the bossbabe podcast - 261. My Exact Journey Scaling 3 Companies to $1M+ with Jim Huffman

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

Do you want to grow your brand to $1M? Of course you do.  Our guest today, Jim Huffman, is an expert in doing exactly that. Jim is the CEO of GrowthHit, a modern marketing agency with a long track record for success. He’s here today to share all of his secrets to differentiating, scaling and optimizing a business in the digital era. Jim’s advice cuts right to the core of where we should, and should not, be spending our valuable time and attention. If audience building, team management and goal setting are giving you a hard time – you’re going to love this super actionable conversation. Highlights: Learn the 2 personas Jim sells to + why you shouldn’t try to sell to everyone (don’t be afraid to stick to your niche!) Hiring based on culture and values is better in the long run – your business is NOT a spreadsheet. What intentional scaling is and how it translates to your overall life happiness. Links: If you’re interested in creating your own million dollar offer, DM @bossbabe.inc “INSIDER” to be among the very FIRST to know about our workshop! Scale your business with GrowthHit —growthhit.com Learn more about GrowthHit’s $3M Challenge Read: Atomic Habits by James Clear Read: Ego Is The Enemy by Ryan Holiday  Check out Jim’s articles — jimwhuffman.com Follow: Instagram: @jimwhuffman Linkedin: Jim Huffman Twitter: @JimWHuffman bossbabe: @bossbabe.inc Natalie Ellis: @iamnatalie

It takes so much discipline. It kind of goes back to what we spoke about. You need to be aligned on the mission and what is the end goal here. Yes, it's fun to show that graph up and to the right, but it's like, oh, now I'm HR and I'm managing people. I'm doing all these sales calls. I like creating. I like building. And I can do that more at this size of a company than that size of the company. A boss babe is unapologetically ambitious and paves the way for herself and other women to rise. Keep going and fighting on.

She is on a mission to be her best self in all areas. It's just believing in yourself. Confidently stepping outside her comfort zone to create her own version of success. Welcome to the Boss Babe podcast, a place where we share with you the real behind the scenes of building successful businesses, achieving peak performance, and learning how to balance it all. I'm Natalie Ellis, CEO and co-founder of Boss Babe, and your host for this episode. So in this episode, I interview Jim Huffman. Jim is the CEO of Growth Hit, a growth consultancy focused on conversion optimization and the co-creator of Funnel Teardowns. He has grown two startups from idea to over $10 million in sales, spent

over $4 million on Facebook ads, and has led workshops at Fortune 500 brands like FedEx, Oreo, Hot Wheels, and Intuit. So this conversation is really, really interesting because it's all about how to build brands to a million dollars. And not just one type of brand, multiple types of brands, whether you're a personal brand, an agency, a product-based, a service-based, we go everywhere in this episode and talk about what we'd both do if we were starting from the beginning. And we get really honest about the things that we've totally messed up as founders and how we would change things up moving forward. I really think that this episode has so much gold in it. I myself was taking so many notes and just nodding. It might even be one of my favorite episodes today because

it's so tactical. So hopefully you absolutely love it. And just to let you know, we are going to be running a workshop at Boss Babe, teaching you how to create your own million dollar offer. It's the first time we've ever done anything like this. We're going to be hosting it live and really walking you step by step through the process. If you're interested, all the info you need is below. I think it'll be an absolute game changer, especially for moving into 2023. I know so many of us are seeking clarity and hopefully that workshop will be just that. So with that, let's dive straight in. Okay, Jim, tell me about this 3 million challenge because I'm very, very interested in what you're doing here. Yeah, we'll see if this is a good idea or not. So I have a growth agency called

Growth Hit. We've been around for like over five years. And hey, if we're such a good growth team, why can't we grow our own stuff? Because we've been a part of some exciting success stories. We're like, oh man, I wish I would have worked for equity. That would have been a smarter move. So our goal is to have a startup studio. And this is our way of really kind of lighting a fire under us. Like, all right, let's do this.

Because if you work in public each month, you have to like talk about the numbers. So it forces you to work hard. The goal is to take three different companies and grow them to seven figures or a million dollars a year or 83K a month. And one is an agency, our agency Growth It. So we've been able to hit that milestone. The second is a e-commerce company, a direct-to-consumer brand called Handsome Chaos. We're doing dry shampoo for men in pomade form because I'm a

dude with long hair. And as a parent, sometimes I might not be able to shower and I need to look like I do shower. And so that's the goal of that. And then the third one is our productized service called One Day Design, where we can design a web page for people in one day. And we do it really fast and do it pretty cheap. So yeah, we've hit the goal of growth hit with One Day Design. We've just crossed like $75,000 in sales. And with Handsome Chaos, we're at $0 because I don't know how to manufacture products. We have pre-sold some products and we've got a waitlist of a thousand people, but it won't be ready till February, which is really painful because it's taken a while. But yeah, I'm happy

to go deep on it, but it's pretty fun. Well, I love that you're doing this. And also, it's such a big risk, right? You must be really confident in what you do. The fact that you're putting this all out there as a growth agency. Yeah, that's a really good call out because when we thought about these businesses we would do, it's like, okay, risk from a standpoint of money and time. And we like to play where we would have an unfair advantage. So if anybody's listening to this and you're trying to think, where should you have a business? Right on a list, where do you have an unfair advantage and where don't you have an advantage? So the advantage with one-day design is any service, productized service or fancy consulting service doesn't take much money up front. You can go on LinkedIn tomorrow and be like,

hey, I'm a consultant. Who wants to hire me? And you have a business. So with one-day design, that one is profitable out of the gate, essentially. Handsome Chaos is the tougher one because we set up a website and ran ads to validate the idea. And I can talk about how we did that as well. We did that for under $1,500. Now we do have to make an investment of inventory.

We'll be spending about $5,000 to get 1,000 units. So that is a risk. We really kind of try to map out like what are the ones we could do, we have an unfair advantage, and the cost won't be like life changing. You know, I'm not like taking my kids college savings and saying, let's let's roll the dice. But yeah, that's kind of like, let's put our money where our mouth is. Because if we can grow these in public, we'll look like a good growth team. But if they fail, maybe we'll never get a client ever again. Yeah, exactly. Are you thinking when you're launching these brands, are you thinking through

a certain framework that you're using to kind of apply to every single business? Because I know for me, I often play the game of what would I do differently if I could start a business from scratch? I feel like we all have hindsight in our businesses. I'm like, you know what, if I could go do it again, I would crush this or I would be so much faster, so much easier, so much cleaner. So are you thinking through a framework? I need to dial in X, Y, Z in terms of maybe an offer, the team you're having, the way in which you market.

What does that look like? You've hit it on the head. They say the quote is, first-time founders focus on product, second-time founders focus on products, second time founders focus on distribution. So the main framework is starting with two things, distribution in mind, one, and two, what does that irresistible activation offer? And with one day design, we named it that name for that exact reason. You know what it is when you hear it, right? It's like

seven minute abs, but for your website. And our thought is if people can easily understand it, we've already got them almost to the bottom of the conversion funnel, right? And now it's like, how do we activate them? So that was one thing. With Handsome Chaos, I'm a huge fan of the book, the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. And they have, I believe it's chapter two called Category Creation. And they say, if you can't be number one in a category, create your own. So our goal is to create a category of dry shampoo for pomades. So there's probably a lot of women listening to this that are like, yeah, I know what dry shampoo is. I've been using it forever. Guys are dumb like me and they have no idea what it is.

And I was stealing my wife's, but I want it in pomade form. So we're really looking into, can we create a category? And then as far as that activation offer for it, we're going into giving a product away for free if they subscribe or if they do a bundle. Whenever we come up with an idea, we're like, how can we sell this right now? And what would we put in front of somebody

to where it's irresistible? Like, okay, I'm absolutely going to try it. But yeah, that's kind of the framework is distribution over product out of the gate. I had a feeling that's what you were thinking through when I seen the website page for One Day Design. It was one of those things when I see offers that are so dialed in, that's how you know it's not a first time founder. Because I think

when we're often getting things off the ground for the first time, we can either not think our offer through strong enough, we kind of throw everything out there and see what sticks. Or we, or I can speak for myself, we kind of fall into something because it feels like a good idea without really dialing in who is it for? What am I doing? And then the business kind of gets away from you and you think, do you know what, if I'd start from the beginning with a really strong niche, a really strong name and the offer was more dialed in, I'd be way further ahead than having to go back and refine and think through that now. So is there like a framework you think about when you're putting together an offer

in terms of who am I targeting, coming up with a name, thinking through pricing, you mentioned testing as well. I would love to know because I think this can sometimes be the thing that people overlook. Oh, I'm just going to go sell consulting or I'm going to have a design agency. Okay, great. But let's go sell consulting or I'm going to have a design agency. Okay, great. But let's get really clear on what this offer is. Yeah, I get really bummed when I see really smart, first-time founders spend really good time,

but on bad things. It's like, let me get the logo right. Let me get this font right or whatever. It's like, at the end of the day, it's like, where does the rubber meet the road? It's like where cash exchanges hands and we've got to get that figured out. And so the way I think about offers,

there's so many good frameworks out there for, I think Alex Hermosi, his book, $100 million offer has some really good ones. But here's the things that I'm thinking through is, there's this idea of time delay to gratification. How can you minimize the time delay to people being wowed by your product, right? That's the whole thing with one day design.

People will pay more for speed rather than pay less for a discount. And in most circumstances. And we're like, hey, if we can get to that magic moment in 24 hours, we're going to delight people. Because you can come to a website and be like, wait a minute, in 24 hours, we're going to delight people. Because you can come to a website and be like, wait a minute, in 24 hours,

I'm going to have a beautiful design that I could take live. Let me see this. So that's one big thing is time delay gratification. The second is a risk reversal. Whenever you're thinking of someone buying your product, think of two people, a skeptical person who's going to like out of the gate,

just be like, this isn't going to be good. Like what's their thought process? The other person is who's someone that's oblivious. I've been so guilty of you're so deep in the weeds. You're like, Oh, of course they're going to know what this means. Like, no, they won't. Like imagine someone's like on a bus and they land on your website and they half are paying attention. What your offer and by prop has to come screaming through within those 10 seconds. So those are the personas that I'm going for. The other thing that we like to do is I think it's really easy to try and be everything to everyone because when you're starting, you don't want to say no to anybody because you're just trying to make a buck. And again, this is the

hardest advice to take. It's easiest to give because I even struggle with it. But if you can take your persona a step further, where you're like, hey, we only target or we only work with Shopify websites, only work with Webflow clients, or only work with SaaS clients, or if you're a men's grooming project, like, hey, we only work with guys that have long hair or medium to long hair. When you can take it that step further, yes, you're going to be alienating people. But when you get in front of that right person, you're like, oh, wait, you're speaking my language. You're speaking to my problem.

Oh, and you have this offer that will gratify me right away. And you're taking away the risk. The point on the risk reversal is, what those risks they have and how can you reduce that with a money back guarantee, with a satisfaction guarantee or a free trial? That way you make it a no brainer decision. So if you can nail those things, you really put yourself in an offensive position. I love that you talked about that, about not like there's no such thing as being necessarily too niche and it's good to alienate some people. And for me, I've always preached this and I still get caught up by it. So I'm in the process of creating a brand new business and I'm going to be creating

a mastermind for entrepreneurial moms. And I know exactly who my ideal client is. I know exactly who my ideal client is. I know exactly. So defined. And I keep getting DMs from all of these women who are entrepreneurs and are moms, but aren't my exact ideal client. And I find myself wondering too, oh, well, it's okay if maybe I need to expand it to this. And it's okay if they're not this because they have this. And it's so easy to get caught up on this magic carpet ride of, well, let me serve everyone because I want to hell. And it's so easy to get caught up on this magic carpet ride of, let me serve everyone because I want to help. And I have to keep bringing myself back to center and

keep reminding myself, if you go that direction, you're just shooting yourself in the foot. You're not going to be able to offer the best service because it's not super specific and you're going to get lost in your messaging and your marketing. But it's so easy, right? To like want to help everyone and feel like, oh, well, I'm leaving so much money on the table or I could be impacting way more people. So that practice, I think, is really important to keep coming back to. I just think that's such a good point.

Like, because one thing to think about, like when you don't go niche, you can have a good website. You can have good messaging. You're like, hey, this is a mastermind for upcoming founders. That'd be great. But if you can be like, hey, we're a mastermind for moms. There's a struggle and the juggle. You can't do the bedtime routine and manage payroll.

This is for you. You go from good to great, where when your persona lands on it, you're like a market of one. And there's this rule that if your market, if you can find a list of at least 2000 people, you're good with your niche. That's all you need is 2000 people. So I love that you have the conviction to do that because that's hard. Yeah. And even what you said there in the messaging was you can't put your baby to bed and do payroll, right? That messaging is so specific because already I'm speaking to the woman that has a team without even having to say, you've got a team. And so there'll be certain people land on that page and like, oh, this feels a bit advanced

for me. I'm not there yet. Or this isn't exactly for me. And it's so true. The more specific you can get and it feels like you've got to be really ballsy to just go, you know what? I'm just going to serve that person. I'm going to do it really well. But that's where I see people win. That's where I see the best products, the best communities, the best defined offers. And definitely when I think about Boss Babe, if we could go back and start from the beginning, I'd probably do more of that because we started this business like we want to help everyone. We want everyone, like all female entrepreneurs or people that want to be entrepreneurs to feel comfortable here, which we had to learn over time. That's not necessarily how things work. So love that we're talking about that. The other

thing I want to talk to you about is team. Because again, first time founders learn this lesson the hard way. There are some team members that you don't really want to hire straight out the gate. More often than not, your first hire doesn't need to be a chief operating officer with 20 years of experience. But you can often think that's the way to go, especially if you come from another company and you've seen a certain structure. How do you think about team with these new businesses that you're getting off the ground? Yeah, man, there's so much stuff here because when I was first launching a company,

I didn't like think or care about team or culture. I looked at my business as a spreadsheet, like, oh, look at the margins this is going to have. Here's how we're going to grow. But the second you start trying to grow past yourself, where you're like, I can't do this on my own, you realize that your number one job as a business owner is being a magnet for talent,

finding the best people possible and just getting out of their way. And so that's really hard to do when you're not like Apple or Facebook or Amazon that's throwing money at people. So how do you compete? And that's where you need to really, kind of to that same spirit,

niche down and be like, this is what we stand for, this is what we don't stand for. And let me put myself out there and the like-minded people could potentially come. And one thing that I did kind of accidentally smart was I had an email newsletter where I was blasting out what we're doing with GrowthHit

and the startup studio we want to launch. And literally three people on our executive team now came from me just building in public, sending out little SOSs of like, I'm looking for this role, anybody interested? Where they're like, hey, you can't afford me, but I love what you're doing. I'll test what we do on a part-time basis and maybe there's something there. And so that's one thing is like you need before you find like, oh, the best ad person or designer, if you want to play the long game, it's really helpful to get people that are aligned with your mission and values.

My co-founder came in two years after I had the agency and really helped us get to seven figures. And the reason why it worked out is we're aligned. We're like, we don't ever want to have to have a real job again. Please, Lord, don't make me have to do that. And then two, we want to be remote first, work from anywhere in the world, and let's make something that's aligned with our lifestyle. We're like, we don't do meetings on Fridays with clients. We don't do meetings on Mondays with clients. Tuesdays and Thursdays we do. And then we want to take our profits and reinvest in the startup studio. And by doing that and getting one person, it allowed us to create more noise where I was able to get other people that are these A players where I can't pay them as much with a salary, but I'm able to give them upside in the startup studio with ventures where people are like, hey, I'll work with the agency, but my goal is to be a founder. I'm like, cool, let's incubate that idea in the startup studio. And then you can have ownership in that or run that.

It's really getting your culture figured out, which is there's some frameworks for that, but then finding the people that align with the mission and then everything else will fall in place because people will, if you don't have that aligned, people can quickly leave you because they don't like a new person or because someone else is

giving them more money. But if you can be aligned on those big things, you can have really good retention and have people that'll kind of go through those ups and downs of what you're doing as a company. Let's take a quick pause to talk about my new favorite all-in-one platform, Kajabi. You know I've been singing their praises lately because they have helped our business run so much smoother and with way less complexity, which I love. Not to mention our team couldn't be happier because now everything is in one place. So it makes collecting data, creating pages, collecting payment, all the things so much simpler. One of our mottos at Boss Babe is simplify to amplify and Kajabi has really helped us do that this year.

So of course I needed to share it here with you it's the perfect time of year to do a bit of spring cleaning in your business you know get rid of the complexity and instead really focus on getting organized and making things as smooth as possible i definitely recommend kajabi to all of my clients and students so if you're listening and haven't checked out kajabi yet now is the perfect time to do so because they are offering boss babe listeners a 30-day free trial go to kajabi.com slash boss babe to claim your 30-day free trial that's kajabi.com slash boss babe oh we are so on the same page just speaking my language here and i love that around the co-founder and defining lifestyle first, because I also think when, and I keep saying first founders, because I know there's a lot of people listening to this podcast who maybe want to start their first business or in their

first business and of maybe listening, thinking, oh, I've done it all wrong. So I just want to keep saying you are not doing it wrong. We're all learning these lessons as we keep building businesses. But one thing I didn't do in the beginning, which I wish I did, was not start with what's the vision for my business, but start with what's the vision for my life? Because we, as ambitious people, we get so in the weeds of our business that we end up getting really excited over all of these big opportunities and these potential ways of scaling. And again, as I think about creating my next business, one thing that I've thought about is this element of really intentional scaling. Because I know this business can be as big as I want it to be or allow it to be. But if I really want to live my life in a certain way with these certain values and

only working X amount of hours and spending time with my baby and my husband and my friends and travel and all of these things, then intentional scaling is important. And I need to know when I have enough clients. I need to know when I've accepted enough people in so that it's time to stop accepting or raise the prices or step back a little bit. Whereas with often with your first business, you don't think about that. And I often talk about this magic carpet ride of business. You can end up being employed by your business because you're not thinking about what this really looks like. And it's something me and my co-founder continually do every year is what do we want our lifestyle to look like? What are those big goals?

Okay, great. Now, how does the business fit into it? So I love that you talked about that. And another thing that I'm really interested in with what you're doing and your businesses is whether you're thinking through kind of an operating system that you're using within the businesses. So are you, and I love getting specific, so are you using the same kind of dashboards or the same meeting structures or the same financial forecast spreadsheet? Are you able to duplicate yourself in that way? Because I imagine once you've started a couple of businesses, you have this great operating system that you can apply to other businesses, which make life so much easier. Yeah, it's so funny. But like to have freedom, you must have discipline. And it's really not sexy, but like, you need to really get into

like what your operating system is for your life for your business. And then that can open up things because if not, as your company grows, growing pains are real, and you'll just wake up in your own kind of personal torture chamber. So for us, the credit really goes to my partner, Yonathan Ainu, on taking us up a notch from a systems perspective. We invested very heavily in EOS, the Entrepreneur Operating System. It's from the book Traction. And what I love about it, it's a framework for running your company. And it is so simple that the adoption is very strong. And we live by that. And what that has allowed me to do is it's allowed me to, one, empower people to help run the company. So I'm not trying to be some hero CEO, but put the right people in the right seats. We have a scorecard. So if you go away for a week or a month, you have this scorecard. So you can see the leading indicators of, hey,

how's the business doing? How's the health of sales, of marketing, of delivery, of retention, of employee happiness. So you can have your finger on the pulse. And it gives you all these tools on how to delegate your work to elevate others, how to assess people when it's going right or wrong. So we do weekly what's called level 10 meetings because you score them and you want them to get a 10 at the end of every meeting. And we've started to fire ourselves from different departments to let people run them. And so it creates a career path for people. And so we run all that in Google Sheets. We use Asana to run our company. But we're huge fans of... A lot of times we have problems at a business, you can

do something that can be very costly. To solve that problem, you throw bodies at it. You're like, oh, we're growing. Let me hire more people. I have found that's actually the worst thing to do. Because when you hire people, guess what? You have to train them. You have to onboard them. If you don't have the systems in place for that, you just doubled your problems. And so whenever problems start to arise, we identify them like, how can we solve this with process, with systems, with technology? And if people are going to come in, we need to have the training and onboarding in place so it's seamless. And again, I'd learned all this the hard way. And so that's something that we've really focused on. So when it comes to like, what's our unfair advantage?

We're trying to become experts at operations for a company. That's why one day design works because it's so operations heavy. Because if we want to do multiple companies, we need to be aligned on how we run that. And that's what's nice about EOS. It can work with any business model. I love EOS. We run our business

on that too, but we didn't integrate it till way down the line, which is a lot harder when you already have tons of people and you're doing things in certain ways. So if I was starting again, I would do that from the beginning. So I love that you talked about that. And yeah, that's such an interesting call out about just throwing bodies at a problem. Because what I often have found is if that's what you do, you often find that you don't necessarily have full job descriptions for those people. You're kind of putting them in hoping to plug a problem. And then in order to fill out their job description, you just add a bunch of bloat and a bunch

of things to their plate that actually aren't moving the needle in your business. Whereas if you take a step back, you can often find like, I do this every quarter and I'll take a look at what we're doing as a business. And there may be certain initiatives and I look at them like, this is not making us any money at all. And it's actually costing a lot of money to run. Why are we doing it? And sometimes there's a great reason that we're doing it. It might be a long-term play. And sometimes what's really funny is someone will say, oh, I have no idea this person told me to do it. And then I go to that person, oh, I have no idea this person told me to do it. And before you know it, you've got this web of tasks. And it's so easy

to get into that when you have multiple people in a business and you don't have a great system for delegation and accountability and KPIs. It's so true. We're going through something very similar because when companies get over around like 20 people or they're going from between a million to 5 million, it's in this book called like Simple Numbers, Real Profit. I think that's the title. I might have butchered it, but they call it the black hole. It's where a lot of companies go to their graveyard because you're hitting this point of growth where you desperately need this layer of either management or systems or infrastructure, but you can and can't afford it. So you have to be really efficient. And if you're going to invest in it, you need to either have good cash reserves or people get a line of credit or they raise money. We're seeing that where we started making some

mistakes for that reason. We're like, wait, why are we doing this? Wait, what's the ROI? Who's managing the budget? And we're like, okay, we need to jump on this. Because I want advantage of, I think, being a bootstrap business owner. Every dollar in the company, someone in our company had to shed blood, sweat, or tears to get that dollar. So I take it very serious when we're wasting money. It's like, oh, that 10 grand we just wasted, Angela worked on that account all weekend that we just burned that money. Call it cheap, call it frugal, we'll call it efficiency. But that keeps me real tight with wanting to be smart with where we're trying to put our dollars.

Yeah. And talking about that, where bootstrapped also, and a realization I had a couple of years ago is the cost of meetings. Sometimes you invite so many team members to a meeting, that's an absolute waste of time for 90 minutes. And if you calculate how much that meeting costs you, you're like, what did I just do? How much did I just spend? And when you think about meetings in that way, you're often a little bit more reserved to just throw something on the calendar and invite everyone along. You think about, okay, if I'm having my team, then I'm spending X amount on a meeting. I don't make it worth a while or make it worth everyone's while.

Or accepting for us, let's say a partnership that comes in, it might look lucrative. It might look like there's a great cash injection, but do you have the systems in place to be able to go away and actually look at how much it's going to cost you to execute that

because you're paying your team to do it. And for a while, we hadn't thought about that stuff. And when we had that realization, changed everything for us and give us a bit of a framework to decide what's worth our time and what's not worth our time. Oh, man, you just said like a trigger word for me with meetings because we were going through the same thing because we actually have a lot of hourly people or look at the numbers. It's like we're paying this much for people to sit there even when they're not like,

not to their fault, but not talking or adding value. And I think Elon Musk has this framework around meetings where anyone's allowed to leave a meeting at any time. You can, like, decline a meeting if it doesn't make sense. And, like, less is better than more. And so we're all, because as an agency, we do so many meetings with clients, we're trying to work on that.

Because when we launched EOS, we had, like, three level 10s across different departments. And we're just like, this is a horrible idea. And we had to backtrack. So yeah, that's a big one. Yeah, I find for us, we need to look at it again every quarter. And we start out the quarter with really, really lean amount of meetings and everything's very structured on certain days. And then towards the end of the three months, things start ramping up again. It's time to jump in. I feel like it's kind of a never-ending process

that you always need to refine. But that's been really interesting to learn. Another thing that I want to talk to you about is distribution. So you talked about this at the beginning, talking about the difference between thinking product first or thinking distribution first. And I think distribution is one of those things that trips a lot of people up. The idea of selling something

or finding clients can feel like this pit, like this bottomless pit that they're never going to understand or get to the bottom of. How do you think about distribution when you're starting a new company? Yeah. So you basically have four options for distribution, right? You can either pay to get customers, you can do it organically, you can grow through referrals or virality, or the fourth is you find a partner channel, something where you can kind of get an unfair advantage. And the good thing is when you're starting out getting to, whether it's like seven figures or even getting to like a B round of funding or an A round of funding, you only need one to work.

And so the way to uncover where that is, is who's your persona? Where do they live online? And where do they live in a place where it's okay to be messaging and marketing to them? So obviously like a lot of people will default to paid going to social, which can work and it can bottom out.

It can be a little tougher right now. That's obviously an option. A lot of DDC brands, if you have broad appeal. What I'm excited about is distribution channels that are emerging where you have the potential to own something. I spoke with the CEO of Privy. It's an email pop-up tool.

They sold to Attentive for a very big sum. And we talked about this and he's like, we got lucky slash maybe we were kind of smart that as they're emerging in the Shopify ecosystem, the Shopify marketplace just was blowing up. And they started to see if we ride that wave, that's all we need to do. So they stopped doing everything and went all in on, we need to be good for SEO within the Shopify app marketplace. We have to be on every list that people write about. We have to have amazing reviews. And they just hitched their

wagon to that. It's like, so what's the new Shopify ecosystem that's launching? Slack just opened up theirs a year ago. Stripe opened up theirs three months ago. Let's make it for more software-based products. I mean, everyone's looking for that kind of new social network to emerge and testing TikTok. I'm also really excited about, and the idea of referral marketing or getting referrals are going viral. You can also grow by having an insanely good referral strategy. Harry's did this, Hotels Tonight has done this, Robinhood has done this, where you make such an amazing offer that if people share it, they get that thing, and then it grows. So with Harry's, they're giving away free razors. With Robinhood, they're giving free accounts.

That's one to think through. But another one is community-based marketing. This can be a little bit harder, but if you do it right, it's so sticky. Because if you have something that's truly mission-driven, it can work very, very well. But you have to all be aligned around that core mission and you're kind of building your own. And that's where you'd want to partner with a lot of other influencers and marketers. But I think what we're seeing is people have to diversify

out of Facebook and Instagram. It's having to be more thoughtful, having to do a little bit more of a bottoms-up approach, things that maybe don't scale as much as they would want, but can be great for getting those early adopters and evangelists. But yeah, that's always the tough nut to crack. With One Day Design, we're looking at hacking job boards as one way to get people in. We're having some good success on different kind of techie community platforms. With one day design, we've been doing the ads route, but we're interested in going a little bit more bottoms up with kind of a community approach.

So we'll see. Love the hacking of job boards. And it brings me to what I wrote down when you were talking because I feel like with distribution,, I mean just generally in business but with distribution, the number one thing a founder needs to have is resourcefulness because generally you'll try something once or twice and it won't work. And a lot of people at that stage can decide they're going to give up because their marketing is not working or they're going to change their offer, they're going to pivot. And I think with distribution, finding the channel that's really going to work for you takes a lot of resourcefulness. And when you think about a lot of companies, like big companies that we know now, I always think about Reddit, the way that they got themselves off the ground was they would just post in their

community as multiple different people. And it's something that doesn't scale, but it helped get them off the ground and it helped work. And I think you that doesn't scale, but it helped get them off the ground and it helped work. And I think you have to be willing to do the things that don't scale. And in the beginning, roll your sleeves up and just do what works. Are you finding that in the companies that you're growing from zero right now? Oh my gosh, absolutely. One thing to think through, the difference between a company and a startup is a company is default alive. It's like, oh, you can go on vacation. It's still going to run.

A startup is default dead. Like it only exists because you're willing it into existence. We kind of make a joke that like 70% of the things you test will fail. 30% will work. So when things fail, it's like, oh, it's dead. We've got to like revive it and do another thing. But if you can embrace grit and relentlessness and failing as a badge of honor,

you'll be able to kind of pursue and put it through. The other good thing is like, it's okay to like will yourself into existence with these non-scalable ways to get customers. Like with growth hit, like we're now 30 people, but in the early days I would, people would be like looking to hire growth marker. I'd apply for the job and. But in the early days, people would be looking to

hire GrowthMarketer. I'd apply for the job and then go in and be like, you can't hire me, but I have an agency. And so they'd be like, yeah, the room. We're like, okay, let's talk. I would do free work for people. I was like, I just got to get one client. I got to get five clients. And you get 10 clients. Because if you can get one, you can get 10. If you can get 10, you can get 1,000. If you get 1,000, it's kind of unlimited. And it's okay to ladder up and have different phases of that. Nathan Berry, who has ConvertKit, now does 30 million a month. I'm sorry, a year.

What was interesting with his email tool, he would go manually reach out to men's fashion bloggers in New York and be like, Hey, we're the best tool for men's fashion bloggers in New York. He'd get one. And then he'd go to the second one. Like, oh, by the way, you know, we're working with Joe. And then you get Joe and like, hey, you know, we're working with Joe and Nick and it would just snowball. And then he'd move on. Okay, now we're going to work with like women's beauty bloggers and wherever.

And he did that until all of a sudden, word of mouth and referral started kicking in. So I think it's okay. For me, my favorite founders, because we work with a lot of startups, my favorite founders are the ones that are kind of sneaky CMOs that just are naturally good marketers and are so good at failing where they will just let it bounce off of them and move to the next thing. Yeah. And having so much patience to play the long game, to understand that one client is a client. It's okay if it's not a hundred clients, one client is a client.

You're validating your business, your offer, and it will grow. I, yeah, I relate to that so much. And definitely what I was doing in the beginning. I'm very curious because it sounds like with business, you've really got your shit dialed in, in terms of systems and where you're going and the balance that you want to have between lifestyle and business. It sounds like you're really thinking that part through. So I'm curious if you've been able to systemize like that in your personal life. I know you have a wife and two girls, you have a lot going on. So have you been able to take almost the systems that are working in business and think about how you can apply them to your personal life as well to find that balance? Oh man, I'm trying,

but I definitely don't have the answers. Because one thing I've realized with two kids is you can create the best plan or calendar or strategy. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, like our three-year-old has croup and can't go to school tomorrow. Or our other kid had to be picked up at school. And you're like, okay, that wasn't in my planning, but we have to kind of roll with it. So what we've done is try to build a framework and like the best life hack is having a good partner, I feel like. And so for us, it's like, we both have like a trainer we work out with where like we set it up for the week, like, like, we both have like a trainer we work out with where like, we set it up for the week. Like, okay, here's our workout time that we get. Cause I think that is

everything we, we try and bake in at least every two weeks have a date. So we can actually like be a couple and not just be like roommates, like trying to like corral these two crazy kids. And for me, it's a non-negotiable, like I want to be a part of like the drop off and the pickup. And so we have that going. It's funny. I feel like your productivity level or efficiency when you have a kid goes up like 5 or 6x because you can't sweat the small stuff. You have no time for BS.

You're like, you know what? I don't really care. Let's get to the core of it because I have to be out this door at 517 to go pick up my kid. And it really makes you focus on the stuff that matters. But I still struggle. What I have to do is on Sundays is write down what are the three main things I want to get done this week and where am I going to find time to do that and trying to turn that to do into a calendar. Because there's this book, The Four Disciplines of Execution that talks about the whirlwind that you have to run to keep your business afloat and how you always get caught in the whirlwind. But if you can find that extra 10% to 20% of time and be efficient with it, that's huge. And so

that's something that I try and do whenever I'm being efficient with the work time and balancing the family time. Oh, yeah. I feel like I've never been more productive. If there's a meeting I'm on, that's not me. I'm like, I'm out. I've got stuff to do and I'm not willing to extend my day or miss bath time just because I had to stay on this meeting. And in the past, I would have done that. I would have worked into the night. And so that's been a really interesting shift for me, really interesting reframe. I was also looking at your blog, which is great, by the way. I recommend everyone check it out.

We'll put links below about the way you think through your goals and your themes. Can you talk about that? Is that something that you do at the beginning of a year? Do you have regular check-ins with yourself to see where you're at?

Do you keep them really specific? What's your process there? Yeah, I mean, it's always good to have some sort of reflection. And the nice thing about the end of the year, it's a forcing function to be like, okay, let me just think through this. And I found that I'd set these goals and I'd look at them like, well, that was dumb. What was I going for?

But if I can go with a theme, I think people remember stories more than numbers better. It really helps you hold true to that So that's something whether it's like saying no being decisive or having impact You're like, okay, I can go with this and i'm also big fan of like, okay You can set these goals But it doesn't matter if you don't try and build them into habits that you're tracking Like i'm a big fan of Atomic Habits by James Clear.

So I use Todoist and I'll write down my main goals and then the state of mind I want to be in. And then I have the weekly of what I want to accomplish. And then I try and reflect on that. So at least I'm aware of where my time and actions are going. Because for a while, I was working real hard and busy, but I was like, what am I getting done? And so I'm trying to focus on impact rather than hours. But I think goal settings, if you can turn into execution, it's huge. Because I don't know, I get nervous when

I've been working in a company for a couple years. It's like, wait, where are we really going? What's the end goal here? And those can help you kind of recenter. I love that. And when you're talking, it feels like you have a lot of frameworks to help you think through things, whether that's business, personal, you reference a lot of books. Do you have time baked into your calendar where you're learning and like whether it's reading a book getting coaching how do you stay kind of in the know with all of these new frameworks or ideas or what's working for the people yeah I wish I could read more I feel like it's a lie but I do all audiobooks so I don't know if that's called reading or not I call it reading but my wife will always call me out she's like you listened to that book. You didn't read it. I'm like, I know. So I do love podcasts, but I've been forcing myself to try and always have a book going and

do two a week. I'm doing The Ego is the Enemy right now. I'm rereading that one. Just I'm always like, okay, what are the next two to three books that I'm doing? So that's one component. The other thing that I found is I worry when I'm the CEO or the founder, like, wait, am I supposed to be the smartest person in the room? If so, I'm in the wrong room. I should not be in this room. So I've joined an entrepreneurship group, one called EO, where I love it because I'm working with founders that have companies significantly bigger than mine. There's some that are on the same size, and there's some that are smaller. And I think it's really healthy to surround yourself with peers that are doing better, that are cleverer, and less. So you can teach, compare, and learn. And that really challenges my thinking. We make these decisions that can have a profound impact.

And who's really challenging that? Who can you talk through on that? Because when you have to articulate your ideas or your vision to other smart people, it really forces you to be like, wait, what is my reasoning? What's the framework for this? But to your question on frameworks, my other thing is, as much as I want to say we're all special snowflakes, it's like, you know what? This has been done before. Someone's built an agency before.

Someone scaled a business. You might as well learn from them and what they did to get there. And yes, you still innovate on the part that can make you special, but you don't have to innovate on 100% of your business. Maybe it's just the 20% that matters. And then the 80%, let me just copy and paste what they've been doing. Because it's clearly working, which kind of circles back to EOS, right? It's like, let's use a framework that is proven. So true. Success leaves clues, if you're willing to follow up with them. I'm the same. I generally have a few of the same books always sitting on my bookshelf that if I'm creating a new funnel, I'll go and read the same book and I'll remember something or I'll pick up something brand new that I've not seen before, even though I've read it multiple times. I always find myself going back to the same kind of frameworks because it's been done before. So tell me a bit about your agency.

What does your agency do? Yeah. So with GrowthHit, we're a growth marketing agency. And we work with companies that are past product market fit and are really looking to grow to that next level. And we do three core things. Well, first, we want to be that plug and play growth team. The one does paid acquisition on social and Google. We do conversion rate optimization to optimize your website and email automation. And so we really specialize in that inflection point of growth. So I'd say about 70% of our clients are eCommerce on Shopify and the rest are SaaS and B2B. I love that. So for anyone listening who wants to work with you, what would make them a good fit? What does product market fit mean to you in terms of your agency? Yeah, you're not trying to figure it out where

you're like, wait, do we have something or not? You're like, no, we have a, if you're an e-commerce site, we have a conversion rate that's over like 2%. We're able to grow a little bit and get sales, but we're not doing it in an efficient way. If you're a B2B or SaaS company, you're getting leads, you're getting customers, but you're trying to get more sophisticated in how you grow and scale. So usually we're with companies that are approaching or beyond that seven figure mark, or if it's funding, it's probably an A round of funding is where we're at. Got it. Okay. Tell me a little bit about what your biggest challenges are right now. To be very honest, it is deciding where to fire myself and where to keep going. Because as we grow to this size, I have to make some very strategic investments on, do I dip into profit margins and hire someone in this role where I could do it or my partner could do it?

To one, create redundancy, which can be necessary for growth, but two, elevate us to do other things. So we actually made a big decision to make an investment in a VP of BizDev. And the guy was great. It was going well. But with the market going on, we had a couple of clients leave

and it was just like, is this the right decision for us right now? And I'm also learning the way we do sales is more of a sophisticated strategic sale than a transactional sale. So we had to make a really horrible, tough decision there and pull back on that. And so that one has been tough, but it's also opened our eyes. And now I know the best way we need to be doing sales. And it's something that I need to be driving on. So that's one part of it. The other part is, how big of an agency do we want to be? We're on a tear

and we're growing. And even I'm a part-time CFO. She's like, I know your name is GrowthHip. She's like, do you always have to be growing? It's exhausting. And I'm like, wow. And that kind of goes back to lifestyle design because we're at this inflection point of the black hole where are we good just as a 30 person agency and let's be premium. Let's like raise prices, create a wait list, or are we going for the fences and trying to be like 50 or a hundred people? And the thing is, it's easy to be like, grow, go big, but really talk to people that are at that size and scale. And that's what's nice about having masterminds or entrepreneurship groups. You can really get that understanding.

I was fortunate to talk to an agency owner. He sold his company to Accenture. It's 500 people. And I told him my size and he's like, oof, dangerous size right there. He's like, I remember those days because we have bigger goals around what we want to do with the startup studio. So those are some things. I've got a longer list here. The way we grow through business, it's a lot of referrals and word of mouth, which is good. But I don't like that. It's just that I want another channel that's repeatable and scalable. So we're investing very aggressively in marketing here in the next six months. Yeah, that intentional scaling is so important because otherwise, you just keep growing for the sake of growth. And it's always very interesting to other people. When you think the grass is greener, you see, oh, that person's doing 2x the amount of revenue that

I'm doing. And then you dig in and you realize that profit margins are actually less than yours. And they're spending a shit ton of time managing people, but not doing the thing that they love, which might be great. That might be serving exactly where they're going. Or they might look at what you're doing and say, oh, I really liked it when I was there. I'm tempted to go back there. But that's something I feel like is not talked about enough. The idea of backpedaling and just being comfortable where you're at. I feel like we live in this culture where it's always like more, bigger, better, stronger. And there's a lot to be said about being really happy with where you're at and just allowing things to be good. But I think sometimes for high performers, we sometimes can't let things be good. We feel like things

have to be a challenge or we have to be growing versus being comfortable sitting in, this feels really good right now. I have spare time versus getting so overwhelmed, then wanting to create more spare time, then getting bored that you've got spare time. So overwhelming yourself again, Can you relate to that? Man, yeah, it takes so much discipline. It kind of goes back to what we spoke about. You need to be aligned on the mission and what is the end goal here. Yes, it's fun to show that graph up and to the right, but it's like, oh, now I'm HR and I'm managing people. I'm doing all these sales calls. I like creating, I like building, and I can do that more at this size of company than that size of the company. And it also really had us recenter. The goal is we're builders. We want to build things. We love

the startup studio. What's the perfect size of the agency to enable us to do both? So it's really coming to terms with what that setup is. And yeah, it's hard because I think we can fall in love with the idea of growth. And that's what we want to tell friends, right? We all have our own little egos, but what are you really doing every day? And does it bring you joy, right? And so that's something that you've got to kind of have the confidence or the willpower to do that. I have a buddy, he has a company called ClickMinded, Tommy Griffith. And he really inspires me because he is like a disciple of the Tim Ferriss 4-Hour Workweek. And the dude has pulled it off. He did SEO for Airbnb.

He sells SEO courses and SOPs for agencies. And he could get shiny object syndrome so big. They're doing seven figures with four people. They literally have one meeting every other week to run the business. But here's the thing. Everyone that he teaches is like, oh, can we hire you to do SEO? If that would have been me, I probably would have spun up an SEO agency. He gets all these things, but he's very disciplined. He's like, no. He's like, I want to be able to go in Hawaii and work one day a week and surf every day. I want to be able to eat fish tacos at 9am or whatever he does out there. And it's all because he's aligned on that mission.

And that's the other fun thing in the entrepreneurship groups that I'm in and talk to. I get inspired by people that have that same conviction. Another buddy of mine has two companies where he's like, I never have employees, always hire contractors outside the US and they're very disciplined because I don't have to manage people. That's not my skillset, nor do I want that. So yeah, I love seeing kind of original thinkers like that.

Me too. Tommy's been on the podcast. He's great. Oh, cool. Yeah, I enjoy chatting with him. And yeah, and it's so interesting. One thing that I wasn't very good at this before I became a mom, now I am. I track my happiness as a KPI that I would track alongside my profit margins. And I would never have thought about that before. But to me, having peace, spaciousness, happiness, joy is just as important as those profit margin numbers, because it's,

you know, it's great having all of this success, but if you don't feel good and you feel stressed and you've got no time for the doing things you actually love, what's the point of all of it? But it sometimes takes being on one end of the spectrum to even know that that's what you want. So you've almost got to go and learn the lessons the hard way. Just listening to it in a podcast is not really helpful because you'll get yourself in that situation where you get offered, can you do SEO for me? I'll pay you XYZ. And you're like, sure. And before you know it, you've got that SEO agency. So I love that. So true. Wait, how do you track happiness? How do you quantify it? I have a planner and I just review every single week how I'm feeling. I do scores out of 10 and I'll just check in. How did this week feel? So I did X, Y, Z. I have a score

card just the same as you with the EOS. So I can look at everything. But how did this week feel? Was it spacious? I'll look at my calendar. Was I back to back? Was I struggling to do X, Y, Z? Was I struggling to sleep? Was I all of these things? And I'll just rate myself on what I'm doing and see how I feel and do more of the things that are actually making me feel good. That's awesome. Amazon had kind of a Fitbit competitor equivalent I was wearing for a while. I stopped wearing it. I needed to put it back on. And I forgot the name, so maybe it wasn't that good.

But what was interesting is I was like, you know what? I'm going to let it track the audio around me because it gives you a score of happiness or not. And my big insight was when I'm around family and kids, my laughter metric skyrocketed. Because you're always being silly with kids and you're fun. And then I had like a work trip where I was gone for like three days and I didn't laugh for like three days or something. And I was like, oh my gosh. I was like, that's a great argument for why every founder should just go ahead and have a bunch of kids just to help with the mental state. Mental state, productivity,

learning to function without sleep, all the mental state. Mental state, productivity, learning to function without sleep, all the added benefits. Exactly. They're a little expensive, but that's okay. The ROI is there. The ROI is definitely there. Jim, thank you so much for this conversation.

It's been so fun chatting to you. I feel like we're on the same page with so many things. This has been great. Is there something that you wish I'd asked you that I didn't? Something that you think you could have wish i'd asked you that i didn't something that you think you could have give a good response to that i didn't ask or something that you want to share oh man that's a good question no i mean honestly this was a really fun conversation

nothing that that comes to mind i mean for me it's just it's such a grind and it's okay to mess up. I think everyone puts a little too much passion and ego to their stuff. I do as well. But if you can just be like, this all kind of doesn't matter. I'm just going to like put it out there and help others. I think that can go a long way. So yeah, but no, this has been a really fun conversation. I love that. And you have a podcast, right? It's called If I Was Starting Today. Yeah, If I Was Starting Today. I need to get you on there so we can chat. And then kind of similar to you, I love talking to other business owners. And then I have agency Growth Hit. I'm just jim at growthhit.com. And then One Day Design is just oneday.design. And if there's

any dudes with long hair that need product in February, it's handsomechaos.com. I love that. Thank you so, so much for this. This was amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And if you enjoyed this episode on the Boss Babe podcast, then I'd absolutely love it if you leave us a review.

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