done because they have to get done whether it's communicating with team members and

32:35 being involved in hiring decisions i have a fantastic business partner that very much keeps me out of the operations like already discussed so I can focus on

32:41 this stuff um a lot more it used to be that when I was doing everything my YouTube content was two hours on a

32:48 Wednesday afternoon and I would just right I've got two hours i've got to think up a video and go and then that

32:53 was it and then send it off to a editor who wasn't great but was cheap and they edited it then I could then I could put

32:59 it out but now it takes up a lot more time and focus i plan videos meticulously

33:04 i verify I go through each edit from editors very closely i identify bits

33:10 that could be clipped up for shorts i think about titles i think about thumbnail options it's it's the main thing for me so I'm very conscious to

33:17 keep the main thing the main thing okay now uh any advice for agency owners who

Starting a Personal Brand: Is it too late for newcomers?

33:24 feel they are too late to build a personal brand in 2025

33:29 yeah i that's just not a concern like just ditch that the if I go back to when

33:36 I started building a personal brand there was less competition but there was also far smaller audience size so like I

33:43 said the max you could get on a Facebook ads video then was about 40,000 views

33:48 well I've got videos with 5 600,000 so it's the s the potential size of the

33:55 viewership has increased at least 10 times since then i don't think the level

34:00 of competition has increased 10 times it has increased but not not by 10 times there's always going to be place for new

34:09 personal brands to establish themselves they might need to take have a little

34:14 bit of different take they might in most cases just need to do better things than the than the than the competition i

34:21 think one of the best examples of this possible in recent times has been Alexi who I've already mentioned almost no one

34:28 knew who he was two definitely three years ago and now he's one of the

34:34 biggest names within the business space in the world that quickly so if someone

34:40 like that can go from a relatively small YouTube channel with not many subscribers

34:46 to I was going to say millions he might even be 10 plus million followers across channels now i'm pretty sure he will be

34:53 in just let's say let's say three years is I think it's closer to two but let's say three years there's absolutely space

34:59 for someone to go and get 50,000 followers on a platform because that's probably all an agency owner needs to

35:05 build a settle business is well 50,000 would likely be a very successful business you can get 5,000 on a platform

35:11 you could probably make a decent living from the people that come through that particularly if what you talk about is quite specific and you serve those that

35:17 specific audience so yeah that's just not something to be concerned about it

35:22 can absolutely be done okay now uh what's the biggest misconception people

Misconceptions in Personal Branding: What do people get wrong?

35:29 have about personal branding in the agency space so I think I think two come to mind the first is going to be how

35:35 long it takes so I think because most people consume a lot of content and they

35:41 see content creators that come from nowhere to have large followings quite quickly

35:48 they assume that that's possible in the agency space and it rarely is

35:54 the PE the content creators that have that really explosive fast growth tend to be entertaining content creators and

36:00 because your potential audience size is much larger and the content is just much more consumable it's much easier for

36:06 people to sort of binge on entertainment related content that they assume that that's

36:13 possible in space it's not you're going to be producing educational content there's only a relatively small

36:18 percentage of population is interested in that and then of those a lot of educational stuff is like it requires

36:25 thought it requires effort it's not sort of thing you're going to stick on in the background whilst you're doing something else most of the time you're going to

36:30 have to concentrate so that massively reduces the potential audience size now

36:36 it's a very valuable audience like my audience commands really high CPMs in YouTube ads

36:41 in comparison to the average because it's a really valuable audience and then that's reflected in what we can generate revenue-wise from the audience ourselves

36:48 with our own services what I can come up from sponsors so like all the values there but it but it reduces a size so

36:53 that's the first one is just to be like this takes time it is hard to do you just have to accept that it's hard to do

36:58 because you need to develop a skill set it's also hard to do because you sort of build trust with your audience one person at a time and it grows and and

37:05 expands from there the other thing that I think is a massive misconception it's probably even more important is people

37:13 assuming they need to go broad with what they talk about in order to build a

37:19 personal brand that can confer clients for their business that can that can lead to success in in that realm and

37:25 that is absolutely not true in fact I would recommend the complete opposite because if you're creating broad

37:32 business marketing related content you are competing against the Alex Moses and the Gary Vaynerchucks and like good luck

37:37 that's really really hard to do so me I've I'm broad within Facebook ads and within Google

37:43 ads but if I try and take that step and I am that's something I'm trying to do

37:49 to go broader on some of my social channels it's really hard like it's I

37:54 get way less traction it's like wow this is a whole another league up so if you think about that league being like the

38:00 top league and then underneath that you've got someone like me who's broad within a domain so you can have people

38:06 that are broad within SEO broad within Facebook ads broad within within whatever different places and then most

38:11 people can't wouldn't I wouldn't even recommend that that's far too broad for most people to start with you want to go at least one layer level lower than that

38:18 where it's like right we do LinkedIn and we do it for B2B businesses that work

38:25 that operate in recruitment like that's that's what we do so that all your content is about how

38:32 recruitment based businesses can get more leads using LinkedIn can grow their following on LinkedIn like that's the

38:37 level of specificity you want to start at and when you do that your content

38:43 gets 85 views initially it gets 12 views it gets 160 views it grows it's never

38:50 you're not going to have content with 100,000 views it just it's very very unlikely to happen but what you'll find

38:56 is you'll have you'll be in that scenario where I first started where you go "Wow this video got 160 views and we

39:01 got two leads from it." And you know what each one of our customers is worth $10,000 so a lead is worth a lot of

39:07 money this is even though the numbers look really small this is really viable for our business so absolutely start

39:13 specific you can always broaden out later on that's something that I'm trying to do now i I'm like the biggest

39:19 personal brand within the meta ad space i'm trying to broaden out into broader marketing it's really really hard for me

39:25 to do and I've been doing this nearly a decade like I have a lot of skills so someone getting started go really small

39:31 and just dominate that little space hoover up so much of the business that's available from that and then once you've

39:38 got to that level you can hire other people to help you and take that next level if you want to expand but there's lots of businesses that don't that are

39:43 really happy with their 12,000 person following that generates a couple million dollars a year business that's

39:49 absolutely feasible right right right so do you use AI for generating ideas or

Generating YouTube Content Ideas: How do you stay inspired?

39:55 how do you generate uh how do you get more content ideas for your YouTube videos

40:01 so there's a few different ways i'll look at comments i'll look at what people say they want that's often a

40:08 great way particularly if something comes up again and again people like "Oh what about this what about this?" Okay great i'll make a video looking at that

40:14 so I I spend every day I'll spend a few minutes flicking through the comments to to get a sense for that i will take a

40:20 look at what competitors are doing other people that make content in my space okay oh someone's made a video on that

40:25 i've not made a video on that yet i think I could have my own take on this i think I could do something similar that

40:31 video did better than average for for their stuff so there's there's some of that as well in my space and actually to

40:39 be honest any agency related space things are changing all the time so there's a lot of news-based videos that

40:44 I create there's new features it's one of the big advantages I have being a Meta megaphone partner is Meta will tell

40:50 me in advance we're going to do this we're going to release this feature they'll give me a product demonstration

40:55 so I can see exactly how it's going to work and I can have a video ready to go on announcements so that's a a big video

41:01 topic a big source of videos for me is just things changing updating and then for me as well there are just redoss of

41:07 previous videos because everything changes so I will do a big beginner's tutorial every year and I need to do it

41:13 every year honestly I could probably do it every six months because between the last time I did it and this time okay

41:18 that's changed and that's changed and that's changed so like that that creates a lot of content so I never really run

41:23 out of ideas it's one of the things that I think people assume would be a problem would be ideas and that's that's not the case

41:30 i've normally got more ideas than I have slots to record and edit uh so yeah from

41:37 those sources I get plenty okay uh now let's move to building a scalable paid

Mindset Shift for Leverage: What’s the key to effective marketing?

41:43 social powerhouse which of course you have built so uh you have managed uh more than 150 million in ad spend and

41:50 generated over 200 millions in revenue for clients now what's the 600 million

41:56 in revenue for clients okay 150 million in ad spend 200 million generated revenue doesn't sound great

42:02 but we've generated at least a 4x return on ad spend so just wanted otherwise please carry on yeah so what's the

42:09 number one mindset shift marketers need to succeed with paid social today i

42:16 think you need an extra layer of leverage so paying to put ads in front

42:23 of people on social is a form of leverage you're not just posting something organically you're then

42:28 putting budget behind it to make sure that it's put in front of other people but the most successful campaigns that

42:34 we run for businesses they have an extra layer of leverage so a classic example

42:39 of that would be influencers we are running a lot of ad campaigns now with

42:45 influencercreated content sometimes images mostly videos so if you take a a

42:51 standard e-commerce business is advertising their products they might be able to get profitable results it might work well but if they want to be able to

42:58 take that into something that is unbelievably scalable and incredibly successful get an influencer a proper

43:05 influencer a big hitter within their space that has a real audience to create video ads showing their product why it's

43:11 great when we run those they're so much better at stopping the scroll we can see that in the hook rate goes through the

43:17 roof that makes it much more like people to consume the content makes it much like people click and then and then

43:23 purchase so we've had many examples of of clients i've talked about this in some of my videos where we will take a

43:30 business that's operating at say a 3x return on ad spend and then we get them to an 8x return on ad spend using

43:36 influencer based video ads so just an enormous amount of of leverage there

43:41 there are other ways to add in extra leverage into your content beyond just paying and I think that's where a lot of

43:47 people go wrong is they're like "Right well I'm paying to put this in front of people therefore people will take action and not thinking that you still need

43:54 whatever you're putting in front of people to be as convincing as possible as engaging as possible so another layer

43:59 of leverage this works particularly well for local businesses might be an offer so an offer that just absolutely blows

44:05 your competition out the water right not only does that resonate with the people that see it but when you're running that

44:11 locally they are far more likely to recommend it to friends family other people they know in the area as well so

44:17 you're getting that like second order of leverage on on on what you're doing so I

44:22 think that's the single most important thing when it comes to approaching paid social there's lots of other things

44:28 platforms have changed we're having to embrace a lot more of what Meta and this

44:34 applies to all social ad platforms but what Meta will want to do from a targeting and delivery standpoint and

44:39 focusing on what what we can really focus on but yeah but that's the most important thing okay

Facebook Ad Campaign Failures: Why do most campaigns not succeed?

44:45 now you've said most Facebook ad campaigns fail and that's normal

44:52 now how do you coach clients and your team to persist through these failures

44:58 yes so I think a lot of it is expectation setting in the beginning saying look a lot of this isn't going to

45:03 work but we're prepared for that in advance so we're not just going to test

45:08 the one ad we're going to test lots of ads lots of different hooks for those ads lots of headline variations

45:15 different offers we're going to test um featuring different products within a

45:21 product range or different services first and we're going to test a lot of stuff to find the the stuff that works

45:27 the reason why it happens is because any paid social environment is a competitive

45:33 landscape and in order to get fantastic results you need to beat your competition it's kind of like if you

45:38 think about entering a like a tennis tournament if there's 100 people in the tournament there's going to be one

45:44 winner and 99 losers now if you translate that into Facebook ads the

45:49 people that come second third fourth fifth like they're probably got great results as well it's not just one person's going to get great results and

45:55 99 people are going to be unprofitable but it it it's just to help understand that those are the market

46:02 dynamics there's going to be a relatively small percentage of campaigns that do really really well in any space

46:10 and you want to have one of those the good thing is and this really helps with

46:15 experience and this is why expectation setting is so important we could test 49 ads and them all fail and all

46:24 lose money and then the 50th ad does really well generates a 12x return on ad

46:32 spend we scale that thing and it covers the cost of the 49 failed ads 10 times

46:38 over so that's the structure here that's what we're looking to do we are looking for

46:44 those gems for those things that can absolutely crush it when it comes to results and that can more than make up

46:50 for for everything else so you almost need to you need to know what you're getting into going into it you need to look at this more math

46:57 mathematically in terms of it might feel bad to have lots of ads not work but

47:03 that just doesn't matter we're learning we're adjusting we find those ones that work and it can all more than composite

47:08 you can grow a fantastic business off 5% hit rate with your ads now we're able to achieve better than that most of the

47:15 time because we do this all the time we've worked with 3,000 plus clients we spent tens hundreds of millions on the platform right so um we can expedite

47:22 that process but yeah but that is just that's just how it works all right now

Common Mistakes with Ads: What do brands often get wrong?

47:29 so what are the most common mistakes you see brands making with Facebook and Google ads right now i think a lot of

47:35 brands aren't brave enough and there's two ways that I'd say they're not brave enough they're not brave enough with

47:42 their messaging and their creative so they're not brave enough for what they're putting in front of people and what I mean by that is they're trying to

47:49 restrict the personality of the brand they're trying to make it corporate make it sterile boring these things don't

47:57 work they just get scrolled past so that's a battle that we're very often having with brands is like if we just if

48:04 you're just willing to take a few risks here this is not going to do any long-term damage we think we can get

48:09 much better results now of course there are cases where businesses have gone too far and then they've had to they've you

48:15 know there've been famous ones in the news recently where marketing people have been involved and like the Jaguar

48:22 rebrand for example and maybe maybe the business owners and the the board were talked into being a little bit too far

48:27 with with the direction and personality they wanted to uh express with that brand but the vast majority of

48:32 businesses sit on the other side of things where they're they're not brave enough then the other thing that I think businesses aren't brave enough is they

48:40 require too good results to be able to scale properly so I've had many

48:45 conversations with businesses where we will always establish what's the average customer worth to your business and I'll say okay average customer is worth

48:52 $1,000 over a 5year period as an example and we'll say okay what are you willing

48:57 to pay to acquire that customer and they might say $50 something like that and we think

49:05 you're really only willing to pay 5% of what that customer is worth to acquire that customer what if we were able to pay 20%

49:14 of what that customer is worth to acquire that customer so instead of paying $50 in terms of new customer acquired we're paying $200 in terms of

49:21 new customer acquired and they sort of go "Oh I'm not sure about that." You go "Right okay but let me run you through

49:26 this if we're able to pay that much more to acquire a customer we might be able

49:31 to spend on ads and still be within that KPI 10 20 times as much on ads which

49:39 means you will acquire seven eight times as many customers yes you might be

49:44 making slightly less profit on each customer but think about what that will do for your business over the next two

49:50 to three years all those customers acquired all those people using your products using your services telling

49:56 friends and family nothing builds brand I I tell this to a lot of business owners nothing builds brand awareness

50:02 better than selling your stuff to people a lot of people want to run like awareness campaigns and build brand awareness that way like the best way is

50:08 just to sell a ton of your product and have people using it wearing it other people seeing it use your service talk

50:15 about it that's the best way to build brand awareness they're very much very much um aligned there so yeah so I think

50:21 they there's a a really good case for a lot of business to be much more aggressive in terms of customer acquisition be willing to sacrifice that

50:28 profit on the front end to build a much larger customer base and once you've got that customer base you can remarket to

50:33 those people get them to purchase again and again and that's going to be incredibly profitable because you haven't got that c that cost of uh

50:39 customer acquisition again and the businesses that understand this best really are the

50:45 venture-backed often software businesses that that come out of the US because not only are they willing to not make a lot

50:53 of profit on their initial customer acquisition they're willing to lose a load of money on their initial customer acquisition we've worked with some

50:58 businesses in that space and it's so different to other types of businesses you're like "Wow you're willing to acquire a customer that pays you $10 a

51:06 month in a subscription fee and you're willing to pay $80 to acquire that customer." For most businesses that

51:12 would be insane now they can do it because they have the external funding but what they understand is they're going "Aha no the goal here is we get to

51:18 half a million customers and everything looks brilliant from then on because everything's much easier efficiencies we

51:24 can do all sorts we can upsell we can lifetime value these people etc etc um

51:29 we'll get a lot more referrals and that sort of thing so they understand that the best and I think more of that could be brought to other types of businesses

51:36 but it requires bravery right i agree with that now uh

Good vs Great Ads: What distinguishes them?

51:41 in your view what separates a good ad from a great ad it's all in the data so I think a lot of

51:50 business owners in particular when they're running their ads they will

51:55 assign how good an ad is a based on how much time and effort they put into it so if they put a lot of time and effort

52:01 into it they think it's a great ad whether it is or not yeah and then b just how it sort of looks

52:06 visually and for me a great ad is one that produces a better return on ad

52:12 spend than a good ad we can just quite simply see that in the data you do have

52:17 to match that with making sure the ad doesn't hurt the brand it

52:25 doesn't contradict other things that you're putting out into the world elsewhere but as long as you don't do

52:30 that it's it's all in the data and and it's as simple as that for me okay now how do you approach testing and

Testing & Optimizing Ads: How to avoid data overwhelm?

52:37 optimization without drowning in data or chasing vanity metrics

52:44 so the not chasing vanity metrics is a big one and I think I I've spoken to

52:50 quite a few of our clients that are almost disappointed at the lack of data that we track and optimize around i

52:56 think they feel that we should be trying to optimize 15 different data points and no

53:03 no the most important thing for a business when you're running paid social is either going to be your return on ad

53:09 spend if you can track it accurately or your cost per conversion let's say it's a leadbased business and you can't track

53:15 what the individual customers are worth very easily so we're going to go on cost per conversion it's one of those two metrics and 90% of the decisions around

53:21 optimization should be made on which one of these two ads produce the better return on ad spend or the better cost

53:27 per conversion um a and really always bring it back to that now the other

53:34 metrics are useful for diagnosing problems or how you might improve things so if you've got two different ads one's

53:40 produced a much better return on ad spend that's your winner but you could have a look at the other one and think well why didn't this work as well so

53:47 that's when you might look at things like your hook rate how many what percentage of people actually watch those first 3 seconds of the video okay

53:53 this is quite low right so maybe we don't need to throw this whole ad out maybe we just need to record some new hooks for it and there are other metrics

54:00 like that did this ad not produce as well because the click-through rate was was low okay maybe we need a stronger

54:05 call to action in this ad because the clickthrough rate is lower and we we can look to improve that so you can use those to diagnose and potentially

54:11 improve but terms of optimization decisions bring it back to those it sounds overly simplistic and like I said

54:17 some clients have been a bit I think a bit disappointed at that but that's what matters for most businesses far more

54:23 than anything else okay now uh how do you approach creative

Creative Testing Approaches: How has your strategy evolved?

54:28 testing today versus three year ago okay so today we're more videoheavy so

54:35 I've pulled my audience recently and our own internal data supports this that video ads produce the best results on

54:41 Facebook and Instagram about 60% of the time now that's still 40% of the time where you're going to be looking at

54:47 images carousels and it's worth testing for your specific business but we are now more video heavy i think when I ran

54:54 that exact same poll two years ago it was something like 45% of the time video ads produced the best and two years

54:59 before that might you know would have been like 30% I expect so we're definitely more videoheavy now I think

55:07 within that we have a number of go-to styles that we're going to test video-wise

55:12 that's a lot of businesses fall into the trap of "Oh I tested video ads it didn't work." Okay well how good were those

55:19 video ads how many did you actually create what was the style maybe you just created the wrong style of video ad so

55:24 we will have a number of go-tos i'll quickly run through them so UGC video ads user generated content influencer

55:30 video ads different things a lot of people conflate those two user generated is previous customers regular people influencers have audience have

55:36 influencers founderled video ads very self-explanatory demonstration video ads can be great for particularly if you

55:42 develop something new uh slideshow style video ads if you're primarily an image based advertiser you can put your images

55:48 into a slideshow animate make it a lot more engaging and then full animation sort of cartoon graphic style style

55:55 videos now there are other types but those are like the typical ones that we're going to going to look to test very often for different clients and so

56:03 we're going to be more video heavy we often know which one of those or which two of those is likely to produce the

56:08 best results for a client again based on our experience but if you don't have that you don't know for your particular business try and test it's going to take

56:15 time it's going to take money it's going to take resources but again if you find that one in aundred ad that one in 200

56:21 ad that just absolutely flies that could completely change your entire business i've seen it many times businesses have

56:27 5xed in a year of one ad one ad that's done really really well and it's

56:32 massively profitable and you can spend as much as possible and and really grow a business provided you can keep up from

56:37 a capacity standpoint so um so that's that's so that's a big part of it we're

56:42 doing more creative testing and less testing elsewhere so 3 years ago we would have

56:48 done more audience testing we would have done more copy based testing even other

56:53 things and just anyone who is involved in any sort of like data uh work that

57:00 that is familiar with testing knows you can't test too much at once there's only so much you can test otherwise you overload what meta is able to test and

57:07 and you as as the advertiser it's really hard unless you're a fully qualified data scientist it's really hard to work

57:12 out what's going on here what's you know we changed this and this at the same time which one produced the improvement

57:17 in results so because we're testing less elsewhere from a targeting standpoint we're trusting the platforms more to

57:24 work that out that would apply to Google as well that gives us more flexibility to then test on the creative so we're

57:30 going to depending on the type of business but we're always going to have multiple creatives running we're going to always

57:38 have creatives in the wings ready to go so that once we've run an experiment we go "Okay out of these six ads that we're

57:44 running two are winners four aren't turn the four off boom let's put the new ones in and and and go and go and then the

57:51 final thing I'd say on that is probably within the video world um we're going to be much more hook focused now this is

57:56 not something I think we did three years ago where we would let's say we wanted to test different video ads we might record four video ads and test them now

58:04 we will record four video ads but we might record 20 different hooks so those

58:10 by the hook I mean those first three seconds right so that each one has five variations five different hooks because

58:17 that's the most important part by far of the video ad that could be make or break and you can see the exact same video

58:23 could be a 90 second long video but if the first three seconds are different it could have a completely different results from a a return on ad spend

58:29 standpoint so we will also do that now and we will create a lot more hooks a lot more variations and that's something

58:35 I don't think we were doing but it's hugely important to what we do now is it something you are following on your

58:41 YouTube channel the hooks thing are you testing there as well no I'm not

58:46 actually okay so I am not to that same extent and this is one of the beautiful things about ads that you can't with

58:54 organic content is with organic content because you aren't in control of the

59:01 distribution if you try and upload the same bit of content but with different

59:06 hooks the the second third fourth etc version

59:12 you upload is not going to do as well because a proportion of your audience have already seen it they go "I'm not going to watch that again i've already watched it." Right so whereas with ads

59:18 you control the distribution so you just don't have that to worry about it's just it's just it's a non-factor so I test different hooks as in I will see what

59:25 works best from a retention standpoint on YouTube and and the other social content like I do the same thing if I'm creating Instagram reels for example

59:31 i'll take a look at the the retention and see what performs best but it's more I'm learning from video to video as

59:37 opposed to with ads yeah especially with ads we'll take that same video and and do a bunch of testing with the hooks

59:42 right right now now for agencies managing multiple clients like yours how do you keep creative output constantly

Maintaining High Creative Output: What’s your secret?

59:49 high yeah so we have dedicated creative professionals and that's that's really

59:55 important so we have people inhouse and we also have overflow uh freelancers which I

1:00:02 think is I think is quite important so as we've grown we have many people in

1:00:07 house but if we have because with creative requirements we know that there

1:00:12 are um natural spikes so so many of our clients are going to want Black Friday

1:00:19 campaigns so we know there's going to be in in the weeks running up to Black Friday there's going to be more creative

1:00:24 demand than there is at the other time of the year so we can't have enough creative full-time staff to cover the

1:00:31 Black Friday period because some of them are going to be twiddling their thumbs during the rest of the year so we'll have overflow capacity whether it's

1:00:36 freelancers we've actually worked with uh like partner with other agencies that just do creative to help during during those times as well so so I think I

1:00:43 think that's really important but I think the the one of the mistakes I made early on was that we had media buyers handling both so we had media buyers

1:00:50 that would handle account management um well all of it ad copy

1:00:55 writing creative production um and client communication and I think right

1:01:02 at the beginning that's probably how you have to go when it's like your first or second media buyer because you're thinking I can't hire people for those

1:01:08 roles but now we very much break up those roles so the client communicator and the person doing the account

1:01:13 management will most of the time be different some people have skill sets where they can do both so they they'll

1:01:19 dip in and out but most of the time will be different to who handles the creative and then that will also be different to to the copywriter so each new client now

1:01:26 will have effectively a team put on there where they might have a senior media buyer a junior media buyer who's learning and helping do like simple

1:01:32 tasks uh a creative professional whether that's someone just doing post-production so might take video

1:01:38 assets from a client for example edit them up and then and then a copywriter um now it won't be like four full-time

1:01:44 people to each individual client obviously that's fractional across clients depending depending on the size and the number at which they can handle

1:01:50 is different so a copywriter can handle a lot more clients than a a video editor for example because it's much less time

1:01:57 consuming so like the structure becomes a little bit complicated but in our work as we've grown and we've made

1:02:04 connections in the industry and talked with other like agencies the bigger you get the larger clients you work with

1:02:10 they normally end up with something like that more of a pod system as opposed to like just the flat everyone does a bit

1:02:17 of everything who's working on client work right that is true i mean true for our agency as well i mean we have we I

1:02:24 used to hire SEO who used to manage client but then I understand it has to differentiate i agree exactly yeah I

1:02:32 think you learn I mean just when you start you are like CEO is chief of everything officer so you tend to pass

1:02:38 those responsibility and think this guy will do the exact same and that's where the mistake happens 100% and most people

1:02:46 who build a successful agency they're at least competent in about 12 different things because they've had to be

1:02:52 otherwise they wouldn't have built a successful agency and you you assume other people are going to be the same and that is very rarely every now and

1:02:57 then you'll find an absolute gem who is like that but That is very rarely the case that's a wishful thinking so now I

1:03:04 assume people don't because even in SEO the standards which we have and we hire the people they don't match so now as

1:03:10 you said if for me we are we are in a city which has people but I still prefer to hire freshers they are easy to train

1:03:17 mold in our process the the experienced ones come with their own uh baggage becomes absolutely yeah and it can be

1:03:24 often be easier to train someone on your way of doing things as opposed to get them to unlearn something

1:03:31 i I do think that when you switch that system as well of realizing not everyone can do everything that there are there

1:03:38 is a big upside to that in that we have people on our team that are better than

1:03:43 me that every single one of those individual things like better account managers because that's all they do they

1:03:48 just manage accounts that are better um creative professionals because that's all they do whereas when you're an

1:03:54 entrepreneur and you're someone that does a bit of everything you you don't achieve mastery in any of those one things so whilst it seems like an extra

1:04:00 cost that people can't Exactly and it seems like people can't do as much as you can at the beginning yes but they

1:04:06 can deliver they can achieve levels of expertise that can go much deeper over time and there's there's big upside to

1:04:13 that absolutely now uh with the rising ad cost and

Opportunities for 2025: Where should agencies focus next?

1:04:19 platform changes where are the biggest opportunities for agencies and brands in 2025 or uh further ahead

1:04:28 i think probably what we're seeing across the board and this is

1:04:34 definitely something that we're doing with our agency and I almost think we need a better way of sort of charging for this for for

1:04:42 monetizing this is is we've become marketing agency/ business coach in a

1:04:47 lot of scenarios and I think this is very much related to rising ad costs so

1:04:55 as ad costs go up your initial customer acquisition is going to go up you can either decide to not

1:05:02 advertise but I mean if that's one of the core ways you generate business that's not going to work out well in the

1:05:08 long run the other option is going to be make more money from your customers

1:05:13 which is often the best advice and typically what we advise so very often now we will be running ad campaigns for

1:05:20 clients and we've had many clients we work for many years and we might have a very honest conversation with them where we say that campaign that was producing

1:05:27 amazing results for you two years ago it's now costing 30% more cost per purchase um to acquire those customers

1:05:35 now actually the inflation in ad cost has been more than 30% so we're we're

1:05:40 net up but it's still happened your prices haven't risen we you need to raise raise your prices to compensate

1:05:46 for this or you've only got a repeat purchase rate of 0.4% 0.4 only only 40%

1:05:53 of people are buying again one once more time on average we need to get your average purchase rate up to a 2.7 and if

1:06:01 we do that you never need to worry about rising ad costs or you don't need to unless they double which is probably

1:06:06 going to take you know best part of a decade so we're having to go more and more into

1:06:13 the other parts of the business thinking about it strategically from a pricing

1:06:18 from a customer reactivation standpoint and honestly we've had we've had conversations with quite a few businesses

1:06:25 where let's say they they've this is a semi-common scenario they've run their

1:06:30 own ads they've worked with agency for many years things used to work really well five years ago and they've just slowly gotten worse and worse and worse

1:06:37 and they've never changed anything and they just refuse to change anything they don't have any repeat customers they

1:06:42 don't have anything like that we're saying and we've had a lot of conversations say your business needs a rethink more than a new marketing

1:06:48 strategy they think it's just we just need to find a new audience or we just need a new ad and that that might help

1:06:55 but to future proof yourself from rising ad costs you need to make a fundamental shift so what I'll give an extreme

1:07:03 example but I think it helps demonstrate this point really well so Starbucks

1:07:08 average order value is $565 so someone goes to Starbucks they go coffee maybe a bit of food $565 on

1:07:14 average but the lifetime value of a Starbucks customer is over $14,000 so if you're analyzing your

1:07:22 metrics as a business and you're thinking we make $5.65 per customer how much can we afford to pay an advertising

1:07:28 cost to acquire that customer i mean $1.50 maybe not even that but if you

1:07:33 rethink that and you go okay how much can we afford to pay to acquire a $14,000 customer at least 100 times more

1:07:40 than that at least now you have to be good enough to get those repeat purchases um but

1:07:47 Starbucks is so good at generating that lifetime value they would never have to worry about the cost of customer

1:07:53 acquisition so that's an extreme example but there are many businesses where their lifetime value is $150 and they

1:07:59 could easily get that to $400 with a few tweaks a few improvements in things some better remarketing email marketing SMS

1:08:06 to get them over the line and then they just don't need to worry about acquisition cost because it's so far

1:08:11 within their KPI that they're fine right now we're just coming towards the end

Cultural Shifts in Your Agency: What was the biggest change?

1:08:16 i've taken more than an hour the time really flew with Yeah good that's always

1:08:22 good yes this so the lesson in leadership team and vision now you have grown to a 60 plus person team now what

1:08:29 was your biggest cultural shift move oh the biggest cultural shift was

1:08:36 from fully remote to not so when I first started my business was fully remote we didn't have an office and that was the

1:08:42 case until about five years ago so many years we were fully remote and it's

1:08:49 interesting we did that before that became much more common so we were doing that

1:08:55 in 2018 like before COVID and and that became much more usual and we decided we

1:09:01 still have some remote roles and these are basically people that started working with us back then who are still working with us that live in other side

1:09:08 of the country unrealistic for them to relocate and but they've always been brilliant so we're happy for them to keep working in those conditions but we

1:09:14 made a conscious shift of like new people for the vast majority of roles are going to be at least hybrid they're

1:09:21 going to be in the office and we found that well I found this is before I had my business partner working with me that

1:09:27 managing a fully remote team of five people absolutely fine managing a fully remote team of 15 people complete

1:09:33 nightmare nowhere near enough easy communication to let people

1:09:39 know about the extra things everything was a Zoom call it just so ownorous to get people to know about stuff you find

1:09:44 people didn't know so that was a huge shift um and it's absolutely been a good

1:09:50 one i I think if the climate was different I'd quite like to go fully in the office full-time with our stuff and

1:09:56 we might we might look to do that at some point even being hybrid so we do three days in the office two days at home for most people even being

1:10:03 hybrid there's too many times where I hear people say "Oh we're back in on

1:10:09 Friday let's run through it then." And I think "No no no this is a work day right

1:10:14 now." Like I'll see that in a in a Slack channel something like that and I'm like the the not being together is creating a

1:10:21 barrier in communication that's meaning you guys aren't going to deal with this on a Wednesday you're going to wait till Friday like so that's not good so I

1:10:27 quite like the idea of going fully in the office i totally get their advantages to having some remote work and being flexible but that was the big

1:10:33 culture shift and I think more and business have realized that they've realized that if you have there are many

1:10:39 great remote staff but there are also a lot of remote staff that like let's be honest they're going to watch Netflix and you know wake up late and do all

1:10:46 sorts side it's so much like me when we had covid

1:10:52 and everybody went remote a lot of people moved different part of the city now and now almost 40% of my team is

1:10:58 remote but again I said no more remote I can't have there is no synergy it's it's

1:11:04 more like a tick box so you are doing things but I can't and things changes so fast in our industry I need people it's

1:11:11 like all hands on the deck you can't have those hands sitting at home I think people things things slip through the

1:11:17 net as Well it's it's easy when it's much easier when someone's remote for you to think they know about the big new

1:11:24 change or the update or a new way of doing something and you don't realize for a couple of months you're like "Oh they're still doing it that way we've

1:11:30 completely changed." Whereas if someone's in the office with you they're like down the corridor it's so much

1:11:35 easier just to be like or or even in that scenario right everyone come in a sec let me just let you know how

1:11:40 everything's going so yeah I'm And also you know I you can work with someone remotely for

1:11:47 years and never develop like much of a personal connection that is true but if you work with someone face to face even

1:11:54 for a few months that's way more likely i think that's something that we all would benefit from more in our work and

1:11:59 I certainly want that now how do you mentor or train media buyers inside health media

Mentoring Media Buyers: How do you train your team?

1:12:08 so we have some educational material and I think that's one of the benefits that one of the side benefits that comes from

1:12:14 creating a lot of content um and we have like a school community where there's content inside of that that we make

1:12:20 available to the public if they join along with like other live elements and things like that so we start pure and

1:12:26 simple with education you're going to go through my stuff you're going to learn how we do things and and um and I think

1:12:33 that's it's also helpful to keep my content honest because I'm always going to want to

1:12:39 provide the best information and help people as much as possible because I know my guys are going to be trained on

1:12:44 this stuff so like it better be good right not just I want to do that anyway but it's just an extra like a reason to

1:12:49 to to do that um and then from there we get them to work with a senior med

1:12:55 senior media buyer on client accounts and they can see exactly what's going on they literally sit side by side or you

1:13:03 know work very closely with them and they see this is how we're doing what we're doing this is why we're doing it

1:13:08 and they sort of learn then through osmosis through seeing what's happening and then once they've got a bit more

1:13:14 experience then they're going to go on to doing some of the more basic things so senior media buyer might have made a decision right I need we we've we've

1:13:21 recorded these bits of content i need you to work with the creative on this

1:13:26 team to chop up all the hooks pair them with the different video content get that uploaded into this type of campaign

1:13:32 with this structure and then the senior media buyer oversees them sort of doing that work so it's a very gradual process

1:13:39 we've got we've got some clients that'll be spending $2 million a month on ads like we can't have them mess up i

1:13:46 especially with those really high spenders like a junior buy media buy is basically never going to get access to

1:13:52 be able to to be able to do that if it was someone senior but but even if you know let's say that they're working with a client that's in our typical range

1:13:57 let's say they're spending $20,000 a month then they're going to slowly warm

1:14:02 up to being able to do things we we need to make sure that they're not going to make mistakes okay now what's your

Defining Your North Star: What’s your ultimate goal?

1:14:09 northstar now exiting acquiring or becoming a SAS my plan is to build the

1:14:15 biggest agency I can i would like to become a British version of a Gary

1:14:20 Vaynerchuk from a personal brand standpoint and that allow us to build our own version of Bay Media i mean literally Heath Media right a lot of

1:14:27 similarities in the name that's that's what I want to do i'm 32 i have no

1:14:32 desire to retire anytime soon i think I've achieved a lot my me and my team

1:14:38 have achieved a lot in a short time period there's loads more to grow what we've done so far has worked really well

1:14:44 we're growing all the time even in the last 12 months we've grown revenue uh more than double in the last 12 months

1:14:50 from from from a really good place so there's a a lot more growth to to be had so yeah once I get to anything close to

1:14:57 those levels someone wants to put a big offer on the table then maybe that's something that I would I would look at

1:15:03 but for now I'm uh I'm very happy to do that i don't want to go into software i know a lot of people in the space do i

1:15:09 don't think that's that's not me that's not my personality i don't have much to bring to the table in that i want to keep doing what we're doing but do it

1:15:15 more do it bigger work with biggest companies in the world i think that'd be really exciting okay with this we come

Rapid Fire Round: Quick insights and fun questions!

1:15:21 to the last section of our uh show which is a rapid fire question so I'm going to

1:15:28 ask you questions you going to ask answer what comes first in your mind all right here we go one business book you

1:15:35 keep rereading alex Moses $100 million offers okay if

1:15:40 not marketing what do you what would you be doing probably selling something relatively expensive i think I'm a

1:15:46 natural I think I'm a natural marketer i'm a natural sales person so I would

1:15:51 lean into that and it would be Yeah as as as a salesman or in that type of capacity selling hopefully something

1:15:57 very expensive with large commissions okay uh craziest client request you ever

1:16:03 received we had a client who was quite wacky and he wanted to

1:16:11 come up with different hooks for his video ads and he was like a personal brand and he wanted to do a series of

1:16:16 hooks of him in the bath and we said "Oh we think that's maybe a little bit too

1:16:22 far i love introducing personality but you sat in a bath with a load of bubbles i for this type of business I'm not sure

1:16:29 that was quite the right one that's there might there might be others that more crazy than that but that's just one that cracks me up and comes to mind uh

1:16:35 what's one tool or resource you can't live without

1:16:40 now i'd say chat GPT honestly that's probably a fairly standard answer for a lot of people but

1:16:46 right video ideiation any script writing all my email marketing is at least

1:16:52 firstly written by Chat GBT and then I have a go at it so yeah a podcaster or a YouTuber YouTube

1:16:59 creator you admire i think what I've already mentioned it but I think what Alex Hozi has done with his YouTube

1:17:05 channel with his organic content is incredible and I think for me what's so exciting about what he's done

1:17:13 is he's made business stuff that otherwise people

1:17:20 mostly seem as really boring very popular to a wide audience i don't think that had quite even though obviously

1:17:25 other people that operate in the space quite been done before um oh I want to give a quick second answer to that Rory

1:17:31 Sutherland because he's the first person I could think of that has gone from nowhere to

1:17:37 massive fame relatively quickly as a marketer not even as a business person but specifically as a marketer i love

1:17:44 his takes on things so that' be another another name that comes to mind okay what's your 30 secondond advice to the

Advice for Young Marketers: What’s your best tip for newcomers?

1:17:49 24 year old marketer stuck underpaid in a 9-to-five job

1:17:56 okay if you commit to doing something about that and you work at it every day

1:18:03 and you take time to stop and think about how to get from where you are to where you want to be eventually you will

1:18:10 get there if you don't give up that's it's as simple as that it's not easy to do but it's as simple as that

1:18:18 uh Ben this was an absolute masterclass in everything including personal branding and I love the uh paid social

Outro: Final thoughts and takeaways.

1:18:25 ads as well now uh of course and from brutal early lessons to becoming a

1:18:30 YouTube le client magnet uh thank you for sharing so openly everything about your and your agency and the processes i

1:18:37 really appreciate that uh for our listeners go follow Ben on YouTube if you want real battle tested digital

1:18:43 marketing advices especially when it comes to Google and meta ads and this is the Agency Insider Show and I'm your

1:18:49 host Nabit Koshal until next time keep building smarter and then thank you once again thank you very much for having me

1:18:56 it's been great to chat and hopefully that was useful for people yeah I'm just going to end the recording