Behind The Revenue

Chad Kodary (00:02.013)
What's going on everybody. We have Ashton shanks from bad marketing with us today. Now guys, if you haven't seen his face plastered all over the internet for running ads and being an amazing media buyer. Um, he now, I think he just partnered up right. Uh, with Eddie Maloof and joined forces on this insane. I would call it more of like high level marketing company. You work with bigger brands if I'm not mistaken, right?

Ashton Shanks (00:29.454)
Yeah, yeah, we range, you know, all the way from the businesses doing, you know, one to 2 million a year to businesses doing well north of nine figures.

Chad Kodary (00:36.859)
Love it, dude. So I want to, I want to figure out first and foremost, just for context, if you can just tell the viewers a little bit about who you are, kind of your background on the whole media, uh, buying space. Um, and then we'll just dive straight into it.

Ashton Shanks (00:49.006)
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, yeah, my name is Ashton Shanks. I'm mostly known for media buying. You know, I'm going into probably about 10 years of marketing industry experience so far. I actually got my start way back in marketing back when I was 16 for a company that did work on eBay and then eventually Amazon. And then I was in sales for a while, but then I started moving into working with tech companies when I was a digital marketing manager in Seattle to then eventually moving and helping a company called Traffic and Funnels, which is where most people know my name. And

and started there as an intern, then as a copywriter, a project manager, then media buying. And then, you know, long story short, a couple of years later started my company, Heeman Media back in 2020. And it's been there ever since where we mainly focused on direct response, advertising, media buying, copywriting. And then like you had mentioned in October of 2023, we partnered with for media became bad marketing. And now we're a full service agency with.

Teams and offices in Nashville, Atlanta, Denver, and London. Over 170 staff members now, and we do everything from e -commerce to local business to information.

Chad Kodary (01:55.965)
Dude, I think it's your journey's amazing. Um, actually love the fact that you, you recently partnered with four media, which is Eddie Maloof's company for those people that are watching. It's funny because Eddie, uh, about five, I want to say about four or five years ago, um, we hosted in -house events in our DashClicks headquarters here in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Um, and it was called dash day and it was like a one day agency accelerator where agencies would fly out. It was a very small, uh, mastermind. It was like, uh, I think 12 seats that we had available in our studio. They'd come fly down and we'd basically run them through how we operate our agency. Right. Um, and any was actually one of those people that flew down. I got to spend the whole day with him. It was really fun. And now he's blown up all over the internet. Uh, same thing with you, which you guys are crushing it. You've partnered up. So.

Ashton Shanks (02:42.862)
Yeah.

Chad Kodary (02:46.717)
What I want to know is out of curiosity, what made you guys do the merger? Like what was the decision behind that?

Ashton Shanks (02:52.142)
Yeah. Yeah. So Eddie and I, you know, we kind of go way back. We started our agencies around similar times. I started in 2020. I think he started maybe in like late 2018 or early 2019. And so we're very similar in age, but, uh, you know, as we were working in the industry, we didn't really directly know each other, but we'd run in similar circles. We'd had a lot of similar clients or clients that we had worked with and partnered on, you know, for media was really, really well known for content and email. We were really, really well known for ads. And so there was a lot of clients that would.

work with us for ads and then for email. And so we'd kind of have a lot of connections that way. And I think one of the unique things where Eddie and I just like really started building a good relationship was in the agency world, there's so many opportunities to do revenue over relationship where, you know, clients as they always do, you know, if you have a bad month, they start shopping around and then you have another agency do an audit and you always have that opportunity of going, do I want the business or do I like grade this objectively? And there were several situations where later,

Chad Kodary (03:22.715)
Mmm, gotcha.

Ashton Shanks (03:50.958)
we had found out that without knowing each other, we had done the right thing for the other business. Like looking at their stuff and being like, listen, there's really nothing we would change. They're doing a good job. I don't think, you know, we would do any better. And so that started kicking off relationship. Then we started three years ago, a mastermind together called agency founders, uh, where we still were in each other's agencies separately, but we did this thing to try to help other agency owners grow, built really good foundations there. And then really over the last year and a half, we've been,

collaborating, getting on calls together like, what's the long -term pitch? What are we both trying to do? What are the gaps and roadblocks that we're having? And what we started to notice was a lot of the things that we needed in Heeman, our goal was to build a hundred million dollar business. His thing was the same thing. And a lot of things that we needed to do in order to get to that level, they already had perfected. They already had down. And a lot of things they needed to really build, we had down. And so long enough of those conversations, it's like,

Why are we trying to build these things separately? Why are we trying to build these things? And would we really want to just own a hundred percent of this grape or this grapefruit? Or should we play the big game almost overnight and play the massive level where we own a piece but of a watermelon, right? And so that really is what started to kick off the, okay, I think we have something.

Chad Kodary (05:05.789)
How does that, yeah, I'm sure people are wondering, cause I'm wondering the same thing. How does that happen? Like we're two companies are basically merging, right? Is it like we're one company was doing maybe more revenue or had a bigger team than the other? Like, how do you like get all of those things aligned from like a revenue perspective, a team perspective? Like what happened to the teams? Like how did that whole kind of like behind the scenes of that work?

Ashton Shanks (05:24.75)
Yeah.

Ashton Shanks (05:28.526)
Yeah. Yeah. So that was, I think part of the magic or the part of the, okay, why are we not doing this? Because, you know, we had really vetted each other well, not even just, okay, the relationship side, but even when we were like, okay, we should maybe consider merging. We had access to each other's quick books for six months, you know, like where our C at my CMO and CFOs were looking at their books. They were looking at our books, watching it month over month. Like how good are these guys at managing money? Uh, but then really it's like, okay, team.

You're right. Like what do we do with the team? And so we started going, okay, if we did merge, how would the teams come together? Who would have to be let go? And what we were starting to find was like zero people had to be let go. There was no real overlapping things. It was all synergistic. They were really younger and starting to develop their information division. Whereas Heme and most of our business was information and a minority was e -commerce and theirs was almost vice versa. And even in those areas,

Chad Kodary (06:19.421)
Yeah.

Ashton Shanks (06:21.326)
the things that they needed in those departments we had and the things that we didn't have, which was like content email, they had perfectly. And so we're looking at this like no one would have to be let go. There's really no overlapping things here. And if there was two of one position, we need to anyway because of how big we're going to be. And so everything just looked really good. As far as the like logistics side of the merger, you do it just like any other acquisition, do a proper evaluation of the business.

get really into the profits, get really into expenses and overhead and you do a proper evaluation. And then essentially you would do a merger equity based on, okay, on the new side, what was this business worth? What was this business worth? And then that's how you kind of share amongst the equity.

Chad Kodary (07:01.149)
Yep. I love that man. So, so talk to me about the name, bad marketing. Where'd that come from? What? It's, it's cool. What does it mean? What's, what does it stand for?

Ashton Shanks (07:06.606)
Yeah.

Ashton Shanks (07:12.494)
Yeah. So it stands for bold and disruptive. And ironically, the person with probably the least marketing experience or intelligence came up with the idea, but it was the CFO on for media side, Julian, who had this idea of just bad marketing and Eddie instantly loved it. When Eddie called me and told me about it, I was against it. Honestly. Like when I heard it, I was like, I don't know, man.

Chad Kodary (07:15.485)
Okay, so it's an acronym.

Chad Kodary (07:33.373)
Cause well, at some point when you, when you first hear bad marketing, like, well, are they bad at marketing? You know, you get that like quick glimpse in your mind, but

Ashton Shanks (07:40.27)
Right. Right. And I think it was, you know, Eddie and Eddie is so much. And this is why I think we work so well together. Eddie is so much of the showman, like he is sales. He loves it. He loves doing content like which was also another reason why we merged is like, I love focusing on company excellence. I love making an efficient product, a great product team development, leadership development. But like Eddie instantly loved it. I came from it where my company was called Human Media, which was based on like the nickname for the architect of the pyramids.

Chad Kodary (07:58.173)
back in.

Ashton Shanks (08:08.846)
It was a name he meant, right? So I'm like this sophisticated, almost consulting firm feel. And I was like, Oh, bad. I don't know. But the more you think about it, right? Like, just like you said, bad marketing, like, are they bad? It is that ballsy name that you've got to have guts to call your company bad marketing. And you can't just be mediocre, right? Like you've got to be really good if you're going to call your company bad marketing, you can't just be average. But when we were thinking about, okay, $100 million business,

Chad Kodary (08:15.037)
I'm going to go ahead and turn it off.

Ashton Shanks (08:34.03)
We want to go after eventually the Ferraris of the world. We want to get roll out. We want to get these big brands on. There's always shopping agencies. And if we're on a list of other agencies, you got like scale media, you got like all these like gimmicky words, but you see bad marketing. You're like, I've got to know what this is, you know? And so, man, it's the more we set in, the more we thought of it. It like, this is a hundred million dollar brand.

Chad Kodary (08:45.821)
Same. Yeah.

Chad Kodary (08:51.101)
Okay.

Chad Kodary (08:56.837)
Dude, I love the name like because I've seen the videos I see you guys talk about it all the time on social And it resonates. It's really cool. It does stand out. I will give you that 100 % So yeah 100 %

Ashton Shanks (09:07.15)
Yeah, you're going to remember it right? Like you're at a conference, you know you're talking to all these people then you go homes like man. What was it? You're going to remember bad marketing like there's very easy to remember.

Chad Kodary (09:18.813)
So, so what's the NA city of multiple offices, big team, what's team size today? How is team kind of broken up? Where is the offices? Are you guys remote? Is it physical locations? Talk to me about that. Like, kind of like the logistics of.

Ashton Shanks (09:31.31)
Yeah, absolutely. So we're somewhere north of 170, probably, you know, somewhere between 170, 180 people. Um, we are, huh? Full -time full -time staff. Um, we don't really count like part -time contractors or things like that. Um, and we don't really hire part -time contractors either. It's just because of the level of work and the intensity of what we run internally, it's just part -time doesn't really work for us. Um, but I would say, you know, probably 60 % of the company, maybe 70 % of the company is remote.

Chad Kodary (09:38.269)
Is this full time? Full time?

Ashton Shanks (10:01.28)
Um, you know, out of Nashville, you've maybe got 15 out of Atlanta. You've got maybe 40 to 45. Denver is maybe seven. London is.

Chad Kodary (10:12.189)
And these are physical offices.

Ashton Shanks (10:13.996)
You've got all except London. London right now is not an office. London is just a small team. It is an agency acquisition actually, same as Denver. Denver was an agency acquisition that we did. Denver is our Amazon division and London was an agency that was acquired last year, maybe a year and a half ago. And so everyone else is pretty much remote.

Chad Kodary (10:31.773)
I like that. So you guys are, you're just scooping up talent. That's already there. Like teams that are already built and running.

Ashton Shanks (10:37.646)
Absolutely, man. You know, I think a big part of any new venture that someone creates, which is was honestly, again, a reason for a merger was like, okay, Heman at the time, it's like we would need to go build out an email division, we would need to build out a content division. And we've tried to do this in the past, but I think the bottleneck and a lot of founders have probably caught this as well is if you want a division, right, you can't just have a good practitioner, you've got to have a visionary that can drive it forward. Right. And what I was even feeling inside of Heman was I can,

lead the vision. I'm very good at kicking start, kickstarting momentum, but I cannot lead the vision of multiple, multiple different divisions at one time, right? I've got to lead the vision of the company. And so for us, you know, one of our things is that acquiring an agency that already has that visionary already has the person who's like, I can innovate the product. I can push it forward. But a lot of times their struggle is just, I don't know how to generate the business, but I know how to, I know this product really well for us. That's a great opportunity to come in.

Equip them. We know how to get clients. We know how to build the business and attention, but we need the visionary to make sure the product is excellent for our clients. And so acquisitions has been a really great way to do that.

Chad Kodary (11:45.693)
And across the whole kind of portfolio of between your company and all the acquisitions that you've done, how many clients are you guys managing right now?

Ashton Shanks (11:54.638)
Honestly, it's a good question. I would say we're somewhere between 250 to 300, somewhere in there. Um, not necessarily. Right. So, you know, like, well, not so much. So like example, right? Like local or local division, it has a lot of clients, you know, anywhere I think right now from 85 to a hundred clients inside of local, but they're small. They're really, really small. Right. Um, and so,

Chad Kodary (12:00.445)
Okay. And these are big brands. These are not, you're not talking about like a thousand dollar a month Facebook ads campaign.

Chad Kodary (12:17.629)
Give me an example of what's a small client, just so we can get some context there.

Ashton Shanks (12:20.974)
You know, a local business, they're probably spending anywhere from, you know, five to 15 grand a month in ads, you know, you know, pretty small. Their retainer sizes are very small, anywhere from 1500 to $3 ,500 a month, you know, things like that. But then like info example where information or information division is actually probably responsible for around 50 to 60 % of our monthly revenue. But it's, you less than 30 clients, um, because there it's.

Chad Kodary (12:28.317)
Okay.

Chad Kodary (12:46.557)
Yeah, because they're spending a lot. Infos. Yeah. What kind of brands are you working with? Like, can you just drop maybe like a name or two just.

Ashton Shanks (12:47.95)
Bigger brand exactly. It's very larger brands much higher amounts of spent.

Ashton Shanks (12:55.606)
Yeah, I mean, like think like spec phone cases. Think like click funnels .com. You know, like think of those types of brands. Those are those are ones that we would be running on like information side or like, you know, Flex Pro meals, you know, things like that, right? Where they're much.

Chad Kodary (13:09.501)
And those, those big companies, and I always let's say ClickFunnels is an example because I think we're all familiar with them. Um, when you're, when you run ads for them, so you're running ads for maybe just the info side of their business. And they have like the software side, like they have multiple ad people. Cause I know there's like one, I think John parks was his name. He was, I don't know the CMOs like, are they still running ads in house? Do they use you just for like a certain pro? Like, how does that work?

Ashton Shanks (13:28.556)
The CMO, yeah.

Ashton Shanks (13:33.902)
Yeah, a lot of big companies like that, especially in the information world, they'll use multiple agencies. Now, example, like it's all about trust for them in diversity of risk. So they'll test multiple ones at different times, but also because a lot of their brands are spending a very large amount of money, right? So like ClickFunnels isn't just ClickFunnels. They own several different companies that maybe aren't even well known by everyone, but they own those companies. And so they'll, a lot of times they'll have teams on.

And as you earn trust, essentially like we've been fortunate enough to start acquiring some of the other brands that they're doing. Um, and so, but yeah, they'll, a lot of times companies like that will have multiple agencies unless it's like a single brand, right? Like a spec or a flex pro, right? But information, a lot of times they almost work like publishers. They have different offers that almost operate like different businesses.

Chad Kodary (14:23.485)
And you got now that I'm assuming now that you've, you guys have partnered, you have a whole video side to the company and you're doing all the creatives as well. You're not just, you know, jumping into the ads manager and scaling ads and asking for video creatives and stuff like that too. So like, so like for ClickFunnels is an example. You guys are, you're doing the creative side for the ads that you guys are running.

Ashton Shanks (14:37.326)
Exactly. Yeah.

Ashton Shanks (14:44.814)
Right, right, exactly. Yeah. And we'll do both, right? So even at ClickFuel, this is an example too, where they'll even get multiple different creative companies for different offers. But for us, we oftentimes like to sit in the seat of allow us control, allow us to build, and we will also work with this creative agency as well. All we care about is getting better results. So if that person can come up with better creative, amazing, but we've got the resources, we're going to do whatever we can to try to get the best results.

Chad Kodary (15:11.581)
Gotcha. So a hundred and call it 70, 80, 60 people, whatever it is, right. That's already high enough. Um, these are, these are all full -time employees. Um, and they're in, you're not using people unlike Philippines and in all those.

Ashton Shanks (15:17.934)
Ha ha!

Ashton Shanks (15:26.254)
We've got some, we've got some VA's that'll do like a data reporting or, or things like that, but.

Chad Kodary (15:30.557)
Okay. Well, what about on the ads on the ad side, like the performance managing stuff like that?

Ashton Shanks (15:35.278)
And now ads are all US and less example like London team. They'll have some London based media buyers, right? And you consider that international. But when it comes to media buying, no, we don't really need to, namely just because that is my expertise. And so I spend a ton of time with our media buying teams.

Chad Kodary (15:39.643)
Okay.

Chad Kodary (15:50.619)
Yep.

What do you look for when you're hiring a new media buyer? Like what are the qualifications that you want to look for to say, is this dude or girl qualified to be able to run ads for a company like ClickFunnels or one of our big brands to spend 50 K a month? Like, do I trust this person to blow through that budget?

Ashton Shanks (16:09.326)
Yeah, that's a great question. So for me, especially lately, I'd say, you know, over the last two years, realistically, I focus more on is this person a marketer than more media buying sense, right? Media buying is adapted so much now where the media buying technical skills isn't nearly as important now as as the being able to understand why or why something is not working, right? Why is it working or why is it not working? And so for me, I spent a lot more time of going, OK, who are you starting with? Copywriting? Give me an example of a.

top of funnel ads that you'd write for this offer. Give me three remarketing for this offer. I will ask them about, you know, what typical strategies or account structures they use, but it's much less important. I need someone who can think of outside of the box or, or outside of just, Hey, I'm driving down cost per click or CPMs are coming down because really in this new world, a lot of that stuff doesn't necessarily matter. You can have high cost per click and high CPMs and have great CPAs and vice versa could be true. And so I look much more of going,

Chad Kodary (16:59.045)
Yeah, it's crazy, you know

Ashton Shanks (17:06.958)
I hold my media buyers to the standard of being a full stack marketer. Your job isn't the landing page. It isn't email flows. It isn't necessarily even creative, but I actually want to know that if you're running into a problem, you can identify it. You can identify that, hey, it's actually the landing page and we should try this and that. Even if it's not their responsibility, I think everyone on our team is one of our core values is extreme ownership. And if this person is only media buying expertise, they have no ability to have extreme ownership.

And so that's really what I look for.

Chad Kodary (17:38.333)
And do your media buyers own, because you said ownership, do they own accounts or is it like, Hey, this is, this is, or do you have multiple media buyers working for one account as an example?

Ashton Shanks (17:47.854)
Now we don't really have multiple media buyers for one account. It gets messy, I found when you do that, unless, you know, they just, I mean, really, I would just never want them in the same account. Now on Google, we will sometimes have like a junior media buyer with a senior media buyer on Google, just because much more of Google is technical. You know, it's the keyword research, it's the rotating, it's skags, you know, that kind of stuff. So it's very easy, but meta very, very difficult to have multiple people in it.

Chad Kodary (17:54.461)
It does.

Chad Kodary (18:07.133)
Google's hard, dude. It's so complex.

Chad Kodary (18:18.365)
So you guys are doing cross channel? Is it Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, you know, whatever it is.

Ashton Shanks (18:22.286)
Oh, we do everything. Yeah, we do meta Google YouTube, TikTok, snap, LinkedIn, native. Yeah.

Chad Kodary (18:27.997)
And, and is your media buyers that you hire, is it like, this is a Facebook media buyer, you know what mean? Or a meta media buyer, or this is a Google. Cause it's very like Google, like I'll give you a perfect example. I love Facebook ads and the Facebook ads manager almost every day. I can say that I've been doing running Facebook ads for like seven years now. Right? I can say that I can run really good quality Facebook ads. However, I cannot run Google ads for the life of me.

I just hate the platform. It's so complex. I just don't like it. Right. Um, so are your media buyers like cross platform media buyers?

Ashton Shanks (19:03.854)
It depends on the division. So example like info, we really will look for people who can do both Google and Meta, namely because one, our compensation structures are different and a lot of times higher in the information division because of the importance. And we really love the idea of like, we'd rather pay more for someone who can own the full cohesive strategy, you know, when they can kind of work between, okay, I can.

Chad Kodary (19:26.277)
Gotcha.

Ashton Shanks (19:29.454)
Okay, we're going to lower the leverage on meta, but we're going to increase on Google to protect the row as things like that, right? It just happens much more efficiently. Areas like e -commerce or local. A lot of times it's going to be different media buyers just because the compensation models are different, but also it's the congruency between marketing is much less important realistically, right? Like, yeah.

Chad Kodary (19:33.917)
That's where I was getting it.

Chad Kodary (19:49.149)
Let's say, let's, let's just say, it's the one I want to dive deeper into one quick thing. Let's say you had a media buyer that was owning, uh, that was that owned, let's say one of the accounts that you had, how frequently do they log in? Let's say they were just, let's keep it simple just for context. You had one media buyer owned an account and that person was just running ads on meta. So that an Instagram, right? Um, how frequently is that?

person logging into the account and updating, changing, optimizing, right? Like, are they looking at campaigns daily? Like, how does it work in, in your agency?

Ashton Shanks (20:23.374)
Oh yeah. Yeah. We're looking at campaigns daily. Uh, if nothing else purely because reporting exists. Um, but also like our teams, I think one of the things that have set us apart is it was, we're very, very aggressive about moving, making decisions, reading the data. Um, but it's always going to be based on what the circumstances dictate, right? Like if you're in a sinking ship here, then we can't just sit on our hands. Um, and then also it depends on the platform, right? Because example, even write meta.

Three years ago, you could make changes every day and you could get results back on relatively close to how it's gonna continue to perform in the same day. Now, you really kind of do have to give it like two, three days for it to optimize in. It's wild. Like it takes a bit for it to get down. Google takes much longer, but we're still checking every day if nothing else for reporting.

Chad Kodary (21:05.597)
Yeah.

Chad Kodary (21:15.037)
And do you guys use high roast for tracking?

Ashton Shanks (21:17.806)
We're pretty agnostic. We ink like in information. We really encourage high roasts For ecommerce. We don't really care as long as it's something exists whether that's triple whale North beam or high roasts Right, like we don't really care, but it is really important to have it now you're gonna have some of the smaller ones and especially like in local where you just they're not gonna pay for it and so there it's just you got to hold on to UTMs and using the CRM, you know like

Chad Kodary (21:29.917)
Wow.

Chad Kodary (21:44.877)
E .T .M .S.

Ashton Shanks (21:46.542)
You gotta, you gotta just try to navigate and try to get marginally close. You know, we're playing a game of battleship.

Chad Kodary (21:53.309)
Yep. Okay. Fair enough. Man, this is a lot of a lot to unpack. So 170 employees across multiple locations. Um, the employee size that you have, what's, what's kind of like the breakdown is it, how many do you think are like media by using like 50 % of the companies media buying admin sales? It's a lot of people.

Ashton Shanks (22:14.382)
Oh man, that's a hard question to answer. I have no idea to be honest, you know.

Chad Kodary (22:20.431)
What would you think if you could just take a wild guess? And do you also, maybe this might help. Do you have a sales team or is it just maybe like you were Eddie just, you know, dealing with these higher ticket accounts and closing deals?

Ashton Shanks (22:26.094)
Mm -hmm.

Ashton Shanks (22:31.534)
Well, for, yeah, well, I mean, what you could consider like whales, Eddie and I are normally the one, I mean, they're normally coming from our networks. Um, we, but you know, we have a sales team, we have sales team, both for bad marketing, um, internal where we have leads coming in, you know, we get anywhere from 25 to 45, uh, just inbound leads of people just filling out stuff on our website every day. Um, but then we have the other side of our sales team where for some of our information clients, uh, we will actually fulfill their sales for them.

Chad Kodary (22:37.885)
Exactly.

Ashton Shanks (23:00.312)
And so we have a client facing. Yes, exactly.

Chad Kodary (23:01.085)
Here, so you're closing deals. So you have a closing team that's basically closing deals on the info space, which is, that's pretty cool. That's unique.

Ashton Shanks (23:08.942)
Yeah, yeah. You know, it's, it's, and also is super awesome for us. It helps our marketing efforts because now it's, it's an internal team. The collaboration is really great. Um,

Chad Kodary (23:14.845)
Yeah. It's not like the leads suck. It's like, you know, leads suck. You can't close like who's winning here, right? Marketing or sales. Yeah.

Ashton Shanks (23:22.286)
Right. We're all on the same team here. So there's no, your sales team isn't doing well. The agency is pissed off. It's like, Hey, we're all on the same team here. What is actually happening? But also just the speed of communication is so much faster. But so we have those two sides of sales sales. I would say, I think we got one too.

Maybe like 11 people on the sales team.

Chad Kodary (23:42.813)
That's great, dude. That's a big team. That's a big sales team. So I'm going to ask them, uh, some questions that I think I would want to know more about, um, maybe for our industry, like, cause you probably have, do you, aside from ClickFunnels, do you work with any other SaaS companies? Okay. What's work, what's crushing it right now, uh, for strategy wise for SaaS companies, like if you would run marketing for DashClicks, right. And obviously for, for context for DashClicks, we do software.

Ashton Shanks (23:58.188)
Mm -hmm.

Chad Kodary (24:10.237)
And we do white label fulfillment for marketing agencies. Right? So there's two sides to the company. It's like the service and software. And then we do have our info, you know, products and coaching programs and all that, and like a smaller bucket. Um, but primarily we run ads for fulfillment and software. What, what's like, what strategies are crushing it right now? Are you running campaigns straight to booking, uh, uh, like Calendly links, or are you running tripwire funnels? Are you like, what's, what's, what's.

What can I steal from you today?

Ashton Shanks (24:41.262)
Yeah. So I think, you know, it kind of comes down to two paths. It's one, if you want to build a highly high community driven, um, marketing, then I think, you know, it's probably, you probably could guess it, but it's like, I would encourage a challenge. Um, I think challenges are really great for building community. Right. Right. Exactly. So yeah, I would encourage challenges, but the big thing there is like, you have to demonstrate throughout the challenge. It can't just be education. You've got to get them to use it. Right. Um, and so I think that would be a big one. Go ahead.

Chad Kodary (24:53.437)
We just did it, yeah. And you were on it, yeah, actually. Yeah, you were on our Funnel Freedom Challenge.

Chad Kodary (25:07.677)
So let's stick to challenging for one minute before we jump onto the next strategy. Cause you were on our challenge. We did the challenge. So we, when we did the challenge, we had, when we did it, we weren't, we weren't creating the challenge so we could do a live challenge. We created the challenge so we could do an evergreen challenge. Right. And that was kind of like the main mindset that we had behind it.

We ran the challenge. Uh, we had probably about, I don't know, like 12 or 1300 people, uh, register for it, um, through our lists and just mainly, I think like 80 % of the leads came from Facebook ads that we were running at like five or $10 an opt -in, right? Cause it was a free challenge. The problem that we had is the show up rate for the live event, uh, was, I don't know, I think I like 1200 people. We had about maybe 400 people live or something like that, right? At the live event.

Ashton Shanks (25:59.15)
30%.

Chad Kodary (26:00.221)
Yeah. Which is not, was not bad. Here's where everything went to shit. Right. So then what happened is we took that challenge and we, we orchestrated it perfectly to run as an evergreen, right? We took the challenge and we plugged it into challenge fuel. Right. And we basically had the challenge running on Monday. So you would register, we'd run ads. They were evergreen ads. Right. And you'd register and Monday comes challenge starts emails, text messages, go out, all the reminders, all that good stuff. Right.

We had also a calendar plugins where they can, you know, click a button, add it to their calendar. We had all those things that you would normally do to increase show up rates. Our show up rate was like 7 % on cold traffic, which was horrible. Um, we ran that for like a month and I think like maybe like three weeks into it, I was like, all right, we can't just keep bleeding money here because this is not working. So then we said, we thought that maybe the issue was they're waiting too long because they would have to, you know, we'd have people sign up on.

on a Tuesday and then have to literally wait a whole week until the challenge started. And they probably forgot that they even registered for the challenge after like a day. So then what we did was in webinar fuel or in challenge fuel, we went in and we made it on demand. So it's like literally like they would put in their name email. And I think we even whip, we took off the phone number fields because we just wanted to try to like take everything that we thought that could be, you know, some sort of a resistor that we just took everything away and just made it super simple.

Ashton Shanks (27:01.23)
Yep. Yep.

Chad Kodary (27:24.861)
you would put your name and email in and you would jump literally straight in. You're literally in a browser version of day one of the challenge. And we ran that and that there's literally like, okay, well now we have a hundred percent show up rate because you're signing up and you're going straight in. Like you don't have to click anything. You're not downloading the app. Right. Um, and then what we realized the issue that we had there was people it's a five day challenge and it starts every 24 hours. So like if somebody signed up at three in the morning,

The next day would start at three in the morning for them. There's no way to change that and webinar feel right. So it's like we came into all these complications trying to evergreen it to the point where we did that for like a month and a half maybe. And we just stopped running ads to it. And now we just use it for our audience, which still does great, but we just use it to our audience. But we couldn't scale it. We couldn't scale it through ads, right? We just couldn't crack the code on it.

What would you do in a situation like that? Like I know obviously it's a very generic question, but are you seeing any red flags as I'm going through all these things?

Ashton Shanks (28:23.406)
Yeah, because I'm even trying to remember back from when it was with like how you had set it up because like what was the outcome? Like what was the title of the challenge?

Chad Kodary (28:31.549)
Yeah. So it was funnel freedom challenge. The goal was to basically turn your idea into a funnel and start actually generating leads and sales for your business. We were targeting three different audiences, uh, which we actually had segmented landing pages for, uh, the first audience was start your own business. Right. So it was like, I don't have a business. I'm looking to start a bit. I have this idea. I want to start a business bucket. Number one.

Bucket number two was I have an existing business. I'm looking to use funnels to help me generate more sales and leads for my existing business. And then bucket number three was agencies, which I have an agency. I want to use funnels to help me generate leads and sales for my agency. So three different landing pages all go into the same webinar.

Ashton Shanks (29:13.614)
cool. And at what point do people start using DashClicks?

Chad Kodary (29:17.469)
I would say probably on maybe like day three, I think it was day three or we didn't really, the, the concept for what we did is we did not want to shove DashClicks in their face right when the, when the challenge started, because we didn't want it to be salesy, right? But we, we sprinkled it in and we talked about it. Um, just as a side note, we also had a VIP page during the actual, uh, live version that when we're running ads,

We had a VIP page that would upgrade people's $29. And basically you would get a free 30 days of DashClicks. A very small percentage of people that took that like literally maybe like 20 people. Um, so there's a super small, small, small, uh, uh, percentage. Um, but yeah, that answers, hopefully that answers those questions.

Ashton Shanks (29:53.102)
Yep.

Ashton Shanks (30:05.006)
Yeah. Yeah. Cause I think one of the things that I would consider is if you did a challenge, one, I think it should be live for something like this to you. I remember you had several different speakers in like quite a few. I think I would try to like remove all that because then it's, it's no longer a challenge. It's a summit. It's a conference basically. Right. And while the concept was like, use a challenge to grow your business, we were all talking about different things. It wasn't like a curriculum.

Chad Kodary (30:15.933)
like 20, almost 20 speakers.

That's yeah.

Ashton Shanks (30:32.622)
It wasn't like a plan that you had full control over. You had other speakers doing it, which would distract from the whole purpose of building a funnel. And so in my head, if you redid it, it would be, it could be the same idea, but it is a how to start your first funnel and grow it and start generating business. And each day I'm going to show you how to do this. So day one is probably one showing the opportunity of the funnel, walking through the math, showing different types of funnels. Why is funnels important? Why is it better than a website? Like you're casting the idea and the opportunity.

Chad Kodary (30:38.077)
Yeah.

Ashton Shanks (31:02.254)
Day two though, I think it's you starting to break down of this is what a funnel should look like. Here's a template.

Chad Kodary (31:08.349)
So we had just, just to add some more context, we had it orchestrated where we had themes on certain days. So like day one was all about like, what is funnels? How do funnels work? Right. Exactly. Yeah.

Ashton Shanks (31:19.086)
For sure. But you allowed other speakers to give their narrative on it and it wasn't yours because you want it very controlled. And I think it should be like less time. Like each day could really only be like three hours, four hours max.

Chad Kodary (31:32.669)
It was, I think like an, well, the way that we did it was two hours, like maxed out.

Ashton Shanks (31:36.206)
Cool. So that's a good time. But then day two is it's the same person again, walking them through. And it's at the end of this, it's like after you've just shown them every step, it's like, and I want to give you a template today because you're going to get homework. You got to get them engaged with you if it's a challenge, right? And then it should be a trial. They should be getting the trial because you're giving them the template. The only way to use the template is this. And I want you to go home tonight and do this and this and this on your funnel.

Chad Kodary (31:48.957)
Yep. We did homework too. We did homework. We used...

Ashton Shanks (32:03.406)
So, cause tomorrow we're going to come back to doing this. We're going to come back to this funnel. And if you don't have it set up, then it's like, it's literally a waste of time, but like each day is very controlled and precise rather than DashClicks being a pitch or something. It's like, it's literally just a requirement for it. Like at the end of this, you can cancel your trial or whatever, but like, if you don't have your thing set up on day two, like day three is going to be pointless for you. Right.

Chad Kodary (32:26.077)
Yep. So we did, we did a lot of those things. It was, it was like a three month project. It was a big project to like set up the whole event and orchestrated and we build, we built out all the homework pages. It was very similar to like the one funnel away challenge or the, the, your first funnel challenge, right? That's kind of where we got the idea from, right? Um, obviously we had our own spin to it. We didn't copy anything, but.

Ashton Shanks (32:41.452)
Mm -hmm.

Chad Kodary (32:49.501)
Um, it was, it was a very similar concept because we wanted basically to get people into the world of our software to use our funnel builder. And we thought that if we would run this challenge, then people would use our software along the way. It was like the vehicle, right? That you would need to get across. Right. But it, we, I guess once we got into the ad part, by the way, the live event did well. I think we had like an 8 % conversion rate on our, on our product. That, so it's not that the challenge was not good and we didn't sell.

Ashton Shanks (32:56.686)
Yeah.

Chad Kodary (33:19.229)
It was, we couldn't scale the challenge with ads. That was the real challenge that we had. I personally think, and I agree with a lot of the things that you're saying. I think we definitely should have had less speakers and maybe it would have been definitely less confusing, but I think it was from my, from, from what the metrics are telling me, I think it was an ads issue. We just couldn't scale it with ads. We couldn't maybe get the right people in. It was, I don't know. Or evergreen. Yeah, it could be.

Ashton Shanks (33:44.814)
Or the fact that it's just evergreen, right? Like, I mean, you know, if it did really well live, just do it again live. And the hard thing is, is like when you use so many other speakers, you can't do it live.

Chad Kodary (33:54.077)
I would never do it live ever again, dude. It's such an undertaking. Like we will do webinars. We do a lot of webinars. Like I just did a webinar the other week and there was, I don't know, like close to 200 people live. We just blasted our list. We didn't even run ads. Um, and we had a 6 % conversion rate on the live webinar and that's just me going live for like an hour, right? It's not like a whole challenge. So I would rather do webinars and we're planning them. We're doing live webinars every two weeks. Um,

But I don't think I'll ever do a challenge live multiple times. I think it's very difficult, especially like on your mind. It's.

Ashton Shanks (34:30.766)
Well, I would just do it once a quarter, but I would remove the speakers, right? Because you know, what you get, the only thing that can come up with speakers is that you can get a lot of people that are interested because of the speaker, not because of the solution you're providing. Right? Like they want to listen to Tanner Chichester or they want to listen to whatever, not necessarily because of the solution that you're providing. And I would think that, okay, if webinars did really well, I would do webinars, try it live.

Chad Kodary (34:34.557)
Yeah, maybe that.

Chad Kodary (34:44.667)
Got you. Okay.

Ashton Shanks (34:58.254)
And then just do a challenge quarterly. If nothing else for all of the people that you've acquired through webinars that didn't do anything, right? Because they might not like a webinar, but you could do once a quarter where you just hit all of the people who signed up for webinars, didn't do anything with going, Hey, we're going to do a challenge and you have an exclusive invite. Right.

Chad Kodary (35:13.949)
Yeah.

You know what, one thing that my goal for Q1 for myself, um, because I'm the one who is in a lot of the videos, I'm doing the podcasts, I'm doing the webinars and basically the content creator at Dashworks. I'm on the marketing side, right? One of the things that I've basically been trying to do in Q1 is to simplify everything. Um, and what I mean by that is before like me going into a studio would literally be like a half a day thing. It's like four hours. I need my camera crew in there.

with me, like it's just becomes this massive, massive production to get like an hour webinar shot. So basically what I did, um, is I started taking my studio equipment, the basic stuff, and I just brought it into my office and I set it up in my office. Like I'm literally in my office right now. Right. Um, and that allows me to do things very quickly without having to the need to be in a studio environment. I can do it at my desk. Right. So like, I think.

if I did run a challenge again, it wouldn't be with speakers. It wouldn't be in the studio. Um, it wouldn't be anything like that. I think I would literally just go live for one hour a day for five days and it would be a great challenge and I just strip it down. It would just be me and my computer and that's it. Like nothing else.

Ashton Shanks (36:33.134)
Yeah, nice.

Chad Kodary (36:34.461)
So, all right, man. So a lot to unravel here, dude. So where do you see your guy? Where do you see bad marketing in the next one year? Like where, how many employees would you, do you have like goals that you guys have set or forecasting?

Ashton Shanks (36:49.742)
Yeah, yeah, we, I mean, we essentially have, you know, our path at least to the hundred million mark. And we're kind of at a point now where you were having a lot of really awesome opportunities fall into our, our laps right now. And so we're trying to be wise with those decisions and trying to make sure we stay focused. But, you know, realistically we have the, the path to a hundred million mapped out both in infrastructure and employees, what leaders will need to add on our way there. So we kind of have that stuff mapped out already.

But our focus is right now is to continue ensuring we do as much as we can to make sure our products and the services we provide are at an all time high. But then as well of acquisitions, we continue to look for great companies with great leaders and great teams that have a similar vibe and culture and conviction that we carry. And then it's just have fun. And we're really having fun. Our company.

We have to stay bold. We have to stay disruptive. That's our company at the end of the day. And so we're always looking for how do we make sure we continue to do that and how do we stand out from the crowd? And so really, that's all we're focused on.

Chad Kodary (37:55.997)
Yeah, I mean, a hundred dude, a hundred million dollars is a great goal. Um, are you, I don't know if I'm allowed to ask, are you guys over 10 million? Are you an eight figure company yet? Multiple eight figures, dude. So, okay. So you're already on the way there, man. Congratulations to that. Are you guys planning on taking on any VC funding or anything like that? Or you're just going, you're going the whole way, huh?

Ashton Shanks (38:05.102)
We're multiple eight figures.

Ashton Shanks (38:17.006)
You know, it's not something that we're strictly against. It's just we don't need to, you know, and so until there's a point that we need to and we need it badly, then we could consider it. But we're really at a point now where we're very healthy as a company and we just don't need to. And there's no reason to give up control for something as simple as cash. And so, yeah, for now, no.

Chad Kodary (38:36.157)
Yep. Yeah, dude, I love it. And I know you said, and I'm just asking a curiosity. You said on the low end, you know, you're working with clients that are like, you know, paying you guys a retainer of like 1500 to 3500 in the local division. What's like your highest customer paying you?

Ashton Shanks (38:52.91)
Um, well, if, if we're including bonuses, right, because on, on like a performance side, uh, we have several that pay us north of 200 a month.

Chad Kodary (39:02.813)
And when you mean bonuses, are you just, are you taking commissions from sales that you generate? Is that what you're referring? I guess you're referring to his bonuses. Okay.

Ashton Shanks (39:07.886)
Yeah, we like net profits. So we have some that we in our information side will have a retainer that covers a fraction of our overhead that we apply to the account. But then really, we're incentivized on increasing net profit. And so we can increase net profit. And we run essentially all of the marketing, email ads, you know, CRO, everything. And then we take part in the net profit that we grow the company, right. So let's say their average is $100 ,000 a month in net profit.

we can come in, take over all the marketing, and then we'll take percentages of anywhere from 20 to 30 % of the net profit we bring in above that standard $100 ,000 a month. And those are the ones that we really get excited about. We have a lot of fun, but also we get so involved into their business that we can really grow well. Yeah.

Chad Kodary (39:46.909)
Got you.

Chad Kodary (39:51.473)
you're a partner at that point which is yeah dude at that point you're a partner so you're you're fully committed i like that performance style of campaign because your skin is in the game

Ashton Shanks (40:04.342)
Skin is in the game and more importantly, everyone's aligned. Like everyone has the same goal. You know, we're not charging on percentages of ad spend, you know, where it's just spend more even if they make less. Our thing is like, if we can make, put more money in their bank account, that's when we win. Yeah.

Chad Kodary (40:18.907)
Love it, dude. All right, man. Um, I know we're getting close to the end here. Um, if somebody wants to reach out to you guys, uh, where is the best place for them to go?

Ashton Shanks (40:28.718)
Yeah, absolutely. It's very easy. Badmarketing .com or you can go to Instagram and at bad marketing. Or if you want to talk to me, you can just go on Instagram at Ashton dot shanks, but badmarketing .com is pretty hard to forget.

Chad Kodary (40:32.315)
Can't forget the name.

Chad Kodary (40:42.619)
Love it, dude. I'm excited to have you guys on here again in the near future. Hopefully next time I speak to you, you'll be at that a hundred million dollar mark. Uh, I wish you guys tons of luck. And once again, thank you for your time. All right, man.

Ashton Shanks (40:53.486)
Thanks, buddy.