A Day In The Life of an Agency Owner: Brad Friedman

January 27, 2021 • By

Scott Ayres

 

 

Are you ready to use science to bust summits and the social media ecosystem? Welcome to the social Media Lab live, brought to you by a group of our social media scientists experiment real accounts to crack the code on social media success for your business. What now? Your hosts got eres. Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week’s episode of the social Media Lab alive, we tried a little bit different audio with a timer today, and I’m doing some a little different as well. Maybe you’ll notice that. Maybe you won’t. Normally, I’ll play that intro after an opening hook today. I’m not going to the opening hook because I’m always want to test stuff. And so that’s just part of it today. So if you don’t know who I am, my name is Scott Eyre’s. I am known as the content scientist here at the social media lab, powered by a garra pulse. And I’m happy to have all of you come and watch us today, whether you’re watching the replay or you’re watching us live. If you are watching live, we’re going to have a lot of fun today. We’re going to be a little goofy. We’re also going to be serious and learn all about the day in the life of an agency owner. I’m going to bring on here in a minute. My my friend, Brad Friedman, who owns an agency. And we’re going to talk all about just what that looks like, what that feels like, what you do, what you don’t do, maybe, and kind of what the ins and outs of an agency is. And so I’m excited to kind of get into this conversation with you today. But I want to know, we always like to ask a question of the day, and I’m kept this one very lighthearted today. An easy anybody can watch and can say something to this question. How are your New Year’s resolutions going? Do you have New Year’s resolutions? We’re at the last Wednesday of January. And most of us, if we had them, have probably failed. Now at this point. But I’d love to know, like, what is your what was your New Year’s resolution if you already forgotten it? And so let me know in the comments. I’d love to know. Just kind of a fun way to kind of have a little conversation with you and talk to you as we get the live show started here. One of the things we’re always doing in the lab is, is testing different things. Like I said, I just ran a 2 minute timer on this show. Next week, I’m going to run a five minute timer, hopefully starting about two minutes before the hour and let it go about three minutes over. So it always just kind of playing around to see what works and what doesn’t work on live videos. So definitely want to check out. That’s obviously what somebody said in the comments. Adrian says, hello, we’ve got a high a hey from shion. Brad Friedman, our guest is saying, hey, everyone, let’s have some fun today. You should see Brad in the green room right now. It is pretty funny. And I think you’re all going to want to stop what you’re doing and screenshot it whenever he comes on here. I do see some comments from probably someone in a group. I am going live right now through restrain and I do highly, highly recommend restraint. I’ll show you a little something that they do here. Just a second. But restringing right now, they’re working on the ability to pull in comments from groups in their live studio that they have a their studio studios technically still in beta. And so some of these features are just taking some time to get. So I see here that someone said, I made some mental resolutions and so far so good. I’m not sure who you are unless I go over to the group. And I can’t really do that during the live. But I appreciate you leaving your come. If you want me to show your name on here, hop over to the agora pulse Facebook page. And I can pull everybody’s names and stuff on here. That would be pretty awesome for you to do, but I do appreciate those are watching and our groups. And I’ve been told by stream that that should show up here. But they’re hoping like in the week. Fingers crossed. We talk a lot, quite a bit about that. I do want to remind you that we do a lot of tests and the lab, we’ve been publishing a little bit less lately this because there’s so much stuff going on. But typically once or twice per month, I’ll publish an experiment. A lot of paid experiments lately. The last one was on an Instagram. I think it was Instagram, I think done so much. Now I forget now it actually was on Twitter experiment. And so you want to go check that out, go over the goalpost. You can kind of see what that test was like on Twitter, as I’ve got one right now in the hopper that’s on Instagram ads comparing it’s a retests of an old test comparing Instagram stories to ads, Instagram feed ads. And the results were a little bit shocking to me. I was kind of surprised by. Hopefully that will be out here in the next week or so. So you can always run over there. And don’t forget, we are part of a group polls. A gorbals helps you manage all of your content as far as scheduling to all the sites. It matches your comments and manages messages and a lot of the platforms you can give it to teams have a team and have them access. We’ve got customers that literally have one of our people today. We’re seeing someone sign on with like 600 profiles and a cat we call profiles accounts. So 600 different social media accounts and they’re managing all through Garoppolo with a huge team. So that’s where it applies for ages. He’s quite a bit. So we can run over there. Gore post.com live and you get a free trial site. 28 days. And then there’s a coupon code on there that actually gives you your first month for free. So I would certainly appreciate you doing that once you get me. So set here to chat real quick. That was me, Andrew, Kevin, I appreciate you, Andrew. Here we go. Andrew actually hopped over. Now the page will comments from this page. I appreciate you, Andrew. Big high five or five, as always, would give us. Appreciate you hopping over there. I see Deb is coming and looks like probably a group as well. So, Yeah. So I want to just hop in and we’re going to get right into today’s show and talk about life of an agency owner, because I’ve never ran an agency personally, so I don’t really know what that’s like. I don’t know what that means. And what the different ins and outs of that sort of thing are. So I’m going to bring on my guess. And I’m not real big on, like, reading intros because I think it sometimes feels awkward. So I’m just going to bring him on. And we’re going to, like, sit here for a second and let you guys I’ll text screenshots. I want to see some screenshots and some tweets and some Instagram posts or stories from this. Hey, Brad. Hey is it like looking in the mirror? I’m well, I mean, but you’re better looking. But I’m a little embarrassed that we showed up to the prom wearing the same outfit, and I hate when that happens for sure. So, yeah, brad, Brad showed up a few minutes ago in the green room, as we call it, and head on his wig, which I sent him the wig here not too long ago. But I didn’t know he had. I didn’t know you had a lab coat that blew my mind. How long have you had this lab coat? So I’ve had this lab coat for. Oh, about five years, OK, what kind of a joke, my wife had a number of different surgeries. And I was always taking care of her doing stuff for months afterwards. OK, so I bought the lab coat and then I put this little name on it that says Chief bottle washer. And I was wondering what I was going to ask you. With that said chief bottle. And so it was kind of a joke originally. And then I kept it. And, you know, look at you. Yeah, I think now you’re officially like the best what I call laubscher, you know, out of anybody that I know. And I guess I have by far, no one’s gone this far and putting on a lot. Actually, I think I’ve had maybe one other put on a lab coat, but they didn’t have the wig at the same time. So, yeah, you definitely pulled it off. So I got to just tell you a quick story before we get into this. Yeah, I’m a I’m a hat guy, in case you didn’t know that. I mean, you didn’t read that in my intro hat guy, and so you asked me to be on the show. And schedule it. And because you’re such a popular, busy guy, I had to schedule out like three months is a long time ago. So I schedule out. And then one day I’m scrolling through Amazon, ok? And I come upon this hot. I, I well, I’d have to get off camera to get to. I think I had that hat at their office, so I had to buy this hat and then like two weeks later, you sent me the wig and I’m like, oh, what am I going to wear when I’m on the show? And I thought, I mean, we’re both. It’s the dilemma. I mean, if anybody were to. I love that, too, by the way. And that’s awesome. If you were to walk into my office like there, I mean, I’ve got one of those headband wigs right here. And actually, I’m going to say this now for those of you watch and you got to watch till the end. Some one of you can win one of these. If you’re paying attention right now to what’s behind me. Just going to leave that out there, just behind me. You might get a chance to win one of these. But, yeah, I mean, I’ve got hats everywhere. I’ve got headbands. I’ve got an orange bow tie sitting on the floor next to me. So all the orange stuff is definitely fun to play. Right so, so bright before me, before we hop in. And everybody’s having fun. I see other comments about saying, I love this, you guys are fun. Who wears it best? Who wears it best. That’s a good question. I mean, feel free to hurt my feelings. It’s OK. Brad’s definitely Brad’s a braver person than me because I’ve done this now every day for two years. Brad’s just now done it today for the first time in our live video. And so, yeah, I would love to know who do you think wears it best? That would be interesting to see what it says. But if someone doesn’t know who Brad for I didn’t read your, like I said, but give us like your 30 to 60 second elevator pitch of who Brad Friedman is, how you got started with an agency and why should I listen to you when it comes to agency life. Sure thing. So I am Brad Friedman. I am a recovering attorney. I practiced law for about 16 years and till I couldn’t do it anymore, I have this character flaw where if I’m not having fun doing something. And then I stop doing it. And so I stop practicing law. And I looked around, and I saw that all the people that I’d been working with all those years, lawyers and doctors and cpas and financial services providers, they were not taking advantage of the internet because of all the regulations that they have to follow. So I saw this sort of gap in the services being provided and thought, oh, I could start a marketing agency. And work with all these professional services providers who are not using the internet because there’s too much brain damage with all the regulations. And I can use my legal background to kind of help them maneuver the waters and take advantage of the internet to generate leads and revenue without getting in trouble. And in the meantime, I’ve written two books. And I speak at various places. So I have a podcast called The digital slice and. I also have an agency that’s structured a little differently than some agencies, but we’ll talk about that good deal. Yeah, you do a lot of difference. I didn’t realize the two book thing I’ve written. One I did. One was for dummies books, and it was a great experience. I would never do it again. It’s like unless you like waterboarding and like getting your fingernails ripped off. I don’t do that because it’s like such a long process. When your mom was on Facebook, so was Facebook all in one for dummies? And Facebook changes like every two seconds. And so, like, screenshot of a screenshot and a rewrite. Yeah, I would never do that part of it again. So what were the books about? So one of my books was about doing social media safely and you can sort of see both of them behind my shoulder there, ok? And one of them was about inbound marketing for small business owners. Very, very cool. And it looks like there’s almost I’m going back to when I look at the one that says inbound, it looks like the logo for the Indianapolis Colts. Yeah, that’s what I thought it was. It’s actually a magnet. I see that now. And that. Yeah, but yeah, I brought it on full screen. I was actually able to see it. Well, very cool. So what I want to do is I want to hop into if you just hop it on and watch as I’m talking to Brad Friedman from the Friedman group, my brother from another mother who’s got an orange wig, he’s got orange hats. I mean, he’s I mean, you’re giving me a run for my money. Now, when it comes to the look here. But we’re going to talk about what I’m calling a day in the life of an agency owner and just kind of pick your brain a little bit to see what it’s like, what do you do or how do you manage and juggle all of the things. So if you have questions for brad, we’ll get to them, but feel free to ask him if you can put a front of it. That always helps that way. We kind of know it’s a question, we need to answer, but feel free to ask any questions about agency life, whether you’re watching replay or you’re watching this live. Welcome back to it even on the replay. We’ll hop back in and answer those questions to the first thing is and this one could be this could be dangerous to ask. And so just I’m not asking about some things when it comes to this, but how does an agency owner start each day then? You just spoiled it. So I know I can’t go where I was mean. Let’s let’s not talk about number one. Number two. So what’s after that? What’s the first thing you do each day as an agency owner is regarding your business, perhaps regarding my business? Well, to be honest with you, before I can get into my business mindset, I actually do start my day with a good workout. And I’m a breakfast guy, so I have to eat. And then recently, what do you eat normally? Well, lately I’ve been having a bowl of Cheerios old school. Yeah, Yeah. I’m three scrambled eggs every morning. That’s much better today. I had today. That’s what I had with sausage. There you go. Yeah so after you’ve done all the biology stuff right, you’re getting in the business, what does that look? Oh, it’s the first thing you do in your business. So the first thing that I do is I look at my calendar. So I’m a big calendar blocking guy. On Sundays, I go through my to do list. And I see what projects I have and what people I need to call and what reports. I need to generate and all of those different things. And I try to put them on my calendar as best I can to spread them out throughout the week. So the first thing that I do is I look at my calendar and generally, I go into my email to see if I have emails from anyone on my team that needs things done or if I have emails. I need to respond to from clients. So those would be the first two things I do. And then to be totally honest, and I’m not getting paid for this in my beginning of the day routine, the next thing I do is open up a pulse. And I didn’t ask Brad to say that either. I said, I mean, I had the lower third ready, but I didn’t ask you to say to be totally honest, I did get the questions in advance. And I I’m thinking about how I start my day. And I do. I open up a goal post and I go into the inbox. And I look to see if there’s comments that I need to reply to or respond to or I sometimes check the calendar. And it’s just a very brief kind of years. I’m in the Gore post all the rest of the day and we’ll get to that a little later. But that’s really how I start my day. It’s so calendar wise, your Google Calendar guy, is that really where you live? I am a Google Calendar guy, yes. Yeah, that’s an Android phone person. Android users unite. Yeah, that’s what I am. Android, Thanks. Well, with my iPhone. But, you know, we need android, we need the clubhouse, I was to say is non clubhouse users Unite Here and we can have a whole different show about clubhouse, but we won’t do that today. So, Yeah. So you kind of start off you look at your calendar, see if you’ve got a meetings, if you’ve got a client calls, see what’s going on, if there’s any, like, hot items you need to address. So anything else that gets your day going and kind of gets you are your other podcast you listen to. Yeah, absolutely. There’s a few other things I do. So in addition to having to get my workout in, for about two years, I’ve been trying to learn how to meditate and I’ve been very unsuccessful at that. I am not a meditation person, but I did find this tool. It’s called heart Labbe heart math, math, ok? And you hook it to your ear and you hook it on to your shirt and it has an app where you learn how where you work on breathing. So it’s sort of like meditation, but it’s very relaxing. And it’s and you breathe with this like meter that’s going up and down and it’s keeping track of how well you’re doing. So there’s sort of some gamification, but it’s been the best thing that I’ve been able to do. That’s as close to meditating as possible. Well, since you mentioned O’Gara pulse, I want to I will come back to the second question I originally have. Let’s go ahead and start talking about tools. So what are some tools as an agency that you use every day? And what should if I want to start an agency like what tools I need, I know. Well and get into and use on a daily basis to keep track of everything. So, jeez, I use a lot of different tools pretty much every day. I mean, a pulse certainly is one of them. I use Evernote religiously to keep track of, you know, notes and projects and things. I have to do list the. I was using wonder list of how it was purchased by Microsoft. And revamped a bit. So now I use that to do list, I use HubSpot. And I use nimble as CRM. And HubSpot is my marketing tool for building landing pages and doing email and doing all doing all of our internal marketing work. I use the Adobe suite pretty much every day. I’m in Photoshop Adobe spa, maybe I’m in addition editing a podcast. And I use Canvas. I use wave video. It’s a never ending list of tools that I might touch every day. So you’d be like me, like you got too many tabs open, and you get too many things going on. We had a competition like an impromptu competition in our team yesterday of like someone took a screenshot of their tabs, like, oh, wait, let me show you mine. And oh, by the way, I have three screens that look like this. Yeah, I always have too much. So what do you do? I’m not a Photoshop guy. So Adobe suite, you’re using that to create images for your clients. Yeah OK, Yeah, I use that. So I do a live stream show for a client every Tuesday morning, and there they are, a recruiting company. They placed medical personnel in military facilities and we do a show called hot jobs every day. And the recruiter is talking about a job. And I’m flashing up a graphic on the job and overlay. And so I create those in Photoshop every week. And yeah, that’s a good example of one of the things that I would do with that. That’s pretty interesting. I mean, this is tool related, but also just client really. So part of an agency you’re running about your life producer as well, is that what you’re saying? Yeah, as a matter of fact, on that show. And we’re just hopefully making a little change. But I’ve been doing it now for about two years. And I actually put on a shirt from the company logo hat. And I’ve created a background that looks like I’m in a studio with their logo on the side. And I start the show. Oh, hey, Brad. Hey, I’m here with this week’s hot jobs. And then I say something. And I bring in the recruiters. That’s pretty cool. I actually get on there. Intro of the show for you. Yeah, it’s funny. It’s been very fun. Yeah so that just kind of shows me automatically just from the start. And that, like the life of an agency is different. You’ve got comments you’re trying to deal with, you got content to create, you got live video, shows you the produce perhaps, or even hosts and be the, you know, the talent on the show. So that’s a lot already. Just like where do you get like nine amea, you know, that you’re having to do and kind of juggle with that the tools that I’ve tried to list out and get all of them, of course, but HubSpot a gorbals nimble to do with Evernote, hootsuite, not hootsuite, et cetera. I use a little Hootsuite too. I totally said that I was reading HubSpot. And I said that wrong. And I had to edit that out later on. So hopefully nobody knows. But yeah, I mean, there’s lots of tools that you’ll have to use as an agency like I use killingly or calanda. However you say it, you have to schedule stuff. So you’re going to have to as an agency owner, there’s a whole lot of tools you’re going to have to figure out. You want to be an expert Adam per. I do think, like someone said here, Andrew, I’m a Photoshop guy, but I also use Adobe Spark. I wish I knew Adobe. I am horrible at it. I tried a few times years and years ago to use it. And then I just I gave up on it. I create my images and canvas, like you mentioned, cannava, I do everything in Canvas or I’m also using that for thumbnails for my live video shows there’s a company called thumbnail blaster or something like that. I got like a lifetime of those lifetime deals for $49 or whatever. And I create on my thumb most of my thumbnails inside there because it almost feels like cannava. But it’s I know it’s already set to the YouTube thumbnail size, so I just kind of creative. It’s out there. So you’ve got to have a lot of tools in your arsenal. Yeah to, to run successful and like you use kellingley and I use acuity. I’ve heard that also has the ability for me to, you know, set appointments. And then, you know, I guess I also left out that occasionally, not daily, but I try daily. But sometimes I forget. I also use Slack hook. Yeah yeah, it’s a tool. Yeah, I think I spend most of my day. And it’s like I can see it over here bouncing and so that I’ve got a notification I’ve got to go look. Out here and I’ve got I’m in like multiple channels, too, with different companies as well, that I work with. So you’re always just trying to go look at those. Do we leave any tools out that you probably use on a daily basis that you can think of? Now, I mean, I don’t think so. That’s a lot, that’s a lot, and that’s a lot to keep up with. So I think I guess my question would be for people is like, find what works for you. Like, you may not be an Adobe person, and that’s fine. Be a kanfer person. You may not be to do as person. You’re never know. I’ve got I have to do this. And I used to use it like crazy, but then I’d forget to go ahead. And right now it shows me. I have five tasks that are overdue and the corner of my Chrome browser here, but I’d forget to go over to it constantly. And so I just I use a list. Now I literally write it down. And you can see the name of that. I won’t say it out loud, but I love it because I’m getting out of my brain. If you read if you’ve read the know, the GSD books is a good book, actually, you know, getting all the stuff out of your brain, whether it’s on Evernote, it’s on a to do list, it’s on paper, frees you up really quickly. And then you go check it off, makes me feel good when I check it off. So sometimes I write on my list, make to do list just to make myself feel good. When it’s all said and done, so much is left to comment. Real quick. We’re talking to Brad Friedman all about agency life. And I see someone says spark is the spark is good in between for Photoshop and being mobile. And I still use real post-it notes. Yeah, I love that. Yeah my wife is she’s a kindergarten teacher, so she’s all about the post-it notes when I got one right here. There you go. They’re all over my house. I sometimes use those before I get it into my to do list. And while you’re talking about GSD I actually several years ago, but the umbrella GSD tips and I, I, I haven’t updated it lately, but I’m big into time management. And so I thought I’d create this website that gave time management tips. And it’s called GSD. G.s. Yeah. I’m looking at it’s a pretty cool name. I can tell you have an update in a while. But Yeah. I mean updated in a while. But I like the, the landing page look of it. It’s kind of I go look at that on your free time later on. Yeah so we’ve talked about how you start your day other than breakfast and meditation. And I think you should do all those things. I think the exercise, meditation, get your mind right. Right or you get to work in four. You start working for me. I’m a remote worker. You know, our company is based in Paris, France, but I’m in a little town outside of waco, Texas, and I actually don’t work for I can work from home most days, except when I need to do a live show because my internet is so bad at home. So I actually even I don’t have my live show. I still come to my office because it just gets me in that work feeling. And then I know I’m, in a sense, punching the clock when the day is over. And I don’t touch my laptop. I don’t look at it after specific time. I think even if you work from home as an agency owner or some, I work for an agency having set times and know. And when start and stop is so important, very important if you’re married in a relationship. Yeah, Yeah. You definitely got to figure out how to cut that off. Of course, I found I found I spend way too much time in the last month playing the game among us and everything Among us users out there. My 18-year-old son has got me addicted to it. And I’m about to approach 1,000 games played in a month. And I will be getting therapy for that later on. So let’s hop into the next question one day. And this is obviously, the one I get probably the most excited about because it’s geeky stuff, but all related to your clients. This is probably client specific. And what data is important to you to look at on a user appart daily here? But it could say, let’s go daily first and maybe what’s something you don’t look at about once a week, once a month, that sort of stuff? Sure, sure. So for a couple of my clients, we do some Facebook ads for those clients. I actually have a specific budget that I’m allowed to spend every month. So pretty much daily. I go look at the Facebook ads. First off, I look to see how we’re doing on the budget, especially this time of the month, to see if we’re getting close to reaching the budgeted amount. And sometimes I have to turn ads off maybe a little early because I’ve reached my budget. But then I also like to look, of course, to see how they’re performing, how the individual ads are performing. Are my video ads performing better than my ads with images? Are certain images performing better than other images? So I take a pretty good look at the Facebook ads pretty much daily just to see those kinds of things. The other data that I look at for sure daily, again, going back to my O’Gara Paul’s use. For each of my clients in Agora pulse, I’ll go into the reporting feature. And I will look at audience growth. I will look at engagement impressions, the brand awareness data, just to see how I’m doing. I’ll scroll down and see what the top posts are. And again, do some analysis of that. Was it a video that I posted? Was it a Facebook live? Was it an image? Did it not have an image? A lot of what I do in my content creation for our clients is based on data learned right here in the social Media Lab and little experiments that Scott does. So a lot of times we’re making shifts and tweaks based on data that I get from Scott’s blog and videos. So that I look at daily. So when you say, are there podcasts that you listen to, I like to follow you on Twitter. So I can see what the experiments are going to be and see what I need to learn. Yeah, I think you hit on some interesting stuff there, like one you want to look at. If you’re running ads for people, that’s you better be on top of that because you’re blowing. You’re spending their money and investing their money really is part of where you probably want to use as an agency, but you’re using their money. And if it’s kind of gone awry or it’s not converting the way you thought, you probably got to make some quick adjustments. So I would definitely say I could see where, like, ad data is so important to hop in, especially if it’s a huge budget, because they’re going to know and be able to tell if that didn’t perform like we did. We spent $1,000 on this ad and you’ve got us one lead. Right and so you’re going to know because every two weeks, we have a team meeting where I have to report. Yeah so I think the ad data is, as probably I could see, that it’s a daily thing. And then from there, like you said, seeing what is perform yesterday, what did well, what didn’t do well for certain page and can make some evaluations and adjust. Now you like when you’re looking at the same content, especially organa, let’s talk organic for a second, which we know Facebook specifically is tough. Let’s be honest. Right, how quick will you make a shift if you saw something at work yesterday, do you try to repeat it today to see if it was just an anomaly? Do you wait a week? What do you normally do? Yeah, I, I don’t generally do something that quickly just because especially when you’re talking about organic, sometimes those things do change a little bit over time. But I might make a change, you know, the following week based on something that I learned the week before, not the next day. Right but possibly the following week. And I am always changing things up and testing and experimenting and seeing what works and what doesn’t work. And, you know, to be honest, just because something worked last week doesn’t mean, it’s going to work this week. Work last hour work. Yeah, I mean, things change. So quickly that I really feel like it’s just a matter of posting regularly and consistently regardless. And when you find something that works, do it again. But know that the next time you do it, it might not perform the same way. So well. And we’ll talk to the next question. We’ll talk about 10 seconds. How you communicate with your clients, but which already alluded to a little bit. But what, in your opinion, all the different clients you’ve had from different industries and whatnot, what data to them is like the first thing they ask you about? And was what do you see as the most important data just in their minds, even if they’re wrong, what do they want to hear from you? Right typically, every one of my clients from the first day that I started my business is focused on generating revenue. So I can give all the data that exists. Here’s how many impressions we had. Here’s what our reach was. Here’s how many people clicked on that ad or that post and. Most of the time, what they really want to know is how many leads did we get from that? How many of those leads were qualified and how many of those leads did we close? So a lot of the data that I provide gets sort of mixed with internal data, because most of the time, while all of the time. I don’t know if they talked to a qualified lead, whether they deemed the lead to be qualified, and I don’t know whether they closed the lead. So when we meet, we communicate back and forth, OK, I get We had all those impressions and reach and clicks. And on our side, all of those impressions resulted in x number of qualified leads and x number of leads that we closed. So generally, that’s what they’re most focused on, where I’m trying to get people to think about building community and how important is the likes and shares and comments are. They get that, but they get that if they’re turning into revenue. Yeah and I think that’s the hardest thing for especially business owners. They want to know the bottom line. Like, are you are you in my investment leading to more cash in the bank? But I think that’s where you. I think you, as an agency owner and I’m sure you do that, you’ve got to set expectations for the beginning of what you can and cannot impact. I could see where they look at social as a whole and links that you maybe posts or ads that you run. Did they lead to more leads, trials, sign UPS, whatever the product might be? But yeah, the community side is hard to sell, I would think, to a lot of business owners. Yeah, I mean, you know, when you hit it right on hit the nail right on the head with setting expectations on my side of it, I can drive traffic to your website or to your job posting or your landing page or whatever it is. I can make suggestions as to whether that landing page or website page is designed, you know, effectively and all of that. But once they get there, yeah, my job is over. Yeah, I think and I deal with that too. Like my whole goal is, you know, for the, for the lab is I mean, I mean, I’m no reason to shy away from it. Yeah I want to send people to our website, to the lab. I want them to read, I want to sign up for emails. I want them sign for trial for proposals. And kind of filter down the funnel, hopefully sign up, but got control on that scale. Those cells qualified leads as a social media managers. And it’s sometimes hard because they may have a really cruddy audience to start with. And that’s where I guess your ads would probably come into play where you know, OK, this is ideal client you are. We call the ICP the ideal customer profile. My marketing manager should be watching this and know that I learned that at our retreat. And I just said it in our live video. So Deb was watching. She knows. I just said, but you know that ICP is. And so you’re the expert. Now So you target those ads the correct way. And that should lead to those cells, to all that revenue. And that sort of stuff to justify it. Yeah and, you know, on that expectation setting side, developing a really good engaged community on your Facebook page or in your group is also a way to get to those qualified leads and closing them. So I do set expectations about building the community. So that it’s not me really just doing all these things. And then saying, hey, my job’s over. You didn’t close them. You’re you know that it’s your fault. I got enough people to your page. But we have expectations about growth on our business pages and growth in the engagement of our posts and videos, and all of that, too. We have all kinds of kpis, OK, KPIs skills and kills them are all that stuff. Yeah, if you don’t know what that is, Google it or ask us and we’ll tell you. So you’ve eluded us a little bit earlier about having a meeting every two weeks with some of your paid clients, newspaper ads in general. What kind of communication. Do you have with your clients on it? Like a daily, weekly, monthly basis? And how do you set that expectation? How do they I’m sure some of them want to book you a lot like what was it look like typically? Ideally for you. Right so first off, my clients are. Our clients, they pay a monthly retainer, which basically gets them access to me and the team. I wouldn’t say 24/7, but because your retainer client, I mean, we’re attentive to your needs. Generally speaking, I in the best case scenario, I provide monthly reporting to my clients. And I now do that generally with a Zoom call where I put together a report of all of the things that we have agreed that I’m going to report on. And every client is different. And so in the best case scenario, I’m doing that every month. So it’s usually toward the end of the first week of the month where I report on the prior month. So I have some time to get all that data. And it might include Google ads, Facebook ads, as well as all the community management work that we do. It could also include work that we do for inbound marketing on landing pages and email marketing. And, you know, how many people open the email and how many people clicked on the link and all of those kinds of things. So I would say. If we start with monthly reporting, I do have one client where we meet every other week, I still only give them a monthly report, but every other week, I do some kind of this is where we’re at now reporting. And then other than that, I respond to emails. Sometimes we’re going to have the vehicle impounded and I’ll said, take a screenshot and notify the client. Hey, you know, here’s a post that went viral or something like that, just so that they know that we’re, you know, we’re working and stuff, but there’s really no rhyme or reason. It’s not every day I go through my CRM and say, OK, I got a call this client in this client. And this client to update them. I really try to keep people on sort of a monthly monthly schedule when I can. Now, what do you do when a client is bombarding you. And it’s like daily? They’re just, you know, is that when you say where wrong fit or this is what we’re doing? Like, how do you deal with that? I mean, in real estate, I’m sure it’s happened like where someone just outed you how to use an agency to deal with that. So, you know, first off. And I learned this when I was an attorney and was very, very busy, and one of the things that they don’t teach you in law school is how to deal with clients that call you all the time. But they do teach you that you try to make every client feel like they are the only client, you have. Sometimes that’s hard. So when somebody is bombarding me, at least initially, I’m going to take it. I’m going to deal with. And then at some point, what I try to do, because normally, they’re just a quick little questions that need to be answered. And so at some point, I recommend to the client that they actually make a list. And instead of sending me something every single day, how about on Mondays or on Fridays, you send me 10 little questions that I can respond back to. Or I maybe we get on a Zoom call and you get it all out of your system all at once. But I do really, honestly try to make every client feel like they are my only client. So sometimes it’s juggling, sometimes it’s not putting my computer away at 6 o’clock or whatever. And responding to their email that 8 o’clock at night. But yeah, I think that goes back to I mean, what expectations have you set with them from the beginning. Right they know your hours and know, hey, I can’t answer every single call, but I’ll get to you. think I long as you have those expectations from the beginning, that shouldn’t theoretically get you in a pickle. But I could see what like if a client’s got a problem, their Instagram account suddenly suspended or something happened to their ad or you misspelled something or there’s somebody going off on a page and ranting or being rude, they’re going to reach out to and you’ve got to deal with those fires, right? Absolutely and that’s you know, that that happens. But again, it is it’s setting those expectations and it is a matter of setting sort of regular check ins. Right they don’t necessarily have to bug me every day because they know on Friday. I’m going to check in or something like that. Sometimes I have to do that. Now, this is a secondary question from something you said earlier, because I’m just curious, because I’m not a former lawyer. So I don’t understand. I’ve never had to do the concept. You said you’re on a retainer, that it’s that common in agency life or is. And how does that work? What does that look like? Should should everybody do that or what are your thoughts? You’re one of the few people I’ve heard say that when it comes to like agency social media management. So personally, I think everybody should do it because it helps you with your own budgeting and cash flow. So basically what I do is I start off with the client. I do a fairly lengthy discovery call where I learn about the business, I learn about what they’re doing currently with their marketing. And then I come back and I make a suggestion. I make a proposal and I say, look, I want to develop a marketing strategy for you. I’ve decided based on what you’re doing, here’s the channels you need to be on. I’m going to put this all together. And then I create the strategy. And based on the scope of work from the strategy, the I say, this is what it’s going to cost you every month for me to do these things. And it includes when we were posting three times a week, and we’re responding to posts and we’re doing a video and we’re doing reporting. And we’re running $1,000 worth of ads a month. And this and that. And this. And this is what it’s going to cost you every month. For me to do that. I have some clients where I don’t do the implementation. And I’m just doing the coaching. And that’s a monthly fee that gives you access to me every other week for a coaching session and then, you know, some other time in between. But for me. Even if I’m just doing a one time project, there’s a cost associated with it. And if I can get it up front, all the better. If it’s half at the beginning and half at the end, sometimes I’ll do that, but. When I was practicing law, I had to do a lot of hourly billing and I don’t like hourly billing. yeah, because you’re not getting paid till after the fact. And that is right. And to be honest, it really devalues the work that you’re doing because, you know, you never know how long it’s going to take. And if you’re only worth whatever $150, $200 an hour, sometimes you get done and feel like, wow, that was really worth $500 an hour. So I get away from that. And just say, hey, this is what it costs for every month for me to do this good deal. So we get over to our last question. Just hop on and watching talking to Brad Friedman from the Friedman group about the typical, you know, if there’s such a thing day in the life of an agency. And the last one, you even mention the word juggle earlier. You’ve got your existing clients. You know, now you’re setting expectations of its weekly or monthly sort of reporting to your existing. How do you as an agency owner and most agency owners are only a few people and especially starting out may just be the one. How do you juggle existing clients, but yet still try to find new clients? For me, this is really the hardest the hardest question that you’ve asked all day. You’re welcome. I saved it for last. Yeah, I mean, it really is. So I have some lead magnet’s out there. I have some landing pages. I am trying to use my practice, what I preach in my inbound marketing skill set. I do a monthly newsletter that’s not always monthly mean. It really is the area that I struggle with the most because I honestly feel like my responsibility is to my paying clients. So some months my own lead generation work suffers. And that is such an important part of running an agency is that I always have to be trying to manage prospects through the buyer’s journey and nurturing them along until I get them to the point where they’re ready to buy. And oftentimes, that’s my biggest struggle of the day or of the week or of the month. Yeah because I think, you know, you’re trying to make sure you hit all those expectations. I’m you’ve got people who’ve paid you. But you’ve got to be I think, anyway, just me thinking out loud, you always got to be prepared for one of those existing customers to slip off. Right you’ve always got to have someone that you also got to worry about taking on too many clients. So because you can’t handle it. And so I’m sure that’s a balancing act, that it’s really take some time to figure out like I can. I know I can do that. I’m just using a number out of my head because on one hand, I can do five really well. And stick to the five. And I’m not looking for anybody else. But suddenly one drops off because they went out of business because of COVID. And now I’m like, oh, I’ve just lost a fifth of my revenue and I’ve got nobody waiting to come on. That’s where I think I could see a huge, huge struggle from most agencies. Yeah, and that absolutely happened to me last year. I bet I had. Really at once, all but one of my clients decided that they needed to make some changes. It’s always easy to cut your marketing budget. Yeah, business owners look at that as fluff anyway, even though it’s probably the most important line item on their budget. So, yeah, about last may, my agency took a hit. But the beautiful thing about the way I’m structured is that it’s me. And then I have a number of contractors that I work with. So I’m able to pull in these very skilled people for specific projects. But I don’t have full time employees that I have to make salary with. I do have a full time need to put food in my mouth and pay my mortgage, which is sometimes challenging as an agency owner as it was for several months. I bet. I’m sure it is. So I think a good thing. Maybe it’s always going to have those feelers out there. Absolutely or if you got one client that loves you in a certain industry, how do they know somebody else in that industry that maybe, you know, you you keep them in the waiting? Maybe I could take them on and hire somebody to do half of it or. Absolutely so I think that would be the biggest part. I could see that now. And I added that question, because I think this is something I’m sure every agency struggles with, is how do you do both? But I think I saw Deb say it’s like she’s got her own agency as well. And sometimes it’s I’m sure that that’s like trying to manage both trying to keep expectations as high as they are. But, yeah, what’s the balance like? I even do with it? I don’t have agencies, but, you know, just for my own work. OK, can I take on. Another thing of this? Will this suffer? I got to figure out that that balance for sure. So anything else that we need to talk about in the day in the life of a typical age? I think we only get it’s like 10 AM. Yeah, Yeah. We’re we’re actually about 11, 30. I mean, the only other thing that I just thought of, as you mentioned, that is, you know, there’s got to be a time to do some of that administrative work and the bookkeeping and the bill paying those kinds of things, too. And so some bigger agencies will farm that out, have a bookkeeper or a CFO or some kind of accounting team. I mean, me personally like to be I like to be lean and mean. And so I’m in quick books, not daily, but I’m in QuickBooks and I’m, you know, paying bills and trying to do that myself. And fortunately, you know, it’s not a huge undertaking, but it’s an important thing. I just had to get my 1099s in the mail. That had to be done before the end of the year to all of my contractors. And, you know, so there’s that side of it, too. Yeah, I would think maybe setting up a time per month that you do that as probably comes into my calendar blocking. Absolutely all right. Well, brad, you’ve been on my show a couple of times now. You kind of know what’s coming up next. But I’ve got something brand new to intro this part of the show, ok? Five questions. So anybody just, like, hopped on a watch, like, what is going on? Yes, I created a little jingle there. That was that was my lovely falsetto love that. I absolutely love that. I had to get back to the orange hair. I think it’s appropriate. I think it’s so five questions. Basically I like to do all of my guests on the show is asking just five random questions. Have nothing to do because I’ve drilled Brad now for an hour about agency marketing life. And he’s probably sick of talking about it. And I like to get to know people on my show a little bit more, a little bit better. So I have pod decks. You’ve got a pod decks, lab dotcom that takes you over to them. And I think you get like $5 off or something like that, when you use that link. I don’t care if you buy it through that link or not. Just go to pod decks. I like Travis that he actually created a little deck of cards that are integers, interview questions, there’s podcast episode ideas, all kinds of stuff. But there’s also an app for Android and IOS, I believe that you can download and he’s adding stuff to it on a weekly basis. He’s got these huge contests inside the app right now where he’s giving away like expensive gear every week if you’re a monthly subscriber. But so what I do is I’ve got I’ve asked Brad questions before. And I think did about the interview. So, brad, you’re going to get the choice today. I’ve got a would you rather a deck of cards or what the heck? Deck of cards. Which ones you want me to ask you questions from? Let’s go with the would you rather or would you rather. All right. Would you rezo, these are just easy questions. You don’t have to even explain much unless I really just want to push for just five questions with Brad Friedman from the Friedman group. Here’s number one. Would you rather put ketchup or ranch dressing on everything you eat? Wu ranch dressing, ranch dressing. Yeah, I would catch it for a long time, and now I’m probably not unlike more of Thousand Island dressing. All right, question 2, we’re doing. Would you rather questions here with Brad friedman? Would you rather wear a onesie 24/7 for a year or a horsehead costume for a whole month straight? Wow a onesie. I think that horsehead would be hot. Yeah, I think you could pull it off there where you live onesie. And no one would care. There I don’t think. Yeah, let’s see here. I never leave the house anyway, so, you know. Oh gee, I had not read one of them because it was like it was pretty bad. All right. So all right. Question number three, Brad Friedman, would you rather spend the night in a dumpster or a porta potty? Porta potty. That’s such a random question, why OK, OK, why a porta potty? I’m going to ask some details on that. Well, I think I could. Have a better control over the environment you go. That’s a smart one because I was thinking, I don’t want to be all, but yeah, I get that. Yeah, you could clean it up and you have a seat. Yeah, I get that. All right, here we go. This is number four, I believe, with Brad Freeman. Five questions. Would you rather be able to raise people’s memory or predict the future? I would like to be able to predict the future. I think that would be kind of fun to. All right. This one’s pretty funny. All right. I’m going to I think you can handle this. This was not very professional, but we ought to ask you a porta potty one. All right. Five questions. This is a question 5 with Brad Friedman. You’re getting ready. That’s a good one. Your reaction is going to be good. Would you rather fart in an elevator full of strangers or belch loudly while giving an important presentation at work or in a live video? Oh, man, that’s easy. I would much rather fart in the elevator. That’s what I would have said to you. Well, very good. That’s a five questions with Brad Friedman. You can go to codecs to grab your deck of cards. I think they even have a free option to grab one of them. Brad, I appreciate you being on the show again with me. Like you said earlier, show like you booked us like three or four months ago. It’s a decent time to get your hair and get the lab coat ready. Although I love being on the show with you. So appreciate you asking me. And I love having you. And you’re always a champion for the work we do, our polls and the lab and everything else. So what is the best place to find Brad friedman? So the best place other than on the bulletin board, at the police, at the post office. Yeah, I was going to say aside from that, where you’ll see my picture on the wall, friedemann social media dotcom is my website. And from there, you can get to all of the social media channels and, you know, everywhere. We are. But yeah, I just assumed everybody started the website and see what I’m all about. Good deal. I’m going to take you off screen here. If you’ll hang out just for a second. I’ll come back to you after the show is over. And I appreciate you, Brad. I’ll get the props and love if you’re watching and live around the replay. We do appreciate you, Brad. Thanks for having me, Scott. Really appreciate it. You bet. And I want to talk to you real quick about a new live show that I am starting tomorrow, actually called Confessions of a social media manager. Brad is kind of like the precursor to this. I want to ask the same questions, obviously, as I asked him the day about agencies. But we’re launching a new show tomorrow on the agora, Paul’s Facebook page and YouTube account called Confessions of a social media manager. And here’s kind of a quick. Here’s like my intro video for it. All right, so what we’re doing. And this will be I wonder if I can pull this off, actually, I’m going to here, I’m going to come back on camera. You’re just not going to see what we’re doing here. And see Brad could even talk, but nobody can hear it because what we’re doing is we’re going to do a show that is hiding for a little bit. Who are person is that we’re going to interview. It’s called Confessions of a social media manager. We’re going to be asking different social media managers what their life is like in social media was like to work in social media, where their stresses, what their likes, dislikes, what are the tools they use, all that sort of stuff. And we’re going to try to have a little fun with it. And not tell you who the guess is. What’s that may be like? That may backfire on me because like they made no one’s going to promote it or no. But it kind of could be a fun little way to like, OK, who is it? And then maybe I’ll bring them on. So I’m launching tomorrow at 12:00 PM Eastern Standard Time with a guest who has written a book who is very well known on YouTube and Facebook and everywhere else that you might have seen her. It is a she went to social media market where the last two years. You probably saw in the hallway in the hallway with a camera filming and interviewing people. So I hope you come over tomorrow and check out that show. And for me, this show will be live every Thursday at 12:00 PM and I’ve already got a lot of guests booked out in advance. If you’re a social media manager, I don’t care if you’re known or not. Our speaker. I’m not a speaker. I want to talk to you. So this show is not about necessarily interviewing a bunch of the people you’ve seen on every other show. I want to interview the social media manager at the car dealership in Detroit, Michigan. I want to interview people who are doing real work in the trenches. I’m reaching out to people locally where I’m at and getting them on the show and pulling them on camera, which is going to be really fun to get them on. So if you’re interested and be on the show, send me a message either through Facebook or from our social Media Lab group. And I’ll get you on the show. I would love to talk to anybody who’s out there. So that will start tomorrow. And so I appreciate you watching today’s show. Make sure any time you want to take a look at what we’re doing, go over to O’Gara polls, I will see all of you here next Wednesday.