Joe Troyer 0:43
Hey everybody, it's Joe Troyer, welcome to another episode of show me your nuggets. Just kidding. Show me The Nuggets.
Joe Troyer 0:52
Today we have on a very special guest Azhar, I met Azhar. I feel like it was right before COVID hit. So going on two plus years ago, in a mastermind of very, very high level, you know, seven figure and above marketing agencies. And in chatting with him and his team. I'm like, man, these guys are really turned on.
I've been trying to work with them since but they just been so we finally got him on the podcast. Azhar and his team, run a company, as you see on his shirt right there called rep stack. And they help give you guys specifically marketing agencies, town, right virtual sales assistant, let's say account managers marketing assistance. A
nd we're going to get into that big time, we'll give Azhar a chance to really pitch their services. But we're gonna go deep on finding talent, finding good talent. And I want to really peel back the onion and talk to him about because he works with so many agencies like what's working right now in the market? What are his concerns? And what does he see like the market moving, so we got a lot to cover. Without further ado, man, Azhar. Welcome to the show.
Azhar Siddiqui 2:01
Thanks, Joe. It's been it's a pleasure being here, man. You guys are doing an amazing thing. I'm so excited. As a research, what you guys have built at PPC Ad lab. It's an amazing tool fits right into what so many of our clients are trying to do on the digital marketing agency side. That's as you know, kind of our niche. That's our target market. And that's who I am 13 year digital marketing agency owner right here in Calgary, Alberta. And kind of you know, rep staggered was kind of came out of my agency, my struggle, working and talking to a lot of my agency owner friends and things like that. So, you know, like Kevin Hart says in his first book, my overnight success is 11 year old story, right? Or 11 year overnight success. So that's kind of how, you know, you can sum it up for RepStack as well.
Joe Troyer 2:57
That's awesome, man. Yeah, everybody always just sees the end result, right? They don't see the struggle every single day, the work put in every day for a decade plus, right, almost two decades happened a decade and a half. So, before we get too deep into things, can you give everybody just a quick heads up or a quick introduction to what rep stack is who they serve what you guys do?
Azhar Siddiqui 3:18
Yeah, so as I mentioned, that, you know, running my own agency, and then finally, a trend started in my life where, you know, I'm like, you know, the hell with just doing everything by figuring out a loss, and then figuring things out, let's start focusing on learning. And I think one of your questions is going to be about that as well. So once I started investing in learning, on the personal side, and then also on the coaching side, you know, some breakthrough ideas came to me, I knew I've already put in the work, you know, 1012 years, inside the agency world, I understood what needed to happen once I had invested in my coaching services and learning.
So after that, you know, rep stack was born, our first client, and the first person we placed, things started moving really, really fast. And really fast. We figured out that we don't need to be doing everything for every single digital marketing agency. What we wanted to focus was and what I really struggled in my, you know, as an agency owner, and I knew a lot of friends who were, you know, they get to the six figure mark in their revenues. And somehow, you know, even though things are going good, they're, they're delivering amazing results. They're just not able to hit that seven figure, Mark.
And when when I peel the onion, you know, it came to us that the reason is that as agency owners were tending to do our own marketing, even though that should be you know, that should be as a digital marketing agency owners, we should be eating our dog food and you know, very few of us Do at that mark. And then we're doing where our own salespeople would go in and closing those deals. And once those deals are done, we're also doing the account management for those clients.
And we're trying to retain these people. So it's like a crazy vicious circle. And the agency owner kind of becomes a glorified salesperson inside the agency, an account manager, or just a marketing assistant in the business, and they're just going through the circle.
And that's where that vicious circle was. So we figured that we're just going to stick to these three roles, because these are really critical to the growth of any agency can, you know, just the prerequisite is, which I know, like, if I was able to do it, for the last 13 years, the fulfillment side, I'm thinking that you guys are already kicking ass on the fulfillment side, guys got that covered how to push out, you know, amazing ad campaigns and websites and things like that, it's time to now get going, right?
Grow, grow, grow. And we figured that putting this marketing assistant, their sales assistant, and this account manager in place is actually going to save you money in the first year, and going forward, if you're doing all of these tasks yourself as the agency owner. So so that's what we focused on. And the more we've drilled down, Joel, over the year, we've seen that the better success we're getting with this thing, and we're at a point where, you know, inside we're, I think this is our 16 month operating.
And the interest in our service fingers crossed is at a record breaking level right now. And we foresee a good, good year towards the end of this year as well. So yeah, that's kind of short and sweet. That went down for a little bit, but I just get excited about rep stack man.
Joe Troyer 6:49
Yeah, that's awesome. So you're in the, you know, the digital marketing world for 10 plus years, you start investing in coaching and outside help and masterminds and self help. And you have this kind of defining moment, and things take off. You know, I love to say, like, you know, as as entrepreneurs, but as anybody, like, we don't know what we don't know, right, and like when we can get around people that have been there that have done that, that have hit the levels that we want to hit, have done the things that we want to do, all of a sudden, we gain clarity on what it is that we don't know.
And even if we don't understand the whole thing, we can then start to do research and to figure it out. But we have these aha moments. So I'm curious, like, what were one of those or two of those aha moments, those defining moments where you went from being in this business, you know, doing six figures to boom, like inside? It was 15 months, you guys go to seven figures, like, that's crazy. So like, I, I know, my audience will kill me. If I don't like dig into this.
Azhar Siddiqui 7:49
What was awesome question, dude. That's awesome question. And it's really hard to define that. But sometimes, like, especially, you know, I'm really blessed into the journey that we're going through right now. And for this to have happen, I can definitely go back and find that identify that aha moment for you. And this goes back to, you know, 8020, where, you know, what are the 20% of the things that you're doing that are getting the most results? And I would have to say that, you know, during the, just to get the ball rolling for rep stack, we signed our joint venture.
And that's when how repsect got started. So, you know, my co Josh Nelson is always saying that you're just one joint venture away from a seven figure agency. And and he's really true to that, because we're a testament to that, because it happened to us, we had our first client that turned into the first joint venture, and our second client turned into the second joint venture. So we had to write from right out the gates.
And that got us the momentum. And, and yeah, that was a defining moment, man, that first and that first VA, we call our virtual associates are not assistants, that still he's still employed with our first client. And he's gone from an appointment setter, to a sales executive right now closing five figure deals on a daily basis for the client.
Joe Troyer 9:19
Yeah, man. That's frickin awesome. So I'm really curious, like, Did you set out with like, this grand vision, right? Like, these are gonna get them they're gonna be the perfect clients, they're gonna be the perfect jayvees. And there's, they're just gonna blow this thing up. But like, did it happen?
Azhar Siddiqui 9:37
No. So in a funny thing is about vision. You know, I think as a lot of us entrepreneurs, we are dreamers. And we like to have these big, lofty goals. And that's amazing man. I identify with so many people like you, Joe, who are good, great visionary thinkers, and do these amazing things just by thinking about a future and then making that happen. That's part of our jobs as well as company leaders.
But when it comes down to just start doing and landing that first client, you don't have to be so strict about that particular vision, man, you just need to get that client. And, you know, and trust me, like we've gone through clients where we've, you know, broken, our entire systems bent over backwards to get these people in.
And turns out that we don't even want to work in that particular space, let alone with that particular client, right. So it's going to happen, especially early on, but that shouldn't stop us from taking imperfect moves, right. So get going close that first deal. You know, even if it's project work right now, get it done, close it, get the revenue in the door. And as you start getting the revenue in, you'll figure out how to streamline the service offering that you're going out to market with
Joe Troyer 10:54
100% 100%, man? So um, can you give us a little peek of what things look like right now? Like, how many clients do you have? How many then, you know, positions are filled, or how many people are on the team because of your clients out what your average number of people that each client has just some high level information like that?
Azhar Siddiqui 11:16
Yeah, so we're just over 100 clients right now, we are approaching 200 people inside our organization in about 16 months. So that's been a complete, mind blown for me, because I'm 13 years I've been a one man show, and working with contractors, and all of a sudden, you know, close to 200 people that you're responsible for as a CEO. So, you know, that's been a mind bender. And, and then in terms of our average client has 1.25. associates with them right now, some of them have four or five people, you know, a lot of them have to three, and a lot of them are just starting out.
And they start out usually with a marketing assistant. So that's kind of how we're spread out. Revenues are on the rise, we should be ending this year with multiple seven figures. In our first year of operation, we had the seven figure run rate. And we're on track to doing over 3 million in revenue this year. So the run rate part so so that's kind of where we're at right now we're foreseeing I think there's there's a huge potential in the field that we're in working specifically with agency owners.
And right now we're focused on digital marketing agencies. But you know, any agency that has a retainer based model, there's real estate agencies, there's other agencies, they might be separate verticals for us. But the type of person we're bringing in, on the marketing side, the sales side account manager side, you know, these are common to any agency model out there. So hopefully, in the future, we'll we'll be thinking about something like that. And then the eventual goal, like you talked about, on the vision side, eventual goal is to turn this you know, company, or we're kind of helping our clients out with placements right now.
But turn this into a platform, where, you know, managers, entry level managers from grade schools across the world can come on build out their entire careers, inside agencies, in sales, marketing, and accounts, and and clients come from all around the world can come to the platforms, sort of like Upwork for just just for agencies and talent for agencies.
Joe Troyer 13:33
And I love that that's an awesome vision of work for agencies. That's cool. So let's talk about the the main positions, because you said something important, and I want to make sure we don't gloss over it. You got you guys got really serious about a couple of positions within a marketing agency and saying, we're not going to cover everything, right, we're gonna get really realized we're really going to go after three, I think it was three positions. Can you tell us about those positions?
Azhar Siddiqui 14:01
Yeah, so those three positions again, you know, going bit back to the basics, the prerequisite of our clients, we're thinking that these guys are already crushing it when it comes down to fulfillment. So you know, and we did do this, and this is where our understanding and learning came from, by filling out some of these positions for our clients and realizing that that's not what we want to do. We don't want to face a website expert or a WordPress expert or a PHP coder with a client.
That's there's a lot of other options already out there. We're trying to really put this virtual associate who is really an entry level manager inside an agency, they're going to be able to start out in these three key roles. The marketing because I know if you're in six figures wanting to go seven figures, chances are that your marketing is not set up the way it should be, especially for a digital marketing agency. So that marketing assistant comes in and starts doing this full time.
For You 160 hours a month, consistently, instead of us wearing multiple hats. So that's the first person that we identified the marketing assistant, they can start doing building out the outreaches. And there's a lot of other campaigns that we've identified for our clients they should be working on. So, you know, it usually takes a marketing assistant about 60 to 90 days to have some first few of these campaigns up and running, and some results coming through the door. So usually, at this point, 90 days to six months in now you're ready for a sales assistant, where this person comes in. And this is not your, our, you know, grandfather's cold callers are coming in, we give them a you know, throw list at their face and tell them to just dial dial dial like crazy. This is very sophisticated.
And for, you know, the people we're working with were digital marketing agencies, that were already doing sophisticated things for our clients, it just makes sense that we do the same thing for ourselves. So when your sales assistant, the type of sales assistant that we've identified, this person comes in, and this person is again, you know, a college graduate, and, you know, business degree in marketing, maybe understand what digital marketing is, in this day and age.
And they come in, and you know, they're these sweet talkers. And, you know, they come in, and they start booking appointments for their clients now, because the marketing assistant if they've done their job, there's some outreach campaigns going on. If you have some budget, there's some opt ins, that you're running on Facebook and Google and things like that. And you have all these inbound inquiries coming in people opening your emails and things like that. Now you situate this sales assistant thing, and this person starts booking appointments on the closers, calendar. So this stuff starts happening as clockwork.
And now you start closing more deals, hopefully, between three and five new deals every month. And you get to a point where you're starting to cross 10 clients who are on monthly retainers, now, you're going to want to insulate yourself from the last part of this agency day to day, which is managing clients yourself. So you know, a lot of times I've seen this, and myself included, you know, I'm walking at the mall on a Friday night with my wife in a good mood. And this client calls in true story. You know, there's a shouting match going on that, you know, there's a tea missing on the About Us page, and it needs to get fixed right now. Right? So, so as agency owners, we've been there done that. But now as with the help of the marketing assistant, and the sales assistant, the agency is on target to grow towards your seven figures, it's not going to go there.
And as for as long as you are still doing the account management for your agency, you can't handle all of these clients at the same time. And still make sure that you hit seven figures, you need to insulate yourself, put a person in like an account manager who loves doing this is their full time jobs, again, 40 hours a week, 160 hours a month, this person's sole responsibility is to manage if you have 2030 clients right now, usually one account manager inside a digital marketing agency, you know, 15 to 25 clients, they should be able to manage for you.
And, and this person's sole responsibility is retention for you. So now, you know, and now you're not getting that phone call. You can continue to grow or to seven figures and beyond. So that's why these three key roles are so important. That you know and every single digital marketing agency owner who is inside six figures right now, if they can start placing these people, I think the road to seven figures becomes really, really easy and really fast.
Joe Troyer 18:50
Yep, that makes perfect sense. I like I like the order that you get right marketing assistance, then sales assistants and account managers. I'm curious, like, how did you come up with that structure? Where'd that come from?
Azhar Siddiqui 19:03
Yeah, that's again from you know, 13 years ago, struggling through it myself. So anytime I wanted to grow my agency. You know, the first thought that came to me like to a lot of my friends and listeners, is that, okay, let's get a cold calling service. Let's get a lot of appointments. And let's run around with sales, right?
But it doesn't work like that, man. I've tried it several times. And it just doesn't work like that. Think of it like we're digital marketing agencies. We're doing marketing for other people. And we're not doing we're skipping that vital part, which is the marketing part. And we're moving directly over to sales. And what are we going to sell? Well, you know, marketing is going to define your offer for you, right, it's going to do so many things for you. And by the time it starts coming down to the sales, it becomes a lot easier.
So that's, you know, trial and error Joe, doing it myself getting slapped around. Over the years that this is not the way I do it again, this is not the way. And then finally, you know, when we when I got a chance to see our clients do it, the right ones, were always people who had these amazing marketing strategies set up for their own digital marketing agency, these amazing funnels, whether it's a simple giveaway, or a book or whatever it is, webinars, constantly podcasting, proper email outreach, there's so many proper ways of doing this.
And once that was taken care of, then these marketing assistants come in. And it's devil's playground for the right person in there, man, like I told you, our first person that we placed a Rebstock is still employed with our first client. And and that dude is crushing it right now, in terms of the bonuses and the Commission's he's making in US dollars while sitting in Pakistan. It's just, you know, it's a warm and fuzzy feeling. For me for sure, because that's what it's all about right now.
Joe Troyer 21:01
You know, it makes a ton of sense that you've structured things that way. You know, I've always I've always started with like an SDR helping send cold emails and respond to them and things like that, that are easily replicatable, but gets me out of it. So I can focus on the next step, which is sales, right? And then it's on account management, and then pull myself out of each. But you're so right, like the the viewpoint I think is refreshing. Because like, in my last agency that I built by myself, I went from zero to seven figures, right, a million dollar run rate in four months, right.
And it was fast, and it was furious. But like, there's so much lost opportunity everywhere. To your point, I was doing no marketing internally as a company, I was a sales organization, right? Marketing Agency, and like to be honest, like if somebody didn't buy on the first call, we never followed up with them again. I had webinars, I had no podcast, I had no tripwires. I had nothing after the initial consultation or the initial conversation, to change that lead and try to convert them again. So I think it's really cool to help, you know, in that business, what would have happened if I would have had a marketing assistant,
Azhar Siddiqui 22:15
Mary, tremendous, do tremendous, those marketing things, I'll tell you that, you know, and this time around, we did this completely differently, right, because we had our clients in front of us. And we would have been, you know, like, I don't know what to call myself if we didn't do it this way. But we did the right way. We started out with a person in our marketing department who was just assistant back in February 2021.
And, and this person is director of marketing with a six person team right now, inside our marketing. And, you know, right now with with everything that we've got in play just right now, and we're just getting started this year, like I said, we're at 110 strategy calls booked for us this month of February, and we still have two days to go in February. And that's a record breaking month for us. And it looks like that that's not going to be a one off thing. It's going to get to be an average for us going forward this year.
And that's all been possible because of this robust marketing machine that we set up. And to be honest, this time around at rep stack sales department was the last department we just built out. We started building this department out somewhere in October. And right now we're just we're not even fully funded on that side right now. But you know, we have an SDR in place right now. It's just amazing to see this SDR come in and how she's booking appointments right now.
And going back to those, you know, we have partially qualified people, right. So there are who come on strategy sessions. They're not completely qualified to work with us right now. But now this SDR is going back and calling those people up. And we're seeing so many opportunities pop out of that, just because we did it right with the sequence marketing, first sales after that, and then account management to make sure that you retain all the clients that you bring in.
Joe Troyer 24:10
It makes perfect sense. I'm sure most of our people do would love to have 100 sales calls in any given month. And again, I gotta ask you, when you when you look at what marketing channels, those came from, what's what are kind of some of the top level things that are working for you guys.
Azhar Siddiqui 24:25
Yeah, so like I said that, you know, the first bread and butter that we got early on was our joint ventures. We're still getting, some of those joint ventures are still delivering but I would say if we were booking 100 calls in a month, I would say about 20% of them are coming from our joint ventures now. So 80% of it is coming from our own marketing right now and I'm extremely proud of that. And where they're coming from a good bulk is coming from Facebook. We're doing a lot of Facebook, highly targeted Facebook and then we have you know, we have different lists that we're working with. And then, so so that's one of them. We're also doing outreach, you know, very sophisticated outreach, which a digital marketing agency if they're going to be doing outreach, that's how it's supposed to be done a six step, email sequence with lots of cool information, very easy to digest and things like that.
And then we connect all of these campaigns together with a really robust retargeting campaign. So you hit one of our links or our page, we got you everywhere. So you know, all of that stuff is good to go. So you know, it's a combination, our SEO is just starting to kick in right now. We're starting to land on first pages for the keywords that we wanted. So I think before the end of the year, and we're going to actually to this year, we invested in two industry events as well. The ad world is coming up in October, and and then there is the Traffic and Conversion camp, Traffic and Conversion conference in San Francisco in September.
So we're planning on attending both of them. So yeah, it's looking like, you know, we're here without doing any of these things right now. And we've got a few things planned this year in terms of marketing, which are huge. So we're just hoping that it's just going to continue at the same time.
Joe Troyer 26:28
Yeah, man, that's frickin awesome. Congratulations. Um, let's shift for a second, I'd be remiss if we didn't talk about talent acquisition, and training, and how you guys place this kind of top shelf, elite level virtual assistants at rep stack? I mean, obviously, you guys have really figured something out.
Azhar Siddiqui 26:51
Yeah, so you know, the talent acquisition. And I'll be honest, when we first started out, you know, and we've been lucky with the demand that it's always been there for us from day one. And it's been like, you know, our talent acquisition was really primitive at that time. And, and we've made a lot of mistakes over there. But that's some one thing that we had to figure out really, really fast.
Because, you know, that's the product or the service we're providing, it has to be top notch. So, so right now, that's, you know, I used to be the, I used to take over HR two, but now we have like an entire robust HR departments, they actually did three University boots. This past week alone, we have a huge amount of applicants applying. And we only have one final for that, which is our careers page on our website, where they have to start out with a video ask interview. So video, ask is a good tool for great grab grabbing client reviews on, I've seen a lot of agency owners do that. But we kind of flipped it upside upside down. And you know, we wanted to bring this talent in.
But for us, the communication was number one, and for our clients as well. So you know, so that this video ads kind of gives us that window right there, from the get go of who we're calling back. And from there, we have a three to four step process on the HR side. And then after the HR side, we have our rep stack Success Academy, where we're bringing these people in, in these three specific tracks, marketing assistant sales assistant and account manager. And they go through a minimum four week training inside our repsect Success Academy before they're placed with a client. And what that allows us to do is that you know, we've gone through this rigorous HR process, but now we want to see you inside, we call our zoom, one of our zoom rooms is called the RSA auditorium.
And everybody who's part of auditorium, usually we have 30 people are 30 to 35 people at any given time in that batch. And those people are supposed to be in that room at all times. Because at this point, we're really trying to check out their work ethic man's 95 You're going to be available if I call on you, are you going to see me right away. And if we see start seeing red flags, they're out there even before they get a chance to meet a client. And when we first started out, it was not like that. So So I think I'm actually extremely proud that we got amazing and that's part of the reason where, you know, you kind of want to work with a service provider like rep stack is we're taking care of all of these things. On the backend we understand our clientele. And by the time we onboard this person, there's a level of confidence that you know, they're going to be able to do these tasks in this particular track.
Joe Troyer 29:47
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Man, I love the auditorium on boom, that is frickin awesome. Um, we've done a lot of things. Similar we handle training very much the same way way, we, we hire quickly, we vet very hard, but we, we still hire quickly, but we fire even faster. And that the auditorium is a great tip. I love that.
Azhar Siddiqui 30:14
Thanks, man. Yeah, I'm just, you know, when you're when you're growing at the rate that we've been growing these things, you have to kind of you know, there's ideas coming your way, and you have to move fast. And you have to fix things fast as well. So, you know, we we saw an issue with, with work ethic. And we're like, No way, even though we had Time Doctor, we had all of these things, you know, we had this, you know, we started out with one week mandatory training, we increased to four weeks now.
You know, so all of those things kind of came with trial and error and fast. So we fixed ourselves, and we continue to move in that direction. And, you know, and that's my recommendation to anyone that you know, when you guys are starting to grow, invest in your own marketing, invest in your own systems and processes. You know, the amount of money that we're paying right now to some of these software's like, click up to Slack, to you know, God knows how many other software's right now, it's, it's crazy, but you do invest in that, instead of, you know, let's build out our own software. For God's sake, let's just focus on the task at hand, what we're supposed to do not build out another software for yourself right now. Use what you got, and continue to improve your the service offering that you have.
Joe Troyer 31:33
That's beautiful man. How do you? How do you think about training in your head? Because you know that your onboarding, your training, your hiring is going to be a major sunk cost, right? Every time you fire one of those, you don't play some there's no money coming out the other side? How do you? How do you keep your mind in check? Lots of people would be like, in your shoes like, man, yeah, your pants, these people are training like you're spending all these resources, getting them up to speed. Yeah, like,
Azhar Siddiqui 32:05
yeah, so that's, that's a good question. On our site, I think, based on what we talked about earlier on, I think this is a no brainer for us. Because when a person starts out, especially on the associate site, with rep stack, we're starting out with every single day's data point for them, you know, you're you're a big data guy, Joe. And, you know, that's kind of my roadmap towards taking rep stack into a platform, where, you know, this person has a data map of every single day that he's logged in, through Time Doctor, and every one of his clients.
So, you know, God forbid, if a client leaves, which they do, you know, this person, we don't let this person go, because this person has worked with a client for now six or seven months or a year. And this person, as long as it's, you know, we've checked out everything, and everything is in the right direction, it's not their fault, they come back on a bench. And while on the bench, you know, they continue to do their some upgraded trainings and things like that. And now we're actually able to place this person really easily because now we have a track record for this person, we can go to our next client, I look, this is the best person, we've seen his eight years of performance, he will he logged in five minutes late one time, and he had a reason for that.
So right, so we were just starting out with this thing right now. So that's where we want to be, we want to be able to, you know, let these people build their careers inside rep stack. And you know, every single training they take, every, every time they log into work, every time they get a raise from their client. Anything that happens, we have a record of that. And going forward, as years go by, we'll be able to get more and more money, better health care plans, and you know, better commission structures and things like that. So, so training and stuff like that, it's a no brainer, man, we want to invest in it right from the get go. And we want to continue to invest in it. And because our person our associate is really our resource that we're going out to the market with. Yeah,
Joe Troyer 34:12
no, I completely get that. And it makes sense to invest in them. Because the longer you keep them, the better they're going to be if you keep training them, right, and you'll be able to keep giving your your clients better and better results and better and better people and then
Azhar Siddiqui 34:25
that's the thing with with all the agencies, like, you know, we've seen, you know, some of these people, like I said, our client number one, this kid went from being an appointment setter to a sales executive right now inside of a year. And that's because not only because he was doing his job, but big part of it was because the client saw that he's not just another VA. He's actually a part of the team. And they were fair in the compensations that they were giving out to their US based team. They decided to give the same comp compensation on the commission side to a person who's based out outside of the US. And it turned out to be a great win.
And, and this person is treated as a part of the team there. And you know, they've invested a year and some months with this person, and they plan plan on him being there for years to come, right. So this person has gone and built a career inside this agency. In two years, three years, he might be a head of sales. And that's kind of the vision that I have for these people, when they come inside an organization. They may be starting out as a marketing assistant right now for you. But they help you turn that thing around. And they have the right aptitude for right leadership and things like that. These people could be running your departments for you, with their own teams while you're sitting at a beach and sipping that that whatever, that drink by V. Right. So yeah, so that's kind
Joe Troyer 35:53
of whatever that frozen, sugary sweet drink. No, I love that. And, and, and that's my attitude, man. Like, when we find good people, we never let them go. Right? Like, I don't even like saying the word virtual assistant, because I feel like it just has like a negative connotation. Right? You'll often hear me use different names, not virtual assistants just because of that. And I've never called anybody on my team, a virtual assistant, because I feel like sometimes they will leave it's a it's a negative connotation as well. Yeah, yeah, you know, I use, I use different words. But at the end of the day, you know, once you know you have the right person, it makes sense to invest in them right for the long term. So how do you cut bait? Or how do you?
How do you? How do you get rid of your risk on the front end when you're training somebody for a month? Right? What you guys do? How do you? How do you? How do you get rid of people that aren't the right fit? Right? Well, yeah, so earring funnel? Yeah, do you your risk
Azhar Siddiqui 36:52
there? Yeah. So we try to do all of that stuff on the front end as much as possible. But even then, you're going to make some mistakes. But I think we're moving in a direction right now we were just finishing up this month, we were looking at a number today KPI that we track, which is how many of our people that we the contracts that we signed, and the associates that were on boarded last month, how many of them have successfully completed their first 30 days with the client. And and we saw that number to be 100%. And, and that was a beautiful number to look at, because it has not always been 100%. Right. And, but the thing is that we're trying to cut that upfront so that we continue to have these strong numbers when these people are placed with the clients. And how we do that is with by having a strong HR process force. HR as a department is responsible for the first, I believe one week of this person going into the next department, which is our reps that success academy.
Over here, this person is enrolled for 30 days before they're even considered for a client. And over here, like we're tracking lots of different we're getting them to do disc assessments. We're monitoring them in our auditorium on a daily basis. They're doing all these CRM trainings, high level, whichever ones they're putting through for the marketing assistant, when the salesperson is doing their trainings, and so on and on. So you know, if we see any red flags, we see these people not logging in on time, we see these people not delivering on the quality that they promised us in HR, they're already out the door. So we want to see attrition.
We want to see it right over here in this first five weeks before they start hitting our clients. And we've done our job good over here with client, the retention numbers are speaking for themselves right now, this month, has been one of our best months on retention, we're close to 96%, which is close to digital marketing, where we're on the HR side. You know, if you compare yourselves with people what they're doing on Upwork and Fiverr, with virtual assistants. Those numbers are horrendous. And we're kind of matching the digital marketing agency retention ratios of 95% plus so so I'm really proud of that as well. But that happens because of the strong processes up front.
Joe Troyer 39:24
Yeah, beautiful. I love one thing that you said. And I just want to echo it back to make sure people got it right that HR is responsible for the basically the first week of outcome inside of the Success Academy. That is, is brilliant because a lot of the success academy
Azhar Siddiqui 39:38
is held accountable for the first 30 days of that person going to a client now. So that's why the number that we were tracking 100% of people who were on boarded in December completed their 30 days in January. That's tracked by our training academy because they're guaranteeing that this person is going to last At least 30 days when they go over to a client.
Joe Troyer 40:02
Yeah, I love that. I feel like so many times HR and training are separate. And you have this big gap, right? And then, because of that, there's a lot of financial risk, because of it and a lot of blowout or lack of retention. Yeah, I was, like how you really made those two departments if you will work together.
Azhar Siddiqui 40:21
Yeah, and hold each other accountable. Sometimes, you know, like, things are moving so fast. And sometimes our teams grow really fast. And you know, we want to be the great leaders. But that doesn't mean that, you know, you don't call what how it is, man, that's really important. And sometimes, you know, you you kind of enjoy it is like a work family, you guys are spending so much time there and feels bad to you know, some people you really, really like enjoy working with. And if they're not performing, you might be overlooking that. So, you know, my suggestion there would be to, you know, call it as it is, man, you're gonna save yourself a lot of headache and money.
Joe Troyer 41:01
Yeah, Willie agreed. So, um, it's only been what, like two years at Reb step that you guys have grown to have, like almost 200 people and staff. What would you say? Like, if we zoom out, we talked about a lot today, you gave us a ton of takeaways, but what would you say is like the the 8022 rep stacks growth, but like, even if we apply at 22 itself, right? Yeah, that's 64 for like, what, what is the top couple of things, I'll make sure that we really got the essence of your guys's explosive growth. So getting
Azhar Siddiqui 41:35
started, it was definitely 100% of our business was from our joint ventures that we signed early on. So that's really good. Like, if you can think of joint ventures and if you can land one, even if it's not at the best pricing right now is going to give you that client base, you know, we have a huge list of case studies already. Inside, we've been operating for 16 months, this business, not even two years right now. And so that was 100%. But once that started working, we weren't afraid to put that money back into the company, and really build out a marketing department.
And because we were always worried that what's going to happen if this joint venture goes away tomorrow, right, because it's just a relationship, one on one, and could happen, right? So I was always constantly worried. And that's why, for me, the most important thing was to get that marketing going. As soon as we have the social proof, we have close to 100 client testimonials already, we have so many different things going for us it would be stupid not to do this, where ourselves.
And we started focusing on that from last February. And the proof is in the pudding that you know, only 20% of our new customers are coming from our joint ventures right now 80% of them are coming in from our own marketing. And that too at a price point of $14 an hour, which is you know, it's I believe, $2,300 a month contract, about 25 $26,000 a year contract. So So I'm extremely proud of that. And that's the lesson there that, you know, once you do get that opportunity to grow really fast, put that money back in and solidify your marketing department as soon as possible fix. And then we also have to invest on our services where right on our operations is bulletproof right now, you know, ours, our customer service reps, Client Success reps, were taking care of our clients and things like that we invested in that, you know, we implemented clickup across the across the board.
We got the best tools in the industry for our HR. You know, we're using cutting edge tools. Like I said, Vidyo ask, who met people may not be using that, especially in the country we're operating in, so we continue to invest in it. And, and things continue to move fast and fast and even faster to this day.
Joe Troyer 44:08
That's awesome, man. So um, if somebody wants to work with you guys, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you guys?
Azhar Siddiqui 44:16
Just our website reps tag. Cool. And there's a link for discount to book a discovery call there. There's a whole bunch of client case studies on there. And in the notes, just mentioned, Mr. Troyer sent you and we'll make sure that you know we thank you Troyer for that, Mr. Troy for that so yeah, that's that's easy, man. Just repsect Dotco. Everything is on there. And you can easily book a discovery call from there.
Joe Troyer 44:47
Perfect. I know. I definitely want to connect with you guys about a position or two in a company that I have. So we'll have to talk about that offline. In wrapping this up. I always ask people like one question. I'm a voracious reader, but I hate more than anything wasting my time. Like, if you ask me what my pet peeve is, it's that like, like, Nothing's worse for me than like picking up a book and I just can't get into it.
And it's yeah, I'll get. And then like, I forced myself to read it and find that gave myself like, the blessing that if I don't like a book, like within the first two chapters, but but it annoys me bomb, but I love books. So I always asked my guests, right, they're all from different walks of life, and of all different experiences. You know, instead of asking you to recommend three books like, man, like you look at your life, as you look at your business, as you look at all the crazy things that you guys have accomplished in a short amount of time, like, what's the one book that you think has made the biggest impact? And why?
Azhar Siddiqui 45:52
I'm so that's a good question, man. And I'm kind of new to this self learning. But I think that has played a huge part in how everything this breakthrough for Rebstock came about, you know, about three years ago. And you know, for me, reading has been, you know, like, you know, I didn't know what I have. But you know, just reading that book is not for me, but I found listening to books really worked for me. And about three, three years ago, I got myself an audible membership. And, you know, so I can't really pinpoint to just that one particular book. But I'll quickly give you these three, my three best books that I really enjoyed, or the last few years. But even before going into that, Joe, I think the important thing here is as entrepreneurs and as people who are wanting to build something remarkable, the voracious appetite for learning, right? So as you build that up, there's going to be things that are going to because you know, me, finding a coach came out of this, you know, reading because I read Josh Nelson's book, seven figure agency roadmap, I call them up and you know, move on from step to step.
So, so over the last three years, I think I just put this down in chat for you as well. I've read 50 Plus books, which may not be a lot for it is for me, for sure. But 300 Plus podcast episodes as well. And one that I really enjoy is guy Ross's how I built this. It's an NPR podcast, I really enjoyed that one too. But on the book side, I like learning from other people's lives. So I'm kind of like into biographies, and sometimes or autobiographies as well. And so, you know, the one I put down at the top of my list is the Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, I really, really enjoyed it. Something that I recently read is well by Will Smith, really good. And this last one that I put down is How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.
I don't know if you guys have heard of it or not. But it's, it's a best seller. It's by a Pakistani American and British author, Mohsen Amin. And it's a beautiful book. It's it's disguised as a self help book. It's really a novel. But you know, all of us, entrepreneurs lead need that visionary, kickstart or jumpstart from time to time, and reading that book and did exactly that for me about three years ago. It put me in a place of this, you know, this person, and the book took me I can put that book down. And just like what you said, I just wanted to end this was one of those. I was still reading books at that time. And I finished this book in less than a week. And it's a beautiful novel, I highly recommend you guys check it out. But that's kind of my story on learning, man, the more you learn, the faster success comes. I think so better get into it as soon as possible.
Joe Troyer 48:59
Love it, man. I'm excited about your recommendation through so I just finished the Shoe Dog. And man, it was so good. I feel like probably one of the best like Hero's Journey book I ever went through ever. You also talked about audible. And yeah, that's been key for me like I'm big in the gym, big and fitness. And I'm at the gym working out or, you know, running or doing a sauna like probably for like 90 minutes to two hours a day. Yeah. Like, audible becomes very easy and I don't listen to it every day. There's sessions where I don't want to listen to anything or listen to some. But I think yeah, Audible is a way to get through a lot of content really, really fast.
Azhar Siddiqui 49:45
I agree, man, it's it's been groundbreaking for me for sure. Like all my breakthroughs have come when I actively started listening to books and these podcasts and learning and so I highly recommend Whatever it is, if it's reading, it's listening, whatever works for you. Just get it done.
Joe Troyer 50:06
And then your other two recommendations will buy Will Smith has been on my list. So that'll have to become a reality and how to get filthy rich in raising Asia or Rising Asia? I haven't heard of that one, actually. So that'll be on my list. So thank you for yes, two to two endorsements. I appreciate that.
Azhar Siddiqui 50:23
No worries, man. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Oh, Joe.
Joe Troyer 50:27
One last tip for everybody. There's an app called hoopla. And I'm apparently behind the scenes on this one are way behind. But hoopla lets you connect to your to your local libraries, inventory, and licensing. And you can get almost every book about probably 75% of the books on audible that cost like $10 $12 apiece, or on hoopla for free with a free library membership. So definitely check that out.
If you're a voracious, not reserved reader listener, like I am, and you're doing it two hours a day, you're gonna plow through credits, and audible is gonna get really expensive. It's not that big of a deal when it's 20 bucks a month, but when you start spending 20 bucks a day, or every other day gets out of control fast. Well, H O P L, a great little app download. You can do everything just like Audible.
Azhar Siddiqui 51:19
I just slacked myself. That name so
Joe Troyer 51:23
awesome, brother. Well, man, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. I know everybody, I'm sure got a ton of value at it today. Guys, go follow Azhar keep up with rap stack. They're doing some really really cool things, a company to look out for. I love their vision as well for the future and where they're going. And I'm excited. And I'll be here watching the journey. I hope you guys enjoyed today's session. Azhar. Thank you so much, man, Joe Troyer. Thanks for having me Joe.
