Ep 175: Why We Stopped Relying on Referrals to Grow Our Agency | With Ryan Sliva of Social Media Burst

It's so cool that you sort of bring the finance background to the table, because I think that that does tend to be a really crucial missing piece in a lot of DTC focused agencies.

And I think that a lot of agencies popped up around COVID because DTC was just on fire during COVID.

And then after COVID was done, everyone realized that no one had a solid understanding of unit economics and a lot of brands that were on the rise suddenly tanked.

So how how do you leverage your your background in in finance specifically and sort of like the the engagements that you do with your clients?

Yeah.

So I think kind of going back to what I said when I introduced the agency, a lot of it, I'm able to sell our services to clients.

And this is, like I said, we've evolved a lot.

So the services that we offer now are not the same as the services that we offered at the My time with this agency has always been, I see businesses differently than a lot of other agencies see businesses because of my background.

So my wife and I can sit down with a new client and she can get super deep into the creative, understanding all of that, like how things should look from a branding perspective, all that kind of stuff.

But then I can come in and say, okay, All of this is great, but if you don't fix these things or you're not making any money on this right now, we need to fix the unit economics like you alluded to or whatever it might be.

You're dumping too much money into Google right now and it's not giving you the returns that you need, whereas on the meta side, things are looking a lot better.

So capital allocation, moving funds around.

I could kind of bring a new set of eyes to the table that... frankly, a lot of businesses are looking for, um, Especially when we first started, a lot of the brands that we were working with were pretty small.

And so they were brilliant founders who had a great idea and just kind of went pedal to the metal to get that thing up and running.

But they didn't have all of the operator expertise, finance background, all that kind of stuff to make sure that things were kind of moving in the right way.

So whereas most agencies will come in and say, You know, I can help you strictly from a marketing perspective.

We were able to come in and differentiate ourselves because we could help them look at the business holistically and say, here's what's working, here's what's not working, and here's some decisions that you should be making.

And at the beginning, a lot of that was just...

it was kind of a sales tactic in a way where we weren't getting paid for any of that.

It was just, we have this expertise and we want to help you.

We care about your brand.

So we're going to offer you all of this additional information to, to help you guys.

And then we'll actually get paid for the marketing work that you do, that we do for you.

And that kind of evolved to where we noticed that we, That was one of the biggest things we were bringing to the table.

A lot of brands needed that expertise and needed kind of a partner in a sense who could help them through those things.