044 | How to Turn Your Marketing and Branding into a Revenue Machine: Eddie Maalouf’s Strategy

00:06 – Patrick Lonergan (Host)
Welcome back to the Vital Strategies Podcast. I’m your host, patrick Lonergan, and in today’s episode we’re interviewing Eddie Malouf. Eddie is a marketing and branding genius behind the business named BAD Marketing. Bad stands for bold and disruptive. He’s one of our clients and we get a front row seat to see how Eddie runs his business and makes decisions. In our conversation you’ll get insight from Eddie on what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. I highlight some of the strengths I see in Eddie and get his insights on how he developed those traits.

00:36
I’d be a fool if I didn’t ask Eddie some marketing and branding questions while I had him. So we get into what it takes to generate attention that entrepreneurs can turn into revenue. Finally, stay to the end to hear why Eddie thinks I should buy the Ferrari. Let’s dive in with Eddie Maloof. Eddie, I appreciate you joining me on the show today. I’m excited to talk to you for a couple different reasons. A, I think you are a fantastic business owner, entrepreneur, you do things really well, and I also am excited to talk about the marketing piece from a pure business perspective. The only way business works is generating revenue. The way you generate revenue and growth is through marketing, which just drives the growth engine. So thanks for joining us here today.

01:22 – Eddie Mallouf (Guest)
Thanks for having me man Super excited for everyone that’s listening. Patrick and his team handle all my money and tell you what to do with it. So we have a very intimate relationship over the last few years.

Yes, Thank you, and it’s been fun to have a front row seat to all the cool things that you’re doing, so I just appreciate when we think about business owners. I had a mentor of mine tell me once that you grow at the rate in which you make decisions, and I look at how you have grown so quickly and I love how you will take in the information. You know how much data you need before you can be like, yep, I’m in or I’m out, and so where did that come from? How did you develop that skill? Because I think it’s valuable and I don’t think many people do it very well.

I appreciate that I’ve always thought, like, logically I think just over time in my life, but like, logically speaking, if me and you have a year now, obviously each decision you make is a different size, right? Who you marry is different than what you’re eating for lunch today. But at the grand scheme of things, if I’m making 10,000 decisions this year and you are making 100, I’m likely going to be living maybe not 100x what you are, but let’s just say 5 to 10x, maybe, right, not even just in business, but in life, because you’re lagging on your decisions and you’re wasting all this time when you have all the information necessary to make the decision. Yet you’re lagging for no reason and if you don’t know the answer, it’s practically a coin flip, right, and it’s going to be a coin flip in a week. And it’s probably gonna be more of a coin flip in a week because that data and information is further from the day you made the decision.

03:00
And so I just look at it as what’s the point of wasting time, having this decision take up mental space? Because, let’s be honest, man, these things, they sit in your brain and if you don’t take them out and answer them or decide on them, they’re there, it’s like, oh, you got to have this conversation with this person, don’t forget. And it just kind of sits there and it bothers you and it takes up mental bandwidth and space, and so I just try to make a decision as quickly as possible and even with you right, like you bring me a lot of really good tax strategies, and we were just talking about this, like the moment that you’re giving me information on the strategy and I’ve decided I don’t want to do it, for whatever reason, I don’t even let you keep. I’m just like, hey, okay, cool, it’s not, not an option. Don’t bring this up to me again for these reasons. You know what I mean? Yep, and I just think speed wins, especially in today’s world.

I love that and we’re going to get to that later. But we make decisions and, as entrepreneurs, regularly we’re screwing things up. We have to adjust. So how do you handle? Like, okay, I got into something. It wasn’t as awesome as I thought it was going to be. Now I need to adjust. The data is telling me that this isn’t working out well. How do you handle?

those decisions that maybe weren’t home runs. It just depends. So one, is this something that I still think is worth pursuing in the opportunities there, but maybe it’s not as quickly as I want it to be. Yes, let’s keep doing it. Two, is this just something that we have to accept is a sinking hole of money that we’ll keep feeding in hopes with really low odds that we’re going to succeed at it? Like example, I mean, you’ve been me through this and I guess these are things I can say right Because it’s my info.

04:31
So I built a software company to piggyback off of a marketing company that I built. So I built a marketing company for certain kinds of businesses. Then I built a software company for those businesses because I saw there’s a massive need in the marketplace, spent probably a quarter million dollars, a couple years worth of time In doing so. Covid wiped out the whole industry. It hurt the marketing side. So we weren’t able to keep feeding clients to the software. And because I couldn’t actively think about growing the software company, this money was just sinking every month on developers, on sales team, whatever it was, and it just wasn’t bearing the fruits of what I wanted it to be.

05:06
And there’s an opportunity cost to everything when it comes to your time, and so I had to make the decision to cut off something that I probably, all in, probably spent 400, 500 K. That’s a huge home run. That’s a fully built operating software that my businesses run on. Just because I have opportunities that are maybe much bigger, quicker, and it’s okay, I had to cut that off. But there are times when we launch things and they don’t do as well as we want them to in the first six months, like a restaurant business that I bought. I bought the restaurant business. We wanted to grow it, but we actually paused for six months and we had to fix a bunch of stuff, like pulling back an arrow. Essentially, we had to fix a bunch of stuff in order to get to a point where we can expand and grow. We still believe that opportunity was what it was, so we didn’t abandon it, we just changed our forecasts or expectations of what it’s going to look like.

I love it, and I think that example there also leads me to the next thing. I think you see opportunity with partnerships and working with operators that maybe have skill sets that you don’t have. Can you talk a little bit about what are those characteristics? Because you’re regularly putting together deals where you’re investing in companies or bringing on partners to work together, and I’m sure everybody that you’re probably looking at new opportunities every day and not everybody makes it through the Eddie filter. So what does that filter look like? How are you deciding? Hey, this guy knows how to make things happen.

Okay. So there’s, there’s two sides, there’s people and there’s opportunity. So how do I look at the opportunity? How do I look at the people? The people’s a hard one because, um, I’m over opportunistic with people.

06:36
I trust people too easily because I I’m saying this like as humbly as possible I’m a really good person. I’m saying this like as humbly as possible, I’m a really good person and therefore, like ethically, morally, like I have never screwed anyone and I automatically kind of assume that that’s human nature because of that self-reflection. I think that’s why I, like people who like lie a lot, think that you’re lying all the time. Right, it’s just kind of a self-reflection of what they would be doing, and so I get punished for that. So I do make a lot of bad decisions in partnerships. I’ve probably been screwed once a year from a partner in some sort of company, maybe once every two years, let’s say, on average, which sounds awful. But in those two years I’m making eight partnerships. If I’m getting screwed on one of them because I made a wrong read, or two of them, I think that’s just like the law of averages at that point. But what I do look for most importantly is someone who I think I trust is the number one factor. And number two are they self-driven to do the things that I direct them to do? Because I’m kind of at a point where I don’t have a lot of time to do things, so I have to direct people to do things and then they have to do those things, and so, from that standpoint, can they self-direct themselves sometimes and not have to have me tell them all the time what to do? I think is super important. But I’ll tell you, in every business, patrick, there’s two sides there’s revenue and there’s operations. And that’s kind of how I break down. It’s offense defense. Just like any sport, like the whole world revolves around push and pull offense defense. Whatever it is, business is the same. And so, depending on the business, where does my skillset lie? Is it on offense or defense? And I’m looking for the opposite.

08:13
So when I bought the restaurant business, I knew my skillset was branding, marketing, bringing in more revenue, fixing the marketing systems, the POS system, what the menu looks like, the branding of the business, everything, and then getting money from investors. I knew I could do that, but I knew I definitely never wanted to step into a kitchen. I definitely never want to run a location. I definitely never want to fry a French fry. I never want to serve anyone. It’s not what I want to do and I will never do it.

08:35
And so I needed someone to play defense, which was that side of the business. And so I went to all the restaurants that are currently working. I picked the one that was doing the best financially and on the ground and I made those people my business partners for the main franchise to run the whole thing. I’m just finding those gaps on the other side of offense or defense that I can’t play on in that business because you never want to. I mean, you can play both sides to start the business, but eventually your first hire should be the opposite side anyways, right? So that’s kind of how I’m gauging people that I get into business with, but I make a lot of mistakes. You know I get sued by people all the time.

I generally default to trusting people. I just feel like I’m going to give you the chance to like we’re going to do business together until you give me a reason not to trust you and then we’re probably done. But I agree, I just feel like life is so much easier when, and move so much smoother when, I just default to trusting people, and I learned that the hard way, that everybody’s not like me when I first started with rental property. You know I’m I’m hustling, I’m collecting the rents and people are telling me, like you know, my grandma died, my car needs fixed, like I’ll pay you next week. I was such a sucker, you know, I was gave people the benefit of the doubt and then all of a sudden I’m, I’m funding their, their house. So I’ve learned a lot of lessons in those, uh, those timeframes. But, um, in general it’s uh, it’s paid off for me as well, so that’s very good, yeah, so I appreciate the the insight to Eddie.

09:59
As an entrepreneur, I love the push, pull the-defense. I think that that makes a lot of sense. You need both sides of the equation right, like it doesn’t matter how much revenue I generate if I can’t operate the business and if I operate really well and can’t, you know, generate any revenue. It doesn’t work. So I think that leads me to the next thing you own and operate bad marketing. Bad stands for bold and disruptive, which I think is brilliant, thank you. Yeah, the marketing just drives revenue into businesses and I think you do a great job of that. You can you just give us an outline overview of all the different maybe businesses that Eddie’s involved in, that sort of sit in this, this marketing space, and then we’ll sort of dig into marketing from there?

Meaning like the types of businesses we work with as an agency.

Yeah, that would be good. And then I’m also thinking of Eddie as entrepreneur. Like here’s all of the different things that we’re doing to, from a business perspective, around the marketing space, because we’ve got agency founders, we’ve got bad marketing, we’ve got all of these different things that we’re doing around marketing to just be profitable within the marketing space.

So bad. Marketing. Essentially overview. We work with three categories of businesses either local type, businesses on a small scale who are serving a local market. So I’ll give an example. It’d be custom car shop, where they change the color of your car or change your seats or wheels or whatever. It is High ticket. They sell thousands of dollar items. That’s one category. Number two is e-commerce, which is basically tied for the biggest category in our company. We have about 100 employees on that side and that’s basically anything on Amazon, anything you buy that ships to your door. That’s in that category.

11:38
And then number three is basically sales or info-related products, meaning anything from a national insurance company that wants to generate leads and spend millions of dollars a month on Facebook and Instagram and Google, all the way to someone who’s selling courses online on how to get into real estate Basically, anything that requires lead generation digitally at a limitless scale, meaning they’re not confined within the walls of how many people fit in this building. It’s just how many people can I reach on the internet to buy this product? That’s what we do. And then essentially, there’s a few parts of our business. Each one of those is actually its own entity, which is pretty cool. So, like, local business is one, e-commerce is one, and then basically I went and acquired other agencies and created partnerships with those owners to come be equity partners in bad marketing. So bad marketing owns a portion of their company and then they own the other portion. So that’d be like our Amazon department. We have an overseas department in Europe, so we created partnerships like that. So there are multiple entities under bad marketing that have different partners because we went and acquired Instead of going in.

12:44
Let’s just say you’re doing tax advice and then you want to get into I don’t know running a brokerage so that all your clients can have their money in there. Like you wouldn’t want to go try to figure out how to start a brokerage. You’d want to figure out how to go and partner up with a brokerage. Or like, find a brokerage that’s small and take it over. It’s just a lot faster. So that’s basically what we did.

13:02
It’s like why sit here and try to learn Amazon when we could just get the best person at Amazon to come do that for us? And so that’s what we did. And then we also educate the agency space. So we have, like an agency founders ecosystem which is essentially like from as cheap as 99 bucks a month to like a digital program and community where, like marketing agency owners can all network and hang out and there’s a few thousand people in there to an event that costs five, ten thousand dollars to attend uh, once a year all the way up to, you know, a thirty five thousand dollar like coaching program where they become a part of a year-long membership and work only with other multi-million dollar marketing agencies so that they can all collaborate, share ideas and bring there. So not only are we marketing, but we’re helping other marketing agencies become better as a whole.

And my guess is building all of those ecosystems. You have your finger on the pulse of what’s working, what’s not working in the marketing space, Because I look at how dynamic it is. Yesterday Google ads were working, Today they’re not. You know, Facebook changes the algorithm. Now I’m in trouble. So can you just talk through a little bit about, like, obviously, being involved with that network of other agencies, having so many different clients testing new things? How are you staying on top of all of the marketing opportunities out there?

Yeah, the reality is we’re not Just like any businesses. We have to say no to certain verticals that we don’t believe enough to play in yet. So example we were literally probably one of the first people ever to be able to run ads on TikTok just because we had massive, famous people that we were managing and they got access first and then we got to start playing with it. It was really cheap, but it was horrible. It didn’t produce dollars, and so we gave it a shot for like nine months, 12 months, maybe. We built an entire department around it, a team, content, ads, whatever everything. It didn’t work out. We said, hey, you know what, let’s not touch this again for a while. So we backed off it. We kept some clients on there that were doing really well, but overall we weren’t crushing it for people. So we didn’t feel right ethically selling the service. And so, even though everyone I’m telling you, everyone I could have made an extra 15 million that year just selling that, but we just didn’t. We knew that it wasn’t producing the results.

15:16
Then, a year later, tiktok shop comes out Biggest opportunity ever. At the time we’re like not again. Here we go. So we’re like do we invest? Let’s wait. And then we waited a year and we missed a massive wave because of it. But now we’re 100% confident it works and we do it for our clients and we make them money. And that’s okay that we missed a wave and a ton of money. But like we’re at the point where the business is so mature that like putting all those resources into something and then having it fail, like that is not worth putting in another year of it when we could just do something else. So you can’t stay on top of every trend, is my answer.

15:52
But here’s what’s important. I think marketing as a whole has not changed in 100 years. What changes is the tools that we use to consume the marketing. So all marketing is is just generating attention from people that generates some sort of inquiry or interest in a product or service that ends up getting them to buy. And so back in the day, when it first started, it was in newspapers, then it was on billboards, then it was on TV or radio, then it was on TV, now it’s on phones and over time the oldest one kind of fades away in a way.

16:24
Right, but for example, right now everyone’s like, oh, I got to get on social media all this stuff. Yeah, way Right. But like, for example, right now everyone’s like, oh, I got to get on social media all this stuff. Yeah, true, but like 40 years ago, people were sending mailers and everyone was buying stuff. And guess what, everyone stopped sending mailers because it’s not the thing that everyone talks about anymore. And so now, because no one sends mailers, everyone still has a mailbox. That attention is still there and no one’s taking advantage of it. And so all you’re doing from a marketing standpoint is trying to find underpriced attention that you can get and you can leverage on, just like a stock If I can get to the same person for $5 through One Direction, but I can get to that same person for $20 on a different app or source. My goal is to find those $5 ones instead of those $20 ones and invest as much money as I can into there to be able to attract those customers for less.

I love that. So I know you’ve taken businesses from almost zero revenue or or hey, here’s an idea to. They’ve engaged with you and your company and created tremendous amounts of revenue in pretty short order. When somebody comes to you, what is the onboarding? How do you assess which channels to go, generate attention through and get people interested in looking at those? And I’m sure it’s different in each one of those companies you talked about. Brick and mortar is going to be different than e-commerce, than coaching and info products.

Actually, it’s not even about the category. It doesn’t matter if it’s info or local or e-commerce. The category of business doesn’t matter. It’s the actual business entity itself. And what do they sell that matters. If you think about it this way Facebook, instagram all these things are the equivalent of television back in the day. You watch it and you consume whatever’s coming your way, but you’re not specifically looking for anything that’s being sold to you. It’s just a matter of how well can they convince me I need or want this thing in the next 30 seconds? And if they can’t, I’m not making that purchase now. Maybe I’ll do it later, when I see it again Versus Google, which used to be like yellow pages, where I’m going with the intent of I need to find a plumber and I’m going to Google to do so.

18:32
So the platform is actually based on the kind of business that you have. Is it a kind of business where a large volume of people are searching for that product or solution at a mass scale, or even just a problem that you solve? If people are like my electricity keeps turning off in my house, what do I do? It would be great to run an electrician ad as the number one spot right, so it doesn’t need to be like I need an electrician. But if it’s a business where people are inquiring for those problems and solutions, then you want to go on a search engine like Google, like Bing, even YouTube, because YouTube is Google. Therefore, you can run video ads to people based on what they search. So if you search something for a plumber today, over the next two weeks I could show you plumber ads and you’d be like man, I need a plumber. Perfect timing, you know what I mean.

19:13
So, whereas Facebook, instagram, snapchat, tiktok are usually not search-based platforms, they’re attention-based platforms, which means you’re going to go, put yourself in front of someone and interrupt whatever they’re doing and hope that you made a good enough video or image to be able to capture their attention, to stop doing what they’re doing and just listen to you for 20 seconds or read what you have to say, and so there’s just two different forms of marketing, and so I think it just depends on the business that you have.

19:40
If you have a really good offer or a really good product that people need and don’t usually have around the house, or you can show why there’s value in it, you can infinitely scale with Facebook, instagram, television, because there’s infinite amount of spots of media. You could just spend billions of dollars and it would spend, whereas on Google, everyone has a ceiling. The ceiling is how many people are searching for these things and how many words can you find and phrases that people are searching for that lead to someone buying your product, and once you spend all the money to get all of it, there’s no more to go, and so it’s just two different things. I don’t think it’s based on the kind of local or online business. It’s based on what is the product or service that I’m selling.

Yeah, that’s a fantastic distinction. I never have thought about those channels that I can advertise on in those ways. So that’s good and really I like the scale piece right. If I’ve got a product that I’m pushing out and I can spend $1 on advertising and it generates $2 of revenue and I still profit from that, like I can dial that up, like you said, to a billion dollars and it works out well. Do you see limits to that? Is there times where there is a ceiling in some capacity? There’s not a?

ceiling of spend, but there’s a line of marginal returns. So if I can get a 5x return at $100,000 a month, if I spend $200,000 a month, so I’ll get a perspective. Let me simplify it. I get a 5X return at $100,000 a month means I make 500K, so I would have a 400K spread. If I spend $200,000 a month and I get a 4X return instead of a five, I now have a $600 spread on $800. So even though my return is less, my total money is more.

21:25
Therefore, it’s worth the marginal return or, sorry, diminishing return is what I meant to say. It’s a diminishing return, right, so as I spend more, it becomes much harder to be as profitable as I was at lower spends. But there’s also a point where it’s the opposite, where you spent so much that there’s so much brain recognition that actually all your costs of marketing goes down, because now you’re acquiring twice the customers on the same budget, because they’re used to seeing bad marketing everywhere, and so now they know, and so now, when they see it, the likelihood of them engaging or making a decision is much higher than what it used to be two years ago when you never had any marketing. Yeah, so it’s kind of a weird curve, but that is the ceiling. Yep.

Interesting. So you talked a little bit about brand for a second, because I think that’s something that if I rewind to television like the brand recognition really, really mattered, you know, and it was like, oh hey, I want to be associated with that Cause I, they’re at the cool pool party and that that aligns with me. It wasn’t necessarily going oh, that fits a need that I have. It was more of a subconscious thing. Is branding still as important as it used to be? I feel like I used to be able to just go buy TV ads and make it work, but now attention seems so spread out that it’s hard to get my brand top of mind, or is that not the case?

Because attention is so spread out. Brand is so much more important Because really, what it is is brand recall. So let’s think about it mathematically, as a formula. If there is way more attention being taken up, that means each point of recall meaning I remember. This brand is worth so much more Because, instead of 10 brands that they’ve seen in their memory years now, they’re seeing 100 in their remembering years. Therefore, brand recall is actually more important and financially necessary than ever before. So I think it’s super important.

23:21
I’ll tell you, I even ran a test where I would run the same ads that we’re running for ourselves on other pages that were not ours. It wasn’t bad marketing. It didn’t have the Instagram profile that we have that looks so beautiful that everyone can look at, and our cost was like 5x higher just to run it. We ran the same ads, the same offer to the same audiences, just from a different, like name, entity and like existence, and it costs us more money. I think that’s something that’s super important to reflect and be like. I mean, if this isn’t a clear indicator of brand value, I don’t know what is. Then we turned it back on and we reduced our cost by five.

So that’s fantastic. So that leads me to the question of, like, how do people develop the brand? You talked about Instagram and there’s some of the social channels. Is it creating good content and just sort of being out there in the world where people are constantly seeing you, is it? I guess I’m a little bit lost as to how, how that, that brand development?

comes. Yeah, that’s a great question. So all brand is is how people perceive you, and how they perceive you determines how they interact with you. I might perceive your brand a certain way, therefore, I don’t want to interact with it, and vice versa, I might perceive it a certain way, and so it all comes from the brand story. And what are the values of that brand and what do they represent? So, like, what’s the mission of this brand? What’s the story? How did they start? People really care about these things.

24:49
So, believe it or not, like in the marketing world, some of our best campaigns are when we’re talking about the story of the brand owner and how his hair was falling out. And because his hair was falling out, no shot at you, patrick. Then he decided he had to travel the world for years to come up with the best hair loss solution and then he grew his hair back and now he’s doing it for other people. What an awesome story. Look at the thousands of people that he’s helped. It screams confidence. Blah, blah, blah. That is the brand right, and that’s why people buy from that person versus, I don’t know, nivea Men’s, for example, hair loss solution or HIMS. It’s because that brand that it represents.

25:29
And so in my case, for example, bad marketing that’s not for everyone. You know what I mean and that’s okay. The thing is, if you build a brand to be okay with everyone, you will never be great with any certain pocket of people and therefore you’ll never grow like that. And so you have to pick a side, just like politics. I don’t think both candidates go up and all make the same points. They have to dispute each other because there is a side to each point, right, there’s people who think pro-abortion and there’s people who think pro-life, and it’s always going to be like that. And so when you’re defining a brand, you need to say what do we represent and who do we want to interact with and buy from us?

26:11
I, as a marketing person, finally decided I don’t want to work with lame people who don’t want to be exciting in marketing and just be super boring. We can do the boring stuff, but then we need some budget for the stuff that’s a little bit out of pocket that can make us 100x return instead of a 2x return, and that’s the game I wanted to play, and you know that from managing my money. I hate those slow, long-term returns. And so we decided we want to be bad marketing. Just like Liquid Death, it’s not for everyone, it’s polarizing.

But the person who gets it, who’s like I like that, that’s who I want to work with. That’s fantastic. And I think people should absolutely go check out the bad marketing and Eddie Maloof Instagram, cause you’ve put some really good stuff out there on. That just gives people flavor for for who you are and how you attract attention, and every time I see you know something coming up, I’m I’m excited to see what you have going out into the world. So, yeah, I totally agree and you think about I like to use the example of a beige Camry like nobody gets excited about a beige Camry.

27:15
Like it’s a car that will transport me from point A to point B, but it’s like I would rather have the we’ll call it lime green Lamborghini. Okay, the lime green Lamborghini is either you love it or you hate it, and that’s okay. Let’s just be very clear on on where we stand on these things, cause I don’t I don’t want somebody being like, eh, that’s okay, I want somebody to look at what we do and how we do it and go, yes, I’m either really excited about that or those people are crazy, and, uh, I’m okay with both.

It’s funny. You picked that scenario of the green Lambo because when I was buying my Lamborghini, I was picking and my friends got to tell me to pick the green and I just felt like it was a little too childish and like I loved it, but I like didn’t love it. For me it was like such a it’s funny, that’s such a funny scenario because I was like on the line either way and I like literally love it or hate it. I couldn’t even decide which one I wanted. It was like do I love it? Do I hate it? It’s one of them, I feel it. I just don’t know what it is.

And Eddie ended up with the blue Lamborghini and it’s it’s a sharp looking car, so I love that car. Yeah, I don’t blame you. I I think at some point the responsible financial guy in me like I want a Ferrari sitting in my garage. I’m just. It’s not there yet.

Look, I’ll challenge you on that for a second. Okay, you as a financial advisor with a Ferrari especially now that you’re making more content too will get you much more clientele online In the areas that you live in. You will start connecting with other people who own other Ferraris and Lamborghinis, etc. Which are probably your ideal clients as well, and it will end up paying for itself and you will experience a different side of life that you will not have access to without the cars. No matter how much money you have, there’s a side of life that you can only access with those luxury vehicles, and it is what it is. It’s like the entry ticket for it, and so I think you would ROI a lot.

29:10
Obviously, you don’t make a lot of video content like I do, but that has helped me a lot, for sure, from that side. But even if I was in your shoes, I think I would benefit much more from my car, because I would actually be giving people financial advice and tax advice, and when I go to these, you know we went to a track and all drove our exotic cars as hard as we could for, you know, six hours there’s 50 of us. All of them run massive companies insurance companies, real estate companies every car is 400, 500 grand and some of them it’s like their 10th car. Those are all people that would be ideal clients for Patrick, but not Eddie, because I don’t work with any business. You know what I mean but, like you, work with anyone who has money technically right as a market.

So yeah, somebody with tax problem that wants some help getting organized.

They all want to be able to buy an extra car every year. I’ll tell you that.

I’m like look, I will save you in tax enough money to go buy another Ferrari.

That’s like what a pitch I’ll take it.

You know what I mean and you’ve done that for me. I love it. Uh, very good, thank you. How about other luxury items? I know watches and that type of thing. You know I see I’m rocking my Apple watch ultra and it’s very functional, you know, does does the job for telling me my time and keeping track of my workouts and that type of thing. But do you see other luxury items sort of help build that brand that, hey look, I’m successful.

I have a lot of luxury watches. I probably have like I mean not that much I guess, but I have like a few hundred grand of watches and, um, my friends have watches that are just a few hundred grand in one watch. Right, so there’s layers to it but at the end of the day, the watch does nothing compared to what the car does. The watch is good for conversation and respect. If you’re going to business events or entrepreneur events or business owner-based events, then, yes, you’re walking around, you’re in close proximity. People look at each other’s watches and they gauge does this person have money or not from their watch? It is what it is and that’s how that environment works. When you shake someone’s hand, you make a judgment based on what they’re wearing and how they’re carrying themselves and what they drive about what kind of financial situation this person’s in. If you’re in a business type environment, right, so that’s just the reality. It does help in those environments. People come to me like damn, that watch is insane. And then we have conversations about it and then now we’re friends and we’re doing business.

31:26
But the car is different. The car is like, at least where I live. I don’t live in Miami. If I lived in Miami, the car is just another Lamborghini. But I live in Atlanta and the car is literally like a hundred million dollar private jet. You drive it around and, like the people that you park anywhere, they all want to come up and ask you questions and it’s just a different level of experience, whereas the other luxury stuff even the watches, shoes, jackets, all that stuff like it’s just like for show. I don’t think it creates opportunities.

So, when we think about the typical entrepreneur and let’s let’s just if we can, let’s put them in the three categories you talked about brick and mortar, e-commerce or coaching put them in the three categories. You talked about brick and mortar, e-commerce or coaching. Is there fundamental marketing that people should be doing that? You’re just looking at folks and they’re almost all missing it, like, hey, stop doing that or start doing this.

Yeah, most businesses don’t make any content. It’s the biggest mistake they do. I mean, you follow us. I make content every day for myself, for my company, for my business partners pages on multiple platforms every single day and that drives our business. Like that makes us the most money out of anything.

32:37
And it’s just because, like, if you think about it, like these business owners are trying to do, like they spend too much money to get such little return, like they’ll spend like 50 grand to make a website, but like they won’t spend instead of that. Why don’t we spend 10 grand on a website and 40 grand to bring people to the website, so that there’s a point of the building that we’re building for people to buy from which is the website Right? And so I think the biggest mistake people make is like not making content. You don’t need to be in all your videos. You’re running a company but someone needs to be making videos around the stuff that you guys are doing as a company so that you can reach more people, because people are spending four to six hours a day on their phones and someone is buying their attention and it’s not you.

33:20
And sometimes you buy it with money and sometimes you just buy it with content. You post organic content and these Instagrams do such a good, these algorithms do such a good job reaching people exactly where they’re at and finding the people that you want based on what you’re selling. So I think just making content is like the biggest mistake I see. And I’ll tell you when I coach people, patrick, and I tell them make content. It won’t happen overnight, it won’t happen in a month, won’t even happen in three months, but a year from the time that they start their entire business is a completely different operation, because they have so much business coming in from non-paid marketing and it’s just so important.

Yeah, I see Gary Vee just talking about it. Just start. Just it’s absolute trash when you get started, but that’s okay and it will get better. Nobody’s watching anyway when you first get started and so like, just keep showing up and then all of a sudden you’ve got this asset that is really producing. So that’s fantastic. So when I think about marketing as an entrepreneur, is there let’s let’s assume we’re past the like solopreneur guy doing it on his own that’s making enough money to support his lifestyle? We’re talking about a real business here. What is the dollars I should be thinking about spending on a regular basis to start moving the needle to drive people in? Is there a dollar figure? If we’re less than X dollars, it’s not worth it.

It all depends on what you’re selling. If I’m selling something that costs a hundred thousand dollars, I’d be pretty naive to think I’m going to spend ten dollars a day and get that right. I’m going to be spending 300 bucks a month. You’re saying I’m going to spend 300 bucks and get a hundred thousand dollar order. That doesn’t make sense right now. It happens one off, but it’s not like an actual consistent marketing strategy. It’s all really depend on.

35:03
Here’s the, I guess, is how much does a customer pay me? How much do I profit on that customer? That is the maximum amount of allowable margin I have for marketing. Now how much do I want to keep in profit determines how much my maximum amount of marketing I want to spend is. So if I make $10,000 per customer, I pay five in cost. I have five in profit. How much of that five do I want to keep? That still makes it worth it for me. Four, grand Perfect. Then I need to spend $1,000 for each customer that I’m acquiring. If I want to acquire 30 customers per month, I’ll need to spend $30,000 this month to do so and the goal is to get them for less than $1,000, but I’m okay paying up to $1,000 to get these customers, and that’s really how you work the formula. It’s not a one size fits all and it doesn’t. You know. It all depends on what are you selling, how much are you profiting and how much are you willing to cut out of that to get more customers and scale your operations.

I love it. That’s fantastic. So, eddie, you’re one of the sharpest guys I know Really.

You’re just saying that, come on, I appreciate that You’re with a lot of really rich people.

It’s really irritating how quickly you understand things. It’s like you’ll be having a conversation, something’s happening over here and all management, but you’re like look, I don’t, I don’t need to figure out my own tax strategy, investment and all that other stuff. Like, I’m going to hand that off to somebody that is going to be expert at it and I’m going to stay in my lane and do what I’m best at. That’s going to generate as much revenue as possible. I see that with our entrepreneurs that we work with as well. Like, so what does it take for somebody to engage with Eddie and bad marketing to like go cool, look, I’ve maybe been running this, or I’ve got six different people involved in my marketing. I got my daughter doing my social media and I’ve got a friend doing my website and somebody else editing some of my podcasts or YouTube videos. Like, what does it take to sort to bring all that together under one integrated and coordinated strategy with Bad Marketing? How do they get in touch with you?

Well, they can just go to our website, badmarketingcom, and you can’t call us or anything, but you can fill out a form, an application, and then our team will go through the business and reach out to you to basically get on, a call and do an audit of the company externally and internally to see if it is a good fit. Because, at the end of the day, we’re in a recurring business and we’re trying to build long-term relationships with our clients and partners and it doesn’t make sense for us to take someone on that we don’t really think is going to make money and stick around. Long-term, short-term cash is cool, but we’re trying to build long-term cash and relationships, and so we audit every business that we work with and if you fail the audit, for whatever reason, that just means you’re not in a position for us to grow you or you’re in a great position and we just don’t feel like we can help much more. And so, yeah, just going to our website would be the best way. That’s kind of our process.

Fantastic. So we’ll put links to badmarketingcom and all your social, because people should absolutely check all that out in the show notes. So it’s entertaining at the very least. So I appreciate it. Thank you, Eddie. Thank you so much for being on. I appreciate you sharing your insight as an entrepreneur and also as a an expert in the marketing arena.

It’s been wonderful Thanks for having me on dude and uh thanks for saving me so much money every year, much appreciated. Hopefully people listening take the same choice. Thanks, eddie.

Thank you for listening to the Vital Strategies podcast. We know that it’s not right that the government takes so much of our money every year in taxes. We wanted to give you the first look at the tax tools we’ve developed in an online course that will give you and your CPA everything you need to save up to $5,000 or more in income tax with some basic level one tax strategies. To be an insider to get immediate access to these tools to help manage your tax bill so you can pay less tax and live a great life. Go to vitalstrategiescom forward slash cornerstones. You’ll get immediate access to these tools that some clients have paid us $10,000 or more for. These tools are designed to help you pay less tax so you can build more wealth and live a great life. Again, that website is vitalstrategiescom forward slash cornerstones.

39:16
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044 | How to Turn Your Marketing and Branding into a Revenue Machine: Eddie Maalouf’s Strategy

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