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Hey, everybody, this is Jessie Michael Moore, agency and transformation coach and founder of Mission Control. Creator of leverage for growth and I’m Lucas James, founder of Twist Attire, which scaled from 0 to $200,000 a month with my own agency. We are the host of leverage for growth, podcast agency leverage and Episodes. We know that in order to scale your agency successfully, there are multiple shifts that need to happen within the founders mindsets, skill sets, and leadership styles.
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We are on a mission to interview marketing and PR agency owners on their journey to six, seven and eight figures and leverage the lessons from their journey to save you time, energy and money. In order for you to get your agency to the next level. If you find value in these episodes, watch the case study video to learn more about leverage growth and how we successfully scale agencies quickly at Niche in Control Decomp case study at Niche in Control Accommodation.
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You are now listening to leverage for growth. Hey everybody, this is Jesse Gilmore, founder of Niche in Control and creator of leverage for growth. Welcome to the agency Leverage Edition. Today I’m here with Eli Israel, co-founder of AI Digital Commerce, a family owned paid search marketing agency specializing in Google, Bing Social and Amazon ads focused on optimization and growth.
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Thanks for coming to our show today, Eli. My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Jesse. This is really been, wonderful to, be invited to to share on your podcast. Absolutely. Can you tell us a little bit more about the history and kind of background of your agency? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So, in our agency started, I was, I happened to be doing some community work in, a place called Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, for children, coming from broken homes.
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And, I was volunteering and, you know, I was finishing up school, heading into college and doing some volunteer work, full time volunteer work, living on premises and really growing and understanding how people work. And, as it as it, as it comes, you know, you go into the world and you need you need something to do.
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So the story really starts before that. And, my partner who’s who I’m very lucky is, is my father. he’s our visionary, as we call him. so he he’s an actuary by profession, and he he loves the numbers. And, one day, my neighbor who worked at a company called barnes.com, came up, and they would always chat back and forth about different analysis.
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And, you know, he he would you would offer his different tidbits of information. And he said, what you can work for us. And what’s an analyst. Sorry not an analyst but what’s it what’s it actually going to do at a a essentially a marketing agency? Every as we all know, every online platform, every website, online really is a marketing agency, especially companies like guys.com who do dropshipping.
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They are there as a marketing platform. Their website is a brochure. What’s what is he going to do there? But you know, he asked him what he wants and my dad doubled his salary and next day comes back and says, hey, you got the job if you want it. So, I’m a big believer in God, and this was just something that that was laid out for him, and he went for it.
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And, slowly but surely, this was when I was younger. Obviously, I was a way at boarding school. And so come back to when I was heading out of my volunteer work time and he already left Lipscomb, got a kidney transplant and all this revitalized energy. And so he was working as a partial CMO for a couple of companies and the developer of one of those companies said, hey, I have this small company.
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Do you want to, you know, do their advertising and my dad resume. He says, hey, do you want to do this? in the middle, we were actually we bought a leather bags company, learned a lot. it did fail. It was our first, failure. but it taught us so much more in a short amount of time than I think this business, which has been, thank God, such a success.
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took me a lot longer to learn. Just very, very, important lessons. So that’s that’s really how it started. It when people ask me, just like you just asked me, hey, how how did you start a digital commerce? Especially in my community. But, I share it with everybody that asked me, is really God dropped it into my hands and and it’s been successful ever since.
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That’s awesome. Yeah. There’s, there’s a kind of like these divine moments, that lead people towards either entrepreneurship or, feeling a calling and things like that. did you ask, did you know from, like, did you know before, this agency that you were going to become an entrepreneur and like, found businesses and was that kind of something that always was in place or was it kind of.
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Yeah, absolutely. I, I started my first business when I was, I think, 12 years old. I decided I’m going to power wash driveways and, I do owe a lot of credit to my, my late grandmother, who she’s like, oh, you want a guitar washing? Okay. She went to Home Depot, bought me a power washer.
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She said, I’m investing in you. And, I would. I started to power washing with, with a buddy of mine, and, I remember I, I love music. I would, I would bring these huge boomboxes, you know, plug it into their wall, and I would, I would, power wash driveways. And then from there, so that was around 12 years old.
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At 13, I went to boarding school away from home. and, you know, kind of, you know, strapped for cash at my boarding school. We don’t have Zelle and and, you know, you know, my little siblings, when they go to boarding school, they go to school, they get allowance. And it’s it’s it’s a lot different. But, you know, my parents gave me some cash, and there you go off on the off on the plane.
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And that was it. so once a year I would, I also had a little business on the side where also my grandmother, she would it was actually, it’s a, it’s a Jewish holiday called, she called where we build the heart and put palm fronds on top. And I would go around the community and I would, you know, see who I would make orders, take orders, and, I would go to other people in the community.
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I asked them, hey, can I cut your trees for free? I’m happy to trim them. And, my grandmother at that time, you know, as, that business kind of scaled from, you know, $500 to $700 to 1000, $2,000 once a year, one day, you know, one day, you know, this is my business. And then I went off to school, and she’d be she would she would rent from, U-Haul and F-250.
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And you see a 75 year old, older woman getting out of the car, you know, stepping out of the F-250. And, so it really brings a smile to my face, obviously. But that’s that’s where my entrepreneurship started. And I always knew that I wanted to, be an entrepreneur and get into the business world. That’s awesome man.
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On your journey with, the agency, you talked about how, it’s been a really, a gift, for it to be successful. and there might have been some times where you had to overcome some challenges or, maybe do a pivot or something where like, you’re like, oh, man, if I only knew that, you know, a year ago or something like that.
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if someone would be in the same kind of scenario is as you are and you were to give advice to them, maybe it’s a shortcut. Kind of those trials and errors. what kind of advice would you give somebody that might be just a little bit before where you are? So I mean, there’s there’s tons of different stages, in, in, in the process of growing your agency and scaling and obviously scaling does hurt.
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my, my, my biggest, what I, my tidbit of information is, first off is really treat your employees great. I want to say that something I learned from something bad happening, but something that I’ve seen really helped, people become part of, you know, our, our culture is really treating your employees with respect and, and and dignity and care and and understanding.
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But in terms of a lesson learned, I would say that it’s really important. And I know that a lot of business owners, you know, they sometimes can skip over this part or try to save a little bit of money. it I know this might seem very simple, but I fell into this pitfall is early on. Get yourself a CPA, get yourself a bookkeeper because you never know.
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You know, our business happens to do business in New York, and they treat every little company like a fortune 500 company. So I get a bill, I’m traveling, I get it finally, you know, after Covid goes through the mail, I get a $16,000 fine for not having workers comp. And we’re a Texas based company. We don’t need worker’s comp, but we have someone on payroll.
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It’s a New York. And you know, you just don’t go through the mail and and that little thing. Okay. So we got a piece of mail once a month. But I mean, as a business owner, we all know you probably get tons of mail and tons of stuff. So you’re like, okay, New York City. I’ll look at that later.
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Really. You know, even though there’s these platforms out there are QuickBooks cluster where they really help with payroll, I would at least sit down with a CPA or somebody who understands financials from the tax perspective as well as wealth management, in order to really get things in line. And I’m still struggling with that, actually, because we’ve grown so much without it going backwards to fix it.
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It’s so much harder. So yes, it does cost money. Yes. It’s hey, what are they doing? And yeah, you know what? We don’t I don’t know what he’s doing, but a lot of my clients don’t know exactly what I’m doing and they trust me. So I do trust him, and I. I bug him because he’s my CPA. But I would say definitely.
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That’s a huge little lesson that I always tell anyone that comes to me, hey, I’m starting a business. What should I do? Make sure your foundation is solid, make sure your taxes are solid and you know what you’re doing. Don’t try to save that $100, $200, 500, $1,000, even if it’s monthly, just to skimp on that because they’ll come and get you.
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And it’s just no fun. It’s no fun. And and it’s it’s it takes a lot of your time to then deal with these things. So that would be a big one for me. That’s awesome. And and what is kind of like what are you excited for in the future. like what’s happening with your inner agency that you’re hoping to achieve in the next one, maybe three years?
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Oh, wow. I mean, I am so excited for for every part of our agency. Thank God. We just got a brand new video. Our office, which is great. I’m. I’m looking forward to, you know, having events for our, our clients and our, our employees. More importantly, like I mentioned, but we’re really excited to start offering and partnering with, we where we just partnered with a production company.
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So I’m really excited to start offering graphic work and video production and really expanding our social media, advertising management department. And just overall, there’s been so many cool different things in Amazon ads in, in Google, in, in, in, in, so we just we’ve been we’ve been expanding our reach in terms of services that we offer. Management of Criteo and, and so many other different little sectors that can really help businesses grow.
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So that’s something I’m really looking forward to, is it’s growing our team and and being able to offer our clients all the services that they need and really be able to hit it from every single section. Awesome. And, what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you, or do you have any offers for them that they can take advantage of.
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Oh yeah. Absolutely. So, the best way to get in touch with me, I’m a person to person. I love talking to people on the phone. I love talking about, my business. Our business and what we do and how we can help. So, if you want to call me, you can call me at (713) 589-6104. that’s, just pick number one for Eli.
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And, you can also hit me up on, LinkedIn. You can look up AI, digital commerce or just send me an email at Ellie at I Digital commerce.com and check us out on our website. And, please don’t judge our website. We’re we’re getting there. that’s the one thing that is, I’ll be honest, that’s the one thing that we’ve sort of left hanging.
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And I’m getting to slowly but surely, our analysts aren’t developers, so, it takes time, but, yeah. And in terms of in terms of our offer, I would love to, to to chat with you guys, chat with your business, see how we can help. We always offer a free audit. So we’re happy to go into your any advertising that you do do a full audit with recommendations.
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Hand it to your agency for them to do it. And and we’re happy to help. so if you’d like a free audit, please reach out and I’ll walk you through the process. Cool. Thank you so much, Eli. it’s been awesome having you as a guest. thank you so much for having me. It’s it’s really been a pleasure.
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Okay, agency owners, if you want to transform your agency to sustain and grow without your direct involvement, where you can stop working in the business and switch to working on the business, where you can regain control of your time, delegate effectively, get paid what you’re worth, and have your team run the day to day. Go to niche and control.com/case study right now to learn more about leverage for growth.
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You can book a free strategy session with us to look at your systems. Understand what needs to be done in order for you to scale and get a free strategic plan for the next year. To live the life of entrepreneurship that you’ve always dreamed about. Go to Niche in control.com/ksat that is niche in control.com/ksat now.
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