Brad Weimert: Jason Hennessey. I appreciate you carving out some time to talk today, man.
Jason Hennessey: Thank you. Appreciate it. You’re in LA. Welcome.
Brad Weimert: Thank you. I am in LA and in your… When you said you had a studio set up and you sent me a picture, I saw a picture of like a conference room table. And I could tell you have some dope cameras in the control center and good lighting but I didn’t realize that you had this full-blown, well, we had to pick the green screen set up because you’ve got this full-blown thing here.
Jason Hennessey: Why not?
Brad Weimert: I just thought it was fun. So, we got introduced through a mutual friend, Erik Huberman, who’s also been on the show, also has a marketing agency, but very different than yours.
Jason Hennessey: He does. Yes.
Brad Weimert: I watched the video and prepped for this of your journey from 0 to 20 million as an agency owner, and the lessons that you learned there, which was awesome.
Jason Hennessey: Thank you.
Brad Weimert: I want to hit on a lot of things around that but let’s start with SEO as the beginning, and you can tell me how you found SEO in the first place. But your agency is specifically SEO, right?
Jason Hennessey: Yes. SEO, some paid marketing as well, and for the most part, we work with law firms throughout the country like a lot of the billboard lawyers that you see in the different markets that you go to. In most cases, those are our clients. I’ve been working in SEO for two decades now. The gray hair exposes that. And I got into the legal marketing. Life happens on accident. You have a plan and then all of a sudden, life happens, right? And that’s how I ended up getting into SEO, which was in 2001. I was going to college at UNLV. I just got out of the Air Force. I served my country for four years, stationed in Las Vegas, had met my wife. That’s a whole nother story. We met on the day after Valentine’s Day, and we got married a month and a half later.
Brad Weimert: Wow.
Jason Hennessey: And on April Fool’s Day, I came home, half-jokingly said, “Hey, let’s get married.” She said half-jokingly, “Yes.” Next thing you know we’re getting married, right? So, that was 25 years later. So, actually it worked out. Three kids later. But back to the SEO story. So, I was going to college, I was married, I was a radio personality. I know we have that similar thing as far as deejaying, and next thing you know I’m going to college, going to go to law school. And then my side hustle is deejaying weddings on the weekends. And so, I had to find a way to generate more business. And so, I found SEO and I stumbled upon it. I read a book about it. And next thing you know, I was kind of like immersed in this industry. I knew that that was going to change marketing as we knew it. And so, I went all in.
Brad Weimert: This is 2001?
Jason Hennessey: This is 2001. And then as an entrepreneur, you don’t just have one company. You now all of a sudden you got a million ideas. And so, I’m like, “Wouldn’t it be amazing if there was like a place where brides can plan their wedding online?” And so, I built a website called Vegas Wedding Mall at the time, and that was like one of the first legal, I mean, wedding directories. And that’s where I basically taught myself SEO. And Los Angeles Wedding Mall was built and then Seattle Wedding Mall. And so, I ended up selling those and then found my way back into the legal space again.
Brad Weimert: Interesting. So, SEO in 2001 was what? Keyword stuffing.
Jason Hennessey: Keyword stuffing, white text on white backgrounds. Yeah. Meta keyword tags, that work, yeah.
Brad Weimert: Get the words on the pages and the search engine will find them.
Jason Hennessey: It was a lot easier but a lot more mysterious because it was like a new thing. If you knew SEO back in those days, you were like a small god. Yeah. You were.
Brad Weimert: Yeah, that makes sense. So, you did something that people still do today, which is just build out the same site in a whole bunch of different areas.
Jason Hennessey: Yeah.
Brad Weimert: And just drove because local traffic is easier than national or global traffic. So, build out the local sites. What did you sell those for and why did you sell them?
Jason Hennessey: So, it’s not like the story where you think I became rich from it.
Brad Weimert: Right. That’s why I like to talk about it.
Jason Hennessey: Yeah. It’s actually just the opposite, you know? Hey, we’re here to be vulnerable, right? I mean, like most people watching this, they want to learn from people’s failures and not their success. And so, with that, in hindsight, you said that it makes sense to kind of build a bunch of local websites. But knowing what I know now about SEO, it would have made more sense just to build out one site, and that one website could serve as Seattle and like a Knot, right? There’s a site called The Knot, or there’s a site called WeddingWire. These are like national websites. They have unlimited resources. It would have made more sense to do that because when you’re doing SEO, you’re driving links to a website, and the links is really the currency that makes it rank. So, instead of having one website that has a lot of authority, now you have to spread that with 12 or 15 websites.
And so, the story with that is we actually had one site and it was Vegas Wedding Mall and we’re like, “Hey, this is great. Let’s create Seattle Wedding Mall. Let’s create Los Angeles Wedding Mall. Let’s create Phoenix Wedding Mall.” And so, we just replicated the actual site, which wasn’t hard because we had the technology. But what we did was we’re like, “Okay. Great. Let’s hire a call center. Let’s get a call center. Let’s get people dialing for dollars.” And so, we set this up and it turned into a full business. And next thing you know, we had people that were basically coming in and getting on phone calls and telling these people that had wedding businesses anything that they needed to say to get them to sign up. And so, these salespeople were a little dubious, right? And we weren’t monitoring calls at the time, right?
Brad Weimert: Salespeople? No.
Jason Hennessey: And so, somebody would be like, “Oh, yeah. It’s $99 to sign up,” just because they wanted to get that $100 spiff that was on the wall for the day, for the person that gets the first clothes or the fifth clothes. And so, people were being lied to. And so, we didn’t know that. And then next thing you know, we got the business and this is like now 8, 9, 12 months into this. And then we woke up one morning and we were expecting a large batch of money to hit our account, and the money didn’t hit. And I go to my business partner at the time like, “Hey, you know what’s going on? Payroll was due in a couple of days. The money hasn’t hit yet.” And then we called up and they’re like, “Oh, you guys exceeded the 3% chargeback.” And so, I go, “Do you know anything about this?” And he pulled out like a stack of chargebacks.
He’s like, “Oh, yeah, I didn’t know that they were going to do anything.” And so, we ended up on this blacklist. And so, we ended up having to kind of like shut the business down. And then we ended up selling the assets to somebody else but it wasn’t like this fairy tale story that one would believe. Yeah.
Brad Weimert: So, that blacklist is called the MATCH list.
Jason Hennessey: Okay. So, yes, this is your whole business.
Brad Weimert: Right.
Jason Hennessey: You know this better than I do.
Brad Weimert: I have these stories and calls multiple times a day every day of my life. Yeah. And what’s crazy about it is like the number of. I’m talking to close friends, people that I’ve known forever or that I’ve known for a little while but we’d hang out all the time. It’s like, “Oh, no, no, no, we’re fine.” We’re not high-risk like it’s not our issue.
Jason Hennessey: Oh, yeah.
Brad Weimert: Because that happens even if you don’t get a ton of chargebacks. But when you do get a ton of chargebacks, certainly if you have people that are lying on the phone, yeah, that’s terrible.
Jason Hennessey: Not fun. And then we had to try to find high-risk merchants and we got shut. You know, we were almost like a porn website. I mean, that’s how they were treating us and it wasn’t like that but, yeah, boy, that’s crazy times.
Brad Weimert: Yeah. There are very few companies out there that truly do high-risk credit card processing. And can delineate the difference between what is actually high risk or a space that has the propensity to be but isn’t really.
Jason Hennessey: Sure. Well, the company that took us on, I still remember the name because it was like a lifesaver. It was called Humboldt, I think.
Brad Weimert: Oh yeah.
Jason Hennessey: I’m not sure if they’re still around.
Brad Weimert: They are and they’re actually in Southern California.
Jason Hennessey: They are? Okay. They’re the ones that kind of saved our business at the time but, yeah, that was the company we used.
Brad Weimert: Yeah. We have a portfolio of business with Humboldt, actually. They were acquired, and there’s a whole story there, but I’ll not geek out on payments too on here. But, yeah, it’s a far too common story. So, that ultimately crippled the business. That was the end of the business.
Jason Hennessey: It was. And so, at the time I had kids at the time and they were about to start going into like grade school. And so, is Vegas really the place that I want to raise my kids and my family? And so, we decided this is the perfect time. And so, we decided to move to the south. And so, we moved to Georgia. I had friends that were living there. I ended up connecting with a guy by the name of Brad Fallon, who is a…
Brad Weimert: I know Brad well.
Jason Hennessey: Do you?
Brad Weimert: Yeah. Last time I saw him, I beat him in chess, and it pissed him off.
Jason Hennessey: He’s so smart.
Brad Weimert: He is super smart.
Jason Hennessey: He’s got like one of the highest IQs I’ve ever met.
Brad Weimert: I was impressed with myself for beating him in chess.
Jason Hennessey: Wow.
Brad Weimert: Yeah.
Jason Hennessey: So, yeah, he had a company called Stompernet, if you remember those days.
Brad Weimert: I do.
Jason Hennessey: And so, him and Andy Jenkins. And so, I ended up moving out to the south and connecting with Brad. And I worked with Brad on his 999 launch, which was September 9, 2009. And I knew a lot about SEO, and he was the one that got me into law firm marketing, believe it or not. So, it’s a good transition because Brad was kind of like the SEO guru, right? Everybody knew of Brad as like the SEO guru because he had Stompernet, which was one of the first places where you can learn SEO, right? And they did this launch where they made like $12 million in a couple of hours by getting people to sign up for Stompernet where you can learn this stuff. And so, I was out in Georgia, living there, working a little bit with him, doing some of my own stuff, too. I was doing affiliate marketing, and I was doing some drop shipping at the time, and I was also doing SEO for two poker websites, which we can talk about too.
But Brad came in one day and said, “Hey, I got asked to speak to a group of lawyers tomorrow.” He goes, “You know a lot more about SEO than I do. I didn’t really keep up with this. I know I’m online, the guru, right? But you probably know a little bit more about the tactics that work today.” He goes, “Why don’t you come with me? I’ll just say a couple things. I’ll introduce you, and you can kind of do like a presentation.” And so, I’m like, “Okay. I don’t know anything about like law firm or marketing like that, but why not?” And so, we went there and he got up, said a couple of words, I put together a presentation, and I’m like, “Hey, I know you guys are a bunch of DUI lawyers. My presentation is not going to talk about how to rank for those terms, but it’s the same principles. I’m going to show you how I was able to rank on Google for keywords like online wedding favors or online poker.” That was a keyword that we were trying to like rank for at the time.
So, I gave this presentation, and by the time I got off of the stage, I had like seven lawyers that approached me and said, “Hey, that was really awesome. I’m paying my SEO person like $7,000 a month, and they’re not doing any of this stuff. Could we hire you to do this?” And I’m like, “Well, sure. Give me your business card. We can certainly talk.” And so, I left there at like 7 or 10 business cards. And what turned into about $30,000 to $40,000 in recurring revenue I was doing just consulting.
Brad Weimert: Amazing. Wow.
Jason Hennessey: From one presentation.
Brad Weimert: Damn. So, I mean, there are so many great things about that story for me, personally, because I’ve known Brad Fallon for a long time and actually we do his processing.
Jason Hennessey: Oh, do you?
Brad Weimert: Yeah, there’s a whole story there but I love that part. I love the throwback to Stompernet and knew that you went through that. I think one of the interesting takeaways for most people can be that when you present a complex topic to others and you literally share everything, you teach people how to do it, you tell them the whole thing, there is a huge portion of the business community that will just say…
Jason Hennessey: Do it for me.
Brad Weimert: Do it for me. Yeah, totally.
Jason Hennessey: Oh yeah.
Brad Weimert: Do it for me. And so, you launched functionally the agency for SEO for lawyers in that moment by getting a handful of clients and getting $40,000 a month recurring.
Jason Hennessey: Exactly, right. I didn’t know what I was doing at the time. That wasn’t my strategy by any means. One of my gifts, I guess, in life is I’m very good at breaking down something complex and making it very easy to understand. And so, SEO was that, right? SEO was something that was very nebulous, confusing. And so, I just got up there and like, “Look, just do this. Do this.” I was like sharing the exact strategies that they can all go home and do themselves. And like you said, they didn’t want to do it themselves. Their time is better utilized being in court or on the phone dealing with new clients that they can get. And so, yeah, that was it. And that was my first agency was an agency called Everspark Interactive and we ran that agency for about, I don’t know, maybe like five or six years.
And then we got known into doing law firm SEO. And we mostly work just with law firms like that. Started to attend a lot of the conferences, started to be asked to speak at some of the conferences, and the next thing you know, now I’m becoming like a thought leader, I guess, in that space.
Brad Weimert: Legal SEO?
Jason Hennessey: In legal SEO. Yeah. And so, that was a great journey. Learned a lot, made a lot of mistakes, had a couple of business partners. We ended up buying one of the business partners out. And then, in 2008, my business partner at the time scheduled the meeting with me. It was a breakfast. We walked in and I had no idea what he was going to share. And he said, “I’d like to buy your interest out.” He goes, “You have one vision for the company. I’ve got another vision for the company. And I want to maybe buy your interest out.” And I’m like, “Okay.” And so, he gave a number. I gave a number. We kind of met in the middle. And I ended up selling my equity in that agency, which is still around now. And it was perfect timing because my wife was pressuring me to get back to the West Coast, right? Everything happens for a reason, right? There’s no coincidences in life. It’s like, you know. And so, this is part of our fate, our destiny of what was going to happen.
My young son, Zach, who was probably 9 or 10 at the time, was just getting into acting. He had an agent that wanted to work with him that lived in California. My wife wanted to get to the West Coast because her family is in Vegas, and she wanted to be closer to them. And so, it was just the timing was perfect. And so, I sold my interest. We just moved out to California, LA. Here we come with no place to live. We were just going to do Vrbos for a couple of months and it was right in the summer so the kids didn’t have school and it was like a permanent vacation for like three months when we got here.
Brad Weimert: This is ’08, ’09?
Jason Hennessey: Yeah.
Brad Weimert: Great. And so, the first agency you did, was that all specifically legal SEO?
Jason Hennessey: I would say like 90% of what we did was legal but there were other companies that came in and we just didn’t turn them down but we weren’t marketing as our agency as like exclusively legal. We just catered to that. Yeah.
Brad Weimert: And so, the agency now, was that the next chapter? Did you start that agency?
Jason Hennessey: Yes. So, fast forward now again, 2008, I’m sorry. 2008, I take that back. 2008 is when I launched Everspark Interactive. 2015 is when we relocated to California and I sold my interest. So, we’re talking 2015 now, right? And so, we get in a car, we drive out west, we stay in Vrbos. And I’m financially secure, right? So, it’s not like I need to kind of go find a job quickly or anything. So, I ended up living in a place called Toluca Lake, which is not too far from here. I was playing a lot of tennis. I was playing tennis every single day, which was really cool.
Brad Weimert: That’s a lot of tennis, man.
Jason Hennessey: A lot of tennis and with some of the biggest stars that you probably know. It’s like the celebrity place.
Brad Weimert: That’s crazy.
Jason Hennessey: Like, I’d be just sitting there playing tennis and this guy was my partner for like an hour and a half. We’re playing tennis together. Like, we sit down and we’re just having casual conversations as we’re drinking water, and it’s like, “What do you do?” It’s like, “Oh, I edit all of the Star Wars trailers.” “Wow, that’s really cool. Like, what about you?” “I’m an actress.” “Okay. What about you?” “Oh, I’m in a band.” “Oh, cool. Like, give me the name of your band. I’ll go home and YouTube you guys.” And he’s like, “Oh, Maroon 5.” I mean, like those kind of stories. And so, it’s great. I played a lot of tennis and next thing you know I got bored. Your mind has to get stimulated and I was not going to be a professional tennis player just doing that. And so, I’m like, “Well, maybe I’ll do it again.”
And so, I created another agency which was basically just leveraging my name. And at the time it was just called Hennessey Consulting because I thought it was just going to be me doing some consulting. And that turned into something much bigger later. But next thing you know, I got one client, and then I got another client. My partner or the deal with my partner was that I can compete but I just couldn’t take any of their clients or their staff. So, I could basically kind of just compete with them. And so, I got another lawyer clients. Next thing you know I was playing tennis five days a week. It went to three days a week. It went to now I don’t even play anymore because I’ve been so busy. And that was kind of the genesis of my second agency, again, started 2015, and here we are nine years later. Yeah.
Brad Weimert: So, the second time around, what was the growth trajectory like? What was revenue year 1 to 5? What did the path look like?
Jason Hennessey: So, the first year was I think I started it in May, and the first year I think we did like $185,000 for the year. You know, it was just me and like one assistant really. Second year we were like probably doing like 1.6 million.
Brad Weimert: Oh, wow. Big jump.
Jason Hennessey: Yeah. Third year, we were now probably doing like 2.8. The next year we were probably doing, this was the year that I paid a very large tax bill. And I want to say we were doing, let’s just call it like $3.5 million, right? And it was very profitable because you don’t have a lot of people. My margins were really high. But the problem with that is I was doing a lot of the things, right? And so, like if we would go to Hawaii, I’d be out on the beach and all of a sudden my alarm would go off. It’s like, “Hey, you’ve got to go upstairs because you got to take a sales call.” And I’d go upstairs, I have to take a sales call in my bathing suit, and then come back downstairs, and then all of a sudden, 4:00 I got to be back up there because I got to be on a call with a client. And so, like I wasn’t really living a balanced life.
And so, at the end of the year that year, like I said, I had to write a very large check to the government. And I’m thinking to myself, “Why? Like, what was all that for? Like, why don’t I just hire people that are smarter than me and just instead of paying the government…” Don’t get me wrong. I pay my fair share of taxes, right? But instead of making large payments, hire really smart people. And so, that’s when I recruited a COO of my company. His name is Scott Shrum. He had just exited another company as the CEO of that company. And he was just looking for a new opportunity. He’s a super sharp guy, got an MIT degree, Kellogg MBA. And so, perfect person to kind of take my company to the next level. And then when we brought him on board, he’s like, “You need somebody to help out with finances. By the way, my CFO is also looking for an opportunity.”
So, I’m like, there was not really budgeted for her but I’m like, “We’ll just make this work.” And so, we ended up getting Michele Patrick, who’s our CFO, and him, and they’ve worked together for 12 years. So, that’s like a package when you can get people that have worked together. And then about six months later, we ended up recruiting their CTO of the company. So, I got like basically my whole C-suite in a matter of like six months.
Brad Weimert: And they came from an…
Jason Hennessey: It wasn’t an agency. It was a company that sold test prep for colleges but they worked with an agency. And then at that point, that’s when they started to put systems and processes in place and setting goals and then really letting the entrepreneur be the entrepreneur and putting in the infrastructure to kind of really scale the business. And that’s when we really started to scale. And I think at that point, we kind of jumped to like 8 million and 10 million. And next thing you know like this year we’re on pace to do 20 million.
Brad Weimert: Awesome. I mean, I think I know that a lot of entrepreneurs are afraid of overspending on roles, and certainly want some success. Certainly, in the beginning, you just don’t have any money if you bootstrap. But then you hit a point that you did, which was there was money there but it’s still scary to eliminate basically your whole margin or a big chunk of it. What gave you the confidence to eliminate your margin and invest in the C-suite?
Jason Hennessey: You know, for one, it was the track record, right? They’ve already brought another company to exit. Your gut, like my gut, was really a big part of it, and the fact that I just needed help. I had this huge opportunity to bring on some really smart people. And I really, like I said, I’m a big believer that I don’t get introduced to people for random reasons. It’s like me and you are speaking right now because of a reason Erik connected us. We’ll probably be lifelong friends after this, right? You know, it’s just like things happen for reasons and I just kind of were reading the signals. And I’m a risk-taker, right? And so, I just did. I took the risk. Worst thing is like after three months, it didn’t work out. You know what I mean? Scott went on his way and I go on my way but it ended up working out. And so, it was a blessing at the time.
Brad Weimert: Do you think three months is long enough to assess?
Jason Hennessey: No. I use that. No, it would not have been. I mean, if anything, just from a cultural perspective, right? It’s like, “Oh, my God, he’s an asshole,” or I’m an asshole I mean, I cannot work.
Brad Weimert: We don’t get along.
Jason Hennessey: Yeah. Exactly, right? Well, if anything, that would have been it.
Brad Weimert: I ask that sincerely because through conversation leading up to this, you mentioned that you’ve been working with Cameron Herold and he’s been your coach for a long time.
Jason Hennessey: Yes.
Brad Weimert: Who’s also been on the show. He’s one of the only people that’s been on twice.
Jason Hennessey: Okay.
Brad Weimert: And he’s a very close friend of mine, and he is very firm that if you don’t know if somebody is a good fit in three months, you don’t know how to hire. And I respect Cameron a lot and that hurts me inside. And I’m also self-aware enough to realize that I am not the best person to hiring and I’m always learning and going through that process. So, it was a genuine question.
Jason Hennessey: Oh, yeah.
Brad Weimert: But I think that that camp is split there.
Jason Hennessey: Oh, yeah. Story about Cameron. We’ll come back to Cameron.
Brad Weimert: I like it. I like it. Yeah. So, you grow and one of the questions that I have about agencies in general is vertical specificity. And what I mean by that is both industry specificity but really more it’s focusing on you said you do some paid.
Jason Hennessey: Yeah.
Brad Weimert: And that’s probably, well, you can tell me but there are agencies that have one thing and they’re like, “We do SEO,” which seems to be largely you.
Jason Hennessey: That’s us.
Brad Weimert: And then there are others like Erik Huberman, like Hawke Media, and they say, “We do everything.”
Jason Hennessey: Sure. Yeah.
Brad Weimert: Why? As an agency, why did you pick to be specific to SEO versus offering everything? Because certainly, people ask you for everything.
Jason Hennessey: Sure. Yeah. We went that direction because that was really like my personal passion and my personal skill set. And we had some really amazing case studies, right? So, we’ve done it. We’ve taken firms and we’ve really kind of exploded their practice by generating a lot of traffic and leads and revenue for them. And so, we’re just like, “Let’s just continue to double down. We’ve got a strategy that works here.” And a lot of the people that we speak to aspire to be like this firm. So, let’s just continue to do that. And for many years, I didn’t even have a website like I think I had like a one-page website that just said, “Hire Jason Hennessey,” right? That was basically it. Even when Scott joined my company, it was just a one-page website. He was like, “Is this like legit? Is this like a real thing?” I mean, here it’s like he could probably go work for Google when you’ve got that kind of background and he’s coming to work for some entrepreneur that has a one-page website, right?
And so, yeah, so we just kind of just that’s just it. And typically, when I get on a call, like a sales call because I was doing most of the selling. I didn’t have salespeople like I was doing selling and it was just me just basically teaching like educating people. I was not really selling. I was just showing them what we’ve done for this firm and this is the strategy that we use. And the same thing that I did on that presentation many years back where I got my first seven clients for the first agency, you just do that. And I just come across as genuine because I’m not selling them anything. I’m like, “This is what I do,” and then from there they tell somebody else and they tell somebody else. And next you know, you go from 10 clients to 20 clients to 30 clients, right? And so, up until recently, we’ve just basically did that. There was a time where we had a client that asked us. This is a funny story.
They said, “We need somebody to do social media, organic social media. Can you guys do that?” We’re like, “Yeah. Of course, we can do that.” “All right. Well, send me over a proposal.” We’re like, “Okay. What does a proposal look like for social media? I don’t know. $2,500 a month.” Okay, great. It can’t be hard, right? We’ll just schedule some post five days a week and that’s that. And so, we did that.
Brad Weimert: How long ago was this?
Jason Hennessey: This was probably like three or four years ago. And so, now we’re doing social media but we only had one client just because they asked us. And so, then we had to staff it out and we had to get somebody to do it, right? And I’ll never forget it. And so, it was around St. Patrick’s Day, and all of a sudden, I get a phone call and it’s this client. And I’m like, “Oh, that’s weird.” And they call up. They’re like, “What are you thinking?” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” He goes, “The whole world is shutting down like COVID is about to happen and you’re up there posting on our social media to have a Leprechaun Day or something?” Because it’s like St. Patrick’s Day, and I’m like, “What?” And I’m like, “Oh my God, I’ll get it taken down immediately. I’m so sorry about that.” It was just something that was scheduled, right? You know what I mean? And so, I’m like, “What are we doing? We’re not making any money here.”
Brad Weimert: Being social?
Jason Hennessey: Yeah. Like, what are we doing? We’re not making any money here. And so, we removed the post and then I went to lunch that day at In-N-Out Burger and I had this epiphany. And I’m sitting at In-N-Out Burger and I’m like, “I’m sure somebody pulled up to In-N-Out Burger at some point and wanted to order a chicken sandwich. You’re not getting a chicken sandwich at In-N-Out Burger. You can get a double-double, a cheeseburger, or a hamburger. That’s it. That’s all we do, right?” And so, I’m just like, “There’s something to simplicity.” And so, that’s probably the reason why we haven’t really ventured out to do much more than just doing SEO and doing it very well and doing paid media, which is par for the course. You know, that’s just part of what we do too.
Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love that. And so, why law?
Jason Hennessey: Well, why law is just because like I accidentally stumbled into that area. And then over the years, I’ve become a thought leader on that subject. I’ve been asked to speak at conferences.
Brad Weimert: Organic growth.
Jason Hennessey: It’s all organic growth.
Brad Weimert: So, that’s interesting because one of the questions that I had for you is what has your client acquisition strategy been? And as an SEO person, it seems unusual for you to basically say referrals.
Jason Hennessey: Sure. Yeah.
Brad Weimert: But it seems like that is the acquisition model.
Jason Hennessey: 100%. Yeah. That’s been it, reputation. There are so many different agencies like I go to these legal marketing conferences and you’ll see an agency there like five years ago, right? And all of a sudden they’re there and they’re getting new clients. They’re promising the world. And next thing you know, these people don’t show up the next year because they probably screwed people over. They made people angry. They just can’t show face anymore, whereas I’ve been in this industry for, like I said, since 2008, in the legal space and I don’t have one bad review about me online.
Brad Weimert: Well, let’s talk about SEO a little bit then because SEO you mentioned back in the day it being sort of a black box. For most entrepreneurs, it’s still a f*cking black box.
Jason Hennessey: Sure.
Brad Weimert: And when you hire, it’s sort of like hiring to create content. What do you look for? What should one look for when they’re assessing an SEO agency?
Jason Hennessey: Sure. I would say find an agency or an individual that has experience in the niche or vertical that you’re in. Because if somebody came to me and said, “Hey, Jason, I’ve got this e-commerce website. We’re looking to compete with Zappos.” You know what I mean? Like, there’s other people that I could recommend that know that vertical in that space way better. You know, it’s a whole different platform. So, I’d say find somebody that has experience, that has case studies in that vertical, that speaks the language and the vernacular, that goes to the conferences because that’s the advantages. Not only do we know SEO, but when we get on calls with clients, we know about their intake. We know who they use for their call center. We know who they use for all after-hours, all this stuff, right? So, now we’re like tied in.
And so, we’re able to kind of help them out, just not in the SEO space but also making connections with, “Oh, you’ve got this case in this market. Let me make a connection.” And so, that’s really what I would say is find somebody that if it is an option, find somebody that specializes in that niche.
Brad Weimert: Well, let’s back out for a second. Let’s talk about the elements of SEO as you see them because I think in general this notion of hire somebody that’s done exactly what you want to do makes tons of sense. In SEO, you’ve got sort of on-site and off-site. How do you think about the core elements of SEO? How do you rank their importance?
Jason Hennessey: Yeah. So, there’s basically three. And I wrote a whole book about this. This is called Honest SEO.
Brad Weimert: Honest SEO?
Jason Hennessey: Honest SEO, yeah.
Brad Weimert: Love it.
Jason Hennessey: And so, there’s three core principles of SEO, really four, but let’s talk about the first three. The first thing is just the technical makeup of the website. So, having a website that Google can crawl. It doesn’t have a lot of errors. It loads fast. You have basically that. And that’s the stuff that usually most people can’t figure out on their own.
Brad Weimert: What is fast?
Jason Hennessey: So, there’s something called like a — there’s a tool called PageSpeed Insights. And so, if you go to Google, you put that in, you can put your URL into PageSpeed Insights and then you click on it and it’s going to give you a score. You’re either going to be red, yellow, or green. And so, fast is green. Anything in the green is fast. And there’s a different score for mobile as there is desktop. And so, you want your website to be fast for both and you also want your website to pass something called Core Web Vitals. And in that same tool, it will tell you whether or not it passes or fails. It’s like bringing your car to a check engine. You get to a mechanic and the check engine light is on. It’s going to tell you what’s wrong with it. So, that’s the first piece. And we can probably do a podcast about technical SEO for a lot of…
Brad Weimert: Of course, I bet we could talk for eight hours or eight years about SEO.
Jason Hennessey: But basically, the technical elements of a website make up probably 15% to 20% as far as like the weight of that. The second piece is the content, the content that you publish that truly satisfies the intent of somebody that’s doing a search for whatever it is that you’re trying to market. So, for us, it might be having a page on a website for Atlanta car accident lawyer, Atlanta slip and fall lawyer. So, people that are actually getting into a car accident, they’re doing a search for car accident lawyer. Google knows that that person is doing a search from Atlanta. We have our page optimized for Atlanta car accident lawyer and we kind of make the connection. Hopefully, that page truly satisfies the intent. It’s not written with a lot of keywords at the beginning like it would have worked back in the day.
It’s like really written as far as like getting empathetic like saying, “Hey, if you’re reading this, probably you or a loved one were involved in a car accident. At our law firm, we’ve helped people just like you where we can help you pay your medical bills. We can get your car repaired. We can help you find a doctor.” Really kind of truly satisfying, maybe have a video on the page that walks them through the experience of their firm. So, like that’s something is making sure that you have content that satisfies the intent of what people are searching for. I would say that right there is probably the other if it’s 15%, this is probably more of like 35% of the content.
Brad Weimert: Are you writing content for specific keywords from the beginning?
Jason Hennessey: We are. Yeah. So, when we build a website, our whole strategy is mapped out in an Excel spreadsheet. So, we know like based on who we’re working with, like which cities do they target, which practice areas do they target, what are the most profitable practice areas. So, we know the architecture of the whole website. It’s like building a company where you already have the org chart for a 1,000-person company, right? And then you just start filling in the content.
Brad Weimert: The roadmap for it.
Jason Hennessey: Yeah, exactly.
Brad Weimert: Love it.
Jason Hennessey: So, that’s how we do things. And so, that alone is about 35% of the strategy. So, now that equates to 50%. The other 40%, which is a third variable is, and there’s 10%, which I’ll talk about in a second. But the 40% which will bring it to 90 is the links. And so, that’s basically the currency on the World Wide Web is getting other websites to link back to you. And so, not every link is equal. If I can get CNN to write a story about personal injury lawyers in Atlanta and that links to my client, that’s like gold because that link has a lot more value than if my friend had a locksmith shop that’s linking back to my client’s website. So, the person that wins the game of SEO kind of really gets all three of those correct.
And then the last piece is really the user signals. And so, that’s the stuff that people don’t really think about. But that’s where somebody is doing a Google search and they search for car accident lawyer. They click on your page. Google’s measuring the time that somebody stays on the page before they go back to Google. So, if somebody clicks on your page and they’re only there for seven seconds, it’s telling Google that this page doesn’t satisfy the intent of that search. And so, they go back and then they go to another page that’s below you. And that page has a video, and they watch the video and they’re on the page for like ten minutes, boom, next you know, they’re going to rank higher than you because it’s sending all these user signals to Google that, “Hey.” So, once you get to the first page of Google and you get more impressions, that’s when the user signals all kick in.
Brad Weimert: Yeah. I think the user signals or something that we’re starting as social media has evolved, and we could get into this, but as social media has evolved, it’s clear that engagement with things is a metric that’s really relevant.
Jason Hennessey: 100%. Yeah.
Brad Weimert: And basically, what you’re saying is the same thing is true with SEO.
Jason Hennessey: It’s the engagement. Yep. User signals engagement. Yeah. Same thing. Yeah. Exactly right.
Brad Weimert: I love it. So, where do you start with people? If somebody comes to you, what’s the first thing? Do you build out this plan? What’s the general arc of what you focus on first, second, third?
Jason Hennessey: Yeah. So, the first thing that we do is usually when we get a new website or when we get a new client, we inherit the mess that the former agency had.
Brad Weimert: Yeah. Sure.
Jason Hennessey: And so, we do things a certain way from the way in which the navigation works to the way in which the phone number appears to the way in which the hamburger navigation opens up, right? All of that stuff. We do it all kind of the same way. And it’s not like a template per se, but it’s a strategy.
Brad Weimert: And just for those that don’t know, hamburger navigation is the button you click that expands.
Jason Hennessey: That’s right.
Brad Weimert: Give you the other menu.
Jason Hennessey: Yeah. When you’re on a phone and you click like navigation and it opens up the navigation, then you close it, right? It looks like a hamburger and that’s why we call it that. So, we do things a certain way. And so, usually, once we start working with a new client, there’s a couple of things that we’re going to do. If the client wants to redesign their website, if they’re not happy with the look and feel of it, we’ll work on that. So, we’ve got a creative team that will come up with concepts for like a redesign. But in the background, we’re rebuilding the whole website. That’s like one of the first things that we do within the first like 60, 90 days is kind of truly architecting the whole website so that it fixes all the technical blockers. We take their content, we run it through duplicate content filters to see if there’s any problems with that. And so, that’s basically like the first, let’s just call it 90 days as like rebuilding the engine of the site.
Brad Weimert: Structure.
Jason Hennessey: Yeah.
Brad Weimert: Technical.
Jason Hennessey: Yeah. While we’re doing that, we’re also developing the content strategy. We’re starting to write the content for the firms. We’re sending over pages for them to review. We are publishing content. We’re interlinking things a certain way.
Brad Weimert: Like the pages on the site, they’re linked.
Jason Hennessey: Yeah. How they link together. Like, that’s one of the secrets of SEO is just the way you link pages together. The best example of like best-class SEO is if you look at Wikipedia. So, if you do a Google search today for just about anything like a dictionary word, a sports team, you name it, you’re probably going to see Wikipedia ranking in like the top three of Google for just about everything. Why? Well, for one, they’ve got a lot of authority because they’ve got all kinds of people linking back and sourcing them. Two, the content is constantly changing, like people are updating it. You have all of that. So, the content is always fresh and up to date. I mean, OJ Simpson will die today, and an hour from now, it’ll say that his death was today on Wikipedia. I mean, that’s usually just how it works.
But the secret of Wikipedia is the little blue links. So, if you do a search for baseball, you’re going to get to the baseball page. On that baseball page, it’s going to talk about a catcher, a pitcher, second base, a home run. And so, if you click on home run, guess what? Now, you have this long and thorough document about a home run but all the links on Wikipedia just have that one blue link that’s basically telling Google what this page is about. And so, this is where so many people get it wrong. You just hire somebody to blog for you and they’re just randomly interlinking whatever they want with no strategy. And next thing you know, you’re linking like you might have a page that’s optimized for car accident lawyer but if you’re linking to a blog post and then another page and the Contact Us page all using the word car accident lawyer, now you’re confusing Google. You just need to nominate one page and all your links need to go back to that page.
Brad Weimert: Yeah. We could keep going down that rabbit hole. I mean, when I came in, we were talking about using either of the studios and using your equipment because your equipment is dope.
Jason Hennessey: Yes.
Brad Weimert: And in both of us, you were like, “Well, I don’t really know how to use it.” You said, “If you know how to use it, go ahead.”
Jason Hennessey: Yeah. And you’re like, “I don’t know how to use it either.”
Brad Weimert: I don’t know how to use it either. And it’s probably pretty easy at least one of the setups. But ultimately, you reach some point in business where you can’t be an expert in everything, and it makes sense to pay the experts to do it. So, the nuance of SEO I think is super relevant and interesting. But I think for most people listening, they’re probably going to pay for it. And so, I think that some of the guiding principles are super interesting and relevant. And I guess one of them, one of the questions I have for you to that end is, when do you suggest a company hires an agency versus building out an internal team to do the SEO?
Jason Hennessey: Sure. That’s a really good question. I think you have to hire somebody that is truly passionate about SEO if you’re going to bring it in-house. Or I would probably say you want to know enough about it yourself so that you can hold somebody accountable to getting the results that you need. I’ve seen so many horror stories where people thought that that was the case. They’re spending so much money on SEO with an agency and they’re thinking, “Let me just kind of bring it in-house. For as much money I’m spending, I can have it in-house, right?” And so, they bring it in-house and they bring in some guru and it just for whatever reason, doesn’t work out. And I’ve also seen stories where it actually worked out fine. You bring somebody in and it worked out great.
But there’s a risk either way. I think, if you’re small, you’re just kind of getting started, I think usually the agency route is the way to go just because they already have all the resources that you would need, and you pay a discount, right? They have somebody that can create a new landing page for you. They have somebody they can write the copy. They can have somebody that does link building. You’d have to hire a team of like eight people to kind of satisfy all of that. Whereas like maybe once you’re actually starting to spend $100,000 a month on an agency, maybe it might make sense to look at taking those resources and starting to build an in-house team. And now you have kind of like your own mini agency that’s just servicing your account, right? So, I think you’ll know when the time is right. And hopefully, you learned a lot from the agency. You’ve paid attention to it so that you can replicate what they’ve done.
Brad Weimert: Yeah, I think that idea of hiring people, even if you’re paying for their expertise to do it for you, making sure that that’s not the only goal in that you’re also hiring that expertise so that you can learn something is a really, really important dynamic. When I was probably 20, maybe I was a little older, but I had a girlfriend who, we were traveling salespeople, basically. We’re selling Cutco knives, traveling all over Metro Detroit selling knives. And I bought her one of these early GPS systems. And it was really just to satisfy my own needs because she would call me every f*cking hour asking me how to get somewhere. And at the time, you would travel with these Rand McNally books in your car to navigate. I’m dating myself, and I feel great about it.
Jason Hennessey: Yeah.
Brad Weimert: But I told her when I bought the nav system, I said, “Look, you have a real-time map to show you the whole world. Use this to learn the landscape, not to just follow the blue line.”
Jason Hennessey: Sure.
Brad Weimert: Because if you just follow the blue line, if this goes down when you’re done with this, you’re screwed.
Jason Hennessey: You’re lost. Yeah.
Brad Weimert: And I think the same thing is very true in most areas of business. So, if you think that you’re going to farm it out and then not have to worry about it again, you’re probably playing the game the wrong way.
Jason Hennessey: Exactly right. Good analogy.
Brad Weimert: So, the things that are hot topics now that I think are super relevant for both newbies and people that have internal teams, how does AI impact SEO in terms of the quality of content that gets produced, and where does it fit into the strategy?
Jason Hennessey: Yeah. So, we look at AI, right? You can look at it as an opportunity or a threat. The people that look at AI as like a threat to their business, good luck. So, we’ve been doing a lot of experimentation with AI. We’ve turned AI into a revenue stream. We’ve done some pretty cool things with it. We use it now to help write some of the content that we publish for our clients. Not so much that we just say, “Hey, ChatGPT, write us a page of content about Atlanta car accident lawyer.” I mean, the people that are just doing that like Google is going to know that that’s not good content. But we use AI to take competitor’s pages that are already ranking in the top three positions and we say, “Hey, analyze the three pages. We want to come up with something similar.” And then we kind of then go in and edit it to kind of make it have the voice and the tone of that law firm.
So, that’s where you really can kind of leverage AI because now you’re actually looking at different data points and you’re actually marrying that together with AI to come up with like the perfectly optimized page for that particular query. So, that’s one thing that we do. Another thing that we did recently, we actually have these hackathons like once or twice a year at our agency. And it’s just where we give our engineers a couple of days just to come up with concepts that they think would help improve the efficiencies of our agency. And so, in one of our hackathons, somebody came up with the concept of using AI to take a full website and to translate the website into multiple languages. And so, they built this prototype out in a couple of days. And it was just a very beta and we’re like, “Oh, we’re on to something here,” because it’s unique content.
The page, the content that we have on the website, if there’s 2,000 pages of content on our website and we basically take it and we use AI to convert the whole website into Spanish, but not just that, it takes all the internal links and terms in Spanish. It does so much more. It creates the Spanish URL structure. It puts specific code on the page to tell Google that this is the English page, this is the Spanish page, right? So, next thing you know, we roll this out on a client as a beta and here’s a client that wasn’t getting any Spanish traffic at all. And next you know, we rolled this out, pages got indexed, and then now they get like 10,000 visits a month from all the Spanish content that we translated. So much so that now they actually have to get like Spanish people that could help answer the phone because they can’t even keep up with demand.
And that was just all leveraging AI and just coming up with a novel idea. And so, now that became a new revenue stream for us because now we’re selling that as a service to all of our other clients. So, that’s just one example of us just kind of leveraging AI. Yeah.
Brad Weimert: That’s cool. Another area that AI has wedged its way into is the actual search queries. So, let’s talk Bing specifically. And obviously, because Google dominates the search market, that’s what people usually talk about. How does having AI integrated into Bing search impact sort of intent and the search results?
Jason Hennessey: Yeah. It’s definitely still early to kind of come to any conclusions. You know, Bing is a little bit more advanced in kind of promoting that and their search engine even before Google but they have to pull the data from somewhere. And a lot of that data comes from the way in which you mark up your website. So, there’s something on a website called schema markup. And so, that’s the stuff where you can kind of and it’s actually like a universal language. It was built so that all search engines can kind of understand semantics of a website. And so, I could basically put… It’s almost like building a secondary website on a website. So, you have the content that’s out there for the world to see but then you have the second layer of code that says, “This attorney, he went to this law school. He writes for these magazines.”
And so, you’re almost like building a whole separate website using specific code to tell the search engines a lot more about this person or this business or this place. Like, that’s why when you do searches for blueberry recipes, you’ll see carousels that’ll show like here’s six different recipes. And it’s in a very specific format. First, you do this. That’s all schema markup that’s being coded. And so, a lot of these AI platforms are using a lot of the schema markup. So, it’s really important to make sure that you have that all structured.
Brad Weimert: And that goes back to the technical structure of the website.
Jason Hennessey: Correct. Yeah.
Brad Weimert: AI is going to disrupt lots of industries. If you’re an agency owner, for instance, how do you see AI impacting marketing agencies at large in 2024 and beyond?
Jason Hennessey: So, for us, I think our biggest threat, Google is a search engine, right? You have to look at how do they make their money. They make their money by serving up ads along the lines of their free content, which is their search engine. So, you’re starting to see them kind of experiment by placing AI here or here. But at the end of the day, Google, they’re going to have to change their whole business model. And so, they’re the leader. We’re following the leader. There will definitely be a disruption. Don’t get me wrong. Like, for example, Bing is starting to get more market share, whereas Google had dominance. If Bing gets another 1%, 2%, 3%…
Brad Weimert: It’s a big deal.
Jason Hennessey: It is a big deal.
Brad Weimert: 8% is a huge deal on the search market.
Jason Hennessey: Oh, yeah. So, now we’re like, “Okay, great. We’ve been optimizing our websites for Google. We should probably pay a little bit more attention to the variables that Bing are looking at too.” And so, that’s something that we’ve got to do. But I think the biggest threat for an agency owner is the stuff that might keep someone like me, like not being able to sleep at night is people not even using Google anymore and then just going to ChatGPT and asking questions and getting their answers there. That’s the biggest risk, I’d say.
Brad Weimert: Yeah. I am systemically reconditioning myself to search through perplexity, which is a now dominant app for AI results. Because what a lot of the time, well, it depends what you’re searching for, right? If you’re searching for a product, probably different. But if I’m searching for an answer, where I go to do that is going to change.
Jason Hennessey: Of course. Yeah. And there are things like AI is not perfect yet, right? You know, I mean, like…
Brad Weimert: I’d say that’s an understatement.
Jason Hennessey: So, I’m not going to go to AI and talk about the best way to cure cancer. You’re going to go to a doctor. So, there are things that AI is getting incorrect still. Now, don’t get me wrong. They’re going to continue to refine it. It is going to get better. But at the end of the day, I mean, we’re optimizing for a Google algorithm. At some point, we might be optimizing more for an AI algorithm and we just kind of have to change our focus on what the things that we’re reverse engineering.
Brad Weimert: So, you grew the agency from $180,000 to pushing 20 million this year. What is something that you wish you would have done differently along that journey or that you will do differently next time around if you build something?
Jason Hennessey: Yes. I wish I would have gotten a coach a lot sooner. It’s interesting, right? Like, my whole life I played sports. And from Little League, you had a baseball coach. And I wrestled in high school. You had a wrestling coach. If you did bad in a subject, you had a tutor. So, your whole life you have coaches. And then once you kind of graduate high school or college, even in college, you have prep courses and stuff like that, you’re just on your own. Now, you’re in the business world, right? And a lot of times, like when you’re just an entrepreneur, you’re just getting started, you’re like you’re not thinking about that. And so, I wish I would have gotten a coach a lot sooner, which is probably a good segue to talk about my coach now, which is our mutual friend, Cameron.
Brad Weimert: Let’s plug Cameron Herold. I love it.
Jason Hennessey: He’s great. Yeah. And so, the story with Cameron is, I don’t know, again, back to fate and destiny, but I was just sitting at my desk. It was 2010, maybe, something like that. And along comes a video on YouTube, and it’s a Ted Talk. And this was a Ted Talk about raising your kids to be entrepreneurs. And it was Cameron Herold who I had no idea who he was, but he got on stage. And the fact that he’s on a Ted Talk already gives me confidence that he’s trustworthy. But then I start watching the video, and everything he says is just resonating with me. He talks about the fact that he was a kid selling baseball cards and he would go to the golf courses and get in the water and take all the balls out. And now he’d have like 50 balls and when the people were coming to play golf, he’d be sitting there instead of selling lemonade, he’d be selling them golf balls. And then they would hit in the water and he’d go again and get it.
And so, he had all these things. And then he talked about like when he was growing up in Canada that they made him, he was in French class and he sucked at French. And so, what did the school system do? They actually told his parents that, “You need to get your son a French tutor.” And he’s like, “But I was really good at public speaking. Why would they get me a French tutor instead? Why not double down on what I’m good at?” And so, he showed me some of the flaws of the school system and he’s like, “Why can’t we raise kids to be entrepreneurs?” Anyway, it was this amazing video and it resonated with me. And so, I’m just like watching this. I’m like, “This is me speaking to me. He was a C student. I was a C student in high school.” And so, it was just awesome.
And so, at the time, I’m like, “This guy’s going to be my business coach. He doesn’t know it yet but he’s going to be my business coach someday.” And at the time, we couldn’t afford him. You know what I mean? I manifested him to be my coach. And then once Scott and Michele, my CFO, came on and I started this other agency, we were at about $5 million in revenue, and I think that was the number that he promotes that he doesn’t really work with other people unless you hit about 5 million. And that’s kind of his spot. And so, I’m like, “Okay, great. Let’s just see how much he is. We probably can’t afford him, but let’s just see.” And so, I wrote him like this very clever email and it was really funny and witty. And I sent it to him and he responded and he’s like, “That was the greatest email I ever got. I’d love to coach you guys. Let’s hop on a call. Here’s my assistant.”
And so, at that point, he came on and that’s when he started to kind of give us a lot of the Cliff’s Notes. And he started to, perfect example, there was a time where somebody was, now we’re working with Cameron for, let’s just say, eight months. And so, we get somebody that actually reaches out to us that wants to buy our company. And it’s flattering and so they say, “Okay, great. We want to buy you. Let’s talk. We’re going to send over about 12 questions. Just answer these 12 questions and then we’ll come up with a valuation on what we’d like to buy you for.” And so, I’m like, “Wow. This is awesome. They’re big companies,” like your ego is kind of stroked a little bit. And so, we reached out to Cameron like, “Hey, listen, we got this great opportunity.” And then Cameron just sits us down. He goes, “Are you guys even for sale?” And we’re like, “Well, I guess if the number is right.”
He goes, “Well, why are you going to go down this rabbit hole of kind of giving them this information?” He goes, “That’s just going to be a distraction for your CFO because 12 questions lead to 20 more, lead to next thing you know, you’re eight months into this due diligence.” He goes, “If you’re ready to sell, what’s your number?” And I’m like, “Well, based on where we’re growing maybe it’s $75 million.” He goes, “Okay. Well, if that’s your number, just tell him that’s your number.” And I’m like, “Huh, that’s interesting.” So, we get on a call with them like, “Hey, listen, based on where we’re growing, if we’re ever going to sell like, boom, this would be our number.” And then they’re just like, “Well, that’s a little high. That’s not how we build.” But anyway, he probably saved us a lot of heartache by kind this one example. And there are so many more. I’ve got a document full of Cameron notes that’s probably 40 pages long.
Brad Weimert: I love that.
Jason Hennessey: It’s just awesome.
Brad Weimert: Well, I think the coaching side of business needs to be underscored and underscored again, highlighted and drawn attention to because we live in a world of entrepreneurs where we are expected to make all the choices. It ultimately all rules back to you. And to not have guidance there and to not follow a path from somebody that’s already done it is clearly foolish.
Jason Hennessey: Oh, yeah.
Brad Weimert: Yet, we hesitate to do it for some reason. Many.
Jason Hennessey: Cameron got Scott to join the COO Alliance. Man, I’m giving you all kinds of plugs, Cameron. And so, Scott would go to these 1-800, these COO Alliance meetings where a bunch of COOs get together and they do this thing where it’s like these $100,000 ideas. And one of the ideas that Cameron was talking about was get your CEOs to write a book. And then Scott came home one day. He’s like, “You need to write a book.” And I’m like, “Okay.” And so, next you know, I’m writing a book and that was a big part of our growth because I wrote a book. Now, I’m an industry expert but that wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for Cameron. Cameron got me into YPO. He said that I should look at that. So, all these little stepping stones. He connects me with all these great people.
But anyway, like I said, back to when I was first getting started to your original question, I wish I would have found a coach. It would have been Cameron because I couldn’t afford him yet, but a coach to kind of get me from 0 to 1 million. There’s probably a coach out there that could have gotten me there faster, and then from 1 million to 5 million might have been a different coach. And I think there will come a point where if I’m at 20 million, I want to go to 100 million, maybe I need a different coach. So, it just kind of depends.
Brad Weimert: Awesome. Jason Hennessey, if people want to find out more about you, where do you want to point them?
Jason Hennessey: Yeah. I’ve got content on Instagram. I publish content just about every single day, short little video clips. So, you can follow me at Jason Hennessey on Instagram. YouTube, I create content. And then my website is just my last name, Hennessey.com.
Brad Weimert: H-E-N-N-E-S-S-Y.
Jason Hennessey: E-Y.
Brad Weimert: E-Y.
Jason Hennessey: If you do Y you’re going to get some cognac and that’ll be a fun night, right? But the E-Y.
Brad Weimert: Had some last night, oddly. H-E-N-N-E-S-S-E-Y. Hennessey. Awesome. Jason, it’s been great, man. I appreciate you carving out time.
Jason Hennessey: This is awesome. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
