Ray Corcoran: agency pipeline, content and pricing lessons

Full transcript

Edited for reading. Select a time to play the audio from that point.

Who Ray is and what Groe does (00:00)

Alex: Today we’re joined by Ray Corcoran. Ray, who are you? What do you do?

Ray: My name is Ray Corcoran. I have a marketing agency based out of Sydney. We service clients mostly in Australia, and we have a handful abroad as well. I’ve known Claff for 12 or 13 years. It’s been awful, honestly, the whole way, but somehow we keep catching up. The universe must want us to hang out, so that’s why we’re still in touch.

The main thing we do in our agency is paid ads for people: Google ads, Facebook ads. The other side of the business is marketing consulting. I work with brands to define the marketing strategy, and then either execute it for them or work with them to execute it in-house. That’s my main focus. It’s pretty much all I’ve been doing since about 2010, 2012: getting leads. A little bit of SaaS here and there, but established service-based businesses are the ones we work with the most.

From the Optus call centre to marketing (01:05)

Alex: Right on. So, a bit about your background and your story. We met each other in the call centre in the Optus heyday, the good old days.

Ray: The boiler room.

Alex: The mobile technical support boiler room. So how did you go from frontline customer service to now having a pretty impressive property portfolio? You’re a guy I think of as having heaps of time, freedom and flexibility. I’ll generally text you when you’re at the dentist, commenting on the cleanliness of the floor or something like that.

Ray: It’s a good question. In terms of background, I originally went to university for marketing, and that was my plan. I ended up totally bombing that. I wasn’t applying myself. I was young, and I wish someone had slapped me and told me to leave. You’re either all in or all out. That’s the advice I’ll give my kids if they choose that route: I don’t care if you go to uni or not, but if you go, do it properly. Or just start working somewhere and get three years of experience instead. I fumbled around with that.

The main reason I got into marketing was that it aligned with my strengths the best. My best subjects at school were maths and art, the creative topics, and marketing is a good mix of that. You’ve got the analytics side, and you’ve got the creative side as well.

Free business books at Borders (02:40)

Ray: I didn’t come from money or anything like that, so a big priority for me was to make a lot of money. I didn’t really know how. I would go to the Borders bookshop at Macquarie Centre, near my parents’ place, with my skateboard. I’d skate at the skate park nearby, sometimes by myself, and then go up to the bookshop after. I started pulling books off the shelf in the business and finance section. I’d look at the cover and think, oh, that sounds interesting. Then I’d sit down and read for free for two hours, and get a vibe of what people were saying.

The biggest common theme, and all these books were American focused, was that most millionaires have a business. That was one big takeaway. My mum was a nurse and my dad was a mechanical engineer. There were no business people in our family that I knew of.

The other side was that a lot of them recommended this: if you can help someone else make money, then you’re close to the money, and you should be safe to make money yourself.

A careers advisor, then a job at Optus (03:50)

Ray: I had a year nine careers advisor. I originally wanted to do architecture, but she said, “There’s no money in architecture. Most people don’t make money.” And that’s true if you’re a dumbass. There are lots of people who don’t make a lot of money in architecture. I wish she’d said, “If you’re going to do it, you need to be in the top 5%, because only the best get good money.” That would be a more accurate statement about that industry. But I got scared off. I was only young. I thought, OK, I can’t do that. And marketing became the thing I ended up going with.

But because I had to drop out of uni, and I don’t know why, I didn’t think about trying to get an entry level marketing role at an agency. My best mate Alex, another Alex that you know, Alex Ross, was working at Optus, the big telco, at their head office in customer service. They were paying 45, 47 grand a year for no experience, which in whatever year that was, was actually quite good money. To get nearly 50K and have literally no credentials was appealing to me. So I thought, I’ll go work with my mate while I figure this out.

While I was there, I had a lot of quick promotions. Every six months I would move into a new role. Only small salary increases, but I was bouncing around quickly, because in the early roles you can move up quick, and then it slows down as you get to more serious stuff. Eventually I got into a low level marketing role there.

It’s kind of funny. When I left to start my own business, I learned more about marketing in six months of self-employment than I did in every year at uni and every year in a corporate marketing role doing basic stuff.

Why he left corporate (05:30)

Ray: Fast forward a bit. I’d been in corporate, and I did business analyst work and stuff. And I looked at the guys who were 45-ish in my kind of role, people who were further down the track, which is probably where I was going to be. They were making really good money, but they were all out of shape and miserable. They looked like the life had been taken out of them. So I knew. I was like, fuck that, I can’t do that.

One thing I was bad at in corporate was understanding the politics around me. I thought, if I do a good job, people will notice and I’ll move up. That was half true. The other half was that I needed to proactively build relationships with key people. I kept getting frustrated, because on the metrics of my job I felt I was doing a pretty good job, but I was getting looked over because the boss’s mate got the job instead of me. And I thought, I need to be out of this system.

From there I left and started doing WordPress websites, which my buddy Kiro showed me. You also know him.

The books he read at 19 (06:35)

Alex: Let me pause you there for a second.

Ray: Sorry, that’s a bit too much.

Alex: No, that’s awesome. That’s exactly where I want to go with this. The stair-stepping and bouncing around is a good early signal of someone who wants to progress and is a little bit restless in their role. Do you remember the books you were reading way back in the day? Are we talking Rich Dad Poor Dad type stuff?

Ray: Absolutely. There was one book, and I cringe at the title now. It was Seven Years to Seven Figures by Michael Masterson. I’m like, what were you thinking? I don’t know how old I would have been, maybe 19 or 20, give or take a few years. And I thought, well, by 30 I want to be at this point, and I’m only 20, so I’ve got three years to spare. I was so wrong.

One of the big books that does emphasize business ownership was The Millionaire Next Door. A lot of these books have a lot of corny Americanisms in them, but they do have some good lessons. The way I look at it is that I average out all the advice. If I get 10 books and seven of them say this thing is a good idea, that’s the signal I’ll use to say, all right, there could be something in this.

And then Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek. The 48 Laws of Power. All sorts of classic books in personal development, finance and business. I was reading probably all the classics: The Richest Man in Babylon, The Alchemist. A bunch of classics, really.

That was good. When you know nothing, everything seems mind blowing, so I was devouring books. I don’t read as many books these days. But back then everything was new to me, and I was starting to learn stuff.

A mate shows him WordPress (08:42)

Alex: Cool. Jumping back to where you were in the story: Kiro shows you the wonderful world of WordPress, if you could call it that. What did you learn from that?

Ray: I was at his place, just hanging out, and he was showing me a WordPress website he was building for a client. I go, “Oh, that looks pretty cool.” And he goes, “Man, you could do this as well.” I said, “I know a little bit of HTML. I made some very basic websites back in the day. But I don’t really know this stuff.” And he goes, “You don’t need to know it that well these days, because they have WordPress, and they have this thing called themes, which are pre-made templates of sites. All you really need to do is find a good theme. Then you can pay a contractor to customize it based on what your client’s requirements are.” That was on Upwork. It used to be oDesk.

I was like, oh, that’s interesting. I go, “How much are you charging?” And he’s like, “This one, two grand. The other one, three grand. Another one, four grand.” And I was like, fuck. If I could do that, I’ll be rich. I was working full time. If I could get two or three of these in a month, or even just one or two, that’s money fully independent of my job. I loved that idea, because it felt like a lily pad out of what I was doing, which I didn’t love. And I wasn’t earning tons of money, so a few extra grand was nearly replacing a huge chunk of my low salary. It was very exciting.

So he started to show me that. The first step was telling everybody I personally knew, “Hey, I’m doing this thing. If you or someone you know wants a website, I’ll do it for free.” That was how I got my first few customers. I could cut my teeth and practise without the pressure of invoicing them. I could basically fuck up the whole job and it wouldn’t matter, because I’m doing you a favour, dude.

Quitting with no pipeline (10:45)

Alex: So you dip your toe in the water. I’m really looking forward to the part of the story where you learn about pipeline, and I might be jumping ahead a little too far. When we caught back up after many years and we were walking through the botanic garden, there was definitely this graduation. You’re starting to get some momentum, you’re learning some stuff and feeling pretty good about it. And then it kind of goes off the cliff. Keep going with the sequence, but that part, to me, is such a massive learning moment.

Ray: It was really exciting. Your first few independent dollars are the most exciting dollars you’ll probably ever make in your whole business. I know some people who have made lots of money, and they will still talk about an early dollar figure being more of a dopamine hit than some huge transaction landing years later.

So I started doing that. I went from doing a few free websites to practise, to charging a little bit, to charging a bit more, and then I started charging market rate, or somewhere near it. And I go, all right, cool, I’ve kind of got this. I was pretty young and naive. I quit my job. Whatever, let it rip.

It was like I was walking into a tsunami, but I didn’t know one was coming. I had a bunch of projects to finish. I finished the projects, and I had no pipeline of new projects to do. I was like, fuck, what do I do? I tried to get customers. I don’t remember what I was doing, but it was pathetic. It wasn’t effective at all. Nothing was happening. And slowly I’m eroding my savings, and it’s getting pretty grim.

This was a big ego thing as well, because I thought I was kind of smart. I thought I could figure this out. And I couldn’t. I just flat out didn’t.

Cold calling for solar panels (12:50)

Ray: So I had to regroup and go get a job. I actually had to get two jobs, because I wanted to rebuild my savings as fast as possible. One of those jobs was cold calling for solar panels. I’d go to this place in north-west Sydney, into this tiny crowded office with a bunch of idiots. A couple of cool people, but mostly idiots. I was also an idiot. We’d hammer the auto dialler, a couple of hundred calls a day, and get sworn at all day. Sworn at not only by the people I was cold calling but by the manager, who was just crazy, aggressive with everything. It was just crap.

It was funny, because at the time I thought I was a big failure and everybody cared. Really, nobody cared. It was just me putting a lot of “you’re shit, you’re shit” on myself. Can I say that?

Alex: It’s already too late.

Ray: Yeah, this is PG.

Alex: I’ll fix it in post. Let it rip, as you say, Ray. Let it rip.

Ray: Let it rip. It’s what the people want to hear.

Monthly activity and a $20K floor (13:50)

Ray: So basically I was humbled. I had to rebuild my savings and then go again. But by that time I’d learned the lesson that I need to build a pipeline, and I need to be doing monthly activities to have a continuous flow of people calling me to do work with me.

It was probably a good thing that I got to touch the flame and realize it’s no joke. You really do have to have monthly activities to generate business. Things will fluctuate. But if you do a baseline level of monthly activity, you should be able to drive regular work. You’ll optimize later, once you realize which specific things drive the most outcomes, and you do more of that.

Then, a few years later, I’m not worried about new work coming in. For a long time I was. Even when it would come in like clockwork every month, it was still in the back of my mind. Then one day I looked at my revenue per month for a period and thought, I’ve never actually gone under this minimum number for an extended period. I think it was 20 grand a month or something like that. That was the day where I thought, all right, maybe I should just chill a bit. Things will be OK. That was a big awakening, I guess.

Events, content, early Facebook ads and referrals (15:10)

Alex: When you came to this realization that you needed to do steady monthly or even weekly marketing activity, what did you actually do? What were the activities that got leads coming?

Ray: Early on it wasn’t very efficient. I decided to do everything, and whatever stuck, I would do more of it. To be honest, that’s a great approach for most people. It might be exhausting, but it will probably do it.

Some of the early stuff I did: I would speak at any little crappy business event I could, or even just attend little business events. They were super hit and miss. At some I’d pick up a couple of people. I could go to several others in a row and get zip out of it. But generally speaking, the more people I speak to, the more stuff could happen, whether it’s them becoming a customer or someone they know. It might be three months after the event. I’ll meet some guy called Chris, and three months later he emails me: “Hey, I remember we spoke a little while back. My auntie runs this business and she wanted to get a marketing person, and I thought of you.”

I’ve always played to my own strengths, which is content. So just publishing. I tried to publish everything almost as I was learning it, especially early on. If I discovered anything that worked, I would post about it, whether it was on LinkedIn or Facebook, which was more of a thing back in the day and less so now. I had a small email list, and I would email them.

A lot of that content definitely felt like talking into an empty room. But one thing I’ve learned is that people are watching every post. You have to have an internal faith when you press publish: is this good stuff? If you feel it’s valuable for the right person, it might not have mass market appeal, but it’s valuable to a real, legit customer. The type of person you really want to do business with, not just some dopamine hunting, lowest common denominator sort of derro.

That’s hard to wrap your head around. If you really love the likes, it’s hard to do the posts that get proper customers. I always tell people this. You’ve got to market for the right customers, not for mainstream appeal. Mainstream appeal usually leads to the opposite. You get a bunch of low level people. I mean, everyone’s equal as a person, of course. But in terms of potential financial impact to your business, the real proper people are not liking some really stupid basic post that might get 50 likes but doesn’t help anything. They’ve been around the block.

So I would say events, and a lot of content, especially video early on. I feel like I did more than others on that. Then a small bit of emailing. And early Facebook ads. I would boost some of my content and get mixed feedback. But more people were seeing it, so I didn’t really care. Sometimes I’d get some brutal comments. Some guy goes, “Why would I listen to someone with 400 likes on their page about marketing?” And I was like, that’s rough, man. I also wanted to hunt that guy down. I will get that guy. Later on, well, you know the story. I won’t share it here because it’s sensitive, but that guy got his comeuppance, let’s just say that. Sucked in, buddy.

Those were the main pillars. The last one was referral relationships. Who already has my customer and doesn’t compete with me? People like web designers, because by that point I wasn’t building websites much. I was really focused on the marketing services. They only build websites. They deal with my exact customer, but they don’t compete with me. SEO companies. Business coaches. I would reach out via LinkedIn and try to do a short call, almost like this one. Learn about them, and see if I can refer them business. Those were some of the main things I did back then.

The trap of virality and the right bait (19:35)

Alex: You made a really interesting point. I think of it as the trap of virality. You write, you create, something hits and it goes mainstream. You get tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of eyeballs. And then that becomes almost a threshold you want to hit on the content you’re producing.

It’s been funny jumping back into creating on LinkedIn. I’ve found that the most generic things I’ve posted, sometimes not even my opinion, just someone else’s point of view with some analysis around it, will go mainstream. They blow up and there’s lots of traffic. And it’s actually been a massive distraction.

Ray: One of the hardest things is separating your emotions from your content performance. It’s having that stoic approach: if it goes well, I don’t care. If it goes badly, I don’t care. They’re just numbers.

One thing I remind myself of is this. I don’t even know who these impressions are. I don’t know who these people are. I didn’t care about them yesterday. I didn’t know who they were yesterday. And suddenly I care that all these impressions happened?

It’s hard not to be affected by it. I’m a numbers guy, so I think, oh, that’s doing well. But I try to use my internal compass. The people who are already paying me right now are a certain type of person. They’ve been around the block. They’re established. They’re not new to things. What would they like? So I try to write for those people. I might do an occasional mass market post, I guess you would say.

But you want to use the right bait for the right fish. I don’t want to be using lowest common denominator bait. Even if it gets me some sort of big personal brand, I don’t want to work with those people. I’m just building an audience of the wrong type of person.

There’s that guy James Smith. He’s a fitness influencer. I don’t know if he deleted his old profile or just started a new one, but he has an Instagram profile called James Smith Business. He did a video saying that he built a big audience, and a big chunk of them were offended when he tried to start selling stuff. They go, “Oh, you sold out.” And he was like, “This is who I was the whole time.”

So he’s created a second profile, almost like a burner profile, which has maybe 10,000 or 20,000 followers instead of a million or something. He loves posting on that profile so much more, because he can just be himself. There’s no weirdness about selling, because he’s building it with the right bait now.

I think every brand should be conscious of what bait it uses. Especially when you’ve got no following, you have that desire to have the following. But building the right type of audience will be crucial, because you don’t need millions to do pretty solid revenue. It’s that Kevin Kelly idea, 1,000 true fans. You just need a handful of people who love you.

How he judges a post (22:35)

Alex: You said before there’s this idea of speaking to an empty room, and also not getting too caught up in the metrics and the numbers. What are some of the thoughts or frameworks you use to make sense of that in your head, so you don’t get discouraged? The biggest thing we’re going to get into in the second half of this call, for me and for you, is consistency. You are the steady as she goes, execute daily and weekly type of person. I think there’s something really interesting to understand about how that works for you, maintaining that momentum.

Ray: In terms of content performance, I judge it on who likes it and how many DMs I get from real people, real quality leads. You can have someone who’s the CEO of a $30 million company, and you can have someone who owns a brand new business doing 20 grand a year, at a really early stage. I judge loosely on who messages after those posts and who clicks like on them.

Sometimes mass market can reach some good people. But I generally prefer it when I see who likes it and I know that person runs a successful company, or a company that’s done all right so far. For my business and how it’s set up, they’re the people I love working with. I want someone who does a good job and isn’t new to business, because otherwise I’m going to have to explain all the new-to-business stuff to that customer as well. I’m happy to do that, but not that much these days. I can do it, and I have done it many times. But I’d rather spend that time scaling up what they’re doing than telling them rudimentary stuff about ads that they should probably know by now, or will know themselves after a few more years. So that’s how I loosely assess performance.

A missed day is an empty hotel room (24:30)

Ray: On the consistency thing, I guess it’s like the analogy of a hotel. Once the day has passed, they can’t sell that hotel room for Thursday night once it’s Friday. That opportunity has passed. They can’t go back in time and make it right. So I think it’s a wasted opportunity if you have a day where you could have posted something and you don’t. That could have been the perfect day for someone to see your content.

I’ve had times where people have seen a post and one of two things happens. Either they see it and say, “I’m dealing with that exact thing right now, let’s chat,” and it really resonates. Or it’s, “I’ve got a different issue, but seeing you pop up in my feed reminded me I needed to speak to you about this other issue.” Not even the same topic. That happens to me all the time. I don’t want to miss that opportunity.

I also find that it’s easier to post regularly, because you don’t get stage fright. When it’s been six months since you posted… I’d guarantee you’ve had that feeling, where you hadn’t posted in ages and now you’re posting heaps. I’ve had that feeling when I haven’t posted in a while. You almost want to make the best post ever as your comeback post. And it’s not going to work, because the algo is saying, “Hey, you’ve been inactive, we’re going to give your first couple of posts some shitty reach.” I don’t like having that stage fright.

I’m full of shitty analogies today, but when the water’s flowing, algae can’t build up. If you’re posting regularly, the algae can’t build up. If you’re stagnant, the algae starts building up, because there’s no flowing water. There are no posts flowing out. That’s one aspect of it.

Also, the more you write, the better you get at writing. The more videos you do, the better. I’ve done hundreds of videos now. I could show you many terrible videos that I’ve done, but that was so long ago, because there have been hundreds since. So it’s a proficiency thing. It helps me not overthink my posts, because I’m shooting from the hip quite regularly.

And you never know what’s going to work. I don’t want to wait for that one big swing that I think is going to be a home run, which is always a fizzer. The ones you think are going to be a home run are always a fizzer. And then there’s the one you think is a shit post, that you half-assed, and people say, “Oh, I love that post.” I’m like, what the fuck?

So I can’t be too connected to how stuff performs, because sometimes I have no idea. All I know is that my North Star is what my existing customers want and what I’ve seen work. If I feel like it’s good stuff, I’ll post it, and I try to do it as frequently as possible.

A comeback post and a lead five years later (27:15)

Alex: That’s good stuff. I’m chuckling, because two things popped up for me while you were saying that. The first is my comeback post, to get out and write again. It was about 4,000 words on what they don’t tell you about selling your startup. I spent a lot of time on it.

Ray: I know you did.

Alex: It was almost like I needed to put something good out that would give me a bit of space to create other things that weren’t to that standard. There was a mental barrier.

Secondly, and I think you’ll get a kick out of this one, I started posting on YouTube again. I had a dormant YouTube account, but I had old subscribers and old followers. A person had reached out to me in 2020 for coaching, when I had wound things up. They’d emailed me and I’d said, “Hey, I’m no longer coaching.” They saw me pop back up in their YouTube feed, and reached out to have a convo and talk about where they’re at and what they’re doing. Five years later, dude.

Ray: That is mad. I love that.

Alex: It’s always interesting to understand how people hear of you and where they come from. That’s always a good question to ask when you get one of those inbounds.

Don’t forget the lurkers (28:25)

Ray: You never know who’s watching. I’ve had many examples where people have watched my content for six or 12 or even 18 months, which is a bit too long in my opinion. They’ve watched my stuff for ages, never publicly liked anything, and then messaged me ready to buy and spend a lot. And I’m like, what the fuck? You could have thrown me a bone. My little post with two likes on it? You could have helped me there. You could have helped me when I needed you, but you didn’t. But we’re going to talk about Visa or Mastercard now, so that’s all good.

I’ve done videos on this. Don’t forget the lurkers. Most people, on LinkedIn especially, are lurkers. They’re worried about what they’re publicly seen liking. They may not want to alert their competitors to who they’re following, and stuff like that. There are so many little psychological things in the way. So you never know who’s watching.

Alex: I wonder who’s going to be watching this.

Ray: Five or six people, I reckon. But you guys are going to love it. So drop comments for sure, because we’re going to need that engagement. I reckon this is one of my favourite interviews I’ve done. Not tons, maybe 15.

Alex: Let’s keep it going. Let’s keep the good times rolling.

More services, more chaos (29:45)

Alex: So you get to that steady 20K mark. I think you said that over the course of a year you were starting to consistently hit that mark. Where did you progress from there? What happened next?

Ray: I made the mistake of thinking more revenue would be more services. I’m making 20 with this, so I can add that and it’d be another 20, and another 20. That was a mistake. I probably felt in my gut that I shouldn’t be doing it. But I also desperately wanted to get to that next level. I’d do anything. I didn’t care how chaotic it was going to be, or how hard it was going to be for me to manage, or how many new processes.

Because every new product line is not just another product. It’s another set of processes for the team. It’s another couple of team members who know how to do that stuff. It’s another set of meetings I have to do with those team members about that stuff. It’s another set of conferences I have to go to related to that stuff. A whole set of things comes with that new product type. Even though it’s under marketing, it’s not the same. There’s overlap, but it’s mostly a whole separate thing.

So we became a full service agency, adding websites and SEO and other bits and bobs. And it did work. It did accomplish the outcome. But I got to a point where I thought, this is too many things. I haven’t got the headspace for all these things. And I wasn’t keen to hire lots of people and have a big team. I still don’t want to have a big team. It was just too much. So we did that for a bit and got to the next level.

A hard 40 and an easy 40 (31:25)

Ray: After a while I realized I’d rather be really good at one main service, which is largely the paid ads stuff. I still do consulting, but I would not focus on websites and SEO. We basically don’t do them any more, unless it’s very specific requirements: something I’ve done before, where I know exactly what we will do for that client. If it’s a different industry, or there are too many variables, we’ll refer it elsewhere.

Narrowing down helped a lot. The revenue probably stayed the same for a bit. It might have taken us to 40 or so, and it stabilized. But there’s a hard 40 and an easy 40. I had months where we did 32K or something like that, and I was fucking wrecked. That was crazy. And then later you have months that do double that, and you think, that was easy. It’s interesting how you can make revenue so much harder than it needs to be.

But when you haven’t had that revenue before, you’re so excited just to make that money that you don’t care. I was willing to do as many hours as it took, especially pre-kids. I didn’t give a shit. I’ll work all day and night. I just wanted to hit that dollar number, because that meant I could advance my situation.

The WP Curve version of that mistake (32:48)

Alex: I’ve got a story for you on that one. In the early days of WP Curve, we had to say no to a lot of stuff, because we’d get requests for builds and all these different things. And we stumbled into this space, around 2013 or 2014, of doing responsive redesigns. Not all themes were responsive on phones and tablets out of the box, and you needed to do a fair bit of configuration to get a site working.

I remember this one month where we said, all right, we’re going to offer this as a one-off, which broke our recurring model. We’d offer it as a $500 task or whatever. We had a few queued up, because we had a big enough base of support customers who also wanted it.

What we realized really quickly was that there was only one guy on our team who could do it really well. He was our top dude. Anyone who runs a technical support team will usually have that pillar of knowledge, the person who knows everything. Over two weeks we burned this guy out completely, because he was scrambling to get all these sites done. We basically ran him into the ground.

The impact on revenue is meaningful when you’re coming off a base of 10 or 15 grand a month. You think, wow, I’m going to get an extra five grand. My revenue has gone up 25%. In the early days it’s really hard to say no to revenue. We went the wrong way on that. We also tried to create a bunch of different products and services and random stuff, because it makes things interesting. It’s fun. So I think it’s a common path, and a common misstep.

Owning his value and pricing (34:25)

Alex: All right, so you expand and then you contract, and you get back to focusing on the things you were doing. Were there any major step change moments in the business, where stuff really started to hum or click? What I’ve heard lately is that COVID either crushed someone’s business or catapulted it. It’s a pretty binary outcome from what I’ve seen so far. Any major milestones or thresholds?

Ray: Probably a couple of things. One is owning my value and pricing. We’ve had some clients who have made a lot of money. Me being paid three or four grand instead of two grand would be awesome. It’s a big win for me, especially across several customers. And for them it would be immaterial, because the win was so big.

There were times where I felt, I wouldn’t say resentment, more disappointment. I could have charged this guy double or triple, and a couple of them 10X, and it would not have mattered. I do wonder whether I would have got the sale initially at that price from day one, before the outcome had happened. That’s the rub. But owning that price earlier, doing price rises, charging bigger amounts and backing your own value: that was something I was very slow to do.

If I had to default, I’d charge a little bit under and have them stoked and telling everybody. I do love that. Rather than a bit over, where they say, “Oh, you know, it was all right.” I feel like there is a factor of that. So I’m trying to find that sweet spot, because I want them to get a financial win out of it. I want them to say, “I spent X and I got 5X back,” or 10X back, or whatever the number is. I want it to be a clear, good decision to hire those guys. It makes my life easier. A good reputation is something you can’t buy. So pricing, definitely.

Staying indispensable during COVID (36:28)

Ray: I think it’s also generally having an approach where you want to be in the top 5% of your industry. Stuff like COVID shakes out low quality providers and people who aren’t all in. This is all I’ve been doing since 2010-ish. It’s not like I started my agency two years ago. I’m all in on this, and I want to be doing it for a very long time. I’m sure it’ll evolve, but this is all I do every day. That person who started two years ago because they heard they could make some good retainers is not going to be a competitor. It’s just not going to be a thing.

I’m trying to think what else helped the most. Doubling down on client results as well. Just blowing them away, and doing stuff that, to be honest, was out of scope for what we were getting paid for. During COVID everyone was looking at what to cut. So I tried to make myself indispensable, rather than hiding and thinking, fuck, I hope they don’t cut me. Like a gym membership. They thrive on inactivity.

I wanted to do the opposite and take the leadership position in their business. We’re going to hold the torch up and guide you through the storm. We didn’t know all the answers, but I was determined to be proactive and on the front foot. So they know that when shit hits the fan, we’re going to be side by side with them, figuring stuff out. Adjusting the offers. Mitigating costs here and there. Maybe switching to only the best performing campaigns, and turning down some stuff that’s 50-50. Showing that we take their money seriously, so that they’d really have to second guess firing us. That was my goal. Those things helped me, I would say.

Where Groe is today (38:25)

Alex: Love it. I think that brings us to today. You only have to disclose what you’re comfortable with. You’ve been doing this thing for more than 10 years. You’ve got good momentum and a great reputation. I’ve worked with you personally. I even gave you a Google review. That’s how good you are.

Ray: What a guy. I appreciate that, man.

Alex: I wrote it myself too. It wasn’t a ChatGPT one either.

Ray: Even better. You’re the only person who can write that well, as well. You can tell when an idiot uses ChatGPT, because I’m like, you’ve never written like that. But I know Claff. He’s read all those books on writing well. He writes like ChatGPT. Actually, it’s the other way around. ChatGPT goes to Claff to learn how to write stuff.

Alex: Throws in an em dash for good measure.

Ray: A Claff dash.

Alex: So where are you at today? Where’s the business at, if you’re comfortable talking about it?

Ray: Things are going good. My business is a lifestyle business, but it’s not the kind of lifestyle business where I just pay my bills and get on with it. I do want to make a lot of money. My ethos is this: I want to make great money, working with great people, on stuff that I enjoy doing.

The business will be around 700 in revenue, maybe just under. Our staff costs are super low. That’s largely due to my own skill set, which I’ve built over a really long time. So I deserve that profit. I don’t have heaps of staff, and they’re very dialled in on their processes and what they do, so we don’t need a lot of people.

The catch is that it’s partially dependent on me. I can’t take a six month holiday and not do anything. However, in my view, I’d rather just collect a high amount of profit. I take that and invest it in property, and I invest a little bit back into the business. I’ve probably under-invested in the business over the years. Maybe I could have been at triple the revenue by this point. But maybe I’m a little bit risk averse in that sense.

The tortoise and the property portfolio (40:45)

Ray: I’d rather do slow and steady, conservative, but get rich for sure. That’s my ethos. If I keep going a little inch further each day, it’s going to work out. I might never have a home run business that’s doing 5 million or 50 million bucks or some crazy number. But it’s the tortoise and the hare, and I’m definitely the tortoise. Squirrel away a little bit of money each month, keep adding, and keep buying relatively conservative assets over and over. Then by the time I’m 40 or 45… I’m 37 now, and I’m getting to the point where that’s starting to pay off.

It’s been growing. The property portfolio will be around seven mil a few months from now. We bought a property a week ago, and we’re going to look at another one in a few months. I’m pretty much planning to buy regional property on a regular basis, and then eventually switch to commercial property for cashflow.

Then I’ll probably change the business in a few years, to where I’m doing really high priced work with a handful of people. Very much on my terms. Taking on projects as I want to, rather than trying to be go, go, go. Because I’ve been like that for a long time, working every day, basically. I do a couple of hours every Saturday and Sunday, and I’ve been doing that for years.

So the process is really to do high quality work for legends, make really good profit, and put that profit into safe assets. And then eventually not need to have the business. Then the business is purely for fun, almost. Working on cool, mentally stimulating projects for exorbitant fees.

A mortgage that gets you out of bed (42:32)

Alex: You said something funny to me when we were in the park. It was along the lines of: a mortgage payment of X will really get you out of bed in the morning.

Ray: Yeah. We bought our family home three years ago, and it was already going to be a big mortgage. The house was about 2.75 mil and we put about 750 grand down. The repayment, based on the rates at the time, was around 8.8 a month. That was workable. We knew it would go up a little bit. We didn’t anticipate how much. It went from about 8.8 to 14 and a half in 10 months. Not even within the first year. It was like two seconds after we got the property, and it was several grand more every 30 days. And my wife’s on maternity leave at that point. So not stressful at all.

But to be honest, in hindsight, I loved it. There’s no optionality. You literally have to get out of bed. You’ve got kids in the house. Your wife’s not working right now. She’ll be back at work, but not any time soon. And the business was going fine. It was going good. It wasn’t stuffed or anything. But it definitely got me out of bed, because it was literally all on me. And a sick part of me was like, I love this shit.

Because you have to call that lead. Or there’s that email you need to send to the database. It’s fucking Thursday night and you’re a bit tired. It’s not going out Friday. It’s going out Thursday. Even if it’s a bit shit, we press send and let it rip. I think that’s a good life experience to go through. You’re keeping yourself accountable to micro standards all the time.

I actually sat my wife down and did almost a pep talk. Our other bills are low. We’re quite frugal outside of that. We don’t have car payments or fancy dinners. We don’t spend a lot. We have a big mortgage, and everything else is very low. So I said to my wife, “I’d rather be very strict now and overdo it than half-ass it and act like it’s all good, and then rates go even worse than they did.” Because 14 grand a month can swallow you up pretty fast. If you get behind for three months, you’re 40 grand in the hole. It can turn quite quick. Even if you’re making good money, that’s a lot of money to most people, no matter how you slice it.

So I was very focused on not letting the tsunami overcome me. It didn’t come down to the wire. I didn’t want to be anywhere near the edge. I wanted to be always well ahead of it. But I had to stay on it. I couldn’t have a month where I kicked back.

Now it’s come down. After this rate cut, we’ll probably be around 12 by the end of the month. And the business revenue has gone up a lot since, so it’s not really as big a deal. We have cashflow from other properties and bits and bobs.

Alex: And you can exhale a bit.

Ray: Yeah, definitely.

Momentum and micro wins (45:58)

Alex: It’s funny that you talk about the goals. When you and I got together, I think about four weeks ago, I was mapping out my content plan, the different things I’ve got going on and the commitments I make on a weekly basis.

I think you’ll get a kick out of this. I recorded a podcast with a past client earlier in the week. As we got into it, we started to dive into what he’s working on now, and he talked about some products he’s going to launch, stuff that wouldn’t be public until roughly June 1st. So I wouldn’t be able to publish the podcast until that time. It’s been in the back of my head: who can I tap on the shoulder at short notice and bring in for a pod, so I can keep my momentum going? Because I’m a momentum guy. I know that if I keep my momentum going, good things will happen.

Same thing with the post I published last night. I’ve had the flu for the last week, mostly horizontal. I called my partner at work and said, “I can cook you dinner, or we can have burgers.” That allowed me to figure out that I’d have an hour and a half to put something together, get it out, and tick my thing off the list. It’s remarkable what a tiny bit of accountability will do to results. You keep yourself honest with those sorts of things.

Ray: And it’s very binary. You either do it or you don’t. I would rather ship something that’s only OK. A post that’s only OK has benefits. One, it might remind someone to contact you anyway, even if that individual post wasn’t that good. Two, you get a little micro win. It’s a little bit of micro evidence to yourself: even when I’m tired, I still get it done. It’s not a thing.

Building up those little micro wins is really important to shape your identity. I always talk about the can’t be fucked factor. Generally, the moment you can’t be fucked is exactly the sign that you have to do the thing. That’s literally what separates all the derros from all the people who make heaps of money and do all the great stuff. It’s: I can’t be fucked, but I’ll just send it. I can’t be fucked doing this event, but I’ll do it. I think that’s a good sign.

The people who keep spinning their wheels can’t be fucked, and they go, “Yeah, let’s leave it till tomorrow.” You’ve got to pull yourself up in those micro moments. Otherwise it adds up, and it creates evidence in the other direction, which you don’t want.

Energy management and keeping in motion (48:28)

Alex: When you find yourself in that zone, what goes on in your head? What do you think about, or anchor to, when you start to feel, “Ah, couldn’t be bothered today, not happening”?

Ray: The precursor to that is energy management. I try to avoid getting into those situations. That’s probably the easiest thing to do, to be honest. What’s that quote? Fatigue makes cowards of us all. When you’re tired, that’s when the bitch version of you comes out: you can’t do this, and you can’t do that.

So I’m really conscious of the building blocks: sleep and going to the gym. I don’t eat super strict, but I do eat healthy stuff along with the naughty stuff. Getting sleep, lots of water, all the basic stuff that gives me a base level of energy. That means I’m not compromised.

I don’t really drink at all. I might occasionally have a champagne or something if we’re out at a restaurant. But I basically never have that stuff, because I know I’m a compromised version of myself. Even if it’s only a few drinks, these days anyway, I’m at 70% for a day and 90% the next day. I hate that feeling of not being fully on. So it’s the energy management.

But if it’s already happened, for whatever reason, I also think there’s an element of who gives a fuck. None of this stuff really matters. Your post, my post. I don’t know if it’s nihilism, or what the word is for it, but it doesn’t really matter. One day we’re all going to be dead and in a fucking box. Your worst, most embarrassing moment of your life ever? I don’t remember half the most embarrassing stuff that’s happened to me. It’s just some relic of the past.

So if the post goes out and it’s not great, or the event wasn’t great, or the client outcome wasn’t great, it’s not ideal. But who cares? Just start typing.

If it’s content related specifically, I like to walk, or I like to call someone about it. I’ll call an industry friend, or talk to my wife, or talk to anyone about it. “Hey, I’m trying to do a post on this and I’m not sure how to start it.” Or I don’t know how to keep it concise, or whatever the issue is. I’ll let it out to the universe and see what people think. Sometimes that will unlock me a bit, and I start to get into a groove.

Even dictating into the phone. Sometimes you can say it out loud, but translating it into typed content is hard. So I’ll do a voice note on my phone: “The big thing you need to understand is this, this and this.” And it’ll transcribe it.

I try to always keep a bit of motion. As soon as you stagnate, for me that’s a warning sign. If I’m feeling hesitant about content, or hesitant about doing stuff, I try to keep little bits of action going, to keep it from stalling. Because once you stall, your mind starts going, and then you’re fucked, basically.

Where to find Ray (52:10)

Alex: Dude, perfect. Thank you. If people want to learn more about you, where can they find you online?

Ray: I’ll be jerking myself off on LinkedIn, congratulating myself about client wins and stuff. Really just flattering myself on LinkedIn, largely. So if you want to follow me, Google my name, R-A-Y C-O-R-C-O-R-A-N, on LinkedIn.

Groe.au is my Instagram. I post low quality but high volume content on there. G-R-O-E-A-U is my handle. And groe.com.au, G-R-O-E dot com dot au. If you want to fill in the form and spend heaps of money with me, I would welcome it.

That’s pretty much it. If anyone listening has marketing questions, or just wants to ask a couple of questions, no obligation, I’m always happy to chat with people and help them refine their understanding and make progress. Sometimes those people become customers later. And if not, it’s good word of mouth. So always happy to help.

Alex: Awesome. And frankly, man, thank you. You’ve been really helpful to me, giving me some clarity. It’s often very hard to talk about what you’re good at as an individual coach or consultant. So I’ve definitely had the benefit of that. Thanks for joining me today, man. Appreciate it.

Ray: Awesome. I’ve had fun. And how’s that? 54 minutes, almost on the dot.

Alex: Beautiful.