LA Media Group Doing Over 7-Figures In Revenue Crushing the eCommerce Niche

TRANSCRIPT

What’s going on everybody. We have Arthur Polsky here from LA media group out of Hollywood, Florida, Arthur, really quick for the audience. What is it that you guys do over at LA media group and how do you generate revenue?

Awesome. Thanks for having us, Chad. So we’re a full service ecom agency. We do everything from a paid social website, development, CRO content creation, basically anything that needs to be done to scale an online store.

Love it. And who would you say your ideal avatar is? Is it just straight up e-com guys? And if it is, what type of eCommerce are you guys doing the most? What type of niches?

Yeah, I mean, it’s largely e-comm we work with younger companies for the most part. You know, in that 50 to a hundred thousand dollars a month range at one at the next level we don’t necessarily niche down to specific. I mean, we do tend to work with a lot of beauty and self care brands, but we have brands across a bunch of different industries.

Awesome. And break down your team size form really quick. How large is your team and what does it really compiled up?

So we have 10 people now. We have about half of the staff is largely creative. We started as a creative agency, creatives, hugely important for basically everything we do. So editors, animators, graphic designers. Then we have a couple media buyers on our team, and then we have our director of accounts who kind of oversees communications and internal stuff.

Love it. And how many, how many clients are you guys managing right now at LA media group?

I would say we’re at around two dozen clients or so

Love it. So roughly about 20, 20, a little over 20 clients. Yeah. Nice. And with your current audience and your, your, your outreach, let’s talk about that really quick. Cause 2020 there’s you see all these agencies trying to pick up clients what type of actual outreach are you guys doing? How are you guys actually getting clients? Talk to me about that really quick.

Sure. So we do have campaigns lead gen campaigns that we run on paid social right now. But truthfully, you know, since we’re focused on eCommerce and with the impact that coronavirus has had on eCommerce and really hasn’t been too difficult getting you know, our foot in the door, getting people to reach out to us directly just because companies are learning, you know, brick and mortars are learning. They need to pivot and companies that have already been e-comm centric are realizing the potential growth that they can have right now. So

What would you say though, what would you say out of, out of all of the leads that you get inbound, would you say 50% of them come from ads, 50% come from word of mouth, peel the onion back really quick, break it down for me. What would you say the majority of your actual inbound leads come from?

Sure. I would say about 35% come from ads. I’d say about another 40% or so come from either referrals from existing clients or just people finding us organically. And then the rest is, is a lot of you know, outreach that we do external outreach that we do outbound type to bring in

Of what type of outreach is that? Is that like DMS or what are you guys doing? And anything cold calls could be anything. What are you guys doing the most of a, we don’t really cold call people.

Well, I mean, we you know, in my experience it’s better to try and build a real relationship and not just jump in with sales. So, you know, we have ongoing communications with people on LinkedIn or Instagram or on Facebook and, you know, over time, those develop into sales calls and, and if not sales calls with them, someone that they can refer into the door. So it’s just good to build those communications on a nonstop basis.

Love it, man. And what is your pricing model look like right last? So let’s say right now you hit me up on LinkedIn. We have a full blown conversation and I’m ready to rock and roll with you guys at LA media group. What am I looking at as far as,

Right? So what are you gonna offer me? So we work on a a monthly retainer basis. We don’t peg things to ad spend or performance basis for the most part. There’s the occasional time that we do. And you know, what, what we find works best, both for our own pricing schedule and bring in as much revenue as possible, but also to get client results is not to just offer one service, right? We don’t just come at people with paid social, because if they’re lacking in content creation, if they’re lacking an email, if their website’s not converting the ads, aren’t going to do their job as well as possible. So we’re generally speaking at a come at you with a package which involves paid social and potentially Google PPC, but it makes sense. Email marketing, setting up auto flows, ongoing broadcasts or campaigns, content creation. So blogs, video blogs, and written blogs and all sudden

Price point for that. Cause it seems like you’re going a little, you’re going right

Towards more of the more

Depth services. You’re not doing generic type services. It sounds like you’re like the all around package let’s say, come in, do you have an offer where it’s like, Hey, here’s three packages that you can choose from, or yeah.

You just straight up on the court. So generally we do make three offers knowing, you know, as far as working start, knowing that we want to push someone to one of one or two of those. Right. And we, we, you know, honestly we do customize it for the client, right? I mean, I don’t think you should ever go in there thinking, you know, better right off the bat, what the client needs without having spoken with them. So, you know, we’ll start off with something, maybe just add management as, you know, the bottom tier package, you know, the middle tier might have just email and ad management, for example. And then the top one might throw in full blown content creation, product photography, and all of the other ancillary things. Right? And so at the bare minimum, a client is worth, you know, 2,500 to us at the minimum. Our average client is above 5,000 right now. But we have anywhere from about 2,500 to some clients paying us over $10,000 a month. So

Guys are considered honestly, a boutique agency, which is great. You guys are servicing a little bit more of high end clientele. They can afford it

Upwards of $5,000 a month, basically manage all their digital marketing needs.

So. Awesome. And do you guys have any type of value ladder? I know I’m sure you’ve heard that terminology before. Right. do you, do you guys get, are you guys getting them in, maybe for like a video job, you guys are doing a video for them and then you’re like, Oh, by the way, we can send you something

Traffic to your website. We read your website.

So do you guys, you guys have like a specific value out of that you like go buy or is it just purely, Hey, let’s do a consultation, figure out what you need and then let’s go from there.

You know, we did a lot more that type of stuff. When we were younger agency, one of the biggest things we did offer was video production and creative. And it was a lot easy. You know, what the truth is is if you get someone in the door for an ROI generating service, whether that is something like email, which could be a little bit cheaper for them, but we’ll kill it for them if they’re not doing it. Right, right. It’s a lot easier to make someone money and then say, Oh, by the way, if you do a, B and C, you’ll make a lot more money. So, you know, we, we do tend to get people in, you know, honestly on a bunch of different services at once because that’s the type of client we’re looking for someone who is in scale mode, right. They just need to do a few things to get there rather than someone who hasn’t really dabbled in the digital space too much. But we do, you know, we do have clients that come in for one service. There’s nothing specifically what that one services and then it expands into something else.

Awesome. And now I’m going to ask you a question that I ask most business owners are most digital marketing agencies. If there was one thing that you can think about since this whole journey of you having a digital marketing agency, what was the one needle mover? That one thing that either generated you the most money or saved you the most?

One thing, it was like this campaign that we ran was crazy. We generated like a hundred K from this campaign. Like what was that one crazy that you did?

I mean sure. Committing to advertising is right. It wasn’t that though what it really was, is deciding to niche down and focus on eCommerce. And we, you know, it’s even more fortuitous now considering what’s happened, you know, since coronavirus broke out, I mean, we wouldn’t have chosen this scenario in lieu of current virus, but e-commerce is so like the growth has been so tremendous this year. And we couldn’t have predicted that when we decided to really key in, on econ. But the fact that we did has just made it, I mean, it’s a very easy sales pitch now because people know what needs to happen and they know where they can be. If they focus on it.

Do you feel like you guys are definitely niched down to e-comm to the point where you have like a duplicatable process where somebody comes in and you know that you’ve got to build these 10 things out? Like, do you have a task list? Right. Things, a, an order comes in and you’re like, okay, we’re going to knock out these 10 tasks. And we know that this works because we’ve done this 10 other times.

Yeah. I mean, you know, it’s, it’s a little bit different when it comes to advertising. Although we do follow the same process, we do have internal SLPs, which was another thing that really helps you scale much easier. I mean, if you don’t have your systems in place, it’s a headache when start to get to a certain point. But yeah, we do have, especially for when it comes to email and content marketing, like we do know what works, what works consistently across all of our clients adds a little bit different just because, you know, there’s a few more factors at play, but yeah, we have systems that we follow for the most part that allow us to consistently get results that our clients are looking for. Awesome man, and 2020 Zappy air is going on. All these crazy automations are happening.

If you could think about one automation that you guys have created within your business, and it could be something super stupid, simple as a welcome or an onboarding to your clients or whatever it is, what would the, what’s the best automation that you guys have? And it can be a system. It could be anything at all. Yeah. I mean, we try and automate as much as possible though. I will say in my experience, you can’t, you can’t just fall in love with the idea of being able to automate everything, right? Like that’s just never going work. But we do largely speaking have an automated onboarding process where, you know, once a client comes on, we create certain acts, you know, access to certain softwares that need to give them access to certain messaging that needs to go happier. We use APR a fair bit when there’s no integrations, other times we have, we have auto rules built into Google that are connected from our, our billing books, subscription software through email, and some of the other softwares were used where the message is created and it has it has for lack of a better way of putting it in set this up as like meta tags or whatever they’re called to to, to input certain links and create certain links.

And you know, it’s, it’s worked, it’s worked well, but we, we, you know, there’s other things that we’re still trying to automate. You know, if you could cut out some of the headache of dealing with redundant manual tasks, it definitely, everybody’s trying to get rid of that now, but that’s good. So what time, you know, you guys are, I’m assuming you’re obviously have some type of lead generation process. Are you guys using a CRM to manage your clients when it talks to me about what the backend looks like? So we have played around with a bunch, I mean, far too many systems starting naming. I mean, like it’s, it’s like I can name them all at two hands probably. And, and none of them are perfect, right? It requires playing around and really bringing in someone who knows how to, but are using, are you using one that’s specific?

Because I just, I just literally had an agency on that was doing like a hundred came on. Things I can do. Don’t use anything. I have done it on Google sheets. So, so we do use a lot of Google sheets. We did just sign up this year within the past few months too. And I’m sure you’ve heard of them at this point to go high level. And Gahl is, they are an all in one system, right? Like they have the email up, they have the schedule, or they have the funnel builder. They have a lead management and tracker and on track, all of your communications and auto, like they have everything it’s still though. We definitely don’t use any work close to the functionality that offers and truthfully speaking, I mean, I do believe it’s a great software and, you know, they care about making it better, but there’s still a long ways to go.

It’s a young software. And so it doesn’t have the same, right. So we’re using it for certain things. We use Google drive, Google sheets for a ton of, I mean, just cause it’s what what’s been the most reliable for all these years after having switching from one CRM to the next to the next. But you know that we’re trying to find something where we can bring as much into one software as possible, both from a cost perspective, but also more so from an operations perspective, you know, makes sense. So walk me through your sales process. Arthur, let’s say I jump in and I’m ready to rock and roll with you. And I, like I said, before you get, you catch me on LinkedIn, I’m like, I want more information. Are you actually, are, you are, you know, are you have your sales team jumping on a consultation and you guys sharing your screen and you’re doing a zoom.

Walk me through that process. What are you guys doing? So we typically speaking go through a two phone call process. You know, we do through our ads, especially it’s a little bit harder to do through cold outreach, but we do try and qualify people as much as possible because the truth is, you know, we don’t want to waste our time. We don’t want to waste their time. You know, we still want to be able to give them some resources if possible, but as far as actually being able to bring someone on as a client, you’d like to qualify them. So we do a two sales call process. The first one is, and we tell them straight up, it’s a discovery call. We’re not dropping pricing.

How long is that? Is it like, how long is that call

45 minutes or so on average, I’d say, and it’s all discovery. I mean, we’re trying to find out where they’re at, what issues they’re having, where they’d like to be, what they’ve done so far, what they haven’t done. Are you guys actually calling them? It’s about, I would say it’s about 50 50 on zoom versus phone call. There’s no real reason why that’s the case. It just tends to work out that way. But we do, you know, the first call is straight discovery, right? And even at the end of the call, we ended where we’re asking them to get analyst access to their website and to their ad account. We want to be able to take a deeper dive into it. That’s both a value add for them, but it also helps us determine, you know, a, is this a Bible client in terms of being able to grow them B what do we have to do to grow them?

So it’s all about collecting info. We schedule a second call after that. There’s a, so I want to make sure I’m writing. The viewers are also are understanding what you’re saying. So first call discovery call. You’re not making any pitch at the end of the call. You’re not talking about pricing. You are literally digging deep into their business and trying to find out what their pain points are, what their issues are. And then I’m assuming the second call is where you’re going to give them all the solutions. Am I right? Yeah. I, I, and also some of what we discovered through the audit process, but, you know, we tell them right off the bat, like, and this is true. We want to find out if we can help them write up their client, that we’d to be able to help. And, and and that’s what the process is for, because the truth is, is we’re not a massive team.

And so if you start taking out a bunch of clients that you truthfully can help, you’re going to have high turn. And that’s like the biggest thorn in trying to scale an agency is high turn rate. So you wanna, you want to be selective, like don’t let scarcity take over. You’re young. Okay. You get it. You want to take on business, it’s going to hurt you in the long run. So the second call, the second call, we come at them with a pricing explanation of everything. I mean, it’s try to get them started right there. We also send a manual proposal as well, which details a little bit of what we’re going to do for them and what the pricing is or the options. But that’s, you know, the goal is to close them on the second call.

Yup. Do you typically, most people close to you on the second call or do you find yourself going into a lot of followup where you’re chasing people for days, weeks? Sometimes even.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. We have clients right now that we’ve had for a long time that we had spoke, you know, before we signed them up, we had spoken with them, you know, seven, eight months beforehand. It kind of went cold. Maybe they went with another agency and they said, Oh, they did a horrible job. And they came like that stuff happens. I’d say for the most part, the way it works out practically is we have the second call. We send them the proposal, they review everything. They might have a couple questions to touch on a third call or over email. But for the most part, it’s no more than that. And then they, and then they get started. It doesn’t really stretch out too long on average. Yeah.

What would you say your actual close rate would be? So you get a hundred people on consultations. How many of those guys are you closing deals with?

If we’re doing a hundred phone calls, I mean, you know, I would say that it ends up being in the five to five to 10% range and that’s

Awesome. And that’s, that’s pretty, that’s pretty standard, which is good.

Yeah. I mean, we’re picky. So that will weed out a few people that may be, would be wanting to work with us that we just like, like I said, we don’t want to work with anyone. But I’d say that’s probably our, our numbers right now.

Awesome, man. And in the last 12 months, how much revenue has LA media group generated?

So we are over seven figures. We had our first seven figure year 20, 19 2012. Yeah. Thanks man. And 2020, when Corona hit some of our non e-com clients inherently dropped out Friday, we were not only econ. We do have some other clients, both on the creative side and on the lead gen side. And not only that, you know, just things became topsy turvy and turns up operations, not being in your office for everything changed. The whole world changed, everything changed. So we took a little bit of a, a slowdown period. This month has been though the biggest month of the year for us. We, we, or I should say last month, well, now that we’re in September, but August was the biggest month for us September. It looks like it’s going to be an even bigger than we’re expecting to continue to have that trend throughout the year.

So you know, it’s, it’s really now Krone. I mean, it’s still there, but how much sales did you guys do last month in August? In terms of new clients total sales, like total revenue generated for LA media group. Last one. I think we were just, just shy of a hundred K dude. That’s awesome, man. Where do you guys like, if you can see if you can see yourself a fast forwarding in 12 months. Okay. Cause you guys are obviously you’re a seven figure agency, which is one of the hardest milestones they had. Everybody wants to hit the six figure Mark, and then they get their right. Sees me. And then it’s like, okay, how do I get to the seven figure? Cause six figure seven figure. You’re talking two completely different worlds. Okay. And most people never even get a chance to get close to the seven figure Mark and you guys have done it so big kudos to you on the road.

I’m good for, I know I’m good friends with Lee, Ron over at LA media group. And by the way, these guys own an amazing company called countless creatives to make sure to check them out. Just a side note. But where do you see yourself fast forward in 12 months? Let’s say you’re doing a million dollars a year in revenue as an example, where do you see yourself in 12 months from today? And then what are the things that you need to do to actually get there? Yeah, I mean, you know, there’s, there’s always this internal debate that everyone who gets to this point realizes, which is how big do I really want to get, right? Because the headache, you know, the bigger you get, the more headaches happen. The more, the more things you need to figure out internally, as far as your processes and operations are concerned.

I mean, you know, what, what would we like to do in 2021? We’d like to probably at least double our business. What does it take to do that? It’s just continuing to improve our internal operations continuing to improve our inbound lead generation efforts. And at the end of the day, delivering results because if you keep clients happy and you don’t lose clients, it makes it a lot easier to scale your agency than it does. If, if you’re constantly losing clients on a monthly basis. Now the man to a hundred percent growth in 12 months, hopefully we’ll bring you guys back in 12 months. You say you did $2 million in sales, like this did that countless as well. So final question for you guys, aren’t there aside from any internal tools that you guys have ever built, what is your favorite software tool that you guys use within your business?

God. so I mean, my favorite tool that I use is it really for it’s more so for our clients than any way? What is it? I mean, I love, I, you know, I love Klayvio for, for email it’s terrific, the segmentation, but the cool thing that a lot of people don’t use it for is, is you could create such refined segments of the audiences from what’s happening on your website and in your email. And then you could import those as audiences into Facebook. And so you could really create these super refined segments for, especially for retargeting that automatically integrates with Facebook, creates the custom audience for you. And you know, just as a tool, it probably the needle more than anything else for our clients.

Well, you guys heard it first. Arthur Polsky from LA media group down in Hollywood, Florida. Arthur, thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate your time and hopefully we’ll see you in 12 months.

Yeah, I’m sure I’ll see you before then. Chad brought up a good one too.