Hamlet Azarian on Building 167 Agents Into One Growth OS

0:00 · What Azarian Growth Agency does for private equity firms

Jordan Lally:0:27
Welcome back to the High Ticket AI Systems podcast. Everyone, please welcome the one and only Mr. Hamlet Azarian Hamlet. Welcome to the show today, my friend. How you doing?

Hamlet Azarian:0:37
Good. Thanks for having me on.

Jordan Lally:0:38
Absolutely. Before we dive into all the nitty gritty tactical and strategic questions, can you give the audience some context as to what the company does and who you guys best serve?

Hamlet Azarian:0:48
Yeah, of course. we we work with predominantly with venture capital firms and private equity firms. And we help their portfolio companies do their go-to-market. And for us, we define go-to-market as everything related to marketing, sales, and operations.

Jordan Lally:1:07
How when so when you say you're helping on marketing and sales and operations, are you putting staff in place for them or do they hand you the work and you guys execute on their behalf?

1:21 · Transitioning from high-ticket consulting to building an agency

Hamlet Azarian:1:21
Great question. So about s I don't know how many years, six years ago when we started the agency. part of why we started it, it was a transition from what I used to do, which was I was a high paid consultant. I would come in when VCs had basically deployed capital into their portfolio company. So it might it might be pre-seed or seed companies at that time. And then they would hire me in to come and help develop and train the team members to ensure that we were building an engine that can continue growing and scaling the business. I did this for a while. So this went on for you know a couple years and I couldn't scale past my own limitations, right? So there's only One of me, and there's only X amount of time in the day. And so I would normally take on anywhere up to three clients and I would cut it off. I had 40 hours, 50 hours in the week. That's all I had available for. And that would be the limitation at that time. What I learned over this this experience, and fortunately, those businesses did really well, right? One became A unicorn, which is one billion or more in valuation. Another one basically exited for 150 million on a private equity exit. And the third continued to prosper and still does and is considered the second largest privately held consumer brand in their category. And The fortune or luck or skill or combination of those two or three things for me led to those three successes simultaneously. And what I discovered along the way is there was still inefficiencies in the process. And where the inefficiencies were is I still needed to hire a team, build out the infrastructure, and then execute and deploy that.

And that's the birth of the agency, is for us to speed up that inefficiencies. So we can come in right away, solve the technical gaps, bring in and deploy the right team members to surround. And then as of more recently, to be able to supplement not only with human talent, but also agentic talent that is customized for your for your organization's ability to scale.

Jordan Lally:3:41
How many, if you don't mind sharing, portfolio companies or like private equity firms are you partnered with and do you ever take on more of those since they typically have a a a long roster of portfolio companies?

3:59 · How the agency partners strategically with PE portfolio companies

Hamlet Azarian:3:59
Yeah, so we're strategic in how many we partner with at any given time. We we don't like to overlap, right? So a lot of people might have similar playbooks and that's part of similar, just like in investing. We don't we want to make sure there's no conflict of inter interest. So if we're working with one private equity firm that's specific in roofing, we're not going to take on another P firm that's also doing the same playbook and going after the same industry and also the same category, right? So we we narrow our aperture accordingly to who we are partnered with, but because of that, we also go very deep, right? So what I mean by that is overall, we're not just helping their portfolio companies, we're also helping them.

So how we do that is we might do a sim analysis for them as they're looking at what potential companies to be able to acquire. We might be part of their platform and roll-up strategy session. So we're looking at who they're going to turn into a platform and who they're going to start acquiring. We help find those organizations and knit companies. So we become a value add for them, right? So what this means in essence, they're not just reliant on their portfolio companies to find the deals. We're also strategic. strategically looking for them where they can do a potential geoexpansion, where they can find a potential business that's in the one to 50 million range, you know, typically it's the one to three or one to four million range that is ready to be acquired and we find the contact information and so on and so forth. So the way we operate is very aligned in their best interest and of course their portfolio company's interest as well.

Jordan Lally:5:43
That's what every company that has a quote unquote vendor wants, right? They want the agency to be an extension of their business. I mean, I I think you and I kind of think similarly. I want to help my clients in every aspect of the business, not just in this not just in this one pillar. Because you and I both know business is not just one pillar. It's a simultaneous of dozens if if not more pillars that we have to actually focus on, right? Hamlet, take us all the way back, my man. You said that. private equity firms and you know larger companies become to you for strategy, advice and execution. I mean, I imagine you're pretty damn good at what you do, but how did all of that happen? What were you doing before that led you to be that guy where PE firms are going to you or companies are going to you?

6:29 · Learning from failure and reading Google patents to spot arbitrage

Hamlet Azarian:6:29
You know, honestly, it's having the right mindset from day one. So what I mean by that, and this is kind of what I instill on my team, data is the most essential thing, and the speed of experimentation and learnings is the most critical of the processes we build, right? And earlier in in my career where I would get frustrated with failure. Now I look at it as a learning opportunity. So whenever an experiment doesn't necessarily work, immediately I'm thinking about two, three, four, five different learnings from that and what can we adjust? What can we do better? What can we try again? what's missing and sometimes it's it's as simple as the funnel right or it might be that the messaging was off or it might be that the targeting is correct but the channel is wrong. So I kind of iterate through this cycle over and over again looking for what can potentially work. And at this point, you know we we've been doing this for such a long time We have sort of a library of wins and failures that we can go to and we can say, this reminds me of this particular strategy we did and how the results we got, but slightly adjusted so we can quickly iterate and find a winning formula much faster. So at the end of the day, the playbooks and the tactics we have have come from years of trial and failure that can now now have compounding impacts for the businesses that we represent and work with.

Jordan Lally:8:06
Gotcha, gotcha. So beforehand you just eventually had a a a lot of s successful resume wins and companies kinda trusted you with your work.

Hamlet Azarian:8:16
No, I mean it like from the beginning. I mean my first win was a bootstrapped e-commerce store, right? So if I go back, this is before the early, early days. And I'm gonna age I'm gonna age myself. you know, I some I I this is before YouTube became big. And

8:38 · Generating 40 million views from early UGC campaigns

Jordan Lally:8:38
Okay.

Hamlet Azarian:8:38
and the first win at that time was I saw A bunch of beauty influencers overall creating videos, and the client at this point was a sub beauty supply chain, right? So the idea became how can we scale video content generation and really go at it? And what we were selling at this point, wigs and hair iron hair irons and and skincare, things of that sort.

But we saw an opportunity where no one was really at, which was at this, you know, young girls creating what they were called at that point was halls, video halls. And we said, okay, why don't we s try to sign 30 or 40 or 50 of them? This is the beginning of UGC content creation, right? And one of

Jordan Lally:9:28
Yeah.

Hamlet Azarian:9:28
our most successful videos, we spent three hundred bucks, ended up generating close to forty million views and generated three to four million dollars in revenue. Right. So

Jordan Lally:9:38
Insane.

Hamlet Azarian:9:40
So this is like so I like to go there, right? I I like to go where something is starting to happen and you can kind of feel it, right? You're like, I think there's I think we're gonna go here. I I think this is where the where it's headed. But I come at it with much more of a technical sense.

Right. Like I'm the guy who on the weekends likes to read the Google patents and understand systematically how the system works. I mean, I have podcasts and webinars all about this, right? Where I dig deep into what AI overuse could be. So we were way ahead of the curve on GEO and AI and LLMs and what the change it would be. Because the moment I saw the technology, I also remembered when.

Google first came out when I was in college, right? Like I'm like, wow, this is gonna be massive. So my my natural inklink is to go someplace new, figure out how it works, and take out take advantage of that arbitrage. That arbitrage might be three years or five years or seven years, and really get ahead of everybody and really start.

Being the leader because when it starts, everyone is at the same level field, right? You are at the same level field as me, and someone else is at the same level field. My kid at 12 years old is technically at the same level field as well, right? But it's really the cumulative experience we have and our ability to try, experiment, fail, and learn that sets steps us apart and really makes us get ahead quicker.

Jordan Lally:11:14
What is that new thing now?

11:17 · The future of agentic robotics and operations software

Hamlet Azarian:11:17
Great question. I mean it it it's right now I believe it's gonna be the world of agenc robotics. So so so where I think where we're definitely headed is agentic AI is new still, but I I think in the very, very near future we're about to have software be able to talk to hardware and hardware is gonna be able to execute. So when I say we do sales, marketing, and ops, this pillar of ops for us is definitely going to grow.

Because we're we would be able to get in if you're a manufacturer, right? So you're a manufacturer and you're trying to analyze and figure out how you can improve productivity at your manufacturing plant. There's companies now that are creating basically videos and putting it on humans and monitoring these things to see what overall is a performance gain. That's the beginning of the teaching of the software element of it.

And now what's about to happen is the hardware is is maybe, my guess is two to five years out before it becomes really mainstream. There's some elements of it that do really well. So the combination of the two is really going to give a huge productivity boost.

Jordan Lally:12:31
On that note, I know you guys are working really hard at Growth OS. Can you please give us an overview of what that is for the company?

12:38 · How Growth OS builds 167 agents with a custom memory layer

Hamlet Azarian:12:38
Yeah, yeah, of course. So what we started doing, and this is our gentic platform. So what we started doing about what as every agency, right? We started really documenting all of our processes and building out SOPs. And SOPs for people who don't know are standard operating procedures. You first do A, then B, then C, and it's it's a listicles kind of order.

And we started doing that a few years ago. And mainly we did that is we wanted to also build out a training curriculum for all of our new hires. And it would allow them to quickly be able to read our articles, watch our videos, watch our training courses, watch our podcasts, watch the webinars that I do, and so on and so forth, so they could understand how we think and how we operate. Now, when a gentic Wave started coming right away. I saw that it was just taking our SOPs and transforming them into agents. It literally was a simple parallel track of how you take what the humans are being taught to do and how can you convert that into specific agents, right? So we started building out like everybody else, transformers. We start and and I've done a lot of this live by the way. So if you go watch A lot of my growth labs webinar series in the early days, you'll see me playing with Transformers and showing how it's done and all of those different elements of it. And then to all more of the more modern ones, which I I do for New York and LA Tech Week, is you start seeing the birth of growth at last. So this has been publicly documented in other video sessions. So if there's curiosity, feel free and go check those out. But what I saw was The common problem that was starting to surface within most models at that time was, hey, it takes a while, you're constantly loading the same documents in, you are, you are still getting inference, you know, point blank, it's about, we've tested this several times, it's still about 15 to 20 percent that the models just make stuff up. Okay. And then in addition to that.

When you start giving it more and more information, you start losing intelligence. You're not gaining intelligence because you're not doing it properly. You're not giving it in the way that they need it. So instead of you thinking it's going to be smarter because you loaded 10 files or massive PDFs, you're actually leaving yourself for a lot of room for both inference and errors and so on and so forth.

So what we started doing is we said, okay, how do we solve this problem? And we have to solve it two ways. We wanted our answers to be much more deterministic. So we knew that if we get we said do A, it would do A, it wouldn't do A B, right? Or A B C. It wouldn't kind of change the way of the process. And we said in order to do that, we we need to build a system that can support that.

So this is the idea of Growth OS was born. And what we started building was a platform that today has close to 167 agents inside of it. They're ever agents from everything from sales, marketing, and ops, like I like I mentioned before.

Their intelligence, however, is determined by the the memory layer that we've built. And the memory layer has a database tied to it that has short term, which is memory that you don't want c constantly repeated. So you have different windows for different clients. For us it's 30 days is the default, but we can make it longer or shorter.

You have long-term, which is like you're never gonna forget this. You have session, which is that interaction you're having at that chat session that moment. And then you have procedural, which is the process you're gonna follow, step A, step B, step C, and step D. So that's the memory layer we built. And with each agent run, based off of what it's learning, it adds it into the memory layer and pulls from the memory layer. So the responses and the answers get in all better and better and better. So that's the system we've built. On top of that, it has access to if anything there's an API, we have an MCP for. So it has

17:11 · Using MCPs to cut 4-week execution cycles to 15 minutes

Jordan Lally:17:11
Yeah.

Hamlet Azarian:17:11
its own ability to build MCPs, right? So if it sees that there's an API out there, it'll go and it'll produce and build an MCP that it can utilize.

And today, as it stands, I think we're at 60 MCPs, right? Across pretty much every CRM out there, across Google, across Meta, across you you kind of name it, categorization, data sources, phone systems. So it's able to now access, in addition to its memory, all these other data sets. So what does that allow us to do?

That allows us to do things that used to take us two to four weeks, right? With multiple resources. So we're talking about developers, we're talking about designers, we're talking about, you know.

Email specialists, we're talking about paid media buyers, we're talking about content writers. So all of these different disciplines working in unison, which before was pretty efficient too, if you think about it, like the type of campaigns we were producing used to take two to four weeks, is now being done within five to fifteen minutes. So going back to learning and speed, right? So at the rate we're able to move today.

Is even during the prospecting phase, we're able to add so much value to potential clients, to potential private equity firms, to potential portfolio-backed companies, right? And we're able to do we're able to dig into their data and give them analysis that used to take us one to two months. as part of a weekend turnaround for them on, hey, we met on Friday, here it is, let's talk about it. Let's talk about this on Monday. Fully done autonomously, where we can give them a blueprint on what they need to fix and how they would grow their business.

Jordan Lally:19:12
Yeah, success, love speed. You know, I mean, crunching down what used to take two to four weeks in a five to fifteen minutes. I mean, that's pretty damn awesome. I want to kind of get your strategic perspective on when a when a PE firm hands you a new portfolio company, what are some of the first like one to two things you do from a marketing, sales, and operations perspective? My guess is that you analyze the data across the board, and I call this like, messaging congruency. I want to know what's being said in the marketing channels. I want to know how the sales team is essentially compelling or saying what what's in the what's in the ads, what's in the actual messaging. And then what is operations saying? Like what what are some of the clients saying that they like that they don't like? Cause then that whatever operations is saying, we can now move that to the front or what the marketing material should actually be, depending on what our clients actually like or or don't like. That's just my guess, but we'd love to hear from you.

20:10 · Aligning marketing, sales, and operations to grow EBITDA

Hamlet Azarian:20:10
So what you're saying is what we used to think was important. Okay. Yes.

So let me tell you what really matters at the end of the day, right?

Jordan Lally:20:21
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hamlet Azarian:20:23
So so at the core of any business, especially pre-backed firms, it's profitability. Okay. So so what you really wanna understand and figure out.

Is how does each activity grow either the percentage of Ibita, right, or the total dollar of it? Now there's many different ways you can slice that cat, and and what I mean by that is on the marketing side, right? It's kind of what you were saying.

Hey, what channel is performing? How can I do more of this channel? Where what are the levers I can pull that if I put a dollar in, I'll get $5 back or $7 back or $8 back, right? Those are the common growth levers that you have is by channel, by source, by messaging, everything that you were repeating. Okay. Now the second lever on Ibita is sales performance.

So what I mean by that is how how can you arm your salespeople with more intelligence? How can you, when they are talking to a potential prospect of their B2B, how can they go into that meeting knowing everything about them? What podcasts that they've been on, what blogs have they written? what their CEO has said if they're not the CEO, who potentially are the decision makers of this organization, right? What value add creatives or resources you can give them that they can promise on the call. How can you coach them on how the call went, how you can give them a call game plan before they go into the call to ask the right questions, to figure out what the real pain point really is here.

And to be able to figure out when we do the next phase and provide a proposal, how are we tying everything back to what the other business cares about, which is obviously revenue and profitability as well, right? And then post call, how do you prepare that email for the salesperson to send what the next stages are? How do you update the CRM? How do you score it properly? And so on and so forth. So that's on the sales side.

Now on the operation side, it's some of the stuff we were kind of hinting at, right? So what dashboards, what data you have. So let's say if you're a supplier of plumbing equipment, for example, you you c you carry anywhere between let's say 8 12,000 SKUs, you have multiple locations. The key of your success really is your inventory. Are you buying the right inventory at the right time? Or do you have the right descriptions? Are you utilizing that data feed across your website and your store locations and your pricing strategies? Are you paying attention to what your competitors are running ads at and what price that they're running ad at?

Are you on top of that paying attention to your ERP system and your your database and understanding what who's working on what project? And are you also on top of that paying attention to what general contractor is winning any major bids in your region? Is there a new university build? Is there a new amphitheater build? And so on and so forth. And how are you building creatives to reach out to them? So, like, do you do you see what I mean? There's so many ways. that you can go to market today that offer impact across multiple verticals.

Jordan Lally:24:13
Where do you feel like you learn most of this information? I don't want to say through trial and error, but I mean, I guess I'll let you I'll let you answer that.

24:23 · Winning B2B clients with free value and agentic tools

Hamlet Azarian:24:23
I I think a lot of it comes to first principles, right? So what I mean by that is really thinking about as a marketer or a strategist, at the end of the day, what is the way you can add value to whatever problem a business is feeling, and how can you help solve that problem? Okay.

So I'll give you another business, let's say. Okay, so so let's say let's say you sell A software that supports restaurants, for example, restaurant tech. Let's go into that category now. So if you are a small restaurant owner, right? So if you really think about in a first principles perspective here, and I'm talking about this is the guy that opened the restaurant, you know, he's he's in early, he comes in at, you know. let's say six, seven a.m. because he wants to make sure that he takes advantage of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And he probably is running the restaurant with himself and if he if he's got him big enough he might have some version of employees some might be documented some might not be undocumented this is the reality right so you have to really get into the weeds of understanding your the profile of who you're going to be selling to this is the consumer persona builds that we do and then on far on top of that he's maybe had the restaurant for several years he he's he's getting by but he's stuck He's stuck, he's maybe doing half a million to set 650,000 in revenue. He wants to grow, he just doesn't want, he can't afford to take wrong, uncalculated risks, and that will stall him out or take away whatever reserves he has, and that puts him in a harm's way if business slows down and gets gets tough. Okay. Now, how do you market to this person? So The way I would then start thinking about it is putting myself in their shoes and what value does the platform I'm selling give value to them, right?

So I start thinking about, okay, most likely I can reach them on Instagram because they're also on Instagram and they're trying to market their restaurant. I could probably reach them on Yelp because they they've heard Yelp works. I could probably find them on Google Places because they've heard that local is important and should be on reviews, right? So I go where they're at.

I go with where they're trying to drum up business for themselves. And then I then start thinking about all right, so I know they're here, they're at these two or three watering holes. What value can I give them? Okay, so they're on Yelp. If I if I build an agentic system that can go through and read their Yelp review, read all of their competitors' Yelp reviews, and just give that to them. Here, take this.

What did it cost me? It didn't cost me much. It cost me some engineering time, some understanding how to build this system. But the data that I gave them did the most important thing, which is build trust to them to have a conversation with me.

Then I do the same thing on local, right? I pull out, I can use local brand manager, I can use so many tools out in the marketplace and really do dive deep into how their maps listing is, fix it for them. Actually fix it. These are the things I would do. This is how I would change it. These are the optimization plays I would run. This is what currently you are showing up in in the different geo grids. This is how you can do better, and so on and so forth. And just give it to them again, completely free, right?

Jordan Lally:28:20
Yeah.

Hamlet Azarian:28:22
So that's now another level of trust. Now, so when I come back and I say, hey, by the way, these are two things I just gave to you automatically. But what I'm really more interested in is improving your ability to sell more, right? Your ability to win on Uber Eats or to win on DoorDash.

Your ability to take in more phone orders, your ability to get in more repeat customers via email or SMS, all of these other things that I know they probably, if they weren't doing these two things, they're probably not thinking about all these other things. And then how can I definitely help you? This well, here is a platform that sys systemizes all of this stuff. And these are the ways you can do it. Do you see what I mean? So you start with building that trust.

And this I just gave you multiple industries. This was restaurant tech. And then you do the same thing, repeat and rinse for whatever other industry.

Jordan Lally:29:23
Yeah.

Yeah, no hats off to you. I know I got some value from that and definitely the audience as well. I always like asking this question near the end because in my opinion everyone has mentors, business leaders they like to follow. so when it comes to podcasts you'll listen to, books you like to read, networking events you like to attend to, what what what comes up for you?

29:46 · Books, teaching at USC, and finding inspiration from the next generation

Hamlet Azarian:29:46
Yeah, I I love learning from everybody. And shockingly, I love learning from not people that have done it, but people that are failing at it more than anything else. And then

Jordan Lally:29:57
It is what

Hamlet Azarian:29:58
also the the next wave. I love learning from the younger generation because they ask the best questions. And and The truth is there isn't one person, right? Like I I I can go through what I'm reading now. I'm reading Dan Sullivan's and James Hardy's book, 10X is better than 2X, right? The Who Not How is another one of their recent books that I've recently read. And it it's that's more on exponential growth and how to really think bigger and larger and so on and so forth. Or I can

Jordan Lally:30:30
We know how it's good.

Hamlet Azarian:30:31
go through like Phil Knight's book, right? so where he was talking about when he started Nike and his journey. And so I do like reading stories of that sort where it's talks about their journey, right? Richard Branson's book and so on and so forth. So I I feel I learn a lot from what they were able to do and how they thought about the world.

But the true learning of like some of the stuff I'm sharing from you is coming from the people that I've been fortunate and blessed enough to have either go through my academy or come to my webinars and ask me questions. Or when I'm teaching at the business school at USC and the students are asking questions there. I think that's where the real learning comes from because it forces you to. take these complicated things and try to really simplify it so it's easy for people to understand it.

Jordan Lally:31:30
Hamlet, thank you so much for just coming on the show, my man. tons, tons of wisdom and knowledge. Where can they find you if they wanted to, you know, ask you direct questions or explore the business?

31:40 · Where to connect with Hamlet Azarian online

Hamlet Azarian:31:40
Yeah, of course. I mean, you can find us on Azarian Growth Agency, which is A-Z-A-R-I-A-N Growth, G-R-O-W-T-H Agency, or you can find me on LinkedIn, Hamlet Azarian, A-Z-A-R-I-A-N.

Jordan Lally:31:56
Hamlet, thank you again, brother.

Hamlet Azarian:31:57
Of course. Thank you for having me.