The Trust Move That Builds 10-Year Agency Clients: Paolo Vidali

Jordan:0:00
Welcome back to the [High Ticket AI Systems] Podcast. Everyone please welcome the winner and only Mr. Paolo Vardelli. Paolo, how you doing today my friend?

Paolo Vidali:0:09
Great, great, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Jordan:0:11
Absolutely. Yeah, it is my pleasure actually. You our first conversation you and I were talking about client retention and basically in B2B sales, you can make a substantial amount of revenue just by maintaining your current clients. And I believe you've brought up the fact that your clients, some of them have been with you for like five, 10, maybe 10 plus years, which is phenomenal. So I cannot wait to dive into the strategies that you have for client retention. But first,

Paolo Vidali:0:18
Mm-hmm.

Jordan:0:40
Can you please give us a little context as to what you do and kind of what you guys so.

Paolo Vidali:0:45
Yeah, absolutely. So I am the founder and CEO of Hidden Gears. So we are a distributed kind of boutique e-commerce agency focusing exclusively on Shopify for design development. And then we have also some e-commerce driven ads and SEO clients who might not be on the platform, but are still kind of looking at transactions as their primary online focus. A lot of those folks are designing and building and distributing the goods they sell. So they might do a lot of wholesale, they might have retail doors, pretty much the definition of Omni-Channel. And then some of our clients are more traditional retailers and have different challenges that come with that, like having these huge product catalogs with 10,000 plus SKUs and all that. And we work with folks throughout the US. We're a team of eight, so we have a couple of devs, designer, project manager. a few folks in ads and SEO. And for some folks, we're doing a little bit of everything. For some folks, we're only doing one thing. And we kind of try to plug into where people really need the help in terms of how big is their internal team, how much in startup mode or growth mode are they, what's their experience working with agencies, et cetera, and pretty high touch. And so we've been kind of intentionally small over the last 12, 13 years that we've been around.

Yeah, and I just really enjoy kind of helping be a kind of digital shepherd for the folks who are trying to keep up with an emerging AI everything world where it's just, even if it's, you know, your full-time job as the in-house person to try to own digital, there's just so much going on that we bring our expertise to the table and really try to help people out.

And then I also have a small kind of fledgling dev talent agency called SuperBuilt where we have a kind of one-on-one executive search model for finding programmers and engineers matching folks from Eastern Europe with US companies. So that's just plays in my expertise. I'm a developer and marketer kind of by trade. So it's fun to, yeah, to find great people out there and we're kind of solving our own problem and then helping others people solve it too.

Jordan:3:03
Absolutely. I think some of those businesses that are founded from that built on the back of your own pain and the way that solved it, it it hits deeper. hits deeper. And secondly, you are the expert. It's like, I have this problem and I solved it. Like this is how, you know, I feel like the knowledge gap is a lot quicker to learn because you have already achieved that problem. Opposed.

Paolo Vidali:3:10
Mm-hmm.

Paolo Vidali:3:20
Yeah.

Jordan:3:29
to learning how to build websites and then learning how to do Facebook ads and then Google ads and then TikTok ads, know? Like all of that takes time to actually learn, you know? But you already kind of figured it out on the, well, all now, but specifically for the engineers in Europe with the US companies, which I think is pretty cool.

Paolo Vidali:3:37
Doug.

Jordan:3:51
You do have a full service agency. When you first started, what were the core services that you did provide? And then how has that expanded over the years? When did you add what? Why did you add that?

Paolo Vidali:4:04
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think actually in our case, it's an interesting question, but we've actually contracted over time in terms of services. So I think in the beginning, especially, you have a little bit of a fear of like, what if people don't like me? Or what if this isn't the right thing to offer? And you kind of just try to be everything to everyone as much as possible. And you say jump and you jump. there's been things that we've taken out of our kind of menu.

One is email marketing. I feel like it's really hard to be efficient, to craft emails, get the content, format the images, jump through all the hoops of email being a very like legacy code platform. It's one of the oldest protocols on the internet still exists and it's like such a pain in certain ways. We are Clavio partners and we do kind of flow optimization and kind of CRO activities with that. But in terms of sending emails as a service, really, there's agencies that only do that.

And there's kind of a reason because they really built their flow specialty on that. We dabbled, think, a little bit maybe in the early days with SMM. again, it was like, unless you're on site with the clients, really hard to get content out of them to be able to do that job, be efficient at it. And then for the first half of our company, we were also doing WordPress. We were doing Magento, BigCommerce, custom carts. really anything that involved, you know, a meticulous front end and a complex backend. And at a certain point, we just kept coming back to Shopify and realizing that the decisions Shopify was making as a platform are really good. Also being engineer led company. And it was really keeping our clients ahead of the curve with the managed hosting, with security, with different features. And it was just a lot better to build on. from our perspective, even though it does have its limitations, like no platform can be everything to everyone. But we decided, hey, we're gonna actually just focus on Shopify. So fortuitously, that was like, you know, a few months before COVID and then the world turned to e-commerce pretty heavily. But yeah, so that's always been our specialty. And so us calling ourselves an e-commerce agency and yeah, really just doing ads and SEO as the focus marketing efforts have been an evolution for sure.

Jordan:6:30
Congrats on making that shift. I know a lot of people, a lot of agency owners, kind of how you framed it earlier. They love to be everyone to or everything to everyone, but in the grand scheme of things in reality, at scale, that's not scalable. You know, because to be quite honest, and I think a lot of agency owners need to check themselves, but you're probably really good at one to five things, five things on the like high end, like really like two to three things where you are, you excel. Just sell that.

There's so many businesses out there who need your services on just those two to three things alone. You know, I was guilty of that when I first started. Go for it.

Paolo Vidali:7:04
Yeah. no. Yeah. And actually that's partly because of the feedback we got to that effect. Like there was this, there was a suspicion of like, well, you say you can do all these things, but you have a small team and we like, yeah, we're really smart. We're really hardworking. But you know, at the end of the day, people are like, I'm just going to hire you to do a couple of those things. I'm not going to hire you to do everything. Right. And, and they just very, very bluntly express that. And I totally see that. So that's also. unless you are trying to build that 30, 40, 50 person team where it's like, well, okay, this department does this and this whole other team does that. I think also, there's been trends in the agency world have been in it for a long time where, in the mid-Ox, there was definitely like a, hey, like all services, all inclusive, forget all the fractured agencies you work with, just give everything to us. And that was a trend that lasted, I think, maybe until the early 20 teens.

So I think it's kind of cyclical too. People have that frustration from fragmentation. They sort of go back to generalist and then now we're saying the generalist agency is dead because of AI. can be your generalist and you really need that deep specialty. So yeah, I'm curious to see how it pans out in the next few years for sure.

Jordan:8:21
I think, I mean, maybe like you said, I have owned an agency for six, you know, I'd say definitely five, you know, going on six years. I don't know if when I first joined, they emphasize full service, but I do know just from the mentors and coaches that I've listened to that like who gets paid more.

Generalist or or specialist surgeon, right? So that's kind of where my mind always always goes to however that doesn't necessarily mean you can't offer more services and I actually learned this from this book right here other Tormosi the offers book, but you can have a core offer a core front-end Cold traffic offer that people doesn't matter

Paolo Vidali:8:45
Mm-hmm.

Jordan:9:08
What time of day it is, they will always pay a company to do X, Y, and Z. If other companies offer that and it works, there's a reason why it works. There's a reason why it works. Like people, strangers want that offer. Cool. Now, once you get them into your ecosystem on that, you know, front facing code traffic offer, now you can offer them upsell two or upsell three or upsell four, right? You can still have these services in the back end that, you know, increase profitability. profitability amazingly, substantially, but that doesn't necessarily mean, in my opinion, that you should, on the consultation with a potential customer, you let them know your full sweep. Have on the back burner, but don't let them know your full sweep. That's my...

Paolo Vidali:9:51
Hmm.

Paolo Vidali:9:56
Well, and I think also, yeah, if you're pitching really hard and you haven't proven the value, haven't proven that expertise in all of those different areas, they're not likely to succeed in. Right. And what I find is also probably our biggest thing that we don't actually sort of go out and sell as a service, but is the core of what we do is strategy, right? It's solutions architecture, it's digital strategy, it's, you know, change management. Now we... call it development or call it design, right? But it's just like the process of like, if I look at any dev project we have, there's very little that's just like, oh, that's X amount of hours, 90 % of the hours of programming. It's actually maybe 50 % of the hours are actually code. 50 % is discovery, is research, is prototyping, is figuring out how to solve the problem the best way, figuring out what all those dependencies are, right? And that strategy, And that ability to use strategic thinking is proven through time, through quality, through the relationship, right? Whereas if I pitch a brand new prospect who's never worked with us and has no, say no referral or no, you know, personal tie to us. And I say, Hey, we're going to do this huge discovery project in order to do this project that you came in the door with. They're probably not going to go for it. Now, if through the process of actually onboarding them. pitching them or whatever, we're asking really good questions. I often get this, the response of like, no one's asked us that before. And we've talked to 10 agencies, right? Like you're thinking about things on a deep level, you're proving already you have your expertise. And then it's like, well, actually it's more complicated than maybe other people thought, or maybe you thought, or, you know, whatever that case may be. We actually need to spend more, some more time with this. We need to do a paid discovery or we need to. you know, do this test process and then it's something that's warmed up and then you're actually doing strategy instead of saying, execute this. I've had a really big aversion to being called a vendor this entire time that, you know, last 12 years of running this business. even though to some people effectively, that's probably what we are, but in reality, I think it's like to be a thinking partner, to be strategic to.

Paolo Vidali:12:20
have the intellectual engagement and enjoyment of the work and be able to really affect outcomes and maximize those outcomes, you can't be taking orders, you have to be collaborating.

Jordan:12:31
And I think you gain so much trust from your clients when you do exactly what you just said. A post-taking orders, it's like question their belief in their thought process. Like, why are we doing it this way? Like, I'm not against it per se, maybe I am, maybe I'm not, but like, why? What is the philosophy behind this? And I think when you actually take a true consultative approach, trust does increase significantly. And on the topic of building rapport,

Paolo Vidali:12:51
Yeah.

Jordan:13:00
And you said something that was so, so vitally important. You said from the customers or the prospects point of view, they said, I can tell you guys you're experts because you asked me this question. And I've sat down with 10 other companies and asked for that question. That is a great, not segue, but something that it made me think of something where I'm like sales consultations, right? Where you're always taught to like build rapport, build rapport, build rapport.

Paolo Vidali:13:23
Mm-hmm.

Jordan:13:27
And like that is true to an extent. However, I think rapport could be max like two minutes. I think the objective of rapport is to get in sync, right? Don't just like dive straight into like everything, just like get in sync. It could take minutes. It could take 30 seconds, right? And then after that, that's when one like your questions start rolling in and how you, in my opinion, how you really truly build rapport is by your question asking ability.

Because if you ask deep questions, like how you do in your discovery process, when no one has ever asked them that, they're gonna trust you. It's like, damn, this person knows what we're talking about. That's real report in my opinion.

Paolo Vidali:14:05
Yeah.

Paolo Vidali:14:08
Yeah, and conversely, if you ask a stupid question like, oh, I could have got this information off their website, but I didn't spend enough time like looking through, you know, whatever that immediately then is like, well, you're wasting my time. You haven't, you're not paying attention, right? It has the equal opposite effect, I think on both ways. And you know, I'm a New Yorker, so like I'm very direct. Also being an engineer and whatever, like really a lot of calls with their New York clients, know, maximum 30 seconds of how is your weekend. it's just all business. Whereas other places like I live in Hawaii these days, it's the opposite. You really need to build that rapport first because people need to know that you're a real human and that you do care about their business and then how they're doing and everything else. And it's a much more humane way to run your business, but it does shift culturally. And of course, from country to country, it changes, et cetera. But I do think, yeah, we've always tried to lead. our sales process by expertise and showing that not just by saying, here's a deck of all of our engineering capabilities, but showing that through the engagement of the problem and, and figuring out, it actually the thing that you're coming to us with? Is that the thing that needs to be solved? Or is actually there's a core other issue, right? Somewhere else that is the trickle down effect is creating this problem you're trying to solve with code or something or with.

UX design, but really like what's the top of that funnel and what are all the other influencing factors? A lot of times, particularly the larger the business, it's actually, well, you know, our ERP can't sync this or our legacy retail POS puts it in the Shopify in this way. So that's like what we have to do. And we're like, actually, no, we could build something that fixes that. then actually you don't have to build something else. I think that's other. thing with trust that I try to impress upon people is if I and my team can figure out a better way to build this that is a smaller scope and costs you less money and makes us less money, I'd rather do that and gain your trust and build something more efficient and more sustainable than jumping through hoops that don't need to be there in order to run up the clock. And I think that's something where

Paolo Vidali:16:34
Yeah, we've had revised scope down from what we thought, because we get in and we're like, actually, it's much more simple than that. Here you go. And that's like working with a car mechanic or a lawyer or doctor or something, you're always like, you know, from a client perspective, how much is it going to be? How bad is it once you open up the hood, right? And sometimes it's worse, but sometimes it's better. And just being able to really have that rapport and communicate that, I think, very transparently in a way that's you know, comes across as being caring and understanding their business, like, goes a really long

Jordan:17:12
Do you bill per hour or do you bill based off services provided?

Paolo Vidali:17:17
It's actually kind of all over the place. It really depends. As a small agency that's like very hands-on, we often get not quite rescue projects per se, but we take on clients who already have websites, right? They're not day zero. They've had a business. They had someone else built it. Sometimes a big fancy marketing agency or branding company that they paid a lot of money to and it just didn't work right from an engineering perspective.

Those type of projects, you kind of have to start timing materials. You have to do hourly because you're just debugging, unraveling, reverse engineering. There's not really a way to understand what you're stepping into. We'll do project-based bids for larger projects. We've done value-based pricing for some strategic work. We don't do performance marketing on the ad side. I know there's agencies that only do that, but I think that's... really reliant on having super accurate attribution in these days, that's really hard to find. So I'm not personally comfortable with basing our billings on an attribution model, because honestly, it could be wildly inaccurate in either direction, either for the client or for us. But yeah, we're kind of a hybrid approach, depending on what type of service it is.

Jordan:18:38
That makes so much sense on the technical development side of things, right? Because you can say, as an example, it's like $5,000 to fix your website, right? And once you start digging into it, you're like, dude, this is like a $15,000 project. I just kind of shot myself in the foot. So I see why billing hourly in that particular instance wouldn't make the most sense. Just to clarify.

Paolo Vidali:18:53
Yeah.

Jordan:19:02
When you say performance marketing, are you referring to like a percentage of sales or percent? Something like that. Yeah.

Paolo Vidali:19:06
Yeah, yeah. There's, there's whole agencies, you know, that do, Hey, we're not going to show you any monthly fees, no setup, no whatever. And we'll just take a percent of what you actually earn. Then that really heavily incentivizes like running a lot of branded search and a lot of, you know, low hanging fruit on retargeting and assuming that the pixel is not firing twice. was pixels firing twice. Then you're paying your agency double. Right. So There's just an aspect to that where we've been in so many pixel debugging projects and so many multi-mode, mixed-mode attribution projects where I'm like, you look at Shopify, you look at Meta, you look at Google Ads, you look at G8.4, they're all different. So how are you going to charge based on that in a way that's ethical and or just accurate in any way?

Jordan:20:02
It makes zero sense to me that these freaking billion dollar tech companies are billion dollar tech companies and have dog crap attribution. Like this makes literally zero sense to me.

Paolo Vidali:20:16
Yeah, I think it's in their interest, honestly, because the fuzzier it is, the easier it is to justify spending. I think that's often the hard part of doing digital ads. From my perspective, being in the industry for 20 plus years is like you have kind of an unfair comparison because there will be large companies that let's say they're spending on billboards, they're spending on radio, they're spending on magazine ads, and they have no idea. effectively like what that return is. But they hear about people like, I saw your ad, I was driving down 995. You have these anecdotal things kind of make it back to the showroom, make it back to the corporate, make it back to the small business owner. And then in digital, everything is so attributable, so traceable, so minutely reportable that they say, what's going on with this? We just wasted $200 in ad spend over here. And it's like, well, you just spent 20 grand over there and have no idea whether it works, right? And so I think because of that, it's actually in the platform's interest for it be a bit fuzzy because then, you you're not held up to the same standard slash, you know, if it's rounded up in their favor, they're gonna, they're gonna go for it. So yeah, I think, but in general, Meta is a pretty buggy platform. It's like, it's pretty difficult to use as a power user to make ads work. And Yeah, we'll see if there's ever parity there. I mean, certainly there's a lot of tools that are now using first party data and deep pixels and cookies and stuff like that, even in this privacy forward era that we're in. But at the end of the day, know, I just tell people attribution is a spectrum. If you're looking at hour by hour, day by day, also with botnets, certain, Google might filter botnet, shop might not, it's going to throw out your conversion numbers.

We're in a close as we can get situation, not a, this is all 100 % clean all the time situation.

Jordan:22:20
No, for sure. Have you ever explored like, Hi-Rose or Triple Whale, these third party attribution sites? So it can be, look about it this way, it can be done, clearly, right? Companies like Alex Becker, freaking love his content. Alex Becker, founder of Hi-Rose, they charge a substantial amount for like their bottom tier. They're really effing expensive. But, you know, to their advantage,

Paolo Vidali:22:35
Yeah.

Paolo Vidali:22:43
Yeah.

Jordan:22:49
This shit works. Like it's actually a good, really good platform. Not sure if you use it before, but I've used it in the past.

Paolo Vidali:22:54
Yeah, demo them. Yeah, we also work with AdBeacon. I've demoed probably 10 other similar platforms. Triple Whale keeps coming back in the Shopify world because I believe Shopify invested in their last round. So Shopify has a stake in it. So I think it will continue to work well with the platform. It's one of those kind of things, like Klaviyo is part owned by Shopify now. So there are certain independent apps and platforms that come up in this ecosystem. And when the main player gets behind them, then you know, okay, this is going to be a long play.

Jordan:23:32
No, right. Kind of where I was going with that with third party attribution companies, I guess cracking the code, one might say. I think it will be interesting from a meta perspective or even a Google perspective if they have like an upsell that they can sell to the public. It's like, okay, obviously for free just to run ads, right? Like how it normally is today, aw crap attribution. Okay. But you could pay us an extra $1,000 per month and actually get really granular, perfect.

Paolo Vidali:23:54
Mm-hmm.

Jordan:24:02
you know,

Paolo Vidali:24:03
Yeah, it's true. mean, now we're seeing really heavy data sampling in Google Analytics, which everyone forgets how much everyone relies on Google Analytics and also that it's free. Like there is a paid version, but I mean, 99 % of businesses don't get to that level, right? Where they're, paying for Google Analytics. And I think the recent steps have been like, yeah, let's just like edge it down and make it a little worse and worse until maybe people start considering paying for it. that sort of, yeah, decrementing to get to freemium kind of thing. But yeah, it'd be an interesting concept. mean, we'll see, especially with AI tools out there, it's like, can you even just do modeling based on certain reports? Do you need to have a pixel by pixel, blow by blow?

Jordan:24:54
Interesting point. changing gears here, getting back to the intro that I mentioned, clients have stuck with you for over a decade. That is heard of in the agency space, especially when it comes to CRO, performance-based marketing. Yes, it is. You do some development, but you also do SEO and ads. And that is performance marketing. So.

What do you feel like is the biggest indicator of the, I guess, the key to success when it comes to retaining your clients for a very long time?

Paolo Vidali:25:31
Hmm. mean, you know, obviously trust comes to mind. think building up that, ability to not just, you know, perform well, deliver on time, you know, but really communicate about it well and like prove value. I think there's a lot of times where I could have just fired off an email kind of be like, yep, did this right. because it was done and maybe they don't need to know every detail. But there's also opportunities where it's like today there's a big data transform project and I thought, man, this could take hours and hours, right? And thankfully with some AI, when it's a Python subscription, I was able to like do it in probably 30 minutes, right? And so it's like, well, actually, you know, this is done, you know, ready for your view, ready to launch, but also you know, we built a script for it so that if you have to update this content later, we can just run it and it won't be this big transform. And then I threw that into our GitHub and then, you know, it's like showing that we're, thinking about things on a long-term level that we are building things to last, right. And that it's actually in the end saving time and money by having efficient processes, stuff like that. I think it's like, you have to communicate your value back. And I think.

One of the projects I really have been doing the last few years really since COVID is just making sure that I can try to visit all of our top clients, like at least once throughout the year, do site visits. We've had clients we haven't met in seven years and we've, you know, it's fine. know, Zoom gives you a pretty good approximation of, you know, what people look like and you can look people in the eye a little bit, right? But yeah, making space to like really convene and really have that. to be in the same room and talk about things other than work and have a lunch and learn where people are coming from. And I just find that every time we do an onsite inevitably there's something that comes out that's a kind of major, majorly pertinent thing that I don't know would have gotten mentioned on Zoom, right?

Paolo Vidali:27:54
It's like when you spend a couple hours on it. Oh yeah, you know, I've been struggling with this thing or oh yeah, whatever. And it's when you have these half hour calls, 45 minute calls, hour long calls, they're compressed. People go in agenda. Okay. I don't want to be on meetings all day. Come out. And it's like when you're more in the workplace, when you're more in store sometimes with people and we see like, Oh, when you book appointments, I understand now why you have to have this window of time to blah, blah, blah. Because the way the space works, right? You're like just dimensionally kind of filling out the shape of the problem or the challenges that you've been working on and filling out who those people are and they have you. And I think that's really great if you can. I know there's some agencies who mostly have local clients and we of course have as well, but especially for folks who are doing these long-term remote projects, I think it's really nice to make those opportunities as well.

Jordan:28:46
No, absolutely. Would you say that most of the clients that I've stuck with, yeah, sure. I've stuck with you for, you know, five plus years. Have they primarily been like development projects or you guys are utilizing SEO and other services?

Paolo Vidali:29:01
Yeah, for some, it's definitely ads and those have been ads only people the entire time. I think particularly there's been companies that either we started working with kind of during the chaos of COVID and we've really, you know, it was really clutch that they encountered somebody who really knew digital and could help them during that time. And I think there's a lot of gratitude banked on that, but also, you know, a lot of data and a lot of performance and over the years it becomes.

Easier to optimize and find trends and stuff like that. lot of what we do is yeah, a Shopify design dev space and we're growing as our clients businesses are growing and. You know, they're growing their team. They're growing the site. They're growing their product catalog. They're going through multiple brand iterations. We've now had clients where we've gone through multiple site rebrands, redevelopments, cetera. like throughout the course of our tenure. And then there's also other people, like we've built a custom store for them in 2018 and it's still running. Like it's changed a bunch, but at its core, it's still there, right? And I think when people are able to see the value of building things in a way that's sustainable, then they trust that you're gonna do it right and that it's gonna be worth the money and that they should keep coming back. And there's certainly a good subset of people who are not in like... engagements with but you know every Black Friday or every six months or whatever something pops up they're coming back and kind of getting in touch and we're still there for them so.

Jordan:30:37
No, for sure. It's interesting. So the companies that have rebranded three times in 10 years as an example, do you think from your perspective that that was necessary? Or do you think they kind of jumped the gun and was like, oh, I need a rebrand. Like, know, like real quick. Do you think that was necessary?

Paolo Vidali:30:54
I think, I mean, you since we're not a branding agency, we didn't initiate the sort of kernel of that, like this needs to happen. So we're usually not on the ideation side, we're on the receiving end. But I think, I think in some cases for sure, because as I mentioned with omnichannel clients, like they could be doing like renovations of their retail experience and they're like, Hey, when your website reflects. sort of new experience, like architecturally speaking, the colors that were used, the, you know, the logo that changed that, et cetera. I'm like, Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Or if they're making product and they're, they update all their packaging, because they're like, our brand designed to be on the shelf is this, right? And now our website reflects it and like totally get it. I do, I do think that there can be the chasing the shiny object and like, you know, not every

Jordan:31:31
Right, right, right.

Paolo Vidali:31:51
One could be, let's say conversion focus. Some are definitely more vanity focused, you know, and more in the pure brand focus and others are like, yeah, but how is that going to improve conversion? Is this worth changing or is this being thought about right in the process? And we're trying to advocate of, let's think about how the site is performing, not just how it looks because those are intertwined, but it's often easy to look at one or the other kind of independently.

Jordan:32:21
Roger. Yeah, if you're retailing a customer facing, if your experience on the retail side change, it would make sense to reflect that on the, on the website. 100%. Let's talk about e-comm ads for a second. Cause I have a couple of clients that work inside the e-comm space. I have talked to other e-comm founders and for whatever reason, you know, cracking the code on ads is probably the biggest challenge for a lot of companies, whether they're in e-comm or not in e-comm. And you said earlier that some clients only work with you on the advertising side of the business, which means you guys must be doing something right. So for those clients, is it a mixture of both meta and Google, or is it only Google or only meta?

Paolo Vidali:32:51
Yeah.

Paolo Vidali:33:05
And yeah, it actually depends. There are some Google only folks. There's definitely some, there's rarely a meta only person in our world just because it's usually worth it to spend at least a little bit on search or retargeting on Google, you even if it's a minority to spend, but I would say it tends to change. would say every year, I think pre iOS privacy changes, we were like all the way up to maybe 80, 20 meta.

Google just because of prospecting was so good and the micro targeting was so good. And then these days, you know, for a while as a backswing, I think it was 60, 40 Google. And then these days, it might sit there. It could be more like 50, 50 depending on the type of company, the type of product they have in the market. Yeah, it's definitely a lot has changed. A lot has evolved in the digital ad space. I think What makes us different particularly is that we only do become a lot of digital agencies, including ones I've worked for in the past are predominantly lead gen. And that is just a different mentality. There's a less depth of understanding of like how to drive online buyers like in that moment rather than lead. So that's certainly, I think, part of it. We also tend to go deep within a few verticals. So we know apparel really well, jewelry really well.

And we might have clients who are not competitors in terms of their location or their market, but within a category, we know the trends of like, this is sort of what's happening in jewelry right now. This is a macro trend, right? It's not just you who are struggling with this or your seasonality you're seeing that's this and that, or like, this is how tariffs are affecting things. Like we have that kind of editorial macro perspective within the general vertical of e-comm, which I think is... always helpful to try to bring that kind of anonymized knowledge to all of our clients and say, like, this is what we're seeing right now. These are the trends and this is what we're leaning into. Like video on Meta is doing really well in this amount of seconds, in this amount of format, in this type of thing across our clients, right? So like, can you get us assets for this? Can you do that? And trying to kind of full funnel optimize based on that depth of knowledge. So I think that's important.

Paolo Vidali:35:33
Also, know, ads, while there is the creative aspect, it is a mix of kind of art and science. It is very data-driven if it's done well, especially when you have transactional data to play with. It is incredibly analytical. Ironically, like I took AP stats when I was in high school to kind of get out of doing calculus. And it's the one course out of anything I've done from high school to my master's degree that I use like every single day, right?

And that's just, it's statistical analysis and it is really quite nerdy. And so I think the best ads optimizers are not the creatives, it's actually the analysts. And you have to have an eye for certain things. And if yes, if you write copy or you have to pair with someone writes copy really well, but yeah, it is a very, very minute level analysis of data. And that's just... finding the type of person who wants to really dig into that is his own thing.

Jordan:36:38
Data is so important. Numbers don't lie. Data will tell you exactly what to do, what not to do. And you brought up something earlier as well, where you said some prospects come to you, they think their core constraint is X, but after you've been in the game for so long, really their core constraint is Y. And you don't know what you don't know, right? And not that I feel bad for the business owner, because you know, everybody has problems, but that business owner is coming to you thinking that it's X, but where you really...

I guess unlock a new level of business acumen is when you understand business inside of out and you can look at all your data points, the numbers and say, okay, the theory, like using the theory of constraints, the biggest constraint right now is this. If we can fix this, our throughput shoots up like 1.5x, 3x, 5x as an example, right? But if you don't know like these numbers, if you don't know the benchmarks, the KPIs,

Paolo Vidali:37:17
Yeah.

Paolo Vidali:37:27
and

Jordan:37:37
Like you really can't move forward at all and solve the true constraint.

Paolo Vidali:37:43
Yeah, it's true. think that there's, I mean, there's folks who have like really experienced teams, maybe coming from all these different startups or DTC companies, whatever, and they kind of know we should be here, we should expect this. But there's other folks who are killing it and they have no idea how good their numbers are. There's other people who like, I don't know if this is good number. I'm like, it's not really, but we can work on it, right? So it's all relative. What I find is, yeah, this work is really, it is, business strategy, it's consulting, it's like analyzing the business as a whole. Because again, because digital is so traceable and trackable, it often gets blamed as being a part of a problem that might just be a much higher level business problem, right? And once you start figuring that out, you start asking questions and you say, not to overt any kind of blame or responsibility from the digital space, but you have to know what's connected and how that can. affect things in order to really solve on a high level how to fix it. And yeah, I think there's certain people come in with very high expectations and we have to say this is really, really good. You might be able to push higher than here, but if you're already at operating a really high level and they just have really good product market fit, really good value, something else going on, right? They build a really effective engine, but it's all things. I think the thing that's tricky with pay-per-click with digital ads is it's also used as a solve for other things. So because you can just turn it on, spend money, get people. Sometimes it's easy to say, we're doing that. It's working. It's like, yeah, but what about email? But you know, what about your inbound content strategy? But what about SEO? But what about what's your promotion strategy? What's your SMM content calendar? And you can't just do PPC because you cannot afford no one can afford to just pay for clicks impressions. He says Okay, what size company you are and so it really has to be a part of diversified marketing strategy and so that's we partner a lot with other agencies to like don't do exactly what we do and Because it's like well, you're gonna need an email person if you're not doing anything right now You're gonna need right up in house content person You're gonna need that's a man who's really doing things to make sure that you have these diversified inbound channels because otherwise if

Paolo Vidali:40:11
costing gets bad or the market and changes on competition gets tough in PPC, you're going to need these other things to buoy that and to also be found in different places because it's a multi-touch, multi-device kind of world right now in terms of how people shop.

Jordan:40:31
Yeah, business is never just one thing. Like business truly is holistic, you know, and as you were articulating yourself right there, I was thinking, so you definitely both your left brain and your right brain in business. You need people who understand the data that can tell you what the data means, how to execute different strategies based on the data. And I think the numbers that we look at, how we execute that relies on the other side of our brain. So let's look at copy.

I think whenever you're writing words, it's not the data analytical side. It's the other side of our brain. Or when it comes to sales calls, like speaking with individuals, right? I think that's the other side of our brain. like you need both. And I think a lot of people, I'm definitely guilty of this as well. You get into business for yourself or you start the e-comm company because you want to be an entrepreneur. You want to break free from the rat race. Like go for you. Like we encourage you to do that.

Where I'm guilty is like not realizing that there are so many elements to business, like holy frigging smokes. I did not know like actually how to run a business. I think I'm pretty like, okay, now, like when I first got into it, I have no idea what the hell I was doing. You know, just like I made all the mistakes. You learn quickly, you know, and I, this is outside of like paying for knowledge, but, getting back to the point where you do need, you need, you have to look at business from a holistic.

Paolo Vidali:41:44
Yeah.

Jordan:41:56
point of view, right? You can just rely on PPC as an example.

Paolo Vidali:41:59
Yeah. Yeah. mean, it's just, and digital is very complicated these days. It's something where all the systems have to be working and that's the game, that's the juggle, that's the issue. And even when you have everything working, well, then you're going to scale and then something goes out of balance, right? And it's really, really tricky. It's hard to grasp your mind around all of it and to be good at all of it and so forth. And that's why I... you know, might be biased, but I do believe that agencies serve a really important purpose in coming in and saying, okay, you need deep expertise in something. There's no way you're going to find an in-house person who's going to do your SMM, your email, your PPC, you know, edit your website and then kind of code compliant way, right? It's too much. And that specialization and getting people in fractionally who are senior versus like trying to find generalists. who are junior, like it's gonna be a more effective way to continue to scale in certain ways, depending on your priorities.

Jordan:43:03
No, 100%. Excuse me. man. 100%, my friend. I definitely could not agree more. Let's see. What is something that you would tell your younger self when you first got into owning your own agency?

Paolo Vidali:43:23
Hmm. That's an interesting one. I was pretty young, I say. I guess I was like maybe 32, yeah, when I started. Technically, I think I started the business when I was 30 as side work when I was working for another agency that didn't do any e-comm and that was part of my background. So I feel like now looking back, I was like, wow, I was pretty young when I started doing this. But I mean, I know there's agency owners in their 20s too.

I think.

Paolo Vidali:43:58
I'm not sure exactly what the advice is other than to be cautious about burnout and overwork. I think if there's one thing looking back that I would have liked to have changed is like how to figure out how to take down the cortisol, how to take down the stress, how to really, you know, it feels, it's very personal to run a business when it's like the brand is me and I also. mentioned, you know, I ran my, this business with my wife for nine years. And that's like a whole other dynamic as well. But it was really our life in a lot of ways was figuring out how to grow this business. And then we are the representation of that. We are the people doing the work. There's a lot of people who try to jump out of that work and sort of just be managers, but we're always wanting to be kind of invested in that. And I think in the early years, was, there's a lot of stress and we were too afraid to like build a team. really were like, on the consultant level for a couple of years because building a team seemed also stressful and hard and like a lot of responsibility. But I think, yeah, in the early days, it's like, well, we got busy, stop going to gym, start ordering pizza, start working 60 hours a week, you know, and it's the impulse is to lean in and to grind and, you know, hustle and all this stuff. And I think if I would do it over that.

That's what I would try to work on sooner rather than later. Eventually, I think we figured it out. But I think there's a lot of pressure. I was listening to a podcast a few years ago on Danny Meyer, his restaurant tour in New York City was interviewed. he said, business is problems. Once I heard that, was like, oh, of course. Of course, our business in some way is always going to be stressful, right? Because If you're not solving other people's problems, you don't have a business. The value that we add is figuring out problems that other people haven't figured out and doing that in a way that's efficient and clever and so forth. And so you can't have a business, even if you're going to call agency a lifestyle business because it's not venture backed, right? Business is problems. So you have to really say, OK, knowing that how we're going to handle this, how do we compartmentalize this so we can

Paolo Vidali:46:20
continue tackling it, continue to be rejuvenized and so forth by it. And we've always been pretty good about boundaries, like, hey, we're not working on weekends. We are not answering the phone, you know, seven o'clock on a weekday. Like, we want to create a life work balance for our employees and also like not feel like even as clients, like, hey, you have to respond to me just because I sent you something late, right? But I think that that's something that's often glorified in startup culture, but it's really not good for anyone. And yeah, I think that's, that's for me would be the one thing I look back like, if we really figured that out sooner, that that would have made a big difference in a lot of ways.

Jordan:47:08
That's really important. And not a lot of people actually mentioned that, but burnout is a real thing. I've earned that once or twice, twice, maybe more times running my agency. I played sports at a higher level. I have the hustle culture, one might say, but like our bodies, our minds more importantly need a break. need a mental break from whatever the hell it is that you're doing. You know, the business is not going to die in 12 hours if you step away. I really talk to myself when I when I say that. But yeah, when would you feel like there was an definitive moment in time with you and the missus where you guys were like, we have to like change our lifestyle. Like things are hand this is a lot. We're not healthy. Sure, we're making money, but we're not.

Paolo Vidali:47:52
Yeah.

Jordan:47:58
Did something like that happen to you guys specifically?

Paolo Vidali:48:01
Yeah, I'm trying to think what the factors were going on that moment that really Tipped it. I don't I don't know that was actually any crazy project or you know something I think there's there's a few clients we had to fire over the years because it wasn't a good fit and that that dynamic just Became kind of felt unhealthy or felt really stressful And I think I think it was a culmination. think it's really hard to say no when you're in those early years to any work that comes along because people are willing to pay you and you don't know when the next check is coming or if someone's going to be late or, know, whatever the case may be. So I think, I think learning to really have a confidence to say no, to turn down stuff that wasn't fulfilling to say, Hey, it's not really productive working together in this way to let some of those things go.

Jordan:48:43
Yeah.

Paolo Vidali:48:59
And I think that when one door closes and another door opens, in every case where we were super nervous about doing that, guess what? Something came along that we might've had to say no to that we wanted to do because we were overcommitted. Yeah, I don't recall it being a very specific kind of combination, but I think, yeah, it was just a generalized, like you can do it for a while. I think anyone can do anything they put their minds to for. three to six months or something and sustain just wild productivity or wildly long days. And then if there's going to be a point where you're just like, why am I doing this? Well, what am I doing? And you're just going have to call it. And I think it probably had to do with something with, you know, honestly, being able to go on a vacation or to go to a family function or something and always being like, well.

Jordan:49:37
Yeah.

Paolo Vidali:49:54
I shouldn't really because it work or I shouldn't you know it's gonna be a bad time because of this and that how many times you keep saying that and you're like you know what I can't just sacrifice all aspects of my life for this so

Jordan:50:06
My yeah, my my parents really try to I guess instill that belief in me as I'm getting older I definitely realized the importance of actually living life like our human beings That own a business you're you know what I mean? Like we're at a level where we are living a human experience And if all you do talking to myself here, all I do is work. What kind of human experience is that? You know

Paolo Vidali:50:18
Mm-hmm.

Paolo Vidali:50:35
Yeah. You know, it's the little things too, that first of all, you're doing your best work only if your batteries are recharged, right? So if you want to actually have that work be successful, if you want to bring the maximum creativity, so on and so forth, like at a certain point, you're doing yourself a disservice to the business by not being able to fully function. And yeah, I think it also, it just contextualizes the urgency of problems and what's really important and what's not. And people will be empathetic. You know, we've gone through some crazy health stuff with my wife and I, and there's times where we had, we literally just had to step back from the business or had to say, yeah, we can't do this project or we, whatever. There's other things going on and here's what's, what's happening. And we just, that's just how it is. And the amount of, you know, just really love the love, the empathy, the kindness that other people showed when you show your actual human nature to them and be like, you know, there's this crazy thing happening in my life. Like, I'm sorry, I can't do this for you. they're like, no, of course, if I knew that I wouldn't even ask you. like, you know, here's like a uber Eats gift card and like, here's, you know, all this stuff that I'm going to do, you know, people are so, so generous and caring. And sometimes you also just need to be a bit vulnerable with them and let them know.

And that's part of that relationship too, and longevity and working together. It's like, you would, you would tell a close coworker, you tell a colleague, lot of times we're kind of proxying communication with our clients, but sometimes it's like, Hey, I just have to be real. This is what's going on and getting that break from, from them because of that and being honest with them. And everyone, everyone understands I've never had a bad reaction. Right. And same with employees and team and staff and stuff like that. it's really worth trying to remember that we live in kind of crazy times. It ebbs and flows, but you know, there's a lot going on that we don't know how it affects people's lives and different things. And it's just, yeah, if we can try to be open about it to the extent that it makes sense professionally, then I think it's better than pretending like we're all superhuman, you know?

Jordan:52:57
I was just going to say that not everyone is Superman, you know, and I think by us being honest and vulnerable with our clients, they recognize that we are humans as well. And like you said, 99 % of humans out there are going to be forgiving, empathetic, show care, like, man, like this guy's going through something, this girl's going through something. I'm not going to be an ass. You know what I mean? Most people that pretty cool. Well, it was, it was a pleasure having you on.

Paolo Vidali:53:19
Yeah.

Jordan:53:23
We had a great chat, some laughs, definitely made some memories. Where can they find you, be specific?

Paolo Vidali:53:32
Yeah, sure. So the e-commerce agency is called HiddenGears at hiddengears.com. My dev agency, talent agency is called SuperBuilt. Wearesuperbuilt.com. I'm not on Twitter so much these days, but I am at Power Robot on Twitter and LinkedIn is kind of where I'm putting content insights, chats like this, cetera. So yeah, love to connect there and really appreciate the opportunity in the chat. Okay.

Jordan:53:58
Absolutely. Audience, we love you guys. We'll talk to you all soon.

Paolo Vidali:54:02
Ciao!