AL EP 43: Robert Hicks – How to Step Into the Next Stage of Your Agency

Show Notes

Bobby Hicks is a digital marketing expert with over a decade of experience in the industry. He’s been featured on major networks like CBS, NBC, and ABC, as well as top business podcasts like Entrepreneur on Fire. He co-founded Traffic Titans, a successful YouTube ad agency that has spent over $40 million on Google, is the host of the Organic Intelligence podcast and works relentlessly to help other agencies and coaches optimize their creative production to create high-converting video content.

Connect with Robert Hicks & Everwork here – Web: https://www.goeverwork.com

Episode Transcript

00;00;04;03 – 00;00;11;03
Jesse Gilmore
Everybody is adjusting to your agency. Transformation coach and founder of Mission Control Greater of Leverage for Growth.

00;00;11;08 – 00;00;13;13
Robert Hicks
And I’m Lucas James, founder of Twist.

00;00;13;17 – 00;00;14;19
Jesse Gilmore
I am which scaled.

00;00;14;19 – 00;00;18;03
Robert Hicks
From 0 to $200000 a month with my own.

00;00;18;03 – 00;00;45;24
Jesse Gilmore
Agency. We are the host of Leverage for Growth Podcast Agency Leverage 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. 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.

00;00;46;09 – 00;01;08;20
Jesse Gilmore
If you find value in these episodes, watch the case, Study video to learn more about leverage for growth and how we successfully scale agencies quickly at Niche in control Icon slash Key Study at Niche in Control Icon and slash kingdom, 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.

00;01;09;07 – 00;01;26;15
Jesse Gilmore
Welcome to the Agency Leverage Edition. Today I am here with Robert Hicks, the founder of Ever Work, a video production agency on a mission to remove creative barriers for growth minded businesses by providing quality turnkey video production solutions. Thanks for coming to.

00;01;26;15 – 00;01;30;03
Robert Hicks
Our show today. Yeah, man, I’m excited to meet with you. Awesome.

00;01;30;13 – 00;01;32;29
Jesse Gilmore
Can you tell us a little bit about the history and background of your agency?

00;01;34;03 – 00;02;03;07
Robert Hicks
Yeah. So ever work started off as a need to help other agencies with their video creatives? I had a ad agency that I co-founded back in 2019 called Traffic Titans, and we had partnered with or we kind of went to the financial publishing issue and found a lot of really good opportunities there to help help a lot of financial publishers scale big on YouTube.

00;02;04;03 – 00;02;30;22
Robert Hicks
At one point we were doing about four or $5 million a month on YouTube ads. I mean, we were generating thousands of orders a day on YouTube. And I think one of the things that allowed us to be able to scale so quickly and, you know, see so much profitability with our ad campaigns was the fact that we could produce video creatives faster than anyone else.

00;02;31;09 – 00;02;55;21
Robert Hicks
And video creatives is typically it’s a it’s a bottleneck for a lot of people. It’s a barrier for a lot of people because it’s like you don’t you don’t just have to create the copy, but you also have to you also have to, you know, shoot the video yet to get the raw footage. You have to edit it and edit it is like an editing is a very expensive and time consuming procedure.

00;02;56;17 – 00;03;17;10
Robert Hicks
So we were doing really well. We had a great process like did our creatives so good it generates results. Like this alone could be another business. And so everywhere it kind of spun from that and became kind of like a standalone business where we work with other agencies to help them replicate the same success that we had with traffic guidance.

00;03;17;10 – 00;03;43;10
Robert Hicks
I mean, we spent over about $40 million on Google traffic and, you know, a couple of years we’ve developed what I call the perfect rewards framework that allows us to create quality ads fast, quickly that generate results, that converts we, we, we, we then the Six Different Principles of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini. We’ve got like, it’s a really great framework and it converts.

00;03;44;04 – 00;04;09;10
Robert Hicks
We’ve done really, really well. I mean, they’ve done case studies on us between case studies on us. You know, we were the ad skills. I know if you’re familiar of Justin Brooke and his community, their ad skills, but they train, you know, world class media buyers. We they had an affiliate marketing contest and they’re going to whoever won this contest to become the world media buying champions.

00;04;10;04 – 00;04;31;22
Robert Hicks
And we beat the contest in two days. And they were like, oh, my God. Like, they had to wait a month for them to reveal the contest winners because they didn’t want people to know that we’d already won. But we crushed in two days. And it’s just because of our ability to create quality, create fast, and to be able to reiterates or you just create new iterations of new creatives.

00;04;32;10 – 00;04;50;29
Robert Hicks
And so we we did extremely well. We’ve done really well. And I just want to be able to offer this as a service to other ad agencies because I know like nowadays where the algorithm and, and everything’s like just taking out like all the, the media buying, you know, it’s just, it’s just all about feeding the algorithm good quality creatives.

00;04;51;21 – 00;05;13;02
Robert Hicks
And you have to do it very quickly. And what happens is in advertising, you know, ad fatigue very quickly. Right. So you need new creatives. And if we had a campaign, for example, we had one campaign a spinning. Now it was making us $100,000 a day in profit. I mean, we were crushing it and then we start getting ad fatigue and, you know, it comes on pretty quickly.

00;05;13;02 – 00;05;33;10
Robert Hicks
And we went from 100,000 to 50000 to 30000. Right. So if I could say, hey, look, I was making $100,000 day in profit, but now I’m at 30,000 days a profit or maybe, I mean, losing money. Okay, I need new ad creatives quickly. It takes me two weeks to get new ad creatives. Well, if the difference there is 70 grand, what’s 70,000 times 14?

00;05;33;21 – 00;05;51;28
Robert Hicks
That’s how much money I’m losing. Right? So if I can get new ad creatives in the pipeline, if I can have new creatives produce, you know, submitted today, delivered to me tomorrow, and I can get my ad accounts back to, you know, the spin that they were where they were at. Well, then I didn’t lose all that money.

00;05;51;29 – 00;06;15;29
Robert Hicks
You see what I’m saying? Like, I’m I’m continuing to collect money. Right. And so, you know, that’s kind of, you know, the history of ever work. And, you know, that’s what we try to help other ad agencies resolve. We know it’s expensive. We know it’s time consuming. We know it’s it’s hard to find good quality video editors. And so we try to, you know, resolve all those issues for you.

00;06;16;13 – 00;06;35;22
Jesse Gilmore
Mm hmm. I love it. I love how you talked about ever work being born. I was born from this kind of need and being able to see the success in a whole another venture. What have you kind of learned over the last couple? How long has ever work been in existence?

00;06;36;14 – 00;06;54;10
Robert Hicks
It’s a young company. I mean, I think that we filed the paperwork to become a limited liability, limited liability company in January of 2021. So I’m sorry, January 2020 to January 2022. So about a year and a half now.

00;06;55;01 – 00;07;17;07
Jesse Gilmore
Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. And you were able to leverage some of your previous agency experience into this one. What have what have you kind of learned over the last year with ever working within the agency kind of experience that you would pass on to somebody that might be earlier in their journey, maybe like one or two steps before where you are right now?

00;07;18;02 – 00;07;19;09
Jesse Gilmore
What advice would you give them?

00;07;19;29 – 00;07;34;28
Robert Hicks
So in respect to, you know, when you ask this question, are you asking it in like, what’s the goal? What are we trying to accomplish? Or we’re trying to get more clients? Are we trying to get better results for our clients? Like, help me understand.

00;07;35;07 – 00;07;50;06
Jesse Gilmore
Yeah, the majority of our agents, our audience is like kind of like six figure agencies trying to get the seven figures. They’re trying to figure out how to maybe get everything out of their head into systems, procedures, duplicate themselves, grow a team, and ultimately get through that.

00;07;51;03 – 00;08;13;11
Robert Hicks
Yeah, Yeah. So, I mean, I have a lot I can talk about on the subject. I think the first when I first started my ad agency, my first ad agency started off it was called Indie View Media, and it was like a local ad agency. And we’d work with like local businesses, mom and pop businesses and I’m from a small rural part of Kentucky called Somerset, and we might have you know, we have a handful of businesses.

00;08;13;11 – 00;08;36;16
Robert Hicks
Most of them are just living paycheck to paycheck, just like most of everyone else. And, you know, you talk to them about, you know, spending 500 bucks a month on advertising. And it was like, holy shit, that’s a lot of money for them. And, you know, or, you know, you might charge, you know, $1,000 a month for your fee and then they’d only want to spend $500 a month in advertising.

00;08;36;16 – 00;08;55;08
Robert Hicks
And it’s like, it doesn’t make sense. Like you’re paying me a thousand bucks, but you’re only spending 500 bucks, you know, and advertising like, it doesn’t make sense, right? So I think the first step is I always like to do reverse math. Right. So if you’re trying to get the six figures, that’s around $8,000 a month. So you need eight clients paying you a thousand bucks a monthly need for clients, paying you $2,000 a month.

00;08;55;08 – 00;09;16;18
Robert Hicks
Now, if you’re kind of a low six figure ad agency, you’re not really an ad agency. You’re just a solopreneur, right? You’re doing everything yourself right. You need to take a profit. You need to make a lot more money. Okay? And what happens is a lot of people fall in a trap where, you know, they’re making a grandmother, they’re spending everything that they make and they’re not reinvesting into the business to grow their business.

00;09;18;09 – 00;09;35;18
Robert Hicks
And so I think you need to be smart about how you spend your money or how much money that you take. If you could have a six figure ad agency in addition to another stream of income like your job, I keep your job and continue to grow the agency and figure out ways to to make more money. Right.

00;09;35;23 – 00;09;55;00
Robert Hicks
It’s very, very difficult if you’re competing on price. I think that you have to I think for me, like the big the big thing that took me from six figures to seven figures was really figuring out like what our niche is going to be, okay. And I’m like, Hey, we need at least $10,000 a client if it’s going to.

00;09;55;00 – 00;10;10;22
Robert Hicks
If I’m going to get to seven figures, maybe I’ll take the six figures. I need eight clients pay me a thousand bucks a month, right? So if I’m turning the seven figures, I need a client paying me $10,000 plus a month. Right. So I started looking at like, okay, who the hell can afford to pay me $10,000 a month?

00;10;11;08 – 00;10;31;19
Robert Hicks
Okay? And who can I get good returns for? And where can I find opportunities that aren’t flooded? You know, you look for blue ocean opportunities, right? And I was like, Dude, no one’s doing YouTube, right? I can take advantage. And YouTube is like the number one search engine that’s like, well, it’s not the number one search engine is the number two search engine, because Google’s number one search engine with the second largest search engine in the world.

00;10;31;25 – 00;11;12;14
Robert Hicks
Right. YouTube, right. People spend time there, more so than any other platform to learn new things. So if if I was like, okay, so who’s got money? Well, people in the financial markets have money, right? What’s their product? Can they spend? You know, can they spend take a month? Yeah, they can spend ten came off easily. So we started creating content around trying how to how we can help other financial marketers or financial support financial marketers, the financial publishing companies we landed a few clients and pretty soon, I mean, it really took us two or three clients for us to go to, you know, I mean, we skipped seven figures in which straight figures within

00;11;12;14 – 00;11;29;23
Robert Hicks
like a few months, right? Because I was taking exactly what I was doing, you know, And I was, you know, when you’re a six figure company and you’re working with these low level clients, you know, these brick and mortar stores in your bust and your ass, I mean, it’s the same stuff that you’re doing for the four then that you’re doing for the seven eight figure clients, right?

00;11;29;23 – 00;11;49;17
Robert Hicks
They just have more money and more capital. But behind the ad campaigns and because they have more money, more capital to put behind that page, you have more resources at your disposal to actually generate them results right where it’s a struggle for, you know, you know, you know, smaller, smaller companies. So I think the first step is, you know, identify a profitable niche that can afford your product.

00;11;49;25 – 00;12;09;22
Robert Hicks
You know, think about personal injury attorneys like they can spend money, right? 5ka month is not a lot of money for them. A lot of a lot of them spent, you know, a lot of big ones. You know, if you can get a big one, they’re spending $1,000,000 a month and those exist and you’re getting a 50%, you know, cut of that.

00;12;09;23 – 00;12;31;18
Robert Hicks
You’re making a pretty great amount. Boom. Now, one client, you’re an eight figure or a seven figure, you know, ad agency, right? And now you’ve got money where you could pay yourself extremely well. And the also you can build a team to support you when it comes to building a team. I thought a lot of this was bullshit when I first started because I’ve always kind of had this mindset like, you got to work harder than everyone else.

00;12;31;18 – 00;12;50;01
Robert Hicks
And, you know, it’s all about grit and tenacity and that’s true. But you can’t grow a business to seven or eight figures by yourself, right? You need other people to do it and they don’t care about the company as much as you do because they don’t have as much vested in it as you do that have much has they don’t have as much skin in the game is as you do, right?

00;12;50;18 – 00;13;12;24
Robert Hicks
So you have to find a way to really kind of, you know, generate systems and processes so that you can take be players, see players and have them come into your organization and get a player results right. And the more that you can kind of niche and do that. For example, when I had my my first six figure business we were at, we would do anything for anybody.

00;13;13;05 – 00;13;29;00
Robert Hicks
So, you know, yeah, you’re rational. I would do stuff for you. Oh yeah, you are a house. But I mean, if actually Yahoo do stuff for you. Oh yeah, your bank would do stuff for you. Well, the problem is if I had a fire start over here not to putting all my energy and effort to put out that fire, but then a fire put out a fire, start over here.

00;13;29;08 – 00;14;04;12
Robert Hicks
Right. Whereas when you Nisshin, when you Nisshin you put out one fire that solves all the future fires for every other client down the road. Right. And then you know what works for an insurance company doesn’t work for a restaurant. What works for Russia doesn’t work for, you know, stop manufactured. Right. They’re all different, right? But if you find something that works for, you know, one client and one knish, then you have a repeatable process that you can bring to all these other clients and and that allows you to to generate results that, you know, generate wins for your clients because you’re getting paid to make the money.

00;14;05;03 – 00;14;24;29
Robert Hicks
But then also that allows you to build systems and processes that are replicable that you can hire someone with zero experience and in 30 days having them, you know, continue to do that process over and over and over again. Copy, paste, copy paste. Right. Talk about scalability so that you don’t have to be so involved in your business that you can have other people do the work for you.

00;14;25;07 – 00;14;50;03
Robert Hicks
Right? And so when I say for, you know, to get the six figures, it’s you kind of doing everything for everybody to the seven figures. It’s doing one thing for one client and then to get the eight figures, it’s doing multiple things for one client or taking that same process that you developed for that one client and going into different industries and that would kind of get you to eight figures and this kind of different things to kind of consider there.

00;14;50;03 – 00;15;13;26
Robert Hicks
But I’d say one of the greatest books that you can read to help you transition from six or seven figures is going to be a book by Jean Wickman called Traction Teacher, something called the Entrepreneur Operating System or iOS. And it teaches you, like you know how to build a dream team, right? The first thing you have to do when building a dream team, you have to first of all, you have to know what your vision is.

00;15;13;26 – 00;15;30;19
Robert Hicks
Where’s this company going? Right? Because people, you know, they follow leaders, but they follow vision to right. And you have to sell people on that vision. So where are you going? You don’t know where you’re going and why would people follow you? So you have to know what your vision is. The second thing is you have to establish your core values.

00;15;30;28 – 00;15;54;27
Robert Hicks
Okay. Very, very, very important to have your core values. And to me, when I first got started again, I came from this kind of hustle, kind of grit kind of background. Mm hmm. Okay. Your core values are so important because you need people who are going to help you move in that direction. And if you have people that shares different values, you know, like I said, we’re all in a boat.

00;15;54;27 – 00;16;18;28
Robert Hicks
We’re all moving towards, you know, that same same direction, towards our vision. Well, if you have other people with conflicting values, they’re going to slow you down. There can be, you know, rowing in the opposite direction and it will destabilize your company. You know, when we first got started, you know, I was hiring people, you know, because I liked them or because, you know, they had the skill sets that I needed.

00;16;19;25 – 00;16;36;22
Robert Hicks
And actually backfired on me. I remember hiring someone who did not share our core values. And in fact, I don’t even know what core values were at this point. You know, I was hiring two members like, Dude, we have people here that are that are thriving, that are doing great. We’re having people over here that are just full of never negativity.

00;16;36;22 – 00;16;57;22
Robert Hicks
And they can’t they can’t get any wins. And I was like, man, what’s a difference? And then and then the people that are negative are starting to have a negative influence on the people that are positive. And then all the results are starting to go down. So I started thinking in our company was called Traffic Titans. I was like, Man, what what traits do like these these, you know, superstars have in our organization that the other ones don’t?

00;16;57;22 – 00;17;21;12
Robert Hicks
And I started writing it down. I was like, Oh, they have these eight traits. And I call on the traits of, well, those are core values. Okay? And, and there’s there’s a verse from the Bible, I think it’s from Galatians, but says yeast works its way through dough very quickly. Right. So if you have any toxic or any negativity or someone with conflicting values organization, they will start to have a negative impact on everyone else.

00;17;21;19 – 00;17;38;14
Robert Hicks
And I realized, like there are some toxic individuals, we want to call them toxic because I think they’re great people. They just had a different vision than I did. Right. And they’re kind of moving us in the opposite direction. You know, they’re probably great people. They’d probably be, you know, a better fit somewhere else. They probably thrive somewhere else.

00;17;38;14 – 00;17;50;26
Robert Hicks
But an organization, they weren’t a great fit. And when I was able to identify that and remove them from the organization, all of a sudden bad things went into alignment and we just we saw supersonic growth.

00;17;51;08 – 00;18;12;27
Jesse Gilmore
Yeah, and it’s crazy what systems people reverse engineering your success being able to understand from 6 to 7. That’s a different playbook then from 0 to 6 or 7 to 8. And being able to understand where you are is really key. That’s right. So what is what is 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?

00;18;14;00 – 00;18;45;21
Robert Hicks
Yeah. So if you need help creating better video as a convert, you can check out our website at Go Ever workshop and book a call with us. And if you’re qualified, we’ll give you a free gift at the end of the class. So just reach out to us, check out some of our portfolio. We do a lot of work for Grant Cardone and Dan Henry and just a handful of other agencies, so we’re very blessed to have those guys on our well to be a part of their team and help them with the growth of their business.

00;18;46;14 – 00;18;56;20
Robert Hicks
But yeah, check us out on on our websites and book a call. And I think that’s we have a lot of different packages and ways that we can work together.

00;18;57;03 – 00;19;07;22
Jesse Gilmore
Cool. Awesome. And for anybody that’s listening, I’ll include the links to Robert and ever work in the show notes. And Robert, I just want to thank you very much for being on the show today.

00;19;08;01 – 00;19;09;06
Robert Hicks
Yeah, thanks a lot. I appreciate it.

00;19;11;05 – 00;19;45;16
Jesse Gilmore
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 in control dot com slash case study right now to learn more about leverage for growth, 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

00;19;45;16 – 00;19;53;14
Jesse Gilmore
dreamed about. Go to niche in control dot com slash k city that is niche in control dot com slash case now.

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