Joshua Chin 8:05
Got it. I think that the name of he’s just my opinion, right. And the name of the business doesn’t exactly matter. All that much. It’s the the meaning that you assign to it over the years of experience and brand equity that you build over time. Most people don’t know this, but the name of my company Chronos Agency came from a random name generator online. So that was just how we started and it really had no meaning. And I felt that it kind of had some kind of affinity to what I believed in at a point in time with a Chronos being the the titan of time. And in control of the flow of time. And it was at a point in life where I had very little control over my, my time and my life. So I felt that that kind of had some level of affinity that I could relate to. So appreciate that. Now, what are you optimizing for with your agency? And you’ve also traveled a bunch over the years. Countries now but 42 countries? 42 Okay. Have you been? Okay, have you been to Southeast Asia?
Duane Brown 9:37
Yeah, I’ve been to Singapore, 11 other countries in Southeast Asia actually. I spent weeks going around Southeast Asia after I lived in London for a couple years. So I’d say that’s your first question optimized towards kind of two things. Yeah. It’s a competition between sort of, like happiness, profitability of the company. You know, I know lots of people talk about why Take growth at all costs and things of that nature. But growth at all costs only works when you know, interest rates really low, and people want to give you money, when interest rates are really high as at least they are in North America and most of Europe, optimizing for growth at all costs doesn’t work when you have no money to access. And so we optimize for profitability. When I say profitability to you, I mean, like, net profitability, not gross profitability. I mean, what we actually on the back end, we pay for everything, including the government, because government wants to have in their pocket. Yeah. And then like happiness, like I want to be able to sleep at night, I want to be able to like, work with good people, both like on our team, but also like our clients and brands we work with, across you know, North America and Europe, it’s so optimized with those things. I often say, and I’m very serious about this, I often will charge people to asshole fee, if someone wants to really work with us, but I think they’re gonna be an asshole, I’ll charge them more money. And then if they really want to work with us, just pay the theater if you don’t, that’s okay. I mean, there’s other brands out there, you know, we have very much, you know, what we would call an abundance mindset of the agency, we know that there’s lots of brands and lots of opportunity. And so if you say no, someone else will say, yes, maybe not today or tomorrow, but someone else will eventually say yes, so we always try to optimize for happiness and profitability. Because I also think like, if the team is happy, you know, that means their lives was stressful, that means we’ll do good work, that means our clients will be happy, for clients are happy. And if you’ve had feedback to me or the team, and it creates a nice circle where everyone’s kind of happy or less stressed, at least, we make good profits, and we all sleep at night. And it’s not the easiest thing to optimize for. Because sometimes people offers us lots of money to do things we don’t want to do. And it’s hard to say no, sometimes, we often say no to things that just like, are not in the wheelhouse clients ask us to do like dev work, or they do SEO? And we could theoretically do this, yes. Because someone in our team has a background or whatever it is in the past life before they join us. But we don’t really want to do it as like a service deliverable.
Joshua Chin 11:58
Yeah, I get that and use adding pain, to the process of working with the client. And a lot of people don’t realize this, but we had a, like, between me and my co founder, my co Luis, we, we had this debate a couple, I think a couple years back on the stakeholders that mattered the most in our business, and how we ranked them, how we prioritize them. And we kind of agreed on the typical things like community environment, vendors, shareholders and a bunch of these other things. I think those are the four. And when it comes to the top two, we really had a heated debate around employees versus customers, because one has to come first. Was it your employees? Or was it your customers, because without customers, you can’t afford employees? Were all employees, you couldn’t serve your customers. And the conclusion that we came to was that if we have two trues, it would be that our employees would come first, or people or people come first, even if that means losing clients, making customers unhappy. And creating some pain on the customer side of things. Because we understood that this was a realization that we came to that with employees being well taken care of with our team members working taking care of stuff. We can, we can pivot, we can grow, we can scale down, we can do lots of different things, we will survive. As long as we have good employees, they’re a great fit for the company. They’re taken care of. We’ll find new customers, we’ll find new clients like what you said doing? Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually we would and there will be it will be a much happier outcome overall. So that was an interesting debate, because it was it didn’t seem like there was a solution to it.
Duane Brown 14:21
But I have to ask it though, Josh. Well, which of you you said you would put company first before employees or which leads did you put employees was before clients I’m curious, would you put that because it is employees? Yeah.
Joshua Chin 14:33
But yeah, no question. That’s a That’s a good question. I I went customers first. Okay, interesting. And my mindset was this without customers we couldn’t play it pay our employees so employees wouldn’t exist. We wouldn’t be able to survive. Louis his mindset was and he’s she’s CEO. So he thinks in in the in more holistic manner. Employees have to come first. Because without employees there is that there are no customers and you can always take a hit on your profitability. But long term, if you have unhappy employees and employees are not taking care enough, you’re not going to last with any customer. That made a lot of sense. So that logic prevail.
Duane Brown 15:24
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it’s also probably depends on what what scale you’re at. But yeah, more times, and unless you’re like Amazon or something like that. Or like a Walmart, where you’re so big that people would like, give the firstborn to work for you. Boys first, it’s true. Like, let’s be honest, employees for us at the at the end of the day.
Joshua Chin 15:48
That is true. Duane now going back to your your travels. So you’ve traveled a bunch 42 countries now you’re kind of settled down over the past couple of years in Toronto. Why, why that change versus being a so called kind of digital nomad moving about the world.
Duane Brown 16:09
Yeah, I mean, moving is exhausted. First of all. anyone’s ever moved, you know, to a new country. It’s pretty hated. Yeah. I mean, even moving across the country in someone’s own country, if it’s a big enough country can be pretty exhausted. Yeah, so me, when I originally moved to Australia in 2011, I was struggling to find work in Toronto without him in the suburbs. And even when I move to the suburbs, I’m like, well, freelancing is going okay, but not amazing, because I’ve run out of cash. Now, what’s one thing I really want to do is like, I want to go to Australia. I’ve never been I don’t know if it’s really been really. So I bought a ticket, got a student visa, I’ve actually found work and what we do, which is really great. I was there for six months, I traveled around the country of Australia and stuff like that went around different states. I went to Melbourne, which is really cool. We went to Sydney for like Mardi Gras in New Year’s Eve. And so I got to see a lot in Australia, which was really great. And I think Australia as a whole is great. And then it came back to Canada and I feel it’s a little bit for some Canadian companies I kept blows away in Australia. And still trying to find like decent decent works. I’m like, why don’t I move to the UK? Because I’m like, Australia thing worked out. Maybe this UK thing would work out. You know, they’re both English speaking countries I can get by there’s lots of people who want to hire people like me to run ads and stuff. So I did that. And I got some jobs and more work and more work. And then my visa ran out. The company worked for golf bought six weeks before my visa ran out. So I couldn’t get my visa sponsored, which is kind of unfortunate. And so I left the UK decided, why did I go to like Asia for 10 weeks, because come back home to Canada in like September, October can be very dicey for a job search. Because if you don’t find a job fast enough, you’re going to just basically be off for the last six weeks of the year. So I’m like, why don’t I go travel in Asia? I’ve never been, I don’t ever seen it on TV as like a Western person. So I research lots of stuff and like, what do I want to go do I want to do like the Thailand the most people talked about, I want to go somewhere else. So I basically picked 12 countries in Southeast North Asia. I spent anywhere from four nights to three weeks in places. I will say I fell in love with like Vietnam, or Laos. And though I do love Hong Kong, Japan, Taipei and Korea as a single person, they’re all really expensive to visit, but love them deeply. Especially Taiwan. And I do recognize Taiwan as an independent country, for them to self direct what they do. So yeah, I went to 12 weeks, and I had a great time, I eat a lot of food. And then a lot of people haven’t thought that it was Canadian after they especially assumed I was American. And it was interesting, because it’s like, I think as a Westerner, it’s kind of like everything I saw, does match up with media in like some really small wins, weigh. But then there’s like all these things over here, you don’t see like in the media, whether it’s like Canadian media or American media. And so I learned a lot and which was museums, and I just I wasn’t I think it’s like an interesting place. There’s lots of really good food, which I love, especially places like Singapore and Vietnam. And yeah, it’s just awesome, man. There’s just a lot of great stuff going on, especially if you get out of the like, go to Thailand as your default or you go to like India as your default. There’s so much beautifulness within Asia.
Joshua Chin 19:21
I agree. I totally agree. And what one thing that I’ve recently learned about and realized is that the thing about Asia is that especially Southeast Asia is that you have so many different countries and different cultures that are kind of grouped up in a similar kind of close location, but also very different languages between like Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand, everybody has a different different way of speaking. And through that, you have also very different cultures, but also language breeds. It’s a different way of thinking. Because the words that we use influenced the way that we think and the way that we think influences our actions. And just kind of reflecting on on my experience, because I speak Mandarin, and Malay, as well as English. They’re just vastly different ideas and cultures that you can kind of express in these different languages, they just cannot express in English, which is so interesting to think about. And I’m just curious if you have any experience around cultures that do not translate well into the Western world, in terms of the way that they speak, or think. And maybe as a result of language, or otherwise.
Duane Brown 20:56
Yeah, I’ve got three stories, actually. Well, two of them are kind of same story. But like, I think, I think one thing I was worried about a little bit, sometimes my travels, like, you know, will be their food that I want to eat. I’m not a picky eater. To Asian, I assume it’s not to be like what they service in North America, which has been Americanized, to a great deal. But I mean, I did find tons of amazing food, and my gosh, I’m gonna come back to Asia as a whole both North Asia and Southeast Asia. But I think two things kind of stuck out me when I travel for like, when I was in Thailand, I read tons of reviews and like, where do you go to eat? You know, what spot do you need to go to? So I stopped to this little older woman’s booth, she was selling salad and fish. And I didn’t realize at the time that people, I guess, at least in Thailand, they always ordered one or the other, they never would order both for their lunch. And I was trying to order both because I was really hungry. Yeah. And this young business woman, probably in her, you know, maybe mid to late 20s. So a bit younger than me without that much anger at the time. She shot me really struggling to communicate with a little old woman. And so she translated for me. And then the older woman looked at me and smiled, and then gave me both dishes, paid for it. And then she gave me a seat beside her car to sit down so I could like actually eat my meal. Yeah, I don’t know what the gravel was doing. My grandma had to go in on she had like fried fish. She’s got this peanut salad thing. It was amazing. Because that’s kind of like the interesting of like, barriers to communication a little bit. All right. The other one was in Tokyo, when I was at the big station downtown, whose name I can’t think of, but I was reading one of the maps and I didn’t realize it was a map of all of Japan. And not just Tokyo. So that meant it was all the train lines in Japan and not just the train lines in Tokyo. Oh, wow. Okay, yes, this person was like, he saw that I was struggling to like, find where the station was I need to go to to go to my every beat and like, Hey, do you need some help? Okay, I’m trying to find like this station. And he’s like, Oh, this is like all in Japan? Oh, yeah. I mean, he told me like, where I need to go and what to do. And I was like, thank you so much, I was really helpful. I assume he was like, I don’t know, maybe a lawyer or a banker because he was wearing a suit. So it’s really hard to tell what he did. But it was really nice of him to stop and ask, you know, if I needed help, because, you know, sometimes, being a black person traveling, like, I really stand out, like more than normal. Or in some trains in Asia, people like literally stare at me for the whole ride. And like, I don’t think I have anything on my face,
Joshua Chin 23:15
you get people taking your photo, like trying to fire I’ve seen it happen quite a few times. And so funny to see.
Duane Brown 23:24
Most of my white friends get that out of anyone take my photo, people usually like to shake my hand and when I’m Canadian, a little kids on the subway will kind of stare at me a lot, right? No one’s ever taken like my photo, which, if they asked, I’d be fine with it, it’s not going to bother me. But I do appreciate both those people realizing I was struggling a little bit and like, let me help out this dude is trying to like, you know, figure out something here. Because they could have been like two dozen people who passed me and he’s on his own wouldn’t pick it out on his own. And then the third story I have is a few of my ex boyfriends sipping French. And I think there’s that struggle even with French to go from French to English because there’s express in French, both them like French is very, especially Canadian, French and even Paris, French they express things based on gender. So there’s like a mask. And there’s words in French that you don’t really can translate into English because we don’t have it in the English word. Right? So even from like that perspective, there’s lots of languages where I think translating things in English is hard because unless you’re born in English speaking country when an English is not that easy, actually can be pretty complex, but I’m like, what your home country was?
Joshua Chin 24:27
Yeah. Makes sense. No, I think that so you do speak French, right?
Duane Brown 24:37
No, I mean, I can get by but any of my ex boyfriends to tell you that I’ve crap my French like, I can say a couple of words here and there. I don’t know if you order like a chicken and waffles at a restaurant. I can’t have a full on conversation.
Joshua Chin 24:49
Okay, but you kind of understand what people are saying..
Duane Brown 24:53
I get by. Just a bit. I mean, I lived in Montreal for two and a half years back,
Joshua Chin 24:57
but most importantly, if, if people cuss you out you kind of You kind of know, you get a sense of that. No, no, really? No. Okay,
Duane Brown 25:04
I mean, I know the odd word, but not enough. Like I can like, semi get by if I know what I need to order, but not enough that if I know, someone’s like, cussing me out, if they are I honestly don’t care. Like, it’s just something to be really asshole to someone, like, why are you going to try to cuss me out whether it’s in English or in French, I just don’t care. At this point.
Joshua Chin 25:25
That’s, that’s really interesting. No quick segue, because I really want to dive through this Unbounce, you were at Unbounce for two years as a senior paid media manager. And you work directly to the CMO or the board. Okay?
Duane Brown 25:50
Our CFO CMO is obviously on the board with anyone else who’s on the board. Right report to the board. There’s, there’s people have taught me, there’s two directors as the VP their CMO, technically on like a hierarchy chart. But I reported to the CMO because I spent the most money in the biggest line item between what I spend on ads and my things. Let’s go right to the top and talk about like, how would you learn what’s going on? You know, at three different managers when I was at Unbounce. It was, it was interesting time to say the least.
Joshua Chin 26:21
Now I have your LinkedIn profile pulled up here. And it really sounds like you’ve did a crap ton in two years, not a long time. Two years, it was a lot of work.
Duane Brown 26:33
You know, it’s just like getting, getting things optimized to the point that you can take on more work. Yeah, like so get get better at your job. And free up your time. So you can do more work while doing the job you currently have. Which more people do the opposite of that. They just kind of like, keep on doing the work that they’re doing. But don’t get better at their job. So they can free up time to do more exciting stuff. Like I love running campaigns. But like anyone with half a brain can run a campaign. It’s not rocket science. It’s hard. But it’s not rocket science. We’re not not saving lives doing I’m not doing brain surgery.
Joshua Chin 27:06
I hear you, I hear you. And you manage paid search paid social display. Programmatic. And you’re also doing some tests around Microsoft was it was that Bing Ads? Yeah, Bing Ads and Twitter ads as well. Okay.
Duane Brown 27:23
Yeah, maybe try this stuff out. Because it’s like when you max out Facebook and Google and all those other platforms that tries to out try and programmatic? You know, maybe it’s going to fail, but you won’t know unless you try. Right.
Joshua Chin 27:35
And, and you’re imagining about a quarter million bucks per month in in that spent was was that? Um, was that all the spin in the in the company? Was it? Was that just a second of spin?
Duane Brown 27:47
No, it was all the spin. So always been across all our advertising. Obviously, you spent a lot of money on Google Microsoft, because we’re very, you know, a SaaS brand, which is very search centric. Yeah, we’re obviously spending money on Facebook and Instagram. And you know, Chester, Twitter trust our automatic test app display stuff, just find it any edge we can get to like just accumulate more customers profitably and scale things up.
Joshua Chin 28:10
And you You were also a speaker, at the point time with a couple a couple of conferences including Moz con and in Google, Google’s Summit, Google’s conference what what was that? Like when, when you’re working full time, but at the same time, speaking as different these different places? How do you how do you do so much?
Duane Brown 28:39
Just figure out how much time I haven’t a day and just figure out what I’m gonna do. Why don’t just it’s just project management, the end of the day, I think people get distracted in most jobs in the office, doing a lot of meaningless meaningless work that doesn’t actually move the needle. But if you’re optimized towards like meaningful work that moves the needle and remove all the crap that doesn’t actually matter, you can actually get a lot of work done in a 40 hour week and call it a 32 hour week because you about five hours a week of lunch and then three hours a week of just crap time. You don’t meet in time so we’re just optimizing for it’s that you know, then the day speak at conferences I enjoyed you know, I think the best piece of advice I can give to anyone in marketing whether you work in an agency or nonprofit whether you work you know in house at a big brand, the best thing you can do is leave your office leave your computer and go out and meet customers meet other people in the marketing field you know you can learn more from talking to five customers and an afternoon at like some sort of event then you could sit behind your computer all day for the next two years like people will more times than not tell you things in person that they wouldn’t tell you online because there’s always this like disarmament effect when you’re talking to people in person you say things you don’t really think about as much because you’re just having a conversation versus like Oh, then we’re gonna company I’ve got to like put my like anti don’t say these things on Yeah, yeah. So I just optimized towards like meaningful work that moves the needle, get rid of all the other crap and just do the things that I want to do. I mean, it’s been at conferences now. And I still have the company and I still have stuff. And it’s just really optimizing towards the things that actually makes sense. And not doing a lot of that, like, busy work is what we call it in Western society, too busy, busy work,
Joshua Chin 30:20
busy work. Now, I think this is a good segue into the recent developments around AI and the tools surrounding AI, including, but not limited to ChatGPT. How do you think about that space, and that opportunity around your core expertise on paid search and paid paint media? Is that I obviously don’t think that it’s a replacement. And it’s been discussed enough, that’s not gonna be a replacement for what we do, as marketers, but how do you think that amplifies what we do?
Duane Brown 31:06
I think, at least in its current form right now. So call it the the beginning of 2023, I think it’s going to produce just a lot of mediocre average content. If everybody’s using the same tool to produce content, how’s the content gonna be original or exceptional, right? You know, the thing that makes people successful at our job over machines is that we understand context really well. But she technology does not really understand context. And so though, I think there’s probably a use case for ChatGPT in some way, or some shape and form the who say, they’re gonna use it to write blog posts and write all my ad copy and stuff like that, I just don’t see it being something that’s usable at scale, because you still have to go through that human touch that context machines don’t have. So it’s, it’s interesting, it’s nice, but it’s just like, those tools you’d use to generate, like, a name for a website, or like, what you’re going to call your kid, it’s just gonna produce a lot of the same results, which was for 100 other people. So there’s not a lot of originality behind that, which is unfortunate, because there’s probably a use case for it. But it’s not in like doing something that scale where everyone else wants the exact same thing in that piece of technology.
Joshua Chin 32:23
I, I agree. I agree that added at its current form, it’s most definitely, definitely limited in what it can do. But the contrarian point of view here is that it still does save a crap ton of time, for lower level creative work, that does not necessarily require a lot of contextual understanding. So it’s kind of that layer one that we’re talking about. Right? I need. I need ideas for ads, on social, for a supplement product, selling vitamins to two parents that have just had a baby trigger, for instance, right. And it’s going to spit out a bunch of different angles, and you can further refine them to fit your context a little bit further. And that could serve as a starting point of right, where do we go with developing creatives? For instance? What do we start testing out what sounds good, that I think still saves a ton of time, may not be like a full headcount worth of time, but it could eliminate some redundancies and inefficiencies. And in that process, that’s how I think about it. But I don’t know if the future of AI in marketing is going to be a function of further developing creative work, like in that direction, like what it is currently, or would it go down the route of what RPA tools or robotic process optimization, automation tools, promise, which is cutting away the menial work of clicking into ADS and publishing and making edits and stuff like that? I’m not sure what the developments going to look like in marketing space.
Duane Brown 34:39
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s open ended. So let’s see what happens you know, I think the example you gave was a something like brand garden for parents, which is having kids interested in you know, I think the challenge would you ever hit these scenarios I find is like, how many other brands have the exact same use case right you didn’t mean is great as a starting point, but I think I think the big thing we will get as like what’s a good capitalism? Right or system is based on people at the top, telling people at the bottom to like, have more output for no raise and salary as like an average large company. And so my fear is people are going to do what you just said. But then they’re not gonna take that step of like, for fighting that list and making it better. They’re just gonna take what was spit out to them, and use that to produce content, right? So people can use the week from things but not go the extra step, because inherently people also lazy, you know, corporations always, you know, pay very well, but people also lazy and so I think it’s a great tool. But yeah, people don’t take that extra step. You know, Josh, it’s gonna create a lot of just bland, boring content, because it goes, Well, does it need more content, the world needs more exceptional content, which is where we started agree. And some people were just not gonna make that exceptional content.
Joshua Chin 35:47
I agree, I have a different point of view there. I don’t think that more content is needed, I think any thing that needs to be said, or most likely have been said. So even I’m kind of hesitant on creating content and doing all the stuff that might my marketing team wants me to do on social. But it really is about curation more than anything, because there’s just way too much information out there right now. But the problem is that, and even we face this in our job as well, that there’s so much content and information that we just don’t know what’s relevant and important. And I think the the tool or the person that can solve that issue of curation, and personalization is going to win. So that’s just how I think about it. But I’m excited to see how that develops over time. Now, Dwayne, a little bit about the clients that you work with, at Take Some Risks, you have some really cool brands like lark, the Shark Tank company. That’s, that’s a company that that, uh, that purifies water with UV light, right. Is that? Is that the one?
Duane Brown 37:05
That is correct? Yeah, we’ve got, you know, water bottles, essentially, we got the water pitcher, we put out last year, there two or three years with us is coming up in July, which is really cool. So he’s gonna go from like, you know, low seven figures to eight figure brand now. That’s awesome. It’s been awesome. It’s a lot of growth. It’s been hard work and stressful on both our side and their side. Because, yeah, to grow a brand that that more and more people realize, and can help make the world a better place by taking plastic out of the water and stuff like that. Yeah. So it’s been, it’s been great. I was really shocked when they emailed me said, we’re gonna go with you versus the bigger agency with more people than ever since that day, Josh, I’ve worked twice as hard to make sure we retain that business and no one comes after it. Because if you come after it, I’m going to cut you how you absolutely don’t mean, just people in general.
Joshua Chin 37:58
I get that. Yeah. How? How the people listening, consider that a warning? But how do you land that business to talk walk me through that process of pitching and it sounds like there’s a there’s a process of a pitch going on?
Duane Brown 38:17
Yeah, I mean, a little bit, I guess we don’t we don’t call it a pitch not like you would see at like, traditional agencies or bigger agencies or companies. I would say 99.9% of all our our clients come from, you know, inbound, it could be current client referral, could be someone on the team who has to reach out to them could be somebody coming from somewhere I’m a community or I spend as a community online and they’ll Hey and say like, Hey, Duane, or hey, team, I saw you on swag, whatever it was. We’ve implemented something a couple years ago, which is our business Intake Forms it’s a form people fill out to tell us everything from what the revenue was last year to what the revenue goals this year, what’s their conversion rate? What’s their CPA their role as all the numbers we sort of camera to understand the businesses today because there’s one thing I’ve learned Josh is you can look at a website and there’s no way you can tell if that website is making a million dollars in a day, or $1,000 a day sorry, when this forum two years ago we have to understand like okay, well this business looks pretty but they’re not making money with this business. Like as a website that looks ugly, but they’re making tons of money. Yeah. oriented conversation. Yes, we do that we there’s either in the past or fails, like okay, I don’t think you’re right fit because maybe your goals don’t align together like you want to $10 CPA, but your product costs like $15 or something like that or whatever. Right? So yeah, goals don’t align. And then brands you want to talk to someone email, you know, book some time on my calendar, we’ll sit down and talk for half an hour and try to like dig into the form or understand the business more. It’s basically a gut check to see like, Are these people saying and would we want to work with them? At the end of the day, because I try to take on clients based on four factors You seem like nice people, you’ve got money to pay the bill, you’ve got an interesting problem. And we kinda want to work with you, right? We don’t want to work with assholes. You know, like I said, we had that asshole fuel fee earlier. So we’ll charge an excellent fee if we have to. Yeah. And then after that we tell people it’s really comes down to do you want to work with us or not? I mean, we can sit here and, and like, dig around all day, like big agencies do. Or you can make a decision. You want to work with us or not with us. And if you don’t want to work with us, that is totally cool. You know, we have clients who say no all the time. Yeah, in fact, I prefer 50% of people said no, at the very least, because we don’t want to work with everyone. And oil can people who really want to work with us, because you know, what, we’re not us and your agency, other agency that we’re not interchangeable, right? You can’t just take us and replace us with another agency. Like, that’s just not how this works. You know, we are at the top of what we’re doing. If you want the best, you’ve got to like, step up and want to work with the best. But if you want to wish to work with any agency, especially an agency that competes on price, well, that’s not us, not gonna come to us. And then you know, after that, it’s really like, you know, yeah, we really want to work with you guys, for whatever reason, lots of people pick us because like, we’re small, you know, people, you know, sometimes few people pick us because we mentioned things in meetings that like no one’s mentioned this, or no one said that. And that’s so true. I found this out yesterday, but the other agency didn’t tell us. Yeah, look, I’m a super nerd. I know things about Google that there’s a lot of people who don’t know how to run Google ads. And so I will like, just spout off things. Because I have a brain like an elephant.
Joshua Chin 41:24
It’s a super nerd. So when,
Duane Brown 41:27
yeah, it is a super nerds. That way, everyone knows on the team, you got to be super nerdy at this job. Yeah. And then yeah, after that meeting, the odd time we have a second meeting, one client recently, we have four meetings, which I’m like asking for a reason. Like, you need to make a decision because I can’t go to a meeting here. I like you, and I want to work with you. But you’ve got to make a decision at this point. Because I’ve met three different people on your team at this point now. And we’ve had three which would have been four meetings. And so we need to make a decision because if you can’t make a decision, that’s a red flag for me, right? Not being able to make a decision is a problem with brands because brands can’t make decisions stalled ability to be successful. Part of success in any business, whether it’s a comm or SaaS or tech or an agency is the ability to make a decision and move forward. It may not be the right decision. But no decision is irreversible or no decision is a death sentence. So make a decision, pick a path, move forward, if it’s the wrong one, make another decision and move forward but not make a decision on this worse because a decision will get made for you. And you probably won’t like the decision that gets made for you.
Joshua Chin 42:25
Yeah, that’s true. And it’s true. So, final question, this, this is something that I saw on your LinkedIn as well. People listening, go follow Duane on LinkedIn, it’s linkedin.com/duaneBrown. That’s Duane Brown links will be in the description below if you’re on our page. If not go to chronos.agency/podcast and get all the links up there. LinkedIn, you’re a core course. Instructor on LinkedIn as well. And you have a pretty fantastic course you have over. Was it 20,000? I saw about 20, close to 20,000 people who have taken the course. And NBC 405, almost 500 reviews at 4.5 out of five stars. That’s pretty awesome. And you’re you’re teaching PPC with Google ads. How do you land a gig? And what what is that? Like? Do you make money from that?
Duane Brown 43:36
Yeah, so what’s the first question? So I actually pitched to speak at a conference in California? This was 2019. Yes. No, this is like the end of 2020 or the end of 2018. And so I pitched it, I went and I spoke. And then someone from LinkedIn, was looking for more course instructors, and they happen to find that another conference, they just went through, like all the people speaking and then they sent me a message. Okay, would you like to make a course about PPC for like LinkedIn? And then like, at first, I thought this wasn’t real, because I didn’t realize this was the thing. And then we spent basically, you know, most of like, most of 2020, recording the actual recording the actual course and stuff like that. Yeah. And then yeah, I mean, LinkedIn does pay us so they pay you like, kinda like any negatives analogy of like a famous person, right? You sign a contract, you get a bit of money upfront, which goes towards you actually making the course and as long as you finish the course and do all your deliverables that you agree to. You get your your lump sum payment, and then there’s a royalty splits with LinkedIn. And depending on what you’re making, and all the other players you get X percentage, based on the people who’ve taken your course. Right. And as they told me, some people pay off their mortgage. Some people buy a steak lunch every day. A once a week. So you can make you know, 50 bucks in a month, you can make maybe $5,000 a month to pay off your mortgage each month. So obviously varies. Yeah, there’s some people I know who’ve got four or five courses with LinkedIn. Yeah, there’s people like me who just have one and probably just stick to one. It’s definitely probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Making a course I think make it of course, for someone else, because the way my brain works, and what I would do isn’t maybe the same way other people who do and what they would do isn’t wrong, obviously, like Clinton’s got tons of data, so they know what their people like in terms of courses. But it really for me, it was hard to just adjust my brain to think about how they would build the course or any other platforms. Of course, it would be different than how I would build the course. Makes sense. Yeah, it’s about 90,000. People have taken it so far. Yeah, that’s right. 5500 reviews, people are loving it. I try to like leave her apply the last year at anyone who says they love the course. And they post about it on LinkedIn, it was one of the things they hate things, of course. And we appreciate it, hope you liked it. I think it encourages people to continue their professional and take other courses on LinkedIn. And I’ve noticed over the last six, eight months, people in their network also even more common as encouragement, I think is really good. You know, I think trying to encourage people to continue, it is really helpful to just give people encouragement they need because it’s a one way road trying to learn anything new for the first time. It’s true, need all the encouragement they can get.
Joshua Chin 46:27
Yeah, I think the community factor plays a big part. And I’m, I’m kind of, I’m curious to know, do you get um, do you get clients out of the course at all?
Duane Brown 46:40
No, I don’t think so. I mean, if anyone’s as taken in and hired, never mentioned it,
Joshua Chin 46:45
right, okay. I, cuz I figured you could, if you ran the course, independently, and hosted it on, like, Kajabi, or something else, and ran ads to it and priced it at say, you know, a couple 100 bucks, you could probably make a lot more money out of of doing that. Especially since you have the exact skills you need to to scale a product like that. paid ads paid media and running funnels.
Duane Brown 47:20
Yeah, I mean, you may say, I mean, there’s obviously young make, because you’ve got a market the course right, and so LinkedIn does a lot of that marketing. So obviously, that’s part of their fee comes in it also with courses, whether it’s, you know, set you mentioned, or Udemy, or Skillshare, whatever it is, like it’s courses in general are pretty combative, especially what we do. So making the course is actually the easy part. It’s like, nice that you can actually sell it and get people to buy it. You know, I do have a course on Udemy. That is just about like Google Shopping and shopping ads that as like, I mean, it’s been a few months as I’ve looked at it, and has like a 3.8 out of five. I think it’s past 100 reviews that’s paid. So if you pay for something, they’re a lot more harsh in the in the grade in, yeah. Where’s it going with this? Oh, but basically, like, maybe the courses is the easy part. It’s actually trying to like, get it out there. Because there’s so much competition, we’ve had one client actually hire us because of the Udemy course, because they literally told us that’s why they hired us partly to get the course. And they realized this guy knows what he’s talking about. And this is too complicated. And that clients been with us. For 25. Three, so yeah, become a year and a half now. So be two years in July. Yeah. That’s the only client that they get in three years without the Udemy course that someone said, Hey, I actually taken this and I just realized I should just hire you. That’s all. We do it more for the education than like, we thought it’d be a legion thing. Yeah. So it’s been good. But you know, it’s gotten the client out of it. And they paid pretty good fees. And they got an interesting brand and one of our nicest clients. So yeah.
Joshua Chin 48:57
That’s awesome. Duane, thank you so much for being on the show. I appreciate it. And for people listening are is the best way to what’s the best way to connect with you? Is it LinkedIn?
Duane Brown 49:08
Yeah, see, what is the best way to connect with me, you can follow me on LinkedIn, I do spend a fair bit of time on Twitter. Twitter’s just Duane Brown as well, just like LinkedIn. Those are probably the two best places unless you’re on Reddit. I spent a lot of time on Reddit. That’s the other place. There’s like the PPC, separate and Reddit. So it’s either Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, all three. I post different content. Each one’s really just depends on where you spend your own time, personally.
Joshua Chin 49:31
Awesome, Duane. Thanks so much for being on the show. And for people listening. If you enjoyed this episode, check out more on Chronos.agency/podcast. And if you can leave a rating, leave a review. It really helps us out a ton. And doing this for about two years ago, I think. And it’s been lots of fun. I want to keep doing this. So let me know if I should. Thank you so much. And I’ll see you guys in the next episode. Cheers
Outro 50:05
Thanks for listening to the eCommerce Profits Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get notified of future episodes.
