social media marketing somerset company where you help businesses. So many people wonder what to do. They know they want to be entrepreneurs but they don't have a lot of cash, because you didn't have much cash to start either, right?? And you didn't have much experience, you're pretty much self-taught. It reminds me of the Jim Rohn saying where he says a formal education will make you a living, but self education will make you a fortune. - I agree. - So let's go back. What year were you, and if you're watching, pay attention because we're going to go through kind of the steps that he took and you can mimic and mold some of your life around what he did and when he found success at. You actually have two companies now but let's focus on the social media marketing agency. He basically, you specialize in restaurants, now. You've done different niches. - That's correct.

- You were telling me about one restaurant where you came in and they were making like 70 grand a week and you took them to 100 thousand a week, so you added 30 thousand times four over 100 grand and there, well, the thing about small businesses, if you own your own company they will pay you if they can directly track that you're making them more money. - That's right. They'll never stop paying you if they can track that you're making them money. - [Ty] Right. You've got a client for life, right? - That's right, and you don't need long term contracts then because that month to month won't stop. - So let's take it back to the beginning. You had an idea, what was the initial idea you had before you started at all? - OK, so for me, it was the business I had before and my industry was sales training and I had, it was dying, you know, and it was 2008 and the economy was crashing all around us.

So a client of mine asked me if I could help them with social media and I said what do you need? They said well, we need a presence on social media, we're getting ready to start our new business and I said well I can help you and so I took it kind of out of desperation, funny enough, but the idea was if I could figure out how to help them, maybe I could help more. So I concentrated all my efforts in trying to get them online on social media, this is 2009. You know, that's back when you're recommending Myspace still, so I spent time immersing myself in the subject about every book that was coming out at the time, and at the time there was quite a few books coming out. In fact, I remember going into the Barnes and Noble and I walked in, and you know how they have the Best in Business section in Barnes and Noble, and I stopped cold, I had this in my slideshow for a long time, I did trainings, but every book in the Best in Business section was a social media book at the time.

It was Twitter marketing, Facebook you know, and LinkedIn and Youtube and video and I was just like this is a clue, you know, this is going to be big. - Yeah, that's what I tell people. If you're watching this, make sure you catch things when they're still cutting edge. Life is, especially when disruptive patterns come out whether it be the internet, car, all of the, even steel industry came out, if you search back through history, it's at those disruptive moments in time that a few people who have eyes wide open and have some courage go out there and step out and they're what you call first movers, and it's called the first mover advantage.

Now, here's the good news, I'll tell people because some people might go I missed it, 2009 was a big time. The first mover advantage is there for about seven years in my experience, seven, eight years. So when the internet came out, let's say 95 or something, you didn't have to catch it in 1995, but that first wave of people who made money in the .com boom was about up to 2000, 2001 and it really started around 94, so it was about seven years. Then you saw the next thing, like Myspace and so on, about seven years later new trends came. Facebook, Twitter started rising and now in 2015, 2016 you see the rise of things like SnapChat and really Instagram has risen since 2012 when it was, became big, so. So you got in there... - And live video. Facebook live, Periscope... - Even though Meerkat disappeared. So you had this idea and how much money did you make in your first year? - First year of business? - Yeah. - First year of business I would probably say I think we did somewhere around three or 400 thousand dollars. - [Ty] Oh, so you came out the gate pretty strong? - Well, we were very ambitious.

We thought we were going to be all over the country, you know, really fast and we tried to spread our wings a little too fast too soon but it did pay off from a revenue standpoint, but then you make some mistakes along that way with, by not concentrating. If I did it again, I would tell people start in you local market and just master that and then go out. - [Ty] Start in a smaller niche. - We were taking on auto dealerships and bars and restaurants and fitness centers.

You name it, we were like whatever, whoever would pay us because we were, I was very sales oriented from my background so I thought I'll just go sell a bunch of these clients and figure out how to help them along the way. That was the lesson learned. - The basic service you were offering, not to interrupt, sorry, is for somebody watching who doesn't quite understand what you do, a lot of companies, there's millions, there's tens of millions of small businesses in the U.S. and around the world wherever you live and most of them, they know how to run their business, but they don't know anything about social media and the also know nothing about branding and nothing about marketing.

So they hire somebody like you to either train them or do it for them so that a pizza restaurant doesn't have to hire a full time marketing staff, they might not be able to afford that, but they can afford to pay you monthly or hourly and like that. How many clients were you able to grow up to, like now, roughly? - So we actually, you know, having more clients doesn't mean you're always making more money.

So we were charging between 500 and 1200 bucks a month when we first started out. That's what I thought the threshold was. Then I realized it's just as easy to sell somebody at 1500 to 2000 dollars a month as it is to sell someone at 500 and 1000. Quite honestly, the businesses that could only afford 500 to 1000 were the broker businesses that caused you more heartache than the ones that could happily afford 2000 dollars a month.

You know, we had 75 clients within like six months of starting that business and most of them retainer based clients. Today, you know, I have just under 50 clients, but paying me a lot more and a lot more per month. - Do you like that model, because I tell people you don't always have to make a big big business. Even Mark Cuban, he was over at the house not to long ago and he was telling me, he said Ty, I never liked to build huge companies. He said a lot of my companies had 30 employees, 150 employees, I mean he's a billionaire and in the billionaire world 150 employees is very small, so if you're an entrepreneur starting out, you can really start out by yourself or you had some business partners at the beginning and a few staff, but you, going back if you could start over you could start from your home with just your laptop by yourself and maybe one assistant, right? - You remember the book Rework that came out? That was the first book to really open people's eyes that you don't have to be in an office to have a successful company, they grew 37 signals which was base camp, and base camp is still a software that we use today to help manage clients.

But yeah, I mean if I was doing it all over again, I'd do it now, I'm virtual now so still out of my home. I have a home office and everybody that works for me or does any type of work for me, contract or employee, are all in their own homes. Now, we do meet and we meet online a lot and we're also meeting at clients. - [Ty] Sometimes you fly out there. - Yes, and also, you know, I'll still go out and meet face to face with some of these clients, too, that are in my area, but you don't have to have an office anymore with a bunch of employees.

You can do it from home. Especially if you're first starting out, that's your office. - This is my office right here. I do almost everything on this. - That's right, and you can manage your whole agency on that and you don't care. Here's what I learned, that businesses don't care about how fancy your office is or your office. They care about you being able to get them results. - That bar, what was the bar that was doing 70 thousand, where was it, Wisconsin or something? - So this was in Woodburry, Minnesota. So it's in, you know, 70 thousand dollars, 72 thousand dollars a week, that was last year November. This year at this time they're over 100 thousand dollars consistently a week. Now I knew they had the potential to do 100 thousand a week because they did it in their honeymoon... - Initial launch. - Initial two months. - But a lot of businesses, a lot of restaurants start out strong and then crash and burn.

- Correct which is what was happening with them and then they were wasting their money on print advertising. - They were doing magazines. You could come in all that money companies are spending on magazines, they'll pay you because you brought results. How much were they spending on magazines? - They were spending about 700 bucks a month on one magazine that they were putting their ads in that were not trackable. It was bad advertising in magazines, let alone you shouldn't be advertising in a magazine, but they said to me, I said how are you spending your marketing dollars and they said that was one of the places. I said can you show me the magazine.

They showed it to me. I said how much did you pay they said 700 bucks a month, that's half our fee right there, right? I said yeah, OK so you're going to stop doing that. They said well we're a craft beer restaurant, we have 70 craft beers on tap we have to be in the craft beer magazine of the local... - Right. - I said says who? Like, says the rest... - Craft people are looking on Facebook, they're looking on... (crosstalk) - We actually took out all the advertising they were doing, they did some radio spots too, that's very expensive nowadays in comparison to Facebook advertising. - And who the heck listens to radio and if they do, people just change the channel. I'm not knocking all radio ads but it's not as good as internet ads because internet advertising is direct, it goes from the page, from somebody's phone or laptop straight to your customer or these businesses and you can attribute.

There's attribution. OK, this one came from Facebook. I spent 500 on Facebook this month, I made 2000 dollars. - I had a radio advertiser call me, advertising sales rep call me, I have 20% stake in a restaurant south of Minneapolis and he says Joe can I tell you what we have and he showed me, he says I can reach 15 thousand people for you on our radio ads and on our display advertising that plays when people are listening to radio on their computers and in their office, the display ad was like 15 thousand people it could reach let alone another 15 thousand. I said so you're telling me I could reach 60 thousand people, how much is it? 4,000 bucks. I said what if I told you that last week I reached 100 thousand people with 100 dollars on Facebook? He said... - So 4,000 is how much he was charging business for 30,000, you were helping businesses reach three times the people for about 5%, less than 5%. - Not even comparable, and I said to him, I said, you know, I really think you've got to find another career soon and he said, you know, most businesses Joe don't know how to do that, but I do see that's a problem.

I mean, he knows this, he's a sales rep. - Yeah, you're getting in on the inside. If you learn how to do this, I'm going to put a link here below, you are actually, Joe's out here at my house because he was nice enough to fly in from Virginia where he lives and record lessons for those of you who are in my how to get small business to pay you one to 10 thousand dollars to manage their social media test program. I have a program that I opened up for people, so you were recording lessons. I wanted to record a video like this for everybody just so you could learn, you know, but I'll put a link. Now the program, depending on when you're watching this video, right now it's currently not allowing new students to come in but if you click the link below, depending on when you're watching this, it might be open or it will have a wait list email where you can actually learn, where I teach social media, what I've learned.

I know how to monetize social media and Joe knows how to bring, you know, those skills specifically to small business niches that you could pick one of those niches and learn. So it's a four month program. You basically get certified at the end so you can come in with no money or experience, very little money and very little experience, then in four months, learn from people like me, learn from Joe, learn from other experts on how you can start making, getting small businesses to pay you one to 10 thousand. It only takes five customers paying you 1500 bucks and now you have a six figure income. I mean, people go to university for a long time to figure out how to make six figures. - I went for a long time and I didn't learn how to make six figures, even. - Yeah, well average person coming out. American has trillion in college debt. More than we spend on the military, more than the trade deficit, is college and people, the worst part is people, not all university and college is a waste of time but for a lot of people, they go, they come out 40 grand in debt, four years of the prime of their life and they can't get a job.

- Yeah, that's crazy. This is, you learn a skill which in this case can be just Facebook advertising and you literally can go to local businesses with that knowledge and get them real results that move the needle. So that's the thing is that it's, that's 100%. So I can look at anyone 100%, a small business owner and say where are you at right now and what kind of marketing are you doing? If they're not doing any type of social media advertising or anything like that, I know without a shadow of a doubt that they'll never not pay me a thousand bucks a month to get them sales, the results, that they need. - Unless they're hard headed or you don't want them. - Correct, but at least I'm confident in knowing that I can help them.

- Right, so you're basically saying anybody in the niches you serve, which right now is primarily restaurants, if they're a going restaurant in business, you pretty much know if they're not marketing on social media, they can pay you a thousand, two thousand bucks a month and you can make them way more than they're paying you. - Every time, and anybody watching this, you know, particularly those that either in your program or are going to be getting into that social media agency program, you know, I don't care how old they are. As long as you can go in and you can give that type of value, six figures is easily within reach. - Because you're now over seven figures over a million plus. - Yeah, I'm, right now one of things that I want to do is continue to learn from people like you so I can... - [Ty] Get it to eight figures. - Eight figures, the next level.

- Look, I say, I always tell people follow the rule of 10 which is figure out how to make 100 bucks a month. Then, quickly figure out, you can pretty much do, no brainer. You get your first client and say instead of paying me a thousand, pay me 100 just to have one client, you know, if it's small client, but then you figure out how to make a thousand a month.

Then you make 10 thousand a month. Once you make 10 thousand a month, you make 100 thousand a month, which is kind of at the level you're at, six figures, and once you figure out how to make 100 thousand a month, you figure out how to make a million a month. - We had a restaurant, a multi unit restaurant franchise owner that owned 34 Long John Silver locations that paid us 15 grand a month and we put a system in place to basically automate the same social media to all those locations so it wasn't taking a lot of our time, but then we did do some local customization to all those 34 locations, but they paid us that 15 thousand dollar retainer a month for almost two years straight. I think it was maybe longer than two years, every month. - This is wide open and one thing that I tell people, and I always thought like this when I was in business. If you have entrepreneurial mined, the odds are you're going to come up with many different ideas.

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, they had many ideas. So what you want is to always be progressing up and you have to be strategic in the small businesses you pick. The strategic thing about learning, getting paid to do intermittent marketing for other companies is any idea you have for the rest of your life, you now know how to market your own idea.

So people getting into the social media marketing agency test group, not only are they learning how to make money today, which is important, but they're also building up a skill that next year, if you have an invention idea, you have an idea of an app or a store that you want to open, retail, restaurant, you can do your own marketing. - Can I give you an example of that? So my wife has a hair bow business and she's... - [Ty] You mean like hair bows? - Hair bows and headbands for little girls and she started this out of our home and she does have a couple of really cool deal sites that help her sell her, for a commission, they sell her bows like Zulily.com, that's one of the big ones, and so I applied what I knew about Facebook advertising, really she was a big testing ground for a lot of this, to her business.

From 2012 to now, she's grown into a million dollar business and the only money she spends on marketing advertising is Facebook and she does this with one employer in our home who drives to our house everyday and it's her mom. She puts her on a full time salary and her mom does an amazing job for the company and she has a million dollar business selling hair bows from our home. It's called Girly Boutique, over 80,000 fans on Facebook. - [ Ty] And you, using your skills, were able to help your wife. - And in the course I teach, I actually show specifically how we did it to grow that business. - We just recorded that, by the way. Those of you in the test group or clicked below that get on the waiting list or get into the test group, you were just explaining how, we were screenshoting his laptop while it was recording so you can see press this button on Facebook, look for this, boom, boom, boom, it's pretty...

Man, you know I got started in early 2000s with internet marketing with just a course from Cory Rudl which was not that in depth. It was basically like, all I remember is Google advertising is going to be good, so I just figured it out all on my own. Nowadays with all the things like this course and what you teach and even this free video here, I'm like it's right there in front of people. - It is. They just got to learn it. - [Ty] Yeah. Would you ever go back to the employee lifestyle after you have this lifestyle? - No.

- [Ty] No. What's your favorite things about being your own boss? - I have eight kids so favorite thing is, and I coach little league football for my third grade son and so, at the end of the day, and you know this because you're a lifestyle guy. In my case, I want to be able to call my shots when it's time to pick up my kids or be able to take them to the bus stop in the mornings or coach flag football or in this case, I have two sons playing tackle football right now, I coached youth basketball for the first time last winter. To me, that's what is was about. It was about time freedom to be able to do those types of things and call my own shots when I could work and when I didn't want to work.

- Now you get to travel. - Isn't that what it's about? - Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, life is made up of moments. If you don't like most of the moments, you don't have a good life. You know, people are always, there's something about the human brain, flawed, where you're always thinking it's going to always, my life will be better in two years, one year, and that just keeps pushing out and next thing you know, people are 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, going where did it all go, where did the time go and a lot of these opportunities, I'll tell you this. I don't know, I'll get your opinion on this, my opinion on the social media marketing agency concept as a business that you watching could potentially open up if that interests you, it's not going to be a wide open window forever, because as more and more people, that's part of why I have a test group that I limit the size.

If too many people learn how to do it, then every small business you go to will already have somebody doing it. So the window on this thing, you know, it's hard to put an exact time frame but I would say seven years and small, to me, 2012 was the big year when I think social media, not only people it was there, but enough adoption of all ages of that technology was being done. My grandma started using all that, so 2012, that means the window is til about 2019. The earlier you get in, the more of the first mover advantage, like you had a great, you got in in like 08, 09. - Yeah, but we were lost trying to figure this stuff out and we had to convince people that it was going to be something that people would adopt.

- [Ty] Now they don't have to now. - Now it's way easier to sell clients. It's way easier, and it's way easier to get results for them, too, because there's now, then I remember going to a business saying there's over 200 thousand people on Facebook. - Really, that's what you told them? Now there's like 800 million people. - I remember when there was half a billion in like 2012 I was doing, or 2011 I was doing a presentation like there's half a billion people on Facebook. - Soon it will be the whole world and what's cool about this like a young person watching this who's 16 or something, you could potentially start this because if you walk up to an older business owner and you say I can do your social media, they'll believe you.

- They will believe you. - Because they believe a 16 year old, but also on the flip side, if you're 50, and you bring results, people aren't going to think you're too old. - That's right. - It's like results driven. - It is results driven. You got to be obsessed with those results because those results are what keep you paid every single month. - Well, this is good. I want to, I'm going to put a link here below. I wish we had more time, but you've got, he's headed back. This is a traveling jet setting man. You flew in yesterday and he's flying back, but if you got eight kids, I understand, that's a big responsibility. I'm going to put the link below, if you want to learn more about how you could get into this program, how to get small businesses to pay you one to 10 thousand dollars a month to manage their social media and internet marketing there will be a link below. Now don't freak out if you click it and it says closed.

As we're recording right now, it's been closed. If you're watching this a week later or a month later or a year later, it might be open. We open it, let a certain amount of people get in, graduate, go through the program, close it as new people, then we bring new people in. So if you can't get in, don't have a heart attack, put your email for the waiting list and you'll be learning, you know, I've spent over 20 million dollars of my own money, depends how you count it, but tons of millions let's say. It's probably more but my lawyers want me to be conservative so I'll say tons of millions on learning how to use social media to create revenue and that's what I know how to do and I think, you know, I'm probably in the top two or three people in the world after the Kardashians and stuff like that actually using social media to generate revenue to their own businesses which is what I do. Joe, so I teach in this program, you're going to learn from me, and then Joe is actually running an agency making seven figures.

The goal of this program is only for you to make six figures if it's your first business. Let's not have too big of ambition, you can always do that later. Get to six figures, the, you can figure seven figures later. Joe is teaching in there hands on stuff. What, how much would you pay if you could go back in time and have yourself teach you everything you know? It'd be worth... - I'd pay a hundred thousand dollars. - [Ty] Yeah. Don't worry, the program, the test group is not 100 grand.

- Let's put it this way. I have been part of a mastermind group that was close to that amount. - [Ty] Yeah, it was like 70 grand. You pay still and continue an education for yourself. How much do you think you spent? You spent 70 grand a year to be part of one kind of trade mastermind group and you probably have bought five, 10, 15 other programs. - More, probably more on different topics, from copy writing, because you want to be good at all the elements of this. Over time, I have at least, I have spent too much. (crosstalk) I was in it for a year. The first year I taught in it which I got... - [Ty] So you spent over a 100 grand learning this stuff.

- Way more than 100 grand, yeah, yeah, and I still am. I'm still buying courses every single month. - Sometimes, you know, people see online courses, we have online courses or there's different places and people are like is this a scam, I'm not going to do them and I'm like well then don't do it, be behind the curve. People who are overly suspicious of everything, I mean you want to be suspicious, but I've learned overly suspicious people are always behind. They just are. - I know, you know, you recently had the OMG course. I bought that, you know, because there is things that I see every day, new angles, new perspectives that I know I can learn from. That's why you pick up a book, you know. You're trying to get one good thing out of something that's worth money to you.