Smarter Marketing, Faster Growth: Lessons from 5,000+ Brands

Jeffro (00:03.349)
What if everything you thought you knew about scaling your marketing was only half the story? In this episode, we’re digging into the real mechanics of growth with someone who’s helped scale over 5,000 brands. From building a marketing agency without outside capital to creating a proprietary AI platform for marketers, Erik Huberman knows what it takes to thrive in today’s ever evolving landscape. As the founder and CEO of Hawke Media, Erik has redefined what’s possible for brands of every size.

And today he’s breaking down what most businesses are getting wrong when it comes to growth, marketing, and staying relevant in the age of AI. So Erik, welcome to the show.

Erik Huberman (00:38.552)
Thank you. Thank you for having me. I love that intro. I appreciate it.

Jeffro (00:42.154)
Well, definitely. I think this is such a cool thing and we have to keep talking about it. know AI keeps coming up in a lot of conversations, but it’s becoming central to so many areas of business. So, I mean, might as well learn from it and embrace it.

Erik Huberman (00:47.182)
Yeah.

Erik Huberman (00:52.45)
Yeah, yeah, it’s like when the internet really started proliferating. It’s the same thing to me. It’s like you kind of got to use it. You got to leverage it. You got to be a part of it. It does get it’s going to get overused like when every company changed their name to blah blah blah dot com. Like I feel it’s going to be everything’s dot AI right now. But at some point it’ll stabilize. But what won’t be gone is the fact that everyone’s going to be using AI.

Jeffro (01:01.203)
Yeah.

Jeffro (01:16.392)
Right. So you got to take your head out of the sand. Is there anything specific though, you know, as this landscape is changing, what do service business owners need to understand if they want to keep up?

Erik Huberman (01:26.07)
Yeah, I mean, this becomes, I literally just got off our executive call a couple hours ago and we talked about this a lot. we’re, it’s every week we’re talking about it a lot because it’s not that it’s going to be the death of service businesses. Like the idea that you’re not going to hire a lawyer anymore, but you’re going to use chat GPT, or you’re not going to hire a Facebook marketer because you’re just going to use AI to run your Facebook ads. That still ends up meaning you’re running your Facebook ads. And if you’re running, if you’re building a real business, that’s not going to be what happens. Like sure. The bottom of the market might go away where like the

$500 freelancer might not exist, but it’s not going to take out like real up the fairway service businesses. But it’s definitely going to compress margins, make it more competitive, probably. I shouldn’t say compress margins. It’ll compress revenue because where it used to be, you know, it cost thousands of dollars to run, you know, an email campaign. You can probably spin up a lot of it really quickly now. And so the fees you can charge, you know, bandwidth there becomes a lot less. So what we’re looking at is

How do we maintain revenue while over delivering in a way that like, I’m just, this is not a real number, let’s use it. Let’s say we used to create a thousand dollars in email and it’s $4,000 to do four emails a month. Well, now we’re gonna do 40 emails for $4,000. But we’re gonna it in a way that’s super automated, super targeted so you can be so much more direct with an individual customer that you’re gonna spend the same amount of money but get way more for it because we’re leveraging VAF.

And so my fear of that replacing us by someone just going, well, I’ll just do it myself. That’s not really where I think this is going. Uh, because again, someone still has to use it. This, this happened when Adobe Photoshop came out. They said it was the death of the art director and it just proliferated the art director. Cause now someone has to run Adobe Photoshop. I think it’s going to be very similar with AI now going back to legal. Cause I think it’s the best example of like, I just went through a small legal battle where I was using chat GPT and then sending it to my lawyer and they were validating it. And it saved me a ton of money.

Jeffro (03:05.182)
Yeah.

Jeffro (03:08.787)
Exactly.

Erik Huberman (03:21.982)
on legal time, but I still needed a lawyer to validate it because some of the shit it said was not correct. And you also need to then understand the right way to respond when you’re arguing with someone and all these nuances that happen. And frankly, I also took four full days because it was worth my time to solve this where if you’re not going to do everything as the founder, you’re still going to need to hire people that are leveraging these tools. I do think there’s going to be compression in entry level jobs, which I’m little worried about.

post-college, what do you do? Like analyst role is kind of dying. But I think long-term, there’s still gonna be a large need for good skill.

Jeffro (04:01.66)
Yeah, I agree. And like Dan Martell says, you’re not going to be replaced by AI, but you’ll be replaced by someone using AI. Right? So you got to embrace it.

Erik Huberman (04:07.18)
Yeah, I know very well. I’ve been snowboarding annual snowboard trip with Dan every year for the past decade.

Jeffro (04:15.15)
Awesome, now I’ve been just binging his content whenever I can, so a lot of good stuff.

Erik Huberman (04:18.51)
What he’s done the past few years has been fun to watch because he’s always been out there, but now he’s really stepped it up the past couple years.

Jeffro (04:25.008)
Yeah, it’s awesome. So if you guys haven’t checked out Dan Martell, just shameless plug, go check him out, read his book and all his content is awesome. So AI, you know, we’re talking about how it’s a buzzword and you you got to embrace it. You got to do stuff. You actually, Erik, went and built Hawk.ai to kind of put some of this into practice and apply it to what you’re doing as a marketing agency. are there other practical ways AI is changing the marketing game? Or can you talk about Hawk.ai a little bit and how that’s helping?

Erik Huberman (04:28.152)
Yeah.

Erik Huberman (04:49.942)
Yeah, yeah. Thankfully, so I was on the board of a nonprofit called XPRIZE that was started by a named Peter Diamandis. focused on like exponential innovation and creating great concept. Like they literally created the first private spaceflight that became Virgin Galactic. That could be a lot longer story, but it’s a cohort. It also had me surrounded with a ton of the most innovative minds in the world, including Ray Kurzweil, who became the head of AI at Google, but at the time was one of the foremost thought readers in what was coming with this AI thing. So that was 2015.

Jeffro (05:04.989)
Mm-hmm.

Erik Huberman (05:20.302)
I think 2015 might’ve been 2016. Anyways, either nine or 10 years ago, I met him and he had this prediction that he laid out, I think in 2013, that was like, here’s what’s coming the next 20 years with AI. This is when AI is gonna do this, this. And what he said was by the beginning of 2023, again, this was in 2013, we’re gonna have computers that basically mimic AI. They’re not gonna be actual artificial intelligence, but it’s gonna feel like that. And then it’ll take another six years.

to become true artificial intelligence. In 2029, that’s when we’re gonna have real artificial intelligence. And then the Singularity event will happen in like 2040. That was his prediction. And so I took the first prediction there very seriously. went, okay, so 2023 computers are gonna be able to think like people in some way. They’re gonna look like they’re thinking like people. What does that mean for my business? Well, I’m not gonna be the one to build that brain, the node, the whatever. Thankfully we had Watson, IBM Watson at that point. So already saw like someone’s gonna build

the thing that everyone plugs into that is that AI and it’s not going to be me. I’m not a developer. I don’t have billions of dollars. This isn’t going to be what I do. At the time I even talked about it. I did a TEDx talk about this that was like, I’m not, it’s going to be Facebook or Amazon or Google or someone that builds this. and so we, but I said, how do, so if we assume there’s a world where there is this brain that’s artificial intelligence, how do I win in that world? How do I create a moat for me? Well,

What do I have that no one else has that that can’t even have access to? And at the time we were already, you know, working with tons of different companies and grabbing all this insight. I was like, we have a better view of like what’s working and what’s not across all marketing channels than almost any agency on the planet. The only people that have the amount of data we have on these companies that have more, excuse me, are companies like Google, Facebook, that became out of it, it’s on Facebook and a few others like Shopify has a decent amount of data, but just on D2C. The problem is,

Facebook’s never gonna tell you to stop spending money on Facebook and to spend it on Google and vice versa. Shopify never really cared about marketing, they still don’t. We’ve had partnership conversations about Hawk AI and they’re like, we don’t really care about the marketing analytics, like not a thing. So that meant like whether it’s prioritization or a conflict of interest, no one was gonna build something that really could harness all that data and actually show what’s working and what’s not. So I went, well, we should have it. So we started gathering.

Erik Huberman (07:42.03)
literally a decade ago, or clients, partners, know, even prospects, data, their marketing media and revenue data, then anonymizing it, because we’re not going just give people their data, but then we’re able to create benchmarks and analytics around that, create predictive analytics that once we launched Hawk AI in August, I think it was of 22, and ChatGPT came out in November of 22. Now, a little reminder, Ray Kurzweil said beginning of 23, so he’s off by two months, but pretty damn good for a decade prediction.

Jeffro (08:10.361)
Yeah, impressive.

Erik Huberman (08:12.364)
And so when it came in, we plugged it in. And so now what we have is we’re digesting about 6,000 companies, marketing media and revenue data in real time. We then plug in an individual company and can immediately have a SWOT analysis on their performance marketing. Here’s what’s working, what’s not based on how the market’s moving because still to this day, most CMOs get their data from like, I don’t know, what kind of ROAS are you seeing? And it’s like, and so we get calls, my friend says he’s getting 8X returns. I’m like, it. So now we can actually show objectively, this is what’s happening by industry.

currently, how things are ebbing and flowing, how do tariffs affect buying behaviors, all these things we have in real time in our own dashboard with enough statistical significant data that now even hedge funds are licensing our data to trade the markets with. so that’s, know, but we started building it a decade ago and now it’s up and running. We’ve got hundreds of companies using it themselves. We use it for our clients. So it’s been good.

Jeffro (09:01.446)
Well, that’s that’s amazing. Because I mean, now you have that bird’s eye view to look and see what’s already working. And then you can make your decisions rather than just guessing and throwing something at the wall, see what sticks, which is what most people do, right. So to have that data is super powerful.

Erik Huberman (09:15.842)
Yeah. And that’s been the big wall. Another note on software, because we have our venture fund too. We’ve had a lot of talks on that side. Software is quickly losing its value as a barrier to entry. It used to be like, it’s going to cost you a ton of money and time and a team of developers to build software. So once you’ve built it and you’re in market, it’s going to be hard for someone to compete. Now you can spin up a new piece of software in a weekend with some AI prompts. so that’s going to change that industry massively.

And so we’re literally changing our investment thesis from like, this is a great piece of software that serves us really well and no one else is doing it. So like that whole chunk of how we underwrite a company has to go away. And then that means you have to overcompensate with their ability to go to market, their ability to get business. Like the marketing and sales aspect becomes even more important now because building a product, it’s like now it’s more like launching a t-shirt company. It’s like find a printer, find some blanks. You’re good to go. You better figure out how you’re going to build that brand.

Jeffro (10:12.526)
Yeah, no, I love that. And I’m also curious, so you’ve got all this data, you bring in a company, and what do you see as kind of one of the most common mistakes that companies are making when they’re spending their marketing dollars? Where are they putting it? Where should they be putting it instead?

Erik Huberman (10:27.714)
Yeah, it’s actually not usually a bad, like I don’t see that many mistakes with placement of dollars. think people are actually pretty apt to that. There’s enough knowledge out there about that. It’s the tracking side that’s really broken. So Facebook, we all know about iOS 14, if you’ve been in this a few years and it killed tracking on meta. The irony is people took that lack of tracking as a decrease in performance. And so it’s this simple.

You used to be able to track 28 days. Someone clicked your ad, you’d watch 28 days of whether they bought something or not. When iOS 14 changed, they dropped their cookie length to a week. So meta can only track one week. So do you think the numbers are gonna look worse after a week than after 28 days? Probably. Nobody actually thinks about it that simply. That it’s like, it’s just under reporting. That’s all it is. And so a lot of people will cut off their noses by their face. They’ll look at the meta dashboard, not do anything else to actually track the long-term benefits of all these marketing channels.

and they’re looking at day by day and the big number they’re missing to bring it really down to like logic and rational behaviors, purchase cycle. Almost nobody buys something the first time they see an ad. We all know about the impression counts. We’ve all heard all the different cliches about it. But what we’ve seen in our data is if you have a $50 product, the average sales cycle is three weeks. $100 is five weeks, $200 is six weeks, and then it trails off between two and three months as it goes up. But that means if you’re selling again,

hundred dollar product, it takes a month. So if you’re tracking a week of performance and watching your ad performance after a week or day by day, a lot of people do. I spent 10 grand today. What I make like it is so misleading. They end up shutting off ads that probably would have performed. They end up shutting off whole marketing channels. Like my whole thing is, especially if you’re like a DTC product or something, there’s no such thing as Facebook doesn’t work for us or Instagram doesn’t work for us or TikTok doesn’t work for us. You need to make it work or you don’t have a fucking viable business.

So you have to get better at tracking these things so that you actually have the right data and make this data driven decisions in the right way. But you also have to be really careful taking data as gospel because there’s data, it’s shit in, shit out. And again, this case of tracking, a lot of times you’re not getting the right data to make the right decision. So that’s the biggest one we see is people forget about sales cycle and are watching their daily marketing numbers, which is,

Erik Huberman (12:50.191)
I see a lot of agencies also promote like we spent this much last week and made this much. And I’m like, the fact that you’re even promoting that tells me I no idea what the fuck.

Jeffro (12:59.133)
Well, I’d also, so you gave some examples, which sounded like D to C examples, right, for products and things. Do you have off the top of your head some examples of a service business or a higher end offer that maybe like a $2,000 thing or even a $10,000, $15,000 roof? What did those cycles look like?

Erik Huberman (13:13.422)
It depends. It really depends. So our sales cycle, our average order is eight grand a month. That’s the average client pays us. And our average sales cycle is 24 days. But we track it. It’s actually 24.4 days. We know it, we track it. That’s the part that’s super important is when we’re analyzing marketing initiatives and we’re looking at how they’re performing, the nice thing is that’s a really short sales cycle for our type of business.

Jeffro (13:24.066)
Okay, that’s reasonable.

Erik Huberman (13:38.99)
So, we can, you within a month we can know how something’s performing and decide to double down, et cetera, because we can see the half-life of our sales cycle. know it, you know, we’ve, we half the benefit has come in within the first month. So I’m just using round numbers. So it’s knowing that more than like understanding what someone else’s is. And it’s all just tracking, like, when did you capture contact and when did they close? When did you first reach them and when did they close? That’s, that’s a really important part.

Jeffro (14:04.472)
Well, I think this is kind of a nice segue into the hawk method. I’d love to hear more about how you break down those three core areas, the awareness, the nurturing, and the trust, and how service businesses can be thinking about these elements.

Erik Huberman (14:16.685)
Yeah, totally. Yeah. And it applies to just any company. actually just was talking on personal brand. you know, thankfully I built a decent personal brand, but guys like Dan Martell and watching what they’re doing, I’m like, got to step this up a little bit. And so we were talking about, like, I have a lot of nurturing. We have a lot of content we put out. We’re constantly out and about doing these things. I think trust is there. We have a ton of validation. So they’re not going to the more, but we don’t have as nurturing. So how sorry, we don’t have as awareness. So I just need to figure out.

Jeffro (14:28.6)
Yeah.

Erik Huberman (14:45.944)
How do I let more people know I exist? That’s the focus. it’s really nice because, and I actually just was at a conference where a guy, it’s by the way, a book is the Hawk Method is where it’s coming from. And a guy walked up to me and said, it was like what set them up in marketing. The book came out three years ago last month. And yeah, now it’s taught at NYU in Columbia. It’s taught at University of Arizona. It’s really fun because it was kind of like a fun little side project that became something real. So the idea is there’s three pillars of marketing.

awareness, nurturing, and trust. Awareness is just how do you let people know you exist? New people. Whether it’s advertising, word of mouth, PR, just how do you just reach new people that didn’t know you existed prior? Then you get into nurturing, which really goes to that purchase cycle I talked about. Like what do you do once they know you exist to actually get them through that funnel to get them to buy and then keep them coming back? So it’s things like email marketing, SMS marketing, content. How do you just keep people engaged, retargeting that you already have in your audience?

that haven’t converted to an actual customer. And then again, keep them as a customer. There’s a lot of things you do there. And then trust is also brand eventually, but trust comes from like when you don’t have an established brand that people are like, I know who you are. I trust you. Like, I don’t need anyone else to tell me what I’m going to get if I order McDonald’s. Like I know what it is good and bad, by the way. So it’s like, it’s going to be, I’m going to feel like shit after I this. It’s not good for me, but it tastes pretty good. So, and like if I’m in Egypt, I know if I’m sick of curry or their food, which Egyptian food is actually pretty good to be clear, but

I just want something back home. I’m going to get a Big Mac at McDonald’s and it’s going to taste like the one in Santa Monica. Like that’s, that’s their brand. Good and bad. I don’t need anyone else to write a review of it or tell me about it. But if I don’t know who you are, I, and I’m like, I don’t know, should I hire Hawk Media or should I do this or like, should I buy this random, you know, new stack? I’m going to go look up who else is going to validate it. And so trust can be borrowed before you build it yourself. And that’s where

PR comes in, influencer marketing, endorsement deals, testimonials, reviews, all those things help build that trust. And trust helps with that conversion process, frankly. So it’s all about, when we’re looking at marketing, what I tried to do is really simplify it. It’s like, this is modern marketing 101. If you’re not, if you’re, you’ve got a ton of people to know about you, but it’s not turning into business, you probably have an either trust or nurturing problem. If you don’t have a trust and nurturing problem, everyone’s converting, people love to tell me, yeah, we’ve got, I’m converting 50 % of the people I’m reaching. It’s like, you’re not reaching enough people.

Erik Huberman (17:10.424)
get out there and go talk to more people. And it is that simple, but that framework really helps drive strategy. And that’s why we built it. And then, you know, I could spend hours and the books about like, then what do you do to build awareness? What do you do to nurture? What do you do to build trust? How does this all work? And what are the tactics around?

Jeffro (17:28.097)
Cool, I really like that. I do think it simplifies into a, you can kind of wrap your head around and help you make those decisions. One of things we’ve been talking about though is having all this data at your fingertips to make decisions about your marketing and such. What about the smaller businesses that are just trying to start scaling or grow and they don’t really have a lot of data points or enough money to hire somebody like you guys to figure this out? What should they be focusing on?

Erik Huberman (17:52.398)
Yeah, and thankfully, again, our fees started two grand a month. So by the time you’re ready to hire anyone, we try to be accessible. Like our whole mission at Hawk is to be the best at what we do, but the easiest to work with. like we really like helping up and coming businesses, but someone that’s not there yet, that’s not ready to hire anyone. Usually it’s, I always talk about like you have two resources, time and money. And if you don’t have the money yet to go hire and start building or start spending on ads and all that, it’s really about spending your time on reaching partnerships is a really good way to get started.

And it depends what you’re selling. it’s high ticket, go to events and talk to people. Like go generate a few thousand dollars and then a few more thousand. Try to build a business that’s, you know, got repeat business too. And not just like you go out and sell. Like if you sell three grand worth of business, hope that that three grand recurs every month and you keep that person, that kind of thing. If you’re selling lower ticket items, you know, it’s more about reaching larger audiences and partnerships. So could be trying to get PR. You could be trying to get, you know, collaborate with other brands, like just trying to reach people and get, start getting it going.

But I mean, I always love it’s because it is a bit of a cliche story, but Damon John’s story too about selling t-shirts out of his trunk with Fubu. That is how you can start sometimes. It’s legit. There’s not really shortcuts to this shit. And so I started Hawk just going to events and telling people I had a bunch of different pitches until I saw the one that really intrigued everyone the most, was where your outsource CMO. And they’re like, shit, I need one of those. And at the time, nobody understood digital. It was really just like.

people are so confused and I like, I’ve built and sold two e-comm companies, I can help you guys and it just rocket shipped from there. And so finding what your pitches for that is really helpful. We always talk about like the five to seven words that are really like your differentiated value proposition, everything in one, just like one sentence, not because you don’t get the opportunity to maybe pitch more than that, but because the people you’re talking to need to feel comfortable telling other people. It’s about word of mouth. So you need to come up with a really concise pitch when you’re starting out.

And then frankly, go talk to people, go tell people about it. And again, if you’ve got a $50 product, probably, you’re going to have a hard time potentially generating enough business that going to events and selling your product directly is going to make sense. So you’re going to want to find channels you can partner with, places you can go that don’t cost money, and then maybe even look at retail. And like, there’s a lot of reasons, like what’s old is new. There’s reasons people aren’t just DTC. And I always think that’s a mistake to be like just DTC and nothing else on product side. On the service side, if you’re selling

Erik Huberman (20:16.29)
I like really low ticket items. Yeah. Then you better be able to build a great funnel that self-petroids very quickly. Like I’ve, I’ve not built that business. If you’re actually providing services charge appropriately, make sure you understand that you need to pay, be paying someone to do that work. Cause if you want any scale, you can’t be the one doing it and generating enough money for marketing and sales dollars and generating enough money for your overhead and your office space and all those things that are going to come up and think of it all as a percentage of revenue and how that breaks down.

and charge enough that it covers all of that and gives you enough profit. So you got to think about that when you price it out, right? And then, yeah, if you can’t sell it at that price, don’t do it. That’s the part that I see people back into because we do a of M &A. We’ve bought 22 agencies. We’ve looked at thousands. And you watch a lot of people that underpriced the shit out of themselves, end up running a business underwater that they can never get above water because they can’t get anyone else to do it because they can’t afford to hire anyone, but they can’t keep up because they run out of time and don’t make enough. And you just, yeah, you can.

go offer a low price, sign a bunch of clients and then you can’t afford to live. So you’ve got to charge appropriately and then learn how to sell appropriately.

Jeffro (21:23.017)
That makes sense. Yeah. So obviously you got to step back and have the strategy and the business approach that’s actually going to work before doing anything. let’s say you’ve got that figured out. Here’s just a practical question because there’s so many ways to track things, right? We’ve got Google analytics. You’ve got the Facebook pixel. There’s platforms like high roast that promise to, you know, hook all this stuff together. You’ve got a hawk AI. Like, how do you know what you need to track and how do you make sure it’s all connected together in a meaningful way?

Erik Huberman (21:51.104)
Yeah, it’s, I mean, this is where it’s like, it’s hard to speak generically to that. It’s, all different. would say. Again, it’s tracking as much as you can, the more data, the better. So like, there’s no real limit to that, but it’s also what’s a reasonable amount of work to put into all this too. Like the example I’ll give is, you know, we track to the T every inbound lead we get every outbound prospecting we do every partnership lead we get.

Every event lead we get, like all the places where we can track as we do. I’m also out and about promoting the company all the time. And we get tons of just random leads, whether they’re through my inbox or just signing up on the site that we can’t track. And I probably could try to force a function that would track it even better and like make people tell us where it got in. Like basically, uh, complicate the funnel for the sake of tracking. That’s dumb. Don’t do that. But.

Jeffro (22:28.778)
Mm-hmm.

Erik Huberman (22:47.212)
I like post purchase, hey, where’d you hear about us? That’s not what I’m saying, but like overdoing it to the sense that you’re putting a ton of work and time into tracking, but then it’s hurting your sales velocity, things like that. That’s what you got to be careful of. anything.

Jeffro (23:00.722)
Yeah, you don’t want to put up walls before people make a decision.

Erik Huberman (23:03.98)
Yeah, but anything that doesn’t do that, the more track and the better.

Jeffro (23:07.476)
Yeah, that makes sense. what about, because everything’s changing, how do you avoid chasing the shiny new objects? Is it just being laser focused or is there more to it?

Erik Huberman (23:20.44)
Thankfully, it’s not in my DNA. Like I’m excited about innovation, but I’m not like the guy that always needs the hot new thing. I like almost forced it a little bit in the beginning where I bought Google Glasses and the first Oculus and all these things. like, it doesn’t matter. What I’ve realized in marketing is like being the first mover onto a platform generally is not beneficial. We were the first agency partner to TikTok, but they took so long to build up their ad platform that by the time it was actually useful, there were hundred agencies on TikTok and it didn’t really benefit us. So.

You know, it’s fun to say and be like, yeah, we’re their first official agency partner. Here’s the PR. Like we have evidence, like first official. but it doesn’t, again, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. And the problem is TikTok ended up working out. Let’s take, what would be another one? Like ARVR, like not ended, didn’t end up really being a great channel across the board. And I’m glad we didn’t really invest in it and we waited and

It turned out, you know, you can wait until it’s actually got the audience thing, you know, it’s moving to jump in. You don’t really have to chase the shiny object there. But the caveat there is technologically, like keeping up with tech and innovation there, I think is important on the marketing side because, and not overdoing it. Like not trying to like, the people that have like completely outsourced their content team to chat GPT, I think are idiots. Like that is terrible, mediocre content. And so that’s not what I mean by it, but I mean like using this stuff, watching it, incorporating it so that

when the time comes that it sort of shifts and technology does get there, you’re not starting from scratch, but you’ve already kind of integrated it.

Jeffro (24:52.435)
Because you’ve been keeping the pulse and that’s, yeah.

Erik Huberman (24:54.154)
Exactly. Keeping the pulse versus chasing it, think exactly the distinction is like, don’t do everything new all the time. It’s like, we all have that friend that was a producer, then a social media expert, then a blockchain and crypto expert, then an AI expert, now a tariff expert. Don’t be that guy. you can be, you know, but definitely, but keeping everything I just mentioned, don’t be the expert, keeping a pulse on everything and understanding how it can affect you and what potentially is coming and seeing

Jeffro (25:08.029)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Erik Huberman (25:24.076)
what do you need to do? That’s what gave us a huge wag up in the AI space.

Jeffro (25:29.026)
that makes a ton of sense. Well, we’re coming up on our time here. So I appreciate you being on the show, Erik. You’ve given us a lot to think about from how to approach marketing with clarity, having that strategy and now even this whole AI thing, how we can embrace and actually use it rather than being scared of it. So for you guys listening, make sure to check out the links in the show notes to connect with Erik, explore more about hawk media and the hawk method. Before we wrap up, if there’s one shift you hope more service business owners make in their approach to marketing, what would that be?

Erik Huberman (25:59.054)
in their approach to marketing.

Jeffro (26:04.883)
Let’s say even this year, like.

Erik Huberman (26:06.508)
Yeah, it’s like understand that it’s just as important as any other business. Like I think a lot of service businesses, including age marketing agencies, undervalue the marketing side of things. And it’s baffling to me because that’s, want to like, are people ask why we’ve been the fastest growing? It’s like, cause we drink our own punch. We do all the things we tell everyone else to do and guess what it works. So I think marketing is a very powerful tool in services and service margins. And you don’t have a lot of cat backs. So.

The ability to scale a service business, I think, is super underrated and you just have to be ready. It’s a balance of great recruiting talent and great marketing. And if you do great marketing, our marketing funnels are incredible.

Jeffro (26:48.658)
Yeah. Well, awesome. think that’s great advice, guys. Thanks again for listening. Thanks, Erik, for being here. To all of you guys tuning in, please leave a review for the show that helps us get in the ears of more service business owners. We really appreciate that. we’ll catch you next time. Have a great day.