GUEST BIO: 

President and CEO Warren Jolly at adQuadrant -- one of the world’s leading digital advertising firms for 7-, 8- and  9-figure eCommerce brands, has been an internet entrepreneur since he was 16 years old.  A full service agency, the firm has represented more than $100M in ad buys and has been recognized as one of the Top 1000 Facebook Marketing Companies (out of 4 million).  Clients include: Thomson Reuters, eHarmony, ProFlowers, A Place for Mom, Caesars Entertainment, Ivory Ella, Telebrands and others.

A prolific investor, Jolly backs a variety of companies including hims, Bolt, Bear Brands LLC, Ellmount.  He is the co-founder and an investor at Intelitics as well as serves as a Limited Partner at Unlock Venture Partners and Next Play Capital.

TAKEAWAYS 

What incredibly powerful old-school sales angle that’s a BIG no-no on Facebook is totally cool on Snap.

How to avoid being overlooked by the platform’s advertising-savvy audience by using these kinds of visuals.

The functional reality of why you need to resist the urge to use cute copy in the platform’s “Discovery Headline”.

How much you need to spend to find out if the platform is a viable vehicle for your business (it’s a lot less than you think).

Why you shouldn’t gauge Snap success by the data you get on Google Analytics --- and what you need to do to REALLY understand what’s going on.

RESOURCES/CONTACT:

https://www.adquadrant.com/
@warrenjolly on twitter
https://www.linkedin.com/in/warrenjolly/

TRANSCRIPT

Speaker 1 (00:00):

On this episode of the rich dad, poor dad podcast, we have the one and only CEO from adQuadrant, Warren jolly. Who's responsible for spending shoot 80 million plus in 2020 for their clients. Hell. Now on this one, we dive into some super different, you know, rich ads and poor ads in the Snapchat game. We dive into, you know, how to create compelling creative call to action specific offers. So if you're doing snap, you definitely kind of want to jump on this because it's super relevant and it's not like any other platform and understanding attribution, the tricky one. If you need some tips, make sure to tune in you also kind of deal on how Warren looks at a 70, 2010 on his investments. More or less kind of continues to bring money in and acquire new deals to expand its portfolio and kind of keep the business booming and innovated. So make sure to tune in this. One's super awesome. He's a legend in the game. So make sure to tune in, um, this brand was able to do a tremendous amount of revenue because of the price point, be the demographic that they really appeal to, which is that younger women cohort and see the investments that they've made into a post-click or landing page and site experiences to be really fast and really focused on, um, fewer steps in the funnel to actually drive the purchase. And that's really, really important on snap.

Speaker 2 (01:25):

You're listening to the rich add poor ed podcast, where we break down the financial principles that rich advertisers are deploying today to turn advertising into profit and get tons of traffic to their websites without killing their cash. These advertisers agencies, affiliates brands are responsible for managing over a billion dollars a year in ad spend. You'll hear about what's working for them today. They're rich ads and we'll roast their Epic failures and crappy ads on the internet with core ads. Let's get into it. Welcome to another episode of the rich ed at podcast is your host sack Johnson. I'm with Mr. Dylan Carpenter. Dylan, are you excited to talk paid media?

Speaker 1 (02:04):

Yeah, man, especially snap. Yeah, we haven't had any Snapchat, you know, individuals on, so this should be a super good one.

Speaker 2 (02:10):

Yes. Yes. Well, today is a legend in the world of paid media. Originally got his start in, in the affiliate marketing world and now runs an agency for almost last seven years called ad quadrant out of LA. These guys are gonna manage upwards of $80 million in media spend this year. And I know that today's guest is an absolute expert when it comes to attribution and tracking. And we're going to dive into some of the trends on how to stay on top of that over, over this next year. So Dylan, you ready to, uh, ready to get into it? Yeah, man, the hype is real is real. Yeah. So today's guests to work with some pretty, pretty big brands as well in their agency over it at quadrant, obviously, uh, most of you listeners probably know, uh, the brand snow we've had Josh on the podcast. Uh, they've also worked with general assembly, fashion, Nova UNTUCKit and uh, budget blinds and some other pretty big spenders. And uh, yeah, I'm, I'm excited to have on the show Warren jolly. Thanks for being here, man.

Speaker 3 (03:21):

Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 (03:23):

Yes, sir. So tell me a little bit about what you're up to these days and, uh, and what you're rocking over it. Uh, ad quadrant going into Q4.

Speaker 3 (03:34):

Yeah. We're trying to solve and crack the code on attribution for the entire world. That would be nice. Uh, we're, we're really, you know, a paid media house that focuses on growth and strategy and strategy being the underscore of everything that we do. You know, our belief is that performance marketing and paid media is just heavily commoditized. You know, Facebook, Google, et cetera, is making it super easy for marketers to place ads, but they don't help you solve through the deep challenges in terms of really understanding the effectiveness of that. What that platform is, is, is doing holistically to your brand, how to think about creative on a per platform basis and really be, be great at kind of solving that storytelling challenge for users that are viewing your brand for the first time or potentially the 10 time. And so we spent a lot of our time thinking about how to tie all these pieces together for brands that are looking to achieve kind of hypergrowth.

Speaker 3 (04:28):

Uh, and, and, and for us, that's, you know, three to 10 X growth over the next two to three years and brands that are able to achieve that are really at the cutting edge of not just testing, but thinking about these challenges of more meaningful, deep way. So that's kind of where we come in. And for me personally, I'm also an investor. So I partner with early stage companies, uh, directly and through a fund to help them, um, mentally get access to capital. But again, kind of make sure that we're being deployed in the most effective manner to drive that trend, to that type of growth trajectory that I highlighted earlier.

Speaker 2 (05:01):

That's awesome. So is this the, uh, unlock venture partners? I'm looking at your LinkedIn profile?

Speaker 3 (05:07):

That's one of them. So unlock is, um, uh, you know, the investing thesis is really focused only on companies that are based in Seattle and LA. And that really has, you know, where, where we see the opportunities, obviously every investor, every venture capital firms focused on Silicon Valley and it's very, you know, Uber competitive there, but there's great company that's coming out of LA and Seattle that, um, you know, the Kleiner Perkins of the world and the Bessemer ventures don't really focus on. So, um, that combined with where everybody is focused from a partner perspective geographically, it gives us access to some really interesting, um, businesses. And so we invested in companies like Dolly, which is sort of the on-demand, um, resource for moving. Uh, we've invested in a company called fight camp, which is the Peloton for boxing. So there's really a host of interesting, uh, direct to consumer businesses and brands that we've been able to, you know, very enough to partner with, um, beyond MK.

Speaker 4 (06:00):

Yeah. It looks like you invested in bolt that's that's pretty awesome.

Speaker 3 (06:03):

Yeah. Yeah. Bull is a built-in, you know, amazing business, really bringing kind of that Shopify payments, uh, ubiquity to all, all e-commerce retailers. So making the process of checking out as a consumer, really frictionless, irrespective of what, um, CRM or shopping cart solution they're using. So it's, it's, you know, we've seen really incredible results with retailers like American Eagle and a host of others that have implemented bull bull and seen conversion rates go up drastically.

Speaker 4 (06:31):

You're one of the only agency owners I know that is even remotely participating in some type of a, of a venture. Right. I think like, ha we had hoc media on here, but like their venture arm is like a million dollars. It's like a million, $2 million. It's like tiny, tiny, tiny, uh, um, venture arm. What made you one want to get into that space? Um, most people lose money in that world and uh, yeah, like H how did that all happen?

Speaker 3 (07:00):

Yeah, so, so candidly, you know, we started at quandrant by accident. We're not, I'm not an agency pedigree guy, nor is my co-founder. Like, that's not what we thrive off of, but we, we, we solved it. We, we started the company to solve the challenges, right. That existed back in 2015 as it related to, you know, figuring out these new channels, getting Facebook to work at scale, et cetera. But as we did that, we started to encounter a lot of brands that had great products, um, you know, seasoned leadership, really passionate entrepreneurs needed help with marketing, but also had that void on the financing side. So for, for me, and for us as investors, we have, we have this opportunity to not only, um, you know, kind of deploy capital into what can be a great business, but also be a creative about it. And that's the key, right? If you're able to put money and control the outcome or influence the outcome of that business, that's far more powerful than just being a check writer. So we're writing a check in the business and we're making sure that our marketing is executed effectively backed by a really strong team and a good core quality product that's solving a real problem for, for users. That that combination is what we identified as the real opportunity. I don't think it isn't wrestling without, without the piece around the creativeness.

Speaker 4 (08:15):

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Now is it just equity or do you do debt investments as well? Only equity. Awesome.

Speaker 3 (08:23):

Yeah, I love it.

Speaker 4 (08:25):

Cool. So let's get into it. Dylan, take, take us through this, uh, this for Chad porridge segment.

Speaker 1 (08:35):

Yeah. Warren man. So thank you so much for the slides. You made it so much easier, but as mentioned y'all this is our kind of first rich ads, snap section, more or less. So Warren, can you kind of give us a 30,000 foot overview of kind of, you know, how this rich had impacted how it performs so well and kind of what made it work?

Speaker 3 (08:53):

Yeah. So before I do, I think it's probably best to talk about kind of the two main, main ad units on snap. You've got story ads and snap ads, story ads are in the discover tile when you open up snap and you're looking at like celebrities and influencers, you'll see a bunch of different tiles in the bottom. And then snap ads are just the interstitials that sit between friends stories that they post on the platform. So what we're looking at here as a story ad, right, effectively there's, and by the way, if you guys want, you can, um, you can Dylan, if you'd like as well, you can scan the QR code whenever and you can see the ad itself is really a prime example of the effectiveness of UGC. Right? If you look at the top ad, that's raw, it's relatable, right? It lives in discovery feed.

Speaker 3 (09:34):

It's got a thumbnail, but you can see that that when a user scrolls over that, they're seeing, they're seeing a girl with acne on her face, right on the top tile. And they're seeing an after on the bottom. And the nice part about snap is a lot of people don't know this. There are a lot friendlier with before and afters, then Facebook and other platforms. So you can be really raw with your users. If you have a brand that's in the weight loss category or fitness or skincare here in this instance, and make that kind of create that raw relatable experience using your creative, the ad that lost was very sort of polished, right? You've got, um, you know, it looks really clean, it looks pleasant, but it's just too professional, right? Even showing the product shots of the actual, uh, the clay, the clay mask, and this instance, it just did not perform nearly as well as it did having kind of that raw visceral image also copy on snap, right?

Speaker 3 (10:28):

You don't have the same canvas that you have on Facebook. So you've got one headline it's called a discovery headline. And so hitting on the value prop and coming across super confident is really, really key. And so in the, in the ad, that one, it says clear skin with this a hundred percent money back guarantee. That's a heck of a lot better than the ad, that loss that said, ladies, this will make you fall in love with your skin, right? Both are, you could argue are compelling, but when you're clear, you're upfront, you're direct about what the customer's getting when they respond, um, on snap, it just tends to work tremendously better. And one thing that's really important though, to remember about snap for all marketers, snap is still the most ephemeral platform, right? So when you talk about add user intention, user attention, and how to engage and keep that user's attention on snap, you really, really have to be effective. And as a front about capturing that attention, because users are just swiping at it at a rate that's unprecedented compared to any other platform,

Speaker 1 (11:26):

And how long did this rich had taken to make? It's so simple and sleek, it's gotta be three, four seconds. I, I know you kind of test it on a creatives, but any idea how long has kind of could have taped to kind of show some perspective of how easy it is to kind of make an ad pretty much

Speaker 3 (11:40):

Five minutes, right. When we're talking about that specific guy, because again, I mean, you, you know, a lot of brands and, you know, media buyers are listening to this podcast, potentially always have this conundrum of, well, I don't have a bunch of resources, right. Really what you need to study and understand is the ad units and creative specs on a per platform basis. And then just make sure you're repurposing it based on those specs, but also what policy at the platform will allow you to do or not do. In this instance, we knew that snap has a different approach towards before and afters, then let's say Facebook does, Oh, that makes total sense. And it's wild from a media buyer's perspective that poor ad, I mean, it looks pretty slicked where you would probably think that would outperform the rich ads. So it's pretty interesting, kind of how it all pans out there and how relevant, you know, the creative has to be for that specific platform.

Speaker 3 (12:28):

For sure. I think one thing though, that's consistent across the board on, you know, on any platform and you're seeing this even on YouTube, which I think we've never seen in the past as much as we do today is just the advent of UGC like users, you know, everyone talks about banner blindness and the old days, like, I, I think there's, there's social ad blindness, right. In a lot of respects and people can start to delineate between, you know, what's not, and they used to be very clearly versus what looks organic. Um, and now the approach towards UDC is just go rawer than you've ever been in the past. Right. That's really what we tell brands that we partner with. And it tends to, it tends to really work. Oh yeah. And the, I mean, the metrics speak to it itself. I mean, y'all spend 13 K on that rich ad with a 2.5 X basically.

Speaker 3 (13:09):

So I mean, that's pretty killer versus, you know, that poor ads, you know, y'all spend a good six 50 with a 0.5, basically. How do you, when did you kind of determine that losing ad is just not working pretty immediately to kind of tone the budget down? How do y'all kind of go about testing the creative and then realizing this isn't working? How much more time should we give it? How much more, you know, budget should we allocate to it, which y'all's kind of thought process around that. Yeah. So, you know, we're, we're very, this is one ad in one geo just in the UK, right? So we, we tested over 20 geos, uh, with this brand and we just, you know, we follow the principle of, of, of leading metrics versus lagging metrics, right? So when we, when we're looking at leading metrics, we're not waiting for CPA and ROAS, we're starting to identify a creative that we believe is resonating with users in the platform, based on that initial story open rate, which is, you know, you click on that thumbnail. And then the next metric is in story swipe up rate, which is once you're in the story, right, are you swiping up and going to the actual brands landing page? So we're using that as a proxy to start to determine, okay, if we're running 20 concurrent tests, you know, which ones actually have the viability to stain. And we'll, we'll just go ahead and fund that one, um, you know, in kind of full maturity, if that makes sense. Oh, most definitely

Speaker 5 (14:27):

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Speaker 3 (15:46):

Now I got a juicy question for you. I love the CPMs on, you know, Snapchat is somebody who was looking to kind of test it out for their brand or business. What do you think good budget to kind of test is really with, you know, how low the CPMs really are. Yeah. So it's a great question. You're going to get a different answer from everybody who buys on staff. Um, one thing about snap that you need to know about though, is they have something called goal-based bidding that you have to unlock, which is unlike Facebook, right? I can start a Facebook campaign today and optimize towards a conversion pixel or its purchases on snap. That takes a little while to get to, and it takes a certain number of conversions, which is generally, you know, in, in the few hundred range, it's not the 58 per ad set that you might think are, you've heard on Facebook.

Speaker 3 (16:27):

But what I like to say is, if you talk to snap about this, they're going to say, you know, test our platform with, with 30 to 50 K in the first month. No, you should know. And part of that, by the way I believe is, you know, they're trying to increase their earnings, which kudos to them. But I think as a smart buyer, you should know within five to 10 K if snap is a viable platform for your business and be your strategy or on creative and user experience is actually viable for snaps user base, and both are equally as important, right? Because you were a, you know, a $1,500, uh, television on snap, just not going to be as successful as you would be in this instance where, um, this brand was able to do a tremendous amount of revenue because of a, of the price point, be that demographic that they really appeal to, which is that younger women cohort and see the investments that they've made into a post-click or landing page and site experiences to be really fast and really focused on, um, fewer steps in the funnel to actually drive the purchase.

Speaker 3 (17:31):

And that's really, really important on snap. As I mentioned earlier, users have that highly, a femoral mindset. So you can't take them through a bunch of hoops to get them to actually purchase if you're an e-commerce brand as an example. Oh, most definitely. Now with these metrics, I think, you know, you were talking to attribution earlier, so I think it'd be good to kind of with the audience, how do you all kind of really gauge, you know, what's working, are you looking at Snapchat, Google analytics? How do you kind of go about to reporting on the Snapchat side of things? Yeah, so we, you know, snap is one platform where attribution, I think is really the hardest. What happens is if someone, um, even just swipes up, but they don't load your website, Snap's going to count that as a click. And you're never going to see that in GA.

Speaker 3 (18:10):

So we, we absolutely look at what the platform says, but we take it with, with a heavy handed grain of salt. We look at GA. Um, but also just looking at GA in the instance of snap is really, really challenging because a lot of users on snap don't end up converting on, on snap as a first touch, but snap is the point of discovery for the brand. So we'll see those conversions happen on either a different device or a different browser. And so trying to knock that story back to GA is also, uh, also frankly, really a challenge. We look at different attribution windows on snap to understand, okay, what is the right credit view to give our platform? But what we really do, that's been successful in terms of attribution is doing snap in a holdout study fashion, where we're only running. Let's just say, it's a brand that targets the entire us.

Speaker 3 (18:55):

We'll just take potentially three States or one state, depending on the size of their influence in that state and only run snap ads in that one particular GL we'll customize the creative that speaks to that geo really make it an effective strategy. And then we'll, we'll baseline that geos results, um, against what we've done with snap on, in that holdout capacity. Right? So anytime we're launching a new channel, now we do this, we've done it with connected TV, we've done it with tick talk and it helps us understand that. What, what is the actual incremental lift that the business has seen compared to what the platform reports and that helps us get to like a multiplier that we apply on any of those ongoing future spends to be able to deduce what the real impact was from that? Oh man, you're leading me to my final question here. Heck yeah. So man, I just got sidetracked. I'm loving this man. Um, all right. It'll come up to me at some point, right.

Speaker 6 (19:53):

You just got all hot and bothered hearing.

Speaker 3 (19:57):

I totally got it. So yeah, whenever you kind of launched snap, you mentioned, you kind of look at the growth across, you know, the whole business as a whole. Now, whenever you see, you know, I'm sure you're driving a ton of traffic with Snapchat. Do you ever see, you know, correlations to where you have to ramp up the retargeting on Google or snap or even Facebook just because you're driving so much traffic with Snapchat, it's be kind of pretty cost-effective. Yeah. I mean, CPM arbitrage, you talked about it earlier, right? So when we think about like the snaps and the Pinterests and the tech talks of the world, CPMs are a fraction of what they are on Facebook and Google. So absolutely like we're not, you know, our expectation on these platforms that are more discovery oriented, if you will, is that, you know, we're going to see unprofitable results on platform from a pure, if we just purely look at on-platform prospecting and retargeting, and we've done that deduction exercise that I talked about earlier, right?

Speaker 3 (20:47):

So we understand that. And what we, what we really try to do in every campaign is tagging teams properly. So we can be target the traffic that actually does reach the site and understand I'll look back window. What is our true aggregate return from SAP as the first touch, right? As well as the sorry, first touch, no conversion. And then, you know, in isolation, what the platform was able to do for that audience that we're prospecting retargeting on there. And that combination is how you really understand what does it snap doing for my business at an aggregate level. Right. And how do I try to tell that story that's true or as close to the truth as I possibly can,

Speaker 1 (21:26):

Man, this is a good one. Y'all all right. So we dove into some rich house, pretty hardcore. We dabbled a little bit in the poor outside, but go ahead and focus a little bit more on that poor outside. So, I mean, when it comes to the poor ads here, what are some of the common characteristics here typically? Yes.

Speaker 3 (21:48):

You know, I think again, when you, when you really break down staff and you have this like limited canvas, as well as timeframe to capture the user's attention, um, anything that seems to polished anything that seems, um, like you've repurposed an ad from Facebook or from YouTube or the staff tends to not really work. I mean, if you, yourself, as a user, go through the discovery feed on snap and you look at, you know, whatever influencers or celebrities or brands that are marketing there, you'll see right there. And then there's the images and the creative is really thought provoking, or it's kind of gives you that, you know, what the heck is this type of reaction. And so like addressing creative in that capacity, which in this poor ad was not done. It was more of like a professional photo shoot or professional influence or shoot, I think is really number one, creating that relate-ability, which is lacking also because, you know, frankly speaking a girl who has acne, it doesn't look like this girl, that's the poor ad, right.

Speaker 3 (22:45):

A lot more like the girl in the rich ad. So, you know, people on snap, especially the younger demographic are a lot wiser to creative and advertising. Then the older demographic is so, you know, making sure that if you're targeting 25 to 35 year old woman, that your ads look and speak and feel like them is absolutely paramount. So I would say, start with relate-ability in mind, make sure imagery is really raw. It's visceral, it's UGC in nature. Um, and you know, again, you can see this poor ad that both from a, from an imagery perspective, as well as kind of the headline, it just really didn't hit the nail on the head to keep users engaged long enough and ultimately manufacture that intent necessary to drive the purchase.

Speaker 1 (23:30):

And, and you would really think, you know, that 30% off that sense of urgency would kind of do some wonders, but it goes to show, Hey, you got to test it really gauge what works.

Speaker 3 (23:39):

Yeah. And I think also, you know, one of the things I left out was just to have a compelling CTA, right? You're trying get this high add audience to convert, make sure you drive them towards the action that you're, that you're, you're actually proposing. That's

Speaker 4 (23:54):

That's the, that should be a course right there. I'm pumped. Well, y'all know what time it is, Zach, it's your favorite time of the whole show. Go ahead and take it away. All right. So let's dive into some financial principles for, and I, I think that, uh, we've talked through a couple different things before the show, but the way that you think about, you know, managing, um, you know, investing in a new initiatives, uh, in your different businesses is very similar to how a media buyer might actually, uh, run an ad account. So I'd love it if you could share, uh, how you look at that and how you manage that. And also just how you came up with that principle.

Speaker 3 (24:34):

So the core of the principal is really, you know, obviously I admire it. I think all of us can respect what that Bezos has built with Amazon. And the fact that he still thinks about Amazon as being, you know, in, in that day zero environment, like our first day of business is really helped drive so much of their innovation and change. And when you're trying to bootstrap a business, which I've always done historically, I really haven't raised outside venture capital for companies I've, I've started until very recently. Um, you've got to really be capital efficient and you have to be almost kind of ruthless about, about, you know, saying no to ideas that just are failures, right? So you generally start a business and you've got an initial way to generate revenue. You signed up every customer under the sun. If you're a services business, you just say yes to everybody that becomes kind of your 70% of what keeps you in business or allows you to sustain.

Speaker 3 (25:23):

Then you have this 20% window, which is really about how do I grow out, above and beyond myself, right? And that 20% is creating a moat and defensibility around your business. Ultimately, that's really, really important because if you don't have a moat around your business, really don't have something that's defensible. And if any competitor comes in with more capital or a slightly better team, they're gonna crush you. So that 20% is about creating moat and investing in areas that are going to be defensible. And then you have to have this 10%, um, that's about hypergrowth ideas, really wild, hairy experiments that you constantly in a disciplined capacity fund, both with time and money. And that once those 10% bear fruit, it goes into that kind of 20% boat and defensibility bucket. And once they've matured into, Hey, this is actually viable. I have more than five customers or whatever it is that'll pay for this.

Speaker 3 (26:13):

It goes into your core 70%. And that's how you bootstrap, in my opinion, or a core principle behind bootstrapping a business from zero to eight figures or nine figures in revenue, but always maintain that discipline and not, not getting complacent because, you know, you're 70% it's going well, right? And you don't need to worry about competition or you don't need to worry about innovation. And so really the idea is it's a 70, 2010 rule and it helps you, you know, kind of innovate outcome as it relates to what else is happening in the ecosystem. And guess what, if you're in a category or three that doesn't have, um, innovation pressures or competition, then it's not really business worth being in, in the first place. So that's kinda how I think about growing companies and how to think about kind of investing in creating that discipline.

Speaker 4 (27:00):

Okay. So let's just say I produce a million dollars a year in profit, and you're saying in terms of I, or are we talking about profit year or are we talking about like, okay, we're going to take 20% of that invest in initiative, 10% of that. It's going to go into, um, you know, crazy experiments or are you more just like baking this into how you operate, you know, the businesses, you know, from a top line? Cause I,

Speaker 3 (27:30):

Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. Um, it really is. I mean, there's, you know, businesses tend to start one of two ways, right? You you're either out you're raising money and you have investors that are writing a check to fund an idea, or you've bootstrapped the company to a certain size. So first example, it would just be off the balance sheet of what money you've invested. And that would be kind of your, your, your, your core, um, approach from, from absolute day one on the second, it's really about taking profit and headcount that you can reallocate, you know, out of that you take that a hundred percent. That's initially gotten you in business and start to shrink it down to 70 and think about your allocations that 20 and 10. So if I were to start a business today and I raised money from investors, let's just say I raise $5 million.

Speaker 3 (28:11):

I would, I would have an initial idea and initial, um, value proposition, which is why I got funded in the first place, but guaranteed whether I like it or not, or anyone believes it or not, I'm going to be pivoting as I learn more about that idea and actually validate the real hypothesis so that all of a sudden same thing, not a hundred percent that I thought I would be doing would that 5 million bucks is going to pivot. And as I pivot, I'm pivoting into what I learned from that 20 and 10 portion of the, of the prorata exercise, right? Same thing. If I've shopped the company, I've been to want to figure out ways to grow faster than I've been able to grow historically. So I start to think about that allocation and where should I be? How do I create my initial loan defensibility and then follow on how do I start to think about, you know, those wild experiments that are going to potentially deliver hyper growth

Speaker 4 (28:58):

And what have been those for you and in the agency business? Like what, what has been some of those 10, those 10%, uh, you know, investments and tests that, that have now kind of got rolled into the core 70?

Speaker 3 (29:13):

Yeah, that's a great question. So, um, one of those has been, you know, building out, building out a full creative studio, right. Um, when we started again, an agency or creative or brand background, that's not, that's not my DNA. Um, but, but taking that bet early and saying, you know what, we're going to, we're going to take the lead on creative now brands that we partner with, not expect them to take the lead and provide us with, um, you know, useful assets. That was one example are venturing to take talk early on. Um, you know, uh, last year was an example of that 10% where, um, you know, there wasn't really a pixel, uh, direct response. Wasn't really kind of a talked about thing. There wasn't an auction, but just saying, you know what, we're going to figure this out because we believe that this platform is here to stay. And that there's a really interesting opportunity for brands to diversify their and in a unique way. Um, was it that, that paid off massively for us? So you, you know, being really aggressive about testing new channels and testing new services internally, um, has helped us, you know, innovate, grow and remain, remain very profitable, but be able to create value in the ecosystem. And that's really how you're able to do that, right, by thinking differently and challenging that status quo as, as fast and as tremendously as you can.

Speaker 4 (30:26):

That is awesome. I love it. I love it. So let's talk about, you know, what you do as an agency owner, you know, from kind of switching from operator to investor hat for a minute. You, how, how, how do you look at, um, getting the most amount of leverage out of your investing activities?

Speaker 3 (30:48):

Yeah. Um, so for us, it's really interesting, right? I mean, the, the, the no-brainer that we realized is we come across a lot of brands where there's great products, great operators, you know, tenured entrepreneurs, they need help with marketing. But when we really start to unpack the business, what we realize is they've overfunded in certain areas. And they're, they're, they're, they're, they're sort of overleveraged right as a business and as an operator. And so Mo great marketing alone doesn't solve that problem, but being able to become a partner of theirs, you know, finance help finance the business as well as be a vendor, allows us to do a couple of things, right? Hey, we get to take equity in the business. Um, E we get to, you know, charge for services and see, we get to make sure that the equity that we're taking in the business by investing cash is a creative.

Speaker 3 (31:37):

And we get to sort of mitigate downside and influence upside because writing a check, but we're also helping the business shore up its growth efforts, right? Maybe they're thinking about going into retail or wholesale, where they should be a hundred percent DTC, or they have a hundred percent DTC presence, but they're marketing and creative and kind of tech stack is really ineffective. And those are relatively easy things for us to fix. That could be, um, you know, frankly, real force multipliers for the business, from both the top line revenue perspective, as well as profitability. So we look, we look for businesses where we can be highly creative, and I also don't believe that anyone should invest, uh, or write a check into a business that they fundamentally just really don't understand, because if you don't understand that you can't be creative and oftentimes if you don't understand it at some point in that journey with you as an investor, you know, something, or someone's going to pull the wool over your eyes, and by the time you figure it out, it might be too late. And I can speak from firsthand experience, um, and saying that. So I've really learned to kind of identify ideas that, that, that, that I get that I believe in that I can be, be along for the ride on a bit more than just a silent observer.

Speaker 3 (32:47):

I love it, man. I love it. Well, this has been

Speaker 2 (32:51):

Awesome. I've actually really enjoyed the sip. So what do you think, Don? I want to get some snap stuff after this. Yeah. Oh, I love it, man. Well, Warren, this has been an amazing, uh, podcast really appreciate you sharing about so many different aspects of what you're up to and really appreciate some of the disciplines that you've put in place and how you managing the business. Tell everybody a little bit about, you know, what else you've got going on and how we can

Speaker 3 (33:21):

Yeah. Um, I'll be at ad world. Uh, and I think what is it next week now? So talking a little bit more about, um, advanced attribution and how you can think about solving some of the challenges. If you're a marketer or a brand that's spending money on Facebook and YouTube and Snapchat, and really trying to develop an underlying proach towards managing all of this. I'll be chatting a bit about that at, on world. So come check out my session. Um, if you wanna learn more about what we do at quad renters, go to act quatre.com. We've got a bunch of case studies and more information about who we work with and who we service. But other than that, I'm happy to add value, answer any questions. Um, best way to reach me is, uh, on Twitter is that Warren jolly feel free to send me a DM and, uh, I'll, I'll get right back to you.

Speaker 2 (34:06):

Amazing. Well, there you have it. Thank you so much. We'll definitely have you back on the show soon. Thanks guys.

Speaker 3 (34:15):

[inaudible]

Speaker 2 (34:16):

Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the rich add more ed podcast. If you're like me and listen to podcasts on the go, go ahead and subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and rich dad, poor dad.com/podcast. And if you absolutely love the show, go ahead and leave a review and a comment share with a friend. If you do take a copy screenshot of it, email me zach@funneldash.com. Show me you left a review. I'll give you a free copy of the rich add for ed book to learn more about the book. Go to rich ed for a.com to leave a review that a rich ed or at.com/review. Thanks again.