How To Scale To A Million Dollars In 2026 With A Smaller Team

I feel like I'm sitting in the back of the bus and the bus is a rocket ship, woke up and realized, you know, I've got basically 20 C players on my team. The problem is all these idiots around me. Not me. It's everyone else in this company. Yes, but not the person that hired them. People in the company cannot treat the clients of the company better than they themselves are true. We routinely, like, several times a week, find tens of thousands of dollars of waste of, and that's been to the PPC campaigns. It's amazing the level of negligence that we find sometimes in some of these campaigns. I had gotten like 120 leads from people who have listened to this podcast and decided they want to do this marketing channel. We went from like three people probably, when I went on your podcast to 35 now, about five years later. Welcome and thank you for joining us for today's episode of the Syrupters where millionaires are made. Today we have Brandon Bateman with Bateman Collective and Brandon Fluid from Salt Lake to talk about how to scale your business to seven figures or more in 2026 with a smaller team. Guys, I'm going to mission to create a millionaires information on this show alone. It's enough to help become a millionaire in the next five to seven years. If you'll take consistent action, you'll become one and right now you got a hundred thousand, two hundred, fifty thousand or even more. Just hanging out inside your CRM resurrect our old and dead leads with the objection proof, calling agent text cash to the phone number 33777 to unlock the money. That's just hanging out inside your CRM. You ready? I'm ready. All right, so we've had several episodes, but for every episode, I think is compelling because you bring a lot of data, you bring a lot of information. Right. And we're going to be talking about how to get even more right now for your marketing, without having to go crazy with hiring a big team and so on. But before we do all that, as you're well aware, I've modified my business quite a bit. Right. And I think they're, you know, our audience is, we got a pretty healthy mix. There are some that are like, hey, how do I do my first deal? We got something like, hey, I'm doing deals. We're in the next steps. And then we have other operators like, I got a team, but like running this team is driving me a little bit crazy. So we've talked about, you know, how you got into PPC, but we never really talked about. What is like to actually build the business kind of like with E-Mith, right? Like, I'm in the, I love baking pies. But once you open up your kitchen, you're not in the pie baking business or you're in the business baking pies. You're not baking pies. Of course. Yeah. It's almost, it's almost as if if you had a pie business, it'd be better if you didn't know how to bake a pie. Your real goal is to have a pie business, but that's never how people get into that business. Exactly. Exactly. So I want to hear like from your side, right? I mean, you launch, statement collective, you're doing deal, you're doing, you've got clients, you partner with Cody. I imagine partnering with Cody, having on his podcast, going all the different masterminds. You kind of had this big rise that maybe you grew a little bit faster than you were perhaps ready for. Is that accurate at all? Yes, that is absolutely accurate. I remember. So I came on this podcast on, was it 2020 around there? It was around there sometime. And at this time, I had like, it was me and like a few members of my team. And we had, I want to say, it was like, I remember the weekend after, I went on your podcast because it was kind of a surprise that we even got on the podcast. I think you're having like last minute or something like that. Cody was very demanding. So like, oh, yeah, we, it was within a week, I had gotten like 120 leads from people who listen to this podcast and decided they want to do this marketing channel. Right. And so, so I thought I was being like really reasonable and I said, well, you know what? As a company, we're going to onboard at maximum six clients per week. So we just got this big old waiting list of, you know, you have to wait like months to follow with us. And I thought I was doing like the responsible thing. But I didn't realize that that's still like realistically, it was a ton for what we had at that time. And six, six a week. Yeah, six a week for us right now. I think five a week for us is what we can comfort the managed with our company as a dance today. Yeah. If we onboard eight in a week, like I got angry team players, team members. Yeah. So it's, it's hard to, to, to onboard too many. And then once they're onboarded to manage them and all that kind of stuff. So, so yeah, I kind of changed from, because up to that point, I'd been running my business for three, three, four years, something like that. And it was all about like, I'm Brandon, I'm the PPC guy. I can help you. I know how to do this, this stuff. And then it changes to, well, now I have to succeed. But it has to be more than just me. And not only does it have to be more than just me, I have to succeed. Like not just in spite of the people that I work with, but I have to succeed, not just with the people that I work with, but I have to succeed through those people that I work with. And that, that's a, that was a really hard, a really hard journey for me. I think the, the advice that I got at first was that you have to hire people. I'm a little closer, is that what you're saying? Yeah. Yeah. There we go. So the advice that I got at first was, well, you have to hire people to work in the business so that you can work on the business. Right. So you hire people to work in the business. And then at some point you realize, well, working on the business is actually far more than a full-time job. Everybody, I always laugh every time I talk to, like laughing like a really endearing way. And not at all negative towards these people, because I was exactly that person in that phase at some point where you're like, you hire the person for acquisitions, you hire the person for disco. And then you're like, well, now there's nothing left for me to do. Because these people do the whole business. And what happens the second that there's a problem or the second that one of those people quits or the second that you need to become better as a company, anything that you do, or you need to innovate or you need to change literally anything. Or those people need to be like managed or led or recruited. Now you're back in. And you know, how often do those things happen literally all the time? Not stop. Yeah. So that, yeah, when I think about it, those are kind of the phases. There was, it was, well, you have to hire people to work in the business so you can work on the business. And then well, now you have to hire people to work on the business. And your whole job is leading and managing and finding those people. And then you hire people to lead and manage those people. And you know, at that point, you've got people to work in the business, people to work on the business, people to lead those people who are working in and on the business. And people to hire and attract those people who are working in and on and in the, in and on the business and leading the people who are working in on the business. And then you're like, what the heck do I do? Now that's basically what the, you know, what the journey was. So yeah, it's a, it's a crazy, it's a, it's a crazy journey. So that's basically what happened to me is I slowly started building the team. So we went from, from like three people probably when, when I went on your podcast to 35 now, about five years later, 10 times the body count, 11, 12 times the body count. Yes. A lot, a lot more people on the team. And it's, yeah, as wild, how much, you know, the dynamic changes over those times. And you know, eventually, well, I got to this point where I showed up to work and I look at my schedule and I'm like, there's, there's literally nothing on my schedule for today. Like what the heck am I supposed to do? And then you kind of learn, you know, learn, learn different things from there. I was reading, have you read the, it's called the road less stupid. I can't remember who, who wrote that. Keep counting him. Keep counting him. So he has a, he has a chapter in there called the CEO must never delegate. Dot, dot, dot, and it has like seven things that you can't delegate as the CEO. I think the seven are kind of redundant a little bit. But there's, there's really three big ones. Yeah. The three big ones are you allocate resources. You provide clarity around point A and point B and you build the culture of the company. And it just so happened like I was just reading that like right when my schedule just really opened up and I started just trying to do those things and, and yeah, that's a, that's what I do. That's what I do every day now. But it's a, it's wild because I was, I was trying to explain to someone, I like this person that I, that I mentor a little bit, who's like an agency world. Like I am. I'm trying to explain to him like how to make this like transition in, in the business. And it's, it's, it's like there's a thousand steps in between there and here. And it's so hard to figure out what those steps are. And it's like, like you know, you know, when you, you know, when you've achieved that a little bit because all the symptoms of it start to appear. But while I was in it, it just kind of felt like I was just, I deemed to try to figure this out for like literally three years. I feel suddenly one day I was like, I think I actually accomplished that thing for now. For now. Yes. Like that's fire at this next, yeah, at this particular stage, right? Cause you're never like, you never done with that by any means. But at some point, it's, it's almost like a ball that you get rolling. And you know, at first you're kind of like this big boulder, like you're pushing it and it's really hard. And then at some point you're like, Oh, the boulder is like sort of continuing to roll, even if I don't push it. That feels great. And then it starts to feel like the boulder is going faster and faster and it's out of control. Like no matter how much you push it, it won't make a difference anymore. Like this boulder is going down this hill. And like that's kind of how the business like, like I feel like once upon a time, I was like, right, I was driving the bus and like trying to get people on it. And then I feel like I'm like sitting in the back of the bus and the bus is a rocket ship. It's like going faster than like I thought it would. And I'm just kind of like riding the coattails of so many great people in my team who are making that, that possible. So when I say like achieving like this, whatever this is, like it just feels like there's a point that you get to where you are no longer the business and the business itself now has intrinsic value and intrinsic ability to actually improve by itself without your input. And it's a wild feeling. So let's talk about. And this might sound like, you know, people in my hair, I could first roll problems or whatever, right? But we've all had these moments where we've had too many leads. Too many what? Leads. Oh yeah. Of course. Because that was me. That was you. So you said, all right, we're going to put these people what sounds like, right? If you can onboard six a week and you had 120 leads, you basically had a 21th wait list. So talk about like, or a 20 week wait list. Yeah, assuming they all actually want to sign up. Yeah, there's they converted it astonishingly high, but not quite that. Yeah, but so let's talk about like, how did you handle that? Right? Because you had to shift very quickly to adapt to the lead volume. Yes. Yeah, you do have to shift very quickly, but honestly, I think I think I kind of failed. Yeah. That's my that's my opinion, like looking back. So so realistically, like we grew a lot as a company over the course of that, you know, that next year or so, as we start to onboard all these clients and and but the the problem was I did not have the foundation in place. So girl too quick can be it can be a really bad thing because you know, at some point I, I, you know, woke up and realized, you know, I've got basically 20 C players on my team. In 20? 20. Yes. And I know that kind of sounds ridiculous. Like you think like, wouldn't you notice before then, but the thing is when you're just fighting to survive another day when you're drowning every single day, stuff stacks up really, really quick. And I wasn't, I don't think I was mature enough to to deny some of the opportunity either. And maybe that wasn't even maybe I did the right thing from a business standpoint. But I ended up feeling like, you know, we like I thought we could do it. But now we're not actually delivering on the level that I want to. And you know, it I started to feel like the problem is all these idiots around me, not me. It's everyone else of this company. Yeah, because when I say I was like surrounded by by 20 C players, some of those people are still with the company. I have many employees have been with me for like five years. And I would call them a players. But I just mentioned that, you know, they were C players because so much of what makes a person an A or C is what is the environment that they're in? How are they led? And, you know, can you actually pull like the most out of them and are the expectations clear what you need from them? And when you go from like three to 20 employees in a year, it's just really, really hard to figure out that stuff out, especially because we had no existing leadership in the company. I didn't have anybody that like knew how to manage people. Yeah. So what happened? Are you familiar Steve with the with the metric employee net promoter score? You ever measured that? How we measure it? I don't know. We measured it. If we did, it was not it's definitely not a consistent thing. Yeah. If anyone's listening to this and you want a good take away from this podcast, I would say absolutely start measuring employee net promoter score measure every quarter from now until the end of time. It's for us, it's like one of the key metrics of the business. Like what's our revenue? What's our profitability? What's our employee net promoter score? Like it's one of the it's one of the really key things because as every business grows, you take on different types of debt and one of those is culture debt. And employee net promoter score is kind of like it's like how much debt do you have to the bank of the culture of your company is kind of how you measure that? So for some context for everybody is, you know, never motor score the way it works is you ask people how likely are you to recommend working at statement collective, for example, to a friend? And they answer on the scale of one to 10. If they answer a 10 or a 9, there's what we call promoters. If they answer a 7 or 8, we call those people neutral. If they answer up to 6, we call them detractors. Yeah. And you're basically taking all the promoters and the detractors off each detractor can offset one promoter. So let's just say you had the same number of detractors as you did promoters. You would end up with a net promoter score of zero. If you had 100% promoters, you would be 100. If you had 100% detractors, you would be negative 100. So it scales from negative 100 up to 100. And zero is considered like, okay. And that's thriving. Not necessarily thriving. 30s considered like really good. If you can hit like 50, it's considered world class when it comes to employing up promoter score. You always have like some people who enjoy working there more, some people that enjoy working there less. So this metric when I had that really small team, it was like 40. After this quick scale, we got, we started bouncing between, I think, at our lowest negative 57 and zero. We would go like negative 50, zero, negative 40, zero. Like that's how we were bouncing like quarter quarter. And honestly, the reason I think everybody needs to measure this metric is because I didn't know it was quite that bad. Because when you talk to people, what do they say to you? They say, oh yeah, everything's fine. It's probably just this or whatever the case is. They're a lot nicer to use here face. When you send out a completely anonymous survey and they know it's 100% anonymous and you encourage people to answer it really truthfully, you start to get really interesting feedback that you don't actually get when you talk to people. And you realize that everybody's telling you one story to your face and then they're actually talking different things amongst each other. But hand you back. Right. As as a leader in the company. So that was, yeah, that was that was basically the when I realized that things were like really bad. And I think the companies' responsibilities to take care of their people, the people are responsible for taking care of the clients. Yeah. The company starts to do a bad job of taking care of the people, then the people will do a bad job of taking care of the clients. Right. That's what will naturally happen. Right. So and I was trying to fix it by trying to do a better job of taking the client. So I was looking at the things like, oh, why do we why do we do this instead of that? Not how am I building an environment and attracting the right kind of people so that we have a culture where people are empowered to make their own decisions. So, so anyways, that was, I don't know how many years ago that was now. I know that, you know, we tried to improve things and now we've been like three years of bouncing between like 50 and 80 when it comes to the net promoter score. So I know. Here's what nobody's telling you. 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But it sounds like you're tracking it though from the beginning. I tracked it before it got bad, tracked it through it being bad and then tracked it right back up to like significantly better than it started in the beginning. So I understand the principle of getting the score. But what do you do with that data? Like, okay, I got a six. For me, engineering, mine, right? Well, it was a six. How do I turn that six to a 10? If it's anonymous, I can't figure out exactly how to take it from a six to a 10. So what do you do with this data? What do you do? Well, I mean, you have to find the root of the problem, right? I think I think I, we talked about it once as entrepreneurs were great problem solvers. And my belief is that the average entrepreneur does not actually solve their problems though because they solve problems but they don't actually solve the right problem that's actually at the root of the issue that they're seeing. Sure. So yeah, I tried to do a whole bunch of like the surface level stuff to try to figure it out. You try to figure things out with individual employees. But like if culture is your problem, you're trying to individually address employee level things to solve the problem. That doesn't actually get you where you want to go, right? So it takes a lot of, it takes a lot of like self-reflection, I think is probably the right word. There's a, there's a quote from, I want to say it's Stephen Covey that I like where he says the way that you're looking at the problem is the problem. And that's exactly what was happening to me because I was looking at it as like a bunch of little problems when really it was one big cultural problem. And in hindsight, the single thing that actually made the biggest difference for us, I think it came down to, how do I describe this? We needed to get the right people working the right way together. And there were a few different things. So if you look at like why is our net promoter score so high right now, the number one thing referenced is the quality of leadership and management. People feel incredibly challenged. I think you just had the camera and held on your podcast a few, you know, a few weeks ago or months or something like that. And he said, don't remember it's there at CG that he said, like a player is like to be challenged. It's a really, really important thing for them. So they feel really, really challenged and they feel supported by leadership. That's kind of what the general consensus says there. We did not have great leadership. And I didn't know what a great leader looked like to be able to hire those people. I hired this one guy's name was Colby. And you know, spoiler, Colby was with us for six months. And he made it. huge impact on how we actually led as a company. Because this guy came in and like, read it a lot of our leadership structures, changed the way that we were interacting with employees and just helped us be like significantly better leaders. And that like, we have a lot of existing, like when we go back to the time that EMPS was really bad, people were saying leadership is the reason. - So they do say why? - Yeah, 'cause we ask them, well, what's the number and then why, why do you feel that way? And a lot of the things that they were citing was leadership. And now it's really high. What are they citing leadership? And those leaders, a lot of them are the same people, the same leaders that we actually had in the beginning. And a lot of them are different to a lot of people are different. But we needed to mature from a leadership standpoint as a company. And I didn't realize how, like it's almost like the access for being a good leader is like a log scale nerdy reference. But there's like, you know, it's entratches. Like you can be, there is such thing as being a 10 times be a better leader than what you are. You have to be 10 times better to get like 20% better results. And then you have to then be a 100 times better to get like, you know, another 10% better results. But it's there. So it was leadership. And then one other thing that I think was a really core thing for us was recruiting. We did not have great recruiting. So what happens when you don't have recruiting and you are taking on six clients a week. Well, now I just have to hire the best people that I can. And you convince yourself, these are really good people because you don't really know yet. You haven't gone full circle. So you bring on these people that are like, okay, generally. I'm making huge, huge averages here, but they're like generally okay. And out of the people you interviewed, they felt pretty good. Well, what happens then? You start to create, because the company's grown quickly, you start to create indispensable C players. What do I mean by indispensable C players? Somebody who themselves is nothing special, but because of the position that you put them on in the company and because of the way that they bear on their shoulders, they are absolutely a linchpin for your company. And you cannot survive without them. So then what happens? Well, now I have all these C players that are on these key seats that I cannot afford to lose these people. And the people themselves aren't even that great. In terms of how they're performing in the company, because I've got no one to replace them with. And so then what happens, we start keeping C players around longer than we need to keep them around. Or longer than you like to keep them around. Because we don't have a way to replace those C players with anybody that's better. And you start adding like good recruiting into here, what happens, like the level of quality of person that you're bringing into the equation in the first place, that person is better. So the likelihood of them becoming an indispensable C player is lower. It's much more likely they're going to be an A, or they're going to be a B. And when you have quality leadership, it's even much more likely that they're going to become an A, or they're going to become a B. And then when you have C players, in your situation where you can easily attract and recruit really quality people, you can just fire them. Yeah. And you replace them with people who are A's or B's. And that's our process now. It's like every quarter, if someone's a C, next quarter they're either going to not be here, or they're going to be an A or a B. There's no option where they are a C two quarters in a row. That's how we do, you know, it's a performance improvement plan if somebody is a C player. And we know that on demand we can replace them with somebody who is likely going to be a better fit. And also with the fact that we're doing better recruiting, that's less necessary, less often. So we kind of have this like spiral of like, we can't get the right kind of talent in the company and we can't lead and manage them properly. And that it's like the spiral went completely the other direction and recruiting made it such a massive difference for us. How many recruiters do you have in your company now? I just have one. Just one. Yeah. And really she's like, so she started as my executive assistant. And then she started as my executive assistant. She started taking on some like HR responsibilities. And now she's kind of like my assistant and HR and recruiting. So this is not like a full time recruiter by any means. But she's she's incredible. We just hired someone. Awesome. A few weeks ago when I was talking to them after they came on like what made you decide to come here? They said I've never seen an HR leader so bought into the vision of a company before. That's why I wanted to work here because I can see the culture. And that's what we noticed is like, once you get culture really good. Like we had a like our lead over client service is now this guy we open up a job. He just calls the next day. He says, I'm only applying. There's one place. Basically like if you guys are hiring, I'm interested. I'm not doing anything else. I decided to leave my current job. Been there for 10 years. He was there from like when they were small, rhythm to big. Responsible for for like massive improvements there. This guy's like one of the you know. 20 references could say he's one of the best people they ever worked with. And like when you have the right culture, you have people like that calling you saying, yeah, I heard you might have an opening for this kind of. And you have a really good reputation as an employer. So the yeah, having like the right culture makes a massive difference for that. But going back to the recruiter. Yeah, it really comes down to just having somebody who's focused on recruiting and the company. And she does a great job of finding like screening people for culture and getting a lot of the best kind of people in. What is she doing the screen people for culture? It's so we have a lot of questions that are designed. It's basically like a screen. So we have a lot of questions that are designed. It's it's basically like a series of questions that are designed to see to someone match our core values or not. So for each core value, we have several different questions. All right. So not going to hopefully not put you on the spot here. Yeah. Core values. So the core values are on your impact. It's like the concept of ownership. Choose to care. Um, um, um, um, um, um, um, and hungry, and be curious. So, each one of those values has specific questions associated with it. An example is, or humble and hungry, we ask people about their first job. We try to see, how hungry were you for your first job? We, or ownership, especially when we were hiring leaders, we talk about, "Tell me a time that you had to fire somebody," and "How did you know for sure that they knew what their expectations were in their job?" We see, "What's that gap between what they felt?" And for humble and hungry, another one that we do is, "Tell me about something that inspired you recently," or something you learn that was new. There's all kinds of different questions that you can ask, and sometimes people start checking the boxes before you even ask the questions, and it's just so overwhelmingly obvious. A big one is, "What's your past, for humility?" We look at what's your past job, tell me about what your accomplishments were, and are they talking about the things that they did, or are they talking about the things that the company did that they got to be a part of? And are they citing themselves as the reason, or are they citing the people they worked with, as being the reason for those successes? That's a huge piece of humility, or something failed, or they put it on themselves, or are they putting it on other people? These are all things where it's like, you would think, it's just a natural conversation between you and the candidate, where they're just saying things, but we're literally checking boxes. They talked about a failed thing. Was it because of them, or was it because of someone else? Those are boxes that were checking that tell us something about this person. So yeah, that's a lot of the culture screening has to do with those types of things. The other thing that's a big game changer here is my eyes were a little closed to the level of talent that exists, and I started to generate this belief that there's just not that great of people out there. And I was absolutely wrong. They just don't want to work for me. That's basically what ended up being true. So I turned into the kind of person that is able to attract those kinds of people that are really good. But the big thing for us is we spend a lot of time on the sourcing the candidates. So because it's really easy with recruiting, I think if it kind of like dispositions, like a Dispo Manager can just sell a deal. The jobs have to sell the deal. The jobs to sell the deal for top dollar, right? Just because you made a 20 grand wholesale fee, isn't success if you could have had a 30 grand wholesale fee if you did a good enough job sourcing enough buyers to get the offer that's then higher so that you can actually sell it. And recruiting is exactly the same way. It's not just like getting the person hired. It's can you get person hired, but they have to be like the best person that you could hire. And that comes down to bringing the money candidates into the pipeline. And it happens all the time where we interview some of the initial ones and it's like, I think this could be the person. And then later on that person looks like nothing compared to this other person without you know. And you meet someone that expands your mind for like what does good look like for this position. And it's kind of like it's how people with PPC you can, these deals can be bought deeper. The fact that they can be bought deeper doesn't mean that you're going to buy them deeper. Because if you're not going into them with that mindset, you're going to buy them just as deep as you buy your other deals because if you could buy a deal at 320, you can also buy it at 350 and you can also buy it at 400, right? When it comes to when it comes to talent, there's a little bit of a shift happening to where the job market is just really not that good right now. And we're finding just a level of quality of talent that I just did not think we could find as a company. Like I'm surprised that these people exist. Like I don't know where they were in my whole life. And you're finding them like open to working. And for the same comp right now, you can get someone of a significantly higher quality than you were able to get several years ago if you're looking hard enough. If you're just checking the box we're recruiting, you're saying I'm looking for somebody that matches my quality standard, you'll find them. But if you're raising your quality standards, you'll also find those people that just barely check the box. So that's been a big part of it recently too, is there's just so much talent out there. Like if you have a company that's thriving in today's market where many companies are not, there are people out there that are exceptional. Where are you finding these people right now? I say if you say you know if you're marketing enough to find these people, right? What are you guys doing to find these people? So we do a lot of, well it depends on the job, right? So there are some jobs where I do. I think you can just post the job a whole bunch of different places. We have some platforms that will boost it on others, where we won't, like indeed, you get like infinity candidates when you boost it on there and like you still never hire any of those people because they suck. We get a lot of good people from, you know, so we'll pay some money behind LinkedIn. So that's, that's like path number one. Path number two, which we use a lot for senior level people, or especially for leaders is the head hunting route. And it comes down to just using LinkedIn recruiter. And your recruiter basically functions like an SDR in that circumstance, where you're, you know, you're targeting which exact people you want. And you're, you know, a lot of the best people they're not looking for jobs. And you're trying to engage with them. We kind of have like, we call it a hook call, we'll get the leader on with that person at the beginning because we notice we lose a lot of them. If we're like, oh, we fill out this application and do this personality assessment. They're like, you came to me. Like I'm not looking for a job. So you kind of have to like, like, like, messages. Yeah, it's a sales process. We're literally running a sales process. And that's what the recruiters doing. And that's why having someone like, Leslie, I'm so grateful to have her. Because she's so body and I'm like the company what we're doing as a company and the culture of the company. So she'll just hold call these people out of LinkedIn and just really sell them on the vision of what we're trying to do as a company and try to like feed them into the funnel as much as possible. And we find, we find really good people that way because there's, there's a specific criteria, right? We look for people that we think what's the background that someone would have? That would mean that there's no doubt that they could slay it in this position for us. Gotcha. And what that often looks like is, well, they were in a similar position at another company. They were in it for a really long time with that company. And they got promoted several times during that. And that company is one that we know has world class talent for that thing. We check all those boxes. Yeah. It's kind of hard to find somebody who worked at a company that's world class at whatever job position worked there for 10 years, got promoted four times during those 10 years. And you talked to other co-workers that said that they were the best performing on the team. It's really day and hard for that person to not be like a really killer group. But you kind of have like a kind of a snapper approach. Like you're, you're like, here's what I want. Right. And then if you've passed these filters, you're probably the person for the role. Yeah, they're very, it's very strict. And honestly, even sometimes when we're building out the job description and everything, we're thinking, does this person even exist? Yeah. And we've been shocked time and time again. It's like you just imagine the unicorn you're looking for and like they're out there. There's so many people doing so many things. You just don't talk to them. You just don't know where they are. But they're there. If you can find the right way to get in front of them. So yeah. And if you do that, if you picture bringing those kinds of people in that level up your company, every single time you bring one of those people in, it's, that's, that's what's been really cool. It almost feels like when it was negative, it felt like it was, like I told you, the analogy, the boulder that's rolling down the hill, it felt like that was our culture. As a company, it's like this boulder cannot be stopped. But when, when it's positive, it kind of feels the same way. Like I feel like I could show up to work like a horrible person tomorrow. And like this culture cannot be stopped. And you know, of course, that kind of thing prolonged over a long period of time. Of course, that's how you stop it. But that's the really cool thing is culture holds so much momentum. And if you can figure that out, then, then those people who are making massive impacts in so many companies, they, they want to do that for you because they want to work in that environment. And we find that's like a key thing when we find someone really high level, they, they ask the culture questions really early in interview process, because they care so much about that compared to everything else. Like they want to make sure this is a culture that's good for them. They're saying a players are selective in the culture. Yeah, you can tell by the kind of questions they ask, they're basically trying to figure out is this the company that has a really good culture or not? Ian at our company, you know, one of the things he said, is like, if they have no questions, it's a no. Like he's never, we've never hired anyone who had no questions and it's worked out. And I'm not saying like great question. I'm just saying no questions. Yeah. Right. It's like, okay, like they're, they're here clearly just for the money. Yeah. No, I agree. Like good quality questions that you care about the right things are thinking about the right things. Like you can see so much someone do that. Yeah. So we talk about it's not rocket science, where it's like, Hey, you want to have a great company? I agree. People like that rocket science, but clearly you guys have implemented practices and so on to really sift sort of filter and make sure the right people are coming through. Which is a very profound answer. Given my question was just really, how do you deal with like being overload overloaded with leads? Yeah. That was that was kind of a journey, wasn't it? Yeah. Okay. So it sounds like then really instead of fixing like, here's a symptom. You just went straight to like deep down into the root cause and resolving the root cause. You were able to solve this problem. But solving this major problem is a multi year process. Right. It wasn't like, all right. Next month, culture is going to get fixed. Yeah. You can't. It's so slow. Yeah. So slow to turn it around. Right. Like that's the battleship, right? But you had to have some speedboat solutions too. So I mean, I guess you went and hired a bunch of sales people, but that was not the right answer. Yeah. It's really hard. I mean, the way I think about this kind of stuff, I mentioned to you, one of the three jobs of a CEO is resource allocation. So what does resource allocation mean? What are the resources we have as a company? There's your time. You have money and you have people. And the crazy thing about all of those is every single one of those things can be used like an asset or like a crutch. Like I think do you know, do you know any entrepreneurs that are busy like all of them, maybe a little too busy, right? And what does that mean? It means when you face problems as a company, you throw your time at the problem first, right? And I guarantee you at least half the people listening to this. This is exactly how I was when you face a problem. What's your, what's your go to? It's like, I'm just going to spend my time trying to solve that problem. All right, you just used your time as a crutch instead of using it intentionally as an asset. The same happens with money. Like what happens to the entrepreneur that throws money at every problem they have? Well, their problems might start to go away, but now they have this new problem of having no money, right? And the same could be true with people. Like when I talk about those indispensable C players, we're talking about people, users are crutch, not necessarily as an asset in the business. So that's going to how I think about resource allocation is every one of those things can be really powerful if you use it the right way. It can be really damaging to you if you use it the wrong way. So if you want to be the entrepreneur that has time freedom, that has money freedom and doesn't have these linchpin people in your company, you have to use all three of those things like an asset. And what did I do to make it through that? I did the exact opposite of what I just said. I used my time to plug every single hole that I could. I used money to solve the problems when I could. My bias was using time instead of money because I always feared running out of money. So I would just work every hour that I could possibly work in the day to make it happen. And I largely did that. And I think it's hard because we know every business when it grows, it's going to take on some type of debt. Right? In my case, I was able to solve the problem by doing that. But what did I do? I just created this massive culture debt that later I had to actually figure out how to get rid of that and how to improve as a company. If I raised funding instead, for example, I would have had all this money. I could have used all that money to maybe solve those problems different ways. And maybe I wouldn't have had a culture debt. Who knows? But now what do I have? Well, now I have these investors because I borrowed from the money. Right? So it's kind of like in those periods of growth, you sort of, you have to sacrifice something, I think a lot of the times. What I sacrifice was basically my time and the culture of my company. And I just, like, it was like every day is survival. We're going to find some way to make it through this. So give me a specific example. So it's turning money from a liability into an asset or burning your time. So we got a fire right now. Like, podcast is done. You jump on your phone and it's like, yeah, we have a major fire. How would you, instead of using time as burning the time, how would you use the time? It's an asset. Yeah. So when I think of using time as an asset versus a crutch there, a crutch says, we've got a fire. I need to fix this. How do I use my time as an asset instead? While I use my time, I can build the value of the company. What is the value of the company? It's the value of the people within the company. So it means instead of solving that problem, solving that problem through someone else, my team, and in the process, providing growth for them. So instead of solving the problem, I would. I would. And solving the problem. I would get someone else to solve the problem is basically what that looks like, which is such a hard thing to do. And I, and I'm not perfect at this. I've done some problem solving myself. Like, we all like to put on our fire fighter hat sometimes and, you know, fight the fires. And I think that's okay sometimes. But the problem is every time you do that, what does it do? It builds your skill and it diminishes the people that are around you. So the. And I think of how do I actually use all the resources like assets? It's that I want the person on my team to be the kind of person who's already fought this fire for me. So that next time they can do it again. And I've got to as much as like I think I might be able to do it better. I've got to let them do it and sometimes let them fail doing it so that they can become the kind of person you can solve that problem. That's the hardest part. Yes. No, they're going to fail. Yes. Or knowing that they're going to be for us. they're probably going to fail. - They're probably going to fail. - Yeah, and thankfully, I got to a point now, where it's like, I do so genuinely feel about so many of the people in my company that if I touched anything that they did, I would just mess it up because there's so much better than what they do that I am at what they do today. - Today. - Yes, but that's really hard like when you don't have-- - But in the very beginning, when you don't have the track record and you don't have all the right people. - Yeah. - Where I've seen a lot of business owners, like 'cause I've coached so many business owners in the past, is when something goes wrong, they go and chew out that team member, which only means next time that problem arises or similar problem arises, they're not going to go solve that problem and they're going to bring it back to you. And now you're stuck in this loop, this cycle that you can't get out of. - Yeah, I firmly agree with that. I mean, I saw that. I lived that. - Yeah. - So clearly. And it's really only after I actually fixed the problem that I realized how bad it was in the first place. - Fixed the cultural realm or fixed that problem? - I think that the same. To be completely honest with you. I think there's a, I mean, culture includes more than just that. That was a big piece of the culture. Is, you know, nobody likes to not be empowered to solve problems. Like if your employees have to bring you the problems, they're not happy about that. And also you're not happy about that because then you're stuck solving all the problems. Like it's one of those things where if you can figure it out, it's better for everybody. - Yeah. So I want to pivot a little bit here. So there's an element, I guess for your business, you've always had to figure out the churn problem. For me, when I was wholesaling, right? The only churn I had to worry about was turnover of salespeople. - Really? - It was the only churn I had to worry about, right? - Which can be a lot. - Yeah, but it could be a lot. - It could be a lot. - Not like a marketing company, yeah. Totally different. But then when I got, when I added coaching and training to it, we had some churn, but it was like whatever wasn't a big deal. Right? Like if they didn't show up to the calls, they didn't get values anymore. Like the sales is this thing where like after six months, they're like, all right, I got it all figured out, which we know that's not true, but like that's kind of attitude you have. - Yeah. - Right? - Okay, like they churn in six months, okay, fine. That's just the way it is, right? Which is not true, but that's the way I treat it. Like that's just the way it is, right? Now I have a software company. Churn is like the most important metric, right? Like we care about, because like, you know, I've talked about this on the podcast, I'm talking to like PE firms in this and that, like hey, like what has to be true, right? For you to like value this company. And it like, it's the what percentage of people are still with you after 12 months, right? That was who's still with you after six months, which is all like, man, in the sales training size, like after six months, okay, that's what we want to be, right? And I think like we're on average, when we're doing the justice sales training, I think eight months was the average of all the hundreds of people that came through about average, which I was pretty good. But in software, if eight months is your average, like you are a horrific company. Yeah, you need like 70% year-to-year. Yeah, yeah. And so, so we hired our very first customer success person, Paul Perraman, right? The very first person we hired, he started, we hired him, I want to say, end of November. So like maybe beginning of December was like his first, like actually talking to customer. And he said, his mission here, his goal in the customer success role was, I want to have to provide the same experience to the customers that I had when I was working with Bateman Collective, not as an employee, but as a client, right? So he stopped by like as a client every month, when he was working in a wholesaling, every month, they have a call with an account rep account, I don't know what you call them. But like that person actually reviewed the account for the last 30 days and had a report beginning the call, right? It's like, and the feeling he has, like this person cares about my business. And he's like, that's what I want to deliver. So I want you to talk to you about like, what you do, what you've done, what you're doing now with regards to churn. Yeah, it's really interesting. And that's cool to hear what Paul was doing. I do remember, I didn't know he worked for you now, but I do remember that he was a client of ours in Texas. So what do we do for churn? It's at the beginning, the easiest way that I could describe the shift that we went through, is at the beginning when I'm onboarding six clients a week, and I don't know what the heck I'm doing, trying to build a team, trying to go from three to 22 team members over 12 months. What are we? I think the easiest way to describe what we are is reactive at that point. What do we look like now? A lot more proactive. So we wanted to be true to that by the time our client of ours thinks something, we're already on top of that particular thing. So Paul might mention things like, yeah, we came prepared to the monthly meetings and stuff, but even outside of that, when the metrics moved significantly during the month or anything like that, he probably got communication from us along the way, saying, yeah, I noticed that we had a longer than normal stretch here where we don't get leads, just so you know where on top of it, this is what we're seeing, this is what I think we need to adjust accordingly. That kind of proactivity, something that I, this is like a horrible tagline, but the thing going through my mind is we basically made proactivity reactive in the sense that our team has requirements of how proactive they are, and they have to reactively respond to those requirements to end up being super proactive. Meaning there's certain minimum standards. We have something we call it, so five non-negotiables of account management. And there's a whole bunch of them. I couldn't even name them all right now, because this is like not exactly like my zone of the business, but our Corey McEwan, our VP client services, this is his whole brainchild. And for every single member of the team, they have to report every single day that I do my five non-negotiables down to the individual things. It includes things like we've got to be doing prep before we're going to meet with clients. And we have to send them an agenda before we actually have a meeting with them about what we're going to talk about to make sure it's a useful meeting. And you have to show up to the call, and then after the call, you've got to make sure that when we, you know, if we agreed on something that was going to get done, we have to put that in writing and make sure all sides know exactly who's going to do what. It includes things like we have expectations that we're going to be in accounts doing certain levels of optimizations on different levels of frequency. And once a quarter, we're going to be doing like deeper strategy work. It includes like communications, like throughout the month and stuff like that. So we basically create this culture of minimum standards. And that's kind of how I like to manage really most of our employees, if you look at what they have. We don't, so we call them minimums. Now, what makes them, what's the difference between a minimum and then everything? A minimum is truly a minimum. This is the minimum for you to be doing your job. But it should be true that someone can do their minimums and that takes like 10 hours a week and then they've got 30 hours a week, additional to do their maximums in their job. That's like the going above and beyond for clients in ways that they didn't expect us to. And in those kinds of things are like, you know, solving actual time to be reactive with whatever problem popped up or whatever the case is. But that's kind of like how, how we do the management of people things is we set that minimum standard and we hold that floor really tight. Like if you don't do your minimums, you will be fired. That's how it works. And the minimums are not the everythings. There's plenty of room for them to do their job their own way to be themselves. So we say like, here's the standard. You have to at least succeed. And if you just do this, you're not succeeding. You have to go far, far beyond this. But this is exactly to the letter what it looks like to hit the floor. So there's two things here. I feel like I can next Victor and my team. Was it Cory? Yeah, yeah. Oh my goodness, if you can talk to Cory, it's a blessing. Yeah. So I'll have Victor and my team ride his co-tales. I basically feel like I'm just along for the ride. Like this guy's running the show. All right. Cool. So I'll have Victor and my team talk to Cory. Because Victor runs the customer's success team. So we'll do that. Second thing, as you're talking about this, I can't help but think of office space. Right? Or as like-- I haven't seen it. I've heard I need to though. The flares, right? Like, well, you know, you're wearing the middle number of flares. I was like, yeah, this is the minimal. It's like, over here. [LAUGHS] Right? So do you want to be known for doing the minimal? It's like that whole line from that movie. But-- and the third thing, too, you were talking about, like, it feels silly. You're saying that you're reactive to be proactive. But it's reactive to the company data. Proactives to the client. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And that's the key thing is we-- Yeah. And we hear from our clients all the time. They've just never-- they've never quite had the entirety of that experience with any vendor they've worked with on anything-- Yeah. --white on the level that we deliver. And I do it to be that's a core. He's the one who's built out all these things. Because before he did this, he worked for 10 years building out the client experience and enterprise marketing agency where they literally had like one person manages like three clients. And they built that level of service. And of course, we had to water it down from that. A little bit. You know, for-- Through to one is nuts. Yeah. Yeah, although we're actually six to one in employees to clients. Really? Which, yes, is-- We have team members per client compared to our competitors. We have like three times as many team members. Yeah. A lot of people don't realize that we deliver way more. And it turns out it's actually hard to do that. You do need more-- like we're the most expensive in the industry for a reason. Yeah. Well, I've looked at my monthly overhead. And I've made this comment a handful of times like customer success. exceeded every other department in overhead. We spent more on customer success now than we do in marketing. And I didn't expect that when we made this pivot. >> Yeah, I can tell you, agencies that's crazy normal. I mean, your customer success exceeds marketing by like five times. >> Yeah. >> In the agency world, I think SaaS, you know, is a little different. Sometimes a lot of SaaS companies, they don't invest a ton into customer success. But yeah, there's a, but agencies are a good thing to model after if you're looking for like a customer success, centric business. >> Right. >> Because it's everything they have. >> Yeah. >> The gap between wholesalers who are winning right now and the ones who aren't is growing and it's getting worse every single day. And you're not gonna like the reason why. It all comes down to how they're actually using AI. Because the information alone is not the problem. It's the time to figure it out that actually is and we solve that. Three days in Dallas. September 19 through the 21st with myself, Stephanie Batters and Jordan Fleming. We're gonna show you exactly how we built AI into our businesses and how you can do the same thing in yours. You come in unsure exactly where to start or what to do next and you walk out with AI actually running inside your business and all the confidence to keep it going. And we don't just tell you how, we will be sitting next to you building it with you live and in the room. And we got an amazing keynote speaker, the author of Second Command and Vivivision, Cameron Herell himself, who's built 300 million dollar companies like 1-800-GaJunk. And on top of that, we got Facebook, Slack, and Salesforce. And they're gonna be sharing what they only talk about in their private meetings. So if you wanna find out more comment, R.I. tech, and we'll get you signed up for a live event. See what there was something else to say there. But yeah, so it's just really fascinating. It's interesting to see. So now we're talking about how to scale right now, what PPC looks like today. And then we've had this message of, with the advent of, I mean, the way AI is involved today, the old way of doing business. And that's to say like it's dead, but like the traditional way of doing business has been historically, get spend whatever you have to do to get the best lead possible, right? Because you only have so many sales people on your team, and you don't wanna waste their time on low quality leads. I think that's been true historically, and that's a historically last five years maybe, right? But what we're seeing right now on our client base is that we're seeing more of like, more, I think PMACs is the term, right? Get cheaper leads, right? At volume and have AI do this sifting and sorting. - Yeah. - And then you're not wasting yourselves people's time. But you're getting your cost per contract down. Are you seeing anything like that or am I just completely crazy? That's my client base, right? - Yeah, I mean, we're kind of, we're doing a few different things. We have a lot of different strategies that are floating out there. And if I were to describe where we are today, compared to where we were in the past, I'd say it's a lot more balanced in terms of strategy for our clients is probably the best word I would say. And what that comes down to is us just having more ways to succeed for our clients. So they can try more things with us that are actually likely to work as opposed to just scratching it and go like launch with another agency and yeah, from scratch. So let me start, I'll describe where we were in the past. And then we'll talk about some of the things that are shifting a little bit. So where we were in the past, and if anybody wants to dig into this, we've got all kinds of like, you and I, what was it two years ago that we did? - Seven videos. - It was a lot of videos. - It was like, I was here for like five hours talking to you. Like whatever it is, I don't know how many videos we made out of it, but it was like five hours where we broke down so much of what we do as a company. Because the number one feedback that we get from people is BBC is a black box. I don't know how it works. And my message for people is, well, if you're willing to listen to me, I won't be a black box anymore, but you might have to invest like a good bit of time, kind of understanding the box. - A lot of coffee. - Yeah, a lot of coffee, but you can get there. But one of the things that we talked about is keyword strategies. So a PPC key reads are so important. It's what is somebody searching into Google for us to actually show up for our ad. And obviously if you have a completely the wrong keywords, then you're gonna get completely the wrong leads. And the strategies have kind of shifted over time. You always have to have some type of minimum threshold of what you say is good enough for you in terms of a lead. Like an example of this is somebody who is searching for like what is my house worth? Could they be a motivated seller that's gonna click on your ad? They're gonna fill out your form. You're gonna talk to them, qualify them, either house for discount. Absolutely. But how many of those is it gonna take? It's gonna take just a massive number of those people to actually do a deal. Someone's searching for we bag the houses totally different, right? They're gonna be really qualified, usually. So you have to draw the lines somewhere. So we would kind of draw the lines sort of in the middle and include lots of stuff. Some stuff that's a little bit more of what I call a periphery keyword, where it's not exactly what we want, but it's pretty close. And then we would tear the bidding for those things according to quality. So what we would make sure is if we're getting leads from the things that aren't quite as good, well, we know that it's gonna convert a little bit lower. So therefore we have to pay less for that lead. And the ones that are gonna convert higher, we pay more for that lead. And therefore we have about the same cost per contract on the stuff that's good, the stuff that's bad, and we have all this volume at the party disposal. And that's kind of like the old Bateman Collective way. I guess you could say that's how we did it. And that strategy is still, I'd say, a dominant strategy across our clients. The reason it's a dominant strategy, and it works really well, is that it gives you a lot of the scope of what's available. And because of that, it tends to increase the scalability of the campaigns. So you can spend just a lot more money on them and in your market and scale your revenue really high. And it also allows you, because you have a wider scope of what you're targeting, it allows you to bring down your bids and not be quite as aggressive. Almost like your low-balling Google, just looking for the cheaper clicks available from certain terms. So that's kind of the strategy that we had before. There's a really important piece of that strategy called lead quality feedback. Because when we get those leads, because there's a huge scope of what we're targeting, we have to do a really good job of feeding to the algorithm. And Google, are these leads good or are these leads bad? This is the reason a lot of agencies can't really pull off this particular strategy, because you have to connect all the dots to be able to give Google this data. And you also need a massive amount of data to give Google, which we do with aggregating our client portfolio, and we feed it all to Google. So Google's algorithm starts to learn what's good and what's bad. So that's kind of like the old strategies. Well, we target a little more broadly, but we do really good job of communicating to Google what we want. Yeah. And it tends to get us what we want. The problem is sometimes that goes a little bit sideways. So Google's algorithm is not perfect. Sometimes you're doing a really good job of targeting what you think is a lot of the right things. You're doing a good job of getting at the feedback that you want. And you start to see that it gets kind of weird, even from like the same keywords, it starts to now like our cost per clicks going down, our conversion rates going down, the lead quality is getting a little bit less. The sales team starts to say these leads aren't quite as qualified as they were before. Our ally starts to tick down, miss happened to us. We had a client that we worked with for eight years. Yeah. With fantastic results throughout the eight years. And then suddenly year eight, no significant change on our part, but the lead quality just gets significantly worse. And we're just trying to figure out what's going on. We're trying to figure out how to solve this problem. And we always have these problems to some extent where we see that like sometimes Google's algorithm just gets in this kind of weird route, which is not generating the right kind of leads. So we decided to approach it a different way and see if we can solve that problem. Where instead of kind of being all the data to Google and everything we tried to be just a lot more targeted with what we're going after. So the way that we approached that is we took all-- we have this really cool database. We basically have every single thing that anyone has ever searched in Google and then clicked on one of the ads for our clients. And with that, we have the individual search. The individual click, did that person become a leader not? Did that person become an opportune deer not? Did they become a contractor not? Did they close into a deal or not? And what was the revenue from the deal? And so just imagine you got this list of 40,000 different things that these people searched to click and add for one of our clients. And a lot of us came to think of like, can you take a 40,000 different things that someone was searching Google to find out a wholesaler? But they're-- it's there. And they're all like-- the 40,000 is the list that's relevant. There's other things that we excluded in the past that weren't good. Like, this 40,000-- like, a lot of people don't realize that not all motivated sellers search the same things in Google. So we have that whole list. And what's really cool about having that data, this is like if we're talking about data as a mode in a business, it's really fascinating because nobody else has this data. There's a lot of our competitors, including the ones, by the way, that say that they do offline conversion tracking, which I'm talking about, they don't do it. They say they do it. They don't actually do it. Nobody knows how to verify that they do it. So they don't actually have this data because it turns out these search terms with these people actually searching Google, there's literally no way to connect your data of what happened in your CRM to those people in your CRM. Sometimes what they'll do is push the keyword in your CRM. So you can see, oh, they came from this keyword. But the keywords in search terms are different. because the keywords, what you told Google you wanted, which we might have 100 of. The search term is what did the person actually type into Google and we have 40,000 of those. And a lot of them, like the keywords we buy at Glee Houses, the search term is Houses for Salem, Houston. It's like how did Google connect these things together? Yeah, like nobody knows how Google connected them. So, sorry, anyways, what we did is basically take the whole database and we are approaching it in the standpoint of let's find a way to generate a keyword structure that generates a lot of the right kinds of leads because the other feedback that we were getting from clients is that the markets changed a little bit. And a lot. Yeah, a lot. And what people are seeing is this gap between an OK lead and a great lead is just getting a little bit bigger than it was before. Gotcha. And those leads that like maybe we were kind of making them work, you know, it's like they, you know, they weren't great but like we're trying to know them, try to create a finance them, they don't have equity, like whatever. Those ones are just getting a little bit harder and distress is becoming more valuable than it was in years past. This is the general feedback that we're getting from clients. So where that gap between a good lead and a great lead is getting just a little bit wider, those great leads become really, really important if we can find a way to get our hands on like those traditional just really good wholesale leads of just really distress people that want to sell their house. Not the ones that like we can probably convert. Right. So, so that's the feedback that we're getting from people. So we decided to set up this was like the like the ground breaking part of what we did or like the, the, you know, the paradigm shift for us was what if we set up a system where we understand all of the things that people have searched and how they ended up converting. Now we can back test to figure out what is the keyword structure that's actually going to yield us the best results. Yeah. So you take those 40,000 and you basically, well, it's 40,000 but it's like, you know, millions and millions of clicks. Right. So you take those clicks and you separate them out into training data and validation data. I don't know how much you know about machine learning algorithm. I mean, what you're talking about, what sounds like you tell my regression testing. Kind of except it's more than just statistical regression testing. It's like, you know, we looked at all regression was one of the one of the methods that was used. Yeah. Well, now we're just saying regression is like, you got this data, you seeing how would it fit the campaign and if this was the campaign, how it would have performed, if this was the campaign that was structured this way before. Yes. Yeah. So we basically, yeah. So what we do is we'll take the reason I bring this up is this is what Ray Daliottoxpa and Friendsables. Oh, really? The reason why he has the most successful hedge fund of all time was because he would constantly test the theory and it take this theory. Okay. We applied this theory looking back. What we had because like you have the data, right? And it'll give you a new theory. Yep. After the fact, if we applied this theory and we went backwards, how would it have done the last 10 years, last 20 years, last 70 years? Yeah. Okay. If this would have been true and it's been more productive the last 70 years, then we should have this theory moving forward. And they were constantly regression testing and it's like, okay, and that's how we create again, yeah, the most successful hedge fund of all time. And how many good ideas do people have that just don't hold up when you actually test what it would have done right from the beginning of time until now. Like I'm 100% with you. So, so that's where because we were hypothesizing like different ways to do these keyword structures and then we're like, you know what? We could just test the same thing. Yeah. So we so we basically create the test and we built all kinds of different ways to build keyword structures. And the and then we train the structure on two-thirds of the data. We validate it against the one-third of the data that's remaining and then we do like a hundred different splits of the validation versus training data and you know smooth out a lot of the irregularities. So, sorry, you guys are listening and this sounds really nerdy because you got two nerfs here talking about. Yeah, Steve, I need to be like more interested in this than you might want to be or than you probably should be. So, so that's what we did. And basically what we realized this by the way is really similar to how like AI data companies work. Yeah. Oh, yeah, machine learning. They're in somewhere. Yeah. So, yeah. But the idea is, you know, they're trying to predict like who's going to sell their house. We're trying to predict what is the likelihood that this person's going to sell their house to us if they search the thing on Google. And you can always narrow in on quality. But the problem with narrowing in on quality is well now you just excluded 95% of what's out there. So, get the 5% that's the highest quality and that's not enough or our cost gets astronomically expensive if we were to just put on this because we have to bid through the roof is we have to win the auction every time because there's no other way that we're going to actually get enough volume. It's really a number of deals that we need to do. So, that's the problem with going to high quality. But if you go to higher and volume and it's like well now we just got to bring every lead under the sun into our CRM so that we can do the quality versus the quantity. You have quality versus quantity. And you can kind of like so we put a we made a graph of what percentage of past contracts that our clients got would have been covered by this keyword set versus at what leads per contract would we have gotten those. And what we found is for given like we so we tested thousands, thousands of different methods of making keyword structures and all that stuff. And if you picture this graph there's all these dots everywhere but there's kind of like a barrier that the dots just never make it past. It's like a diagonal that represents sort of the best coverage of contracts that you're able to get given a certain level quality threshold or the best quality that you can get given a certain level of contracts coverage threshold. And that from there is created a line basically the line that represents the you know the optimal keyword structure and optimal keyword structures one that is on the line one that is off of the line is therefore not well. And then there's several on the line like you could be more narrow you can be lighter. So that's what we basically turned into here is like well so now it's before it was like well we kind of have this one point on the line that we're trying to optimize for. And now we've got sort of our more broad type of approach. We've got something kind of in the middle and then we've got like the more narrow types of approaches that we can do. But yeah what we've been doing that's really popular is we call it 1825. If that was just like the name of that particular model it was just one dot of the thousands on the chart and it represented we are testing the statistical likelihood that this particular keyword produces search terms that are going to perform at or less than 18 leads per contract in order to be included or at or worse than 25 leads per contract in order to be excluded. And that one that one killed it compared to the other ones and what we're finding is for for our clients that we're implementing this for. So if you look at our average cost per contract right now it's down by about 15% you're over year. If you look at the cost per contract of this new structure compared to the old one it's actually it's actually a little bit less compared to the old one right now. But what's really happening is so many of our clients that weren't we weren't able to get the results we wanted with the old one this new structure just gives them a completely different shot. So they're working with the same agency that they were before but they're taking just a wildly different strategic approach that has just like a completely different likelihood of working. Sometimes we're testing like both of these at the same time for clients. We're giving them kind of like the feeling as if they're you know as if they're working with multiple PPC agencies with very different strategies at the same time and yet they're just working with one agency that can kind of understand the data between the different strategies and try to optimize between them. But we're taking like you know lifeless marketing campaigns and actually turning them around with this new strategy which is so interesting. Despite like the average result being pretty similar it's just it's working where the other one did not. Right. Well I think for someone's listening if this is either overwhelming or sounds like really nerdy or boring. This is the kind of stuff you have to figure out and understand in like paper click. Like the reason why I can't do today but the reason why my paper click I was doing my mom before. So I have an engineering background and I can like look at the data. I compile the data. It's like review the data. It's the data part. This is not the sexy part of wholesaling. Right. Yeah. But this is the part where like are you going to make get a good ROI on your PPC marketing or not. Yeah. Yeah. And the other the other thing about this you'll notice is like you can't do it without the data. So that's the key things like I don't even mind every time I go on your podcast and I tell about something we're doing like we like invariably see all our competitors start to like try to do the same thing. It's like they got like someone listening to these ones trying to figure this stuff out. But the thing about this one is nobody has the data set. Right. You need the data set in order to build the keyword structures. But it's so cool because I can even simulate like we have people that come in for audits with us and I can simulate like because we have our thousands of different structures every backtested and you can put whatever structure they're already using on that graph and see where it is. And it's it's funny because like you know none of there's nor the structure we were using before is truly on the line. So there's always a little improvement like we haven't found a way to get past the line. That's why the line is there. But yeah, it's yeah, it's really it's really fascinating. And like I said, it's it's we have clients that that just we could not get results for where we want to put our time we're able to get results and then they fell off where this has made a big difference. Gotcha. And then we're talking about multiple lines on on that chart. Is it so that you can figure out an optimal budget for their account? Well, the thing about that is there's just it's like imagine running a niche direct mail campaign. For example, versus running one where you're sending like a big a big amount of volume. They're just very different strategies like are you going after the stack list versus versus like the the wider one. That's kind of how it is with PPC. So we know like I can tell you this new strategy surprisingly, the cost per click is double literally double what we were paying for the the other campaigns structures we have. But they convert into leads a little bit higher. The leads convert into opportunities higher. The opportunities convert into contracts higher. The deals are bigger when they close. So everything's just a little better down the funnel because the, like, is a higher quality one in the beginning. So it's not necessarily budget based. If we do one versus the other, it's just sort of there's that tradeoff between them. So what we're doing right now is we're kind of, we've learned to recognize the signs that Google's just doing something a little bit funky. And we're implementing the different structure accordingly to see that what we gave it, we gave it the right direction, but it's just kind of going a weird direction with this. So we have to give it something different that's going to narrow it in on what exactly we want. Because there's, like, to give you an example of the kind of stuff we see, like I've got one market now, we had a client just brushing it, like 10x plus returns over significant volume. And we had another client in the market who were able to lead quality. Same budget, same market. We made sure that the campaigns were managed, they made similarly. There's no priority in Google of like this one was there first, or like we control for literally everything you can control for. And then because Google's just an AI system that just sometimes, like the machine learning algorithms, they just work a little differently one time versus the other, it's, you can get wildly different outcomes, even when we control for everything else. So this was our solution to trying to figure out how to solve those problems. Because a lot of people assume, like, if I didn't get good results, because my agency didn't do a good job, or if I do get good results, it's because they did a great job. It's like sometimes, you know, a blind squirrel makes a PPC campaign, it just takes off because it just happened to work that way. And sometimes you don't. But I think the best marketers are those that are most capable of adapting when something doesn't go to plan. Because it eventually, it won't. - Yeah, well, it's given an eye on the campaign at all times. - Yeah, yeah, absolutely. - Yeah. Is there anything else as far as like newer stuff in 2020? The other thing that I would extend, so I was talking about, that's how we're getting really niche. The other thing that's really fascinating, there's any PPC nerds that are familiar with Broadmatch keywords. - Yeah. - Those have been really interesting recently. So the Broadmatch keywords, if you're not familiar, I know you are Steve, everybody else. - Right. - There's different types of keywords. Exact match keywords are when you're telling Google, I want this, but it has to be really dang close to this. Praise matches, like, it could be a little further away. Broadmatch is like, I tell you, I tell you, I want Apple, and then if somebody searches for like, broccoli, yeah, it's like, you know, it grows, it's a plant, like, you know, we're fine, right? So Broadmatch keywords are, like, if anybody here manages their own PPC or something, it might like scare you, the idea of Broadmatch keywords, because if you've ever implemented them, you probably seem to just go at�oriously horrible, because Google starts to target all kinds of things that are cool. - And this is like the antithesis of the strategy I just told you about. But so we've been tracking, we've been trying to figure out Broadmatch keywords for years, and we've been tracking our leads per contract on it. And it was hovering between 25 and 35 for years. And then finally, Q3 of 2025, suddenly 11. 11 leads per contract on Broadmatch keywords. Q4 went up a little bit, 15, still pretty dang good. It has stayed around there since Q4 of last year, all the way through now. So Broadmatch keywords historically performed really poorly in the industry. They, or us at least, they started to perform really well. And we have, at this point, about nine months of performance, really suggesting that they've been performing really well. So there's a way, there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. But if you implement them the right way, what it does is it gets you on all of those queries that your competitors just aren't getting, because they just, very rarely happen. There's, because if you're using Fraser for exactly my, match keywords, you're targeting this list of things that everybody knows about. Right. If you're using Broadmatch keywords, there's going to be something that search, somebody searches tomorrow that has never been searched in the history of mankind on Google. And it's going to be matched to your keyword in Google's, and try to see if the intent's similar. And it's not going to be absolutely perfect. But if, like I said, we're getting, we're getting really good leads per contract numbers on that. And you just opened up 30% more volume, usually is what we get with Broadmatch keywords. So now you can spend 30% more budget, or you can actually get a lower cost per contract within the same budget. So Broadmatch keywords, if you implement them properly, are working really well right now. And that's kind of like the full scope. So when you're asking how we've changed, we've actually kind of brought into that way. And we've also, we're doing more of the niche type campaigns. And we're just experimenting with those different things to see that's working for our clients for each individual account. Well, Broadmatch historically has been horrific. But at the same time, Google didn't know everything about you. Yeah. Now Google knows everything about you. And that's truly the value of that wider approach. If you really open up the funnel like that, is because Google has more than 10,000 data points per user. And what they search right now is literally one of those data points. So if we go with the more niche type strategy that I was telling you about before, that's what happens when we're really saying, we really want to focus on what people are searching. Yeah. What's going into the search bar? Yeah. That's what we're targeting. Right. Versus when you go for stuff like Broadmatch, like yeah, it's looking at what they search. And also, we have to be feeding the algorithm with a little neat feedback data. And it has to be looking at everything else. That's true about that person. And it's doing a good job of finding the right kind of people otherwise. And their Gmail saying, like, you're for closure payments. Or your bank, your mortgage statement is lit. I didn't even think about that one. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's examples of data that Google has that we don't. That is really powerful. And that's why you can't like, you can't manually optimize your way to everything. So yeah, those strategies, your emails, your mortgage balances late or repayments late, there's YouTube videos like, hey, I want to do a loan mod. Like what's involved in that? Google has that data that we just don't have. Yeah, absolutely. And that's why I've always been a big proponent of, you know, give Google a free long leash and tell it exactly what you want. And yeah, that's kind of how we're running things right now. I was like, yes, give Google a long leash. Yes, tell it what you want. And when you notice that it's just running in the complete round direction, try this. Yeah, this different strategy to kind of relate to is like, for me, was that with a broad match, I felt, okay, with a broad match so long as I had a really good negative keyword list. Yeah, you have to be, you have to be really on top of your negatives. And honestly, when I see people come to us with like they, they had a, you know, they're not getting the success that they want with with PPC oftentimes, broad matches, one of the biggest problems that we're seeing in accounts. So I'm here saying like, it's great, but it is under a couple of different circumstances. Yes, many circumstances. And we don't even like, it's not like we do broad match of all of our different keywords. We do, we do a few selected broad match keywords. We set them up in like their own silo where they have limited budget and special control bids of what's going towards them. Like there's, there's a very, there's a very specific way to do this. You got guard rails. What did you say? You got guard rails and guard rails and guard rails. So many guard rails. Yeah. And if you do that right, broad match, I think it could be really good. But I think if the average person listening to this just says, oh, broad match works. Great. I'm going to go do it. I don't think it would actually work for them. You want to make sure it's, it's, it's got to be tightly controlled. Yeah. And then one other things is trending right now is you see a lot of AI, I'm screaming about AI on the mountain top. I'm talking about AI, non-stop. Right. Of course, the intro, everybody gets a positive. Right. I get people saying like, you know, shut up. So I'm talking about AI so much. Right. But this is here. This is the future. Yeah. So like, are you getting people like, um, bombarding or maybe like overly loud about AI in a marketing set? Well, it's interesting is I feel like what we do has not changed too much with AI except you know, something in, in some podcast in the past that we talked about is actually it did change a lot with AI, but it was like five years before all this other AI stuff pumped up. The, yeah, the interesting topic right now that people are talking about when it comes to AI and Google search is Google itself has to change quite a bit like Google has the AI overviews now. And there's risk of other companies like chat GBT's the, you know, the biggest one right now for this, but they're just stealing AI, they're stealing search volume from Google in theory. Now, what we've seen is, yes, there are people who are using stuff like chat GBT instead of Google, but we're not seeing it really impact the Google organic search results right now. So because the biggest topic here is like SEO. And we do SEO for our clients. We're actually doing it for twice as many clients as we were last time I came on your podcast. Yeah. We're doing a lot of SEO these days and I know I talk about PPC so much, but SEO is, you know, it's almost like PPC's what people want SEO is what they need. That's an awesome channel. And what we're still finding is the number of motivated sellers that are finding our clients through AI is increasing actually very rapidly. However, it is still minuscule compared to the number that are finding them through traditional Google search. So there's a lot of people out there right now talking about, well, you have to be doing this. It's called AIO or geo like these, you know, gender, it avenge an optimization type campaigns like in place of SEO. And I think that's a lot bigger in a lot of industries that have a younger demographic and that are very informational where people are, you know, like a HubSpot for example where they're selling to like tech people and most of their blogs are about information. Like they're getting slaughtered by the move to AI people are scrunch at you PT to find the answers instead of HubSpots log, but they would find in Google right. And in this industry because the queries are very commercial. Because the demographics are older that's happening a lot less and it's one of those situations where it's like Where is the ball versus where is the ball going? It's definitely going that direction. I think I think AI is going to be feeding being this a lot more than Then just traditional search engines Lawn into the future, but you know, we're still in an industry where the outside of PPC the biggest channels are people TV and direct mail. Yeah, and how many times the people said that those were dead? Yeah, so many times because it's an older demographic And it just takes a really long time to change and move. So the way that we're approaching that for our clients Like the the shortest route I could describe it is We we do have clients succeed none of those things like I was just talking to a client the other day that has They're about $500,000 in their first year of SEO and 250 from that is from from AI search results Believe it or not. So there's like examples of that that are popping up that are really interesting But overwhelmingly for the most part SEO is like a better cost versus return investment than the AI optimization stuff Just because there's so many more people going to Google right now in the industry. Yeah, however, I do expect that to be changing So we're spending a lot of time studying how that's shifting and we're spending a lot of time optimizing kind of in between because the Chat chat BTE for example and Google they leverage a lot of the same Strength signals to understand what content they're they're actually going to organically promote So there are like I'd say most things that you can do From an SEO standpoint to get better rankings in Google are also going to help you in places like chat GPT Yeah, well, I think the other thing too is like you hear the success stories. I got a deal from a from AI right but it's like Seven conversations someone and they're like I don't want to buy a Tesla because these things catch fire right But then you look at the statistics and They're way lower compared to gasoline cars But every time a Tesla catches fire it's front page news. Yeah, but when a Nissan catches fire like yeah, whatever It's a car. Yeah, it's a combustion engine like what would you expect exactly? So like on average Tesla's a catch fire less than every other gas car but I would not have guessed that actually because I was equally influenced by what you're talking about I assume they just call them fire way more often. Yeah, so like statistically, but If you get a deal sold from AI. Yeah, yeah, everyone know that hey, you know, they found me at chat GPT But if I bought a house from Google PBC, I would never post about it on Facebook. Yeah, yeah, I I yeah, I don't want to be like the AI in Naysay or anything like that because I'm actually like as far as for example This is that you're doing yeah, AI's 100% changing the industry in a ton of different ways. Yeah, it's just as far as search goes It's a little bit of a different game and I actually think it's 100% changing. Yeah, I just think it has so far to go before because you have to think This is a resource allocation decision, right? Yeah, I don't think where does it make sense for me to spend my money Does it make sense for me to spend all my money like getting this ranking that will get me a couple leads a month or does it make sense for me to spend all my money? Getting this ranking that'll get me dozens of leads per month. Yeah, it just does not You know the cost benefit isn't right there yet for like the AI specific stuff But I do think I do think there's so many like a lot of our clients started getting really great rankings in language models Before we even did anything when they just had really strong SEO presences like that shows how strong Well, it's like a person says I think I was like listen to Tom Crowe speak one time, right? And one of the things I surprised me When he was speaking here. He's like he puts 4% of his money in the crypto and his thing was like it's not that crypto is the future But you know just in case right and so it's like We're not saying don't put money in the AI. It's just like put majority of your money Mm-hmm. It's nothing else Put put resources in the AI of course. Yeah, it's on the ground top of it It's all points you want to be there half of your money in the AI of of course That's exactly how I would say it and recognize that there's there's ways you could play both sides at the same time I don't think of them as a completely different things. Yeah, there's there's a Number of things that are a little bit different of course between them But a lot of the things that are different are kind of also leading things so It's the because the core truth is still there all of these different platforms Google all the AI They want to give the most relevant authoritative information to whoever's searching for particular information. Yeah, and Your job is to be that and to show that you are that right and all the like algorithmic stuff is just the way that they got there Well, this is where SEOs have been getting things wrong from the beginning of time is well The algorithm is like like this do a bunch of this and then you know Google shifts their algorithm and then everybody Like who did that their rankings tank because Google realized that you doing that and you actually being relevant and authoritative are two different things So the game is and always has been to just be who Google wants you to be And be who the language models want you to be in order to to actually get recommended a lot and prove that you are that and then as you do that Then as the whole world changes it changes in your favor and it starts Burden your competitors that are just the spamming ones that are trying to chase the algorithm change And I've always believed that our clients have always I think gotten a little bit slower SEO results because of that Because we focus on just those really good foundational things like very white hat SEO campaigns But when algorithm changes happen It's more likely that it actually favors our clients. Yeah, then it takes them down Everybody talks about algorithm changes like oh, and everybody gets the rankings dropping when the algorithm changes like no They don't for everybody who has a ranking drop there has to be someone else who has a ranking increase. Yeah, so why not just be the guy who has the ranking increase when the algorithm changes Instead of just like always dropping and then trying to find the new way to manipulate the algorithm very different way of looking at it. Yeah So we talked about the changes and he mentioned is a master class Resource we're working someone find out more if if you didn't if you're still listening and you want like more information Where can they get more information about? EBC. Yes, you can so this is if you're looking for like the informational content. Yeah, you can go to Bateman collective doc on slash force Mm-hmm on that link and we'll put it in the show notes too. There is a master class I want to say it's ten episodes in the series. This is something that we did like at the end of Q4 Last year and it was in response to a lot of people telling us this feeling that they had that PPC's a black box Yeah, and we actually wanted to add more value to our clients too So we invited all our clients this for free and we said, you know what we're just gonna we're just gonna tell you A bunch of the stuff that we know we're gonna lay it out like this is like whiteboard style We're just kind of talking to these Tom's through these concepts is very much a training not like an SOPA We're not like go press this button in Google. It's more like this is how you have to understand this how you have to think about it Yeah, how you have to think about it because it's the level of stuff like even if you don't want to do your own PPC This is the level of understanding that really helps you as a business owner and I'll give just one simple example of this. I just interviewed It's just top of mind because it was two days ago on my podcast. I just interviewed one of our clients. He's been with us for several years He was you actually see him in the masterclass. He's one of the most like active engaged people in the masterclass and I haven't even I haven't talked to him since just seeing him on the masterclass And you know he pops up on our podcast list comes on I'm talking to him about what happened He's like actually that masterclass really changed my business. So this guy's a solo operator He's gonna do he's he's on track to do seven figures in revenue as a solo operator this year with one marketing channel PPC and you know what last year you'll see him in the masterclass like he was doing pretty well He was at a five extra turn on his PPC now he's nearing like I spent like 10,000 a month and doing seven figures in revenue in a year Like that's you know, for example 10 extra terms. Yeah, so what happened was you know We had been working with him we've been trying to figure out how to make the PPC work really well for him But the thing is a lot of the strategy components and Specifically location strategy was the big one for him or it's like it's really hard for us to make those decisions on behalf of the client Because so much of it depends on their business and how it operates So we came to the masterclass and through the masterclass He learned about how all of those things work and then it kind of unlocked its mind wait this strategy might actually work better For me for my locations implemented at the beginning of the year since then he's doing his first six figure months He's on track to do seven figures this year So it's that that's the kind of value that if you really understand this stuff because otherwise you're it's like you kind of Understand your business, but you don't know anything about the marketing channel the marketing people understand the marketing channel But don't know anything about your business and both sides tried to understand the other a little bit We're not going to get to the same place as if you were actually on the same side of the table and had as much context as you possibly could So I recommend the masterclass for that like it's it's designed for business owners that want to understand their stuff better Yeah, I mean most of the people there were our clients and they pay us to do the PPC anyways right but they're just they're just there because they want to learn So it's baitman collective comm slash course if you want to take a look at that like what he said when he's on the podcast Like you guys could have charged like tens of thousands of dollars for that Because it's it's like truly more in depth Than the PPC courses in the industry that you could pay tens of thousands of dollars for yeah, but we don't have any interest in making money from courses Like we're just here to we're here to show you what PPC done right looks like And then you're gonna look around you're gonna realize there's no where else to get it done right Right working with baitman collective in your work with us anyways Perfect, and then you're gonna be at ritech unlocked Yes, well as a company we will be there. I have no idea if I'm gonna be there or not But baitman collective will be there yes, and you will get to talk to somebody who knows what they're talking about yeah, yeah So why should someone go to ritech unlocked? I mean you know better than I do Steve I've heard it seems like a really cool event that you guys are pulling together like the first really technology focused Yeah, in in the industry and you know the ability to actually interact with vendors and really understand what they're talking about, and not just get pitched, like actually use the technology. - Yeah. Well, the reason why, for us, the reason why we're having it, is we're just as guilty of this, right? It's like, "Hey, you want to find out more about the product?" All right, you gotta jump in and talk. Jump in a call, talk to a salesperson, right? - Yeah. - There will be no talk to a salesperson, you're gonna actually have a full demo, right? You can see the back end, if I'm logged in, or I'm gonna count, or if I'm a client, what does everything look like? So basically, every vendor is gonna be showing up with a computer. Here's what the back end looks like. It's not a sales pitch, like, let me just show you what this looks like. So I'm excited about that, so I appreciate it. Like you guys are gonna be represented as well. So any last thoughts, do you wanna leave all the listeners with? - Yeah, so, yeah, the one final thing I spent a little bit of time thinking about before this episode is, what is my advice for somebody that is looking for an agency in this space? And I'm gonna give you an opportunity to book with our team if you feel like that could be right for you. I can tell you, knowing what I know now, I would have said something different in the past. I'll probably say something different next year. Like, we're all changing, we're all growing people. I would look for two things. I think you'll find them here. Number one, what is the culture of the company? Because the culture of the company dictates how the people in the company are treated. And the people in the company cannot treat the clients of the company better than they themselves are treated. Yeah. I think you could look, you could try to judge, like, look, I could be here, and I could be like some snake oil salesman, just trying to say, like, here's all the, the, you know, PPC strategies that we have that are working for us. And like, anybody can say that. But if, if I'm a genius, is that what's gonna make your results good? You care about my team, right? You need the kind of company that grows their people that has really qualified people, working in the right environment that gets the most out of those people. That's how you actually get the most out of your campaigns. So, so number one, I would say, look into the culture of the company, the NPS, great metric for that. I would say, I would say, we have a company in the company, is another really interesting thing. Like, you know, sometimes people think, well, you guys are so much more expensive. Well, yeah, we pair people so much more. Would you rather work with the company that underpays their people? Yeah. Would you rather work with the one that pays their people well? So, so that's number one. Number two, how many employees they have, or client? Or how many clients per employee, I guess, is the better way to put it? Like I mentioned, we're at, I have 0.7. Right now, you talk to most of our competitors, it's gonna be a lot worse. And that's in 5.7, that's like total employees, it's not necessarily like, per account manager. But different companies have a different ways. Like, we have a lot of support around the account managers, like all the different teams that are actually executing a lot of the work. And, you know, that's what it's required, I think, to actually provide a world-class PPC service. You can't have one guy managing 50 clients, crossing your fingers that he's not gonna miss something on your account. That's a big problem. So, those are the two things I would ask. If you ask us, you can find the culture is fantastic. You can find that there's, we're properly staffed to be able to provide an actual good experience for our clients and actually good results. If that sounds interesting to anybody who's listening, you can go to batemancollective.com/book. That's a link that you can use to book something directly with our team. There's two things you can do with that. One, you just talk to us about, what is it, you know, what is it gonna look like to work with you? And, you know, what do you know about my market? All those kinds of standard questions. You can absolutely do that. Number two, if you're running a PPC campaign right now, and it's not performing the way that you want it to perform, we routinely, like several times a week, find tens of thousands of dollars of wasted and it's spent in PPC campaigns. And we're always more than happy to do that kind of exercise for you. We can have someone qualified from the team who'll actually dig through your data themselves. And, you know, it's, the burden's on them to convince you of what's actually happening in there. Like, they should be able to back up whatever they're gonna say with data. And sometimes we do say, like, everything looks right here. Yeah, you're talking about higher ass. Like, that actually happens sometimes. But oftentimes what happens is you'll share what's actually going wrong. Like, we had someone just the other day, they're like, you're not getting these leads from people looking for a property management company. I can't figure out what's there. We just look in the search terms and it's like all property management companies searches. It's like, well, there it is. We connected the dots of what's wrong with your PPC campaign. It was like, it's amazing. In the required genius. So, so anyways, I encourage you, it's batemancollective.com/book. If you want us to look at what you're doing, if you want to export running the new campaign with us, we're happy to talk to you. Awesome. Perfect. So, thank you. Much. Yeah, we talked about how to connect with you guys. So, thanks so much. Thank you, Steve. We appreciate it. Thank you guys for watching. See you guys next time. ♪ Try not to steal train ♪ ♪ Jump on a steal train ♪ ♪ Disrupt us ♪