Are Standing 1 On 1's Stupid?, Erewhon's Sneaky Way To Bring Customers Back, He Sends Custom Swords To Get Millions In Profits (100% Response Rate), How We're Going To Ramp The F**K Out Of YouTube

In this episode #2976, Eric Siu and Neil Patel explore one-on-ones, marketing tactics, economic trends, and how politics and consumer behavior impact business. They also share YouTube growth tips and creative strategies. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES (00:00) The Value of Standing One-on-Ones (02:53) Marketing Strategies and Consumer Behavior (05:53) Economic Insights and Business Performance (08:55) Political Influences on Business (12:00) Innovative Marketing Tactics (15:01) YouTube Growth Strategies To suggest a topic, go to https://www.marketingschool.io. For more content from Eric and Neil, check out Eric’s Leveling Up with Eric Siu YouTube channel and Neil’s Neil Patel YouTube channel. Connect with Us: Single Grain << Eric's ad agency NP Digital << Neil’s ad agency X @neilpatel, @ericosiu Instagram @neilpatel, @ericosiu Drop Us a Review If You Enjoyed the Episode!

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:36Speaker 00

  Do you do any standing one-on-ones with your exec team or whoever right now?

• 0:41Speaker 01

  What do you consider standing one-on-one?

• 0:43Speaker 00

  So every Monday at 8:00 AM, you're gonna meet with me for 30 minutes, and then right after that, you're gonna meet with Noah for 30 minutes?

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Like, in a group setting or individual?

• 0:53Speaker 00

  Individual setting.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  No.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  Okay. And how many standing meetings are you in overall per week? Like a group meeting, executive meeting, anything like that?

• 1:00Speaker 01

  This got added to my second one now, so two.

• 1:03Speaker 00

  So you have two per week? Yeah.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Uh, no, one is every other week, one is every week, and the one that's every week, I don't even know if I go to every week.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  Okay, so the one that, the new one, I mean, how are, how long are these meetings? These two?

• 1:16Speaker 01

  10, 15 minutes?

• 1:17Speaker 00

  Okay. So, and then what happens at these meetings? A quick overview of the numbers? Are we good, bad? Does that warrant another conversation, right?

• 1:24Speaker 01

  No, no reviews on any of that. I expect people to send me the decks and the information they want to talk about beforehand. And I read it beforehand. It may take me 10, 15, 20 minutes. And then on those meetings, I expect to discuss solutions to make the numbers go the way we want.

• 1:42Speaker 00

  So a quick discussion and actions?

• 1:46Speaker 01

  I just discuss actions. I don't really discuss, hey, why is it down or why is it up? I said, reviewed.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  This is what I think we should fix.

• 1:54Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  And then other people throw out their ideas. Some may disagree with me, and we discuss the disagreements, or if there are agreements, and they discuss their, then decisions made, and then we expect execution.

• 2:04Speaker 00

  And they're not assigning any Asana task to you, right? There's no project management task. My point of saying all this is the real question is, are standing one-on-ones stupid? Now, okay, Jensen doesn't do standing one-on-ones. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't do standing one-on-ones. You don't do standing one-on-one?

• 2:18Speaker 01

  But I'm not as successful as them.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  Whatever. But my point is, are standing one-on-ones stupid? That's the question.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  I don't know. I've never really done standing one on ones. I didn't. The person, the purpose of them.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  I'll give you my thoughts.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Do you do them?

• 2:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do. It just, it depends on who. Like if I'm, if there's someone that's very up and coming and talented. And if they're younger in their career, a standing one on one is helpful because it, it, it grows them a lot and it builds them up, right? But if someone's like an executive, not, not really, because we talk all the time anyway. I don't really need to do that, right? Um, but if I, if I, because a one on one to me is, is coaching. It is almost like you're, you're a therapist as well. So, and I think people that are more junior, they need that. And I'm willing to bet a lot of money that your organization does do standing one on ones for kind of probably more mid level to junior level. Um, right?

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Uh, standing one on ones for more mid to junior. I honestly don't know.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  It's like two weeks or every four weeks or something like that.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  They, they must.

• 3:15Speaker 00

  Even when I work for W promote, like my manager would meet with me like every, every month at least.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Yes, they do. I know our CEO meets with each, the country leaders that are under him. And then he meets up with the regional leaders that are under him and he does one on ones with them.

• 3:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I, my point of saying this is that case by case basis, we can't say we're Jensen Huang or Mark Zuckerberg. Cause their teams are really, really, really elite. But even when you look at Neil's team, the exec team, like that's an elite team, right? So you want your, your elite team to just be, you want to be talking to them all the time. If you're just doing one on ones, I don't think it's enough.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  Now, the other thing, then, then maybe we, we get some more out of this. Um, this one's funny. So I've been buying a lot of Air One, um, candied walnuts and I buy turkey chili as well. Um, and they give you these nice jars, right? These nice Air One jars. Now they charge you for these jars. They charge you, it's like a, in escrow, like $3, right? So you have to return the jars to get money back. Now, I think California requires this or something like that. But I think this is Air One's sneaky way to bring customers back by having those jars and getting people, when you, you're going to come back to the store, you're going to buy something, right?

• 4:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  So you're going to get the money back, but you're going to buy, and then the, the, the average order value at Air One is super high. Like I just ordered breakfast today, like $55, right?

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Jenny's ice cream does the same thing. If you order a lot of ice cream, they give you a bag. And then if you bring it back, you can get, uh, some rebate.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  But speaking of clever marketing. I was talking to one of the head of marketing's at Marsec. I'm probably pronouncing it right, but the shipping container company where the family's on the Forbes list. But it's you, everyone has seen the company logo. People just don't know.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  It's like a star. It's like whatever M A E R S.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  S X or something like that. M A E R S X, I think. Yeah. Yeah. M A E R S X K.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  K.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  K. Um, and it's a Danish shipping company. They're massive. You know, uh, they do billions and billions and billions a week in revenue. Um, or at least a billion a week in revenue, worst case.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  But we were talking about B to B marketing. Dude, one of the most clever marketing campaigns that,

• 5:22Speaker 01

  you know, that's been around in B to B that no one talks about, even though the company's struggling now is Intel. A lot of products in B to B world, um, or in products that we all use from phones to computers and laptops. They they had Intel chips, but no one knew it. And the sticker where it said Intel inside, I thought was a genius marketing.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, cuz you remember that, like, everything was Intel inside, and that made me want it more.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:48Speaker 00

  Like Nvidia in the back of the day, it was only marketed very well to gamers like myself. And the G force, like the, you know what, what, what, what made it stand out? It wasn't its features. It was more so the, the design of the, um, the packaging. That made me want it more, right? And then everyone started talking about it more. And what actually helped Nvidia win, by the way, was they came out with this open GL thing. So I used to play Quake back in the day and Quake, the first person shooter, right? It just made the graphics look so much better. And then it that marketed everything. And then that's how they really started to take off. Like without that technology, um, I think they would have gone bankrupt.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  So is there a launching pad was like Quake in games like that?

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, games, um, and then that technology, open GL, cuz that that was just the best looking games. Cuz all the other games look very pixelated, like when you're playing, but then it smoothed out like your face and everything. And then that became its marketing, like the product actually became the marketing cuz it was like a ton of word of mouth. Cuz you can, you can start chatting in these games.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:43Speaker 00

  So, um, by the way, I mean, we kind of talked about this bad economy right now, but I will say that leads are picking up for us. What, what would you be saying? Like, how much better are leads now after this China deal got done? China, US deal.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Will be up, I think it was six percent over last month.

• 7:02Speaker 00

  Six percent, okay.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  That's not a lot for us, but six percent.

• 7:05Speaker 00

  I would say for us, it's a little different. I mean, because you guys have a lot of RFPs and things like that. I think for us now, so before, maybe a month or two ago, actually, no, I have the Google Analytics data for this. So this is, we were getting previously, let's call it from Google Analytics, eight hundred leads a month or something like that. Then, when April hit, when I looked at our GA, it dropped down to like two hundred thirty or something like that. And then it's been going down, right? I will say, though, previously, almost every day, we would get like one really good lead. And that stopped completely for, for quite a while, like maybe one per week or something like that. Um, one or two per week. Now it's back. It's like, you know, one or two per day. And I'm like, okay, it's coming back.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  Um, so I think the economy right now, to, to, to my opinion, is people are cautiously optimistic. Because we still need to finish off this, hopefully, we can get this, this Russia-Ukraine war done with. Hopefully, we can, you know, end these wars and then inflation's coming down too. But who knows how long that's going to happen because you still have tariffs.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  Uh, but I think the tariffs will be done with and everyone's going to be at like ten percent base level. Most people will be. So I'm cautiously optimistic right now.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  So I judge a lot if marketing is going to come back from local businesses. So for example, I go to a chiropractor here in Beverly Hills. The guy's name is Dr. Ash. He goes by the Cairo Guy, okay? So let's just take his Beverly Hills office.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  That's a rich office, though.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. But just check out this data.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Because his people are either local residents.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Or they're people who work in the area and are coming here for work. Now, forty percent of his revenue is from insurance. You get in a car accident, uh, you get hurt, a lawyer sends you to a chiropractor. He'll adjust you. He doesn't get paid. Once a case is done, he then gets paid. So it's chiropractic, uh, I think it's called lean or chiropractic on loan or whatever it is. I don't, I don't know the exact term for the industry. That part of his business hasn't been hit. Sixty percent of his revenue comes from local people, right? And the, and going back, the reason, the first part, the insurance people like who go on car accidents don't get, that part of his business didn't get hit. Those people don't pay to actually see him. It gets paid from part of the settlement.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Sixty percent of businesses, people who work in the area or live in the area, you would agree in Beverly Hills, homes cost millions of dollars. They're not all like the TV, but there's homes that are a hundred plus million. There's also homes for two, three million dollars. People have money in general. You agree with that statement here, right?

• 9:41Speaker 01

  His business is down fifteen percent.

• 9:44Speaker 00

  Over what period of time?

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Just recently, like when he looks at all this economy stuff.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  Before and after.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. So fifteen percent, but you can't look at fifteen percent on a hundred. Forty percent of his business is insulated from any economic activity. It's not really a good judge for the economy, but the sixty percent is. If he's down fifteen percent on that sixty, it's more realistic. He's down twenty-five percent. So businesses are down like his twenty-five percent. I know that's only one data point because of things like the economy, money and asset. Did you increase rates? Nope, haven't increased rates. He's like, it's just, he's like, I'm starting to see things pick up, but it was definitely bad when tariffs started coming out. Like he noticed it right away of people cancelling appointments and not coming the moment.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  They introduced tariffs and stuff like that, starting in April.

• 10:37Speaker 00

  So I think we need to look at the next two, three months or so to see how things pan out. But the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment thing, so that index was seventy-three in November twenty twenty-four, probably because, you know.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, election.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  New election, right? New, new president. And so that was the highest sentiment for a while, right? And then April twenty twenty-five at the end was significantly lower at fifty-two point two percent. Fifty-two point two, not percent. But, and then the final thing I'll give you here is in April twenty twenty-five, the conference board consumer confidence index fell to eighty-six, down seven point nine from March, reflecting a sharp decline in expectations for future economic conditions. But, but this all like, all these predictions, like all these people like Bloomberg, or I think JP Morgan retracted the recession statement, right? So like, these things change very quickly.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  I thought Jamie Dimon was talking about a recession today, or what did he say?

• 11:30Speaker 00

  On Bloomberg, I saw that JP Morgan retracted the recession statement, not Jamie Dimon.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  I could be wrong, but either way, I don't think these big corporations want to pick political enemies because it can hurt their businesses. It's just like Trump talking about Tim Cook. Yeah, he said it was something online like, and I'm paraphrasing here, he had a little problem with Tim Cook.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  That was today.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  That was today, yeah. And it was about him creating iPhones in India. And I'm not here to tell people where, what to do with their company or what country. That's for people who have a ton of money and are publicly traded to figure out in politicians. But I don't think people want to create enemies. Like, remember the Amazon thing? Amazon?

• 12:15Speaker 00

  The tariff pricing?

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, the tariff pricing. What was it saying? Like that, that lady Caroline, whatever, I don't know her name.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  The press girl.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, press girl Caroline, something?

• 12:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, leave it. I don't know, something like that.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Something like that. She was, Scott Besson was talking about it and someone asked a question about Amazon and he just moved to the side. He's like, I'll let Caroline answer that. And she's like, that's a direct like attack on the USA.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  They backed out.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  And then right away, they're like, oh, this was never confirmed that we actually are doing this. I'm like, no one wants to pick a fight with the government.

• 12:50Speaker 00

  You know what I will say though, like, so this is the only politics we'll talk about today. But I do like the MAGA health or the MAGA investment thing for the kids where the thousand bucks, because that can compound to, I think they said 300 grand or something like that. If you just follow the S and P like returns. But I think that's smart because you should teach kids at a younger age how to invest. And I do like how he's bringing drug prices down 50 to 90%, right? And I do think the speech he gave, like if you put Obama's voice over it, that would have been a pretty damn good speech. Right? And so like they're like, again, it's, I think if people are doing something that's good for the people, like credit should be due. I want to call this out though, real quick. So again, we're not saying we support or don't support Trump.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  Marketing and customer experience that pushes customers away every single day, often without leaders even realizing it. Each episode delivers practical insights, real brand examples, and conversations with marketing leaders showing brands how to win with the new rules of growth, identity-driven marketing, cultural relevance, and frictionless customer experiences. Listen to Frictionless Growth Marketing wherever you get your podcasts. But check this out. This guy has a hundred percent response rate from sending a thousand dollar custom swords to the owners of failing companies. So check this out. It sends you, he sends you these custom swords over here and with your name on it, I think. Remember I sent you a knife with your name on it?

• 14:24Speaker 01

  And then you remember how to give you money for it?

• 14:26Speaker 00

  Give it back to me. Yeah. You give me a dollar. You sent me a dollar on PayPal. Yeah.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, because my wife said it cuts friendships.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, okay, but going back to this. Hundred percent response rate sends a thousand dollar custom swords to owners of failing companies. Why does he do this? Because he's trying to buy their business. So each closed deal represents seven figures in that profit. So he just says this, note says, "Business is war, and I noticed you lost the battle recently. I just wanted to let you know if you ever need a few extra hands in battle, we've got your back." Hundred percent response rate. Go do that to the people you're about to buy. Buy them some custom swords.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  That's cool.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  That's hundred percent response rate. I just made you a lot of money.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  I like it.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  You're gonna do it. Are you gonna do it?

• 15:06Speaker 00

  Come on, these are so nice. Can you buy me one?

• 15:08Speaker 01

  We, we've, we've slowed down on how many companies we're buying. I think we're at this point doing two to three a year instead of trying to do one a

• 15:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're okay, but and then how many do you need to look at before you make an offer like?

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Well, we have a pipe. I can do 10 deals tomorrow.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  Okay, yeah, but how many do you need to look at before you make an offer?

• 15:26Speaker 01

  No, no, I already have 10 deals I can close on that are good that we would do.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  So you're probably gonna slow down.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  But you can't integrate them all. Even if I had all the money in the world, my problem is, is my team can only integrate so many. And if I give them too many, There's just gonna be problems and then

• 15:40Speaker 00

  You also dilute your, your team quite a bit too.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. You don't wanna dilute the people. Okay. We get, we get one more here because we, we started a little late. Um, I want, the last thing I want to talk about here is how we're planning to ramp the F out of YouTube. So here's, here's one thing I noticed. Um, you and I, we've, we've kind of changed it up and I'll let you speak to it in a moment. But I actually watched our Miami interview or not interview, but we did an episode in Miami in my hotel room, right? And I actually watched the whole thing. I didn't mean to watch the whole thing. I just wanted to see a piece of it. I ended up watching the whole thing. Like it was on 1.5X. I noticed on our marketing school podcast YouTube channel, the latest one that we, we just posted the long form where we just, you and me talking. That usually our long form videos might get like a hundred to 200 views. This one got a thousand. I was like, whoa. And the average view duration at 10, 10 minutes or so. I was like, well, this is really good.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  And what is it that we changed?

• 16:30Speaker 01

  We just talked about our lives and what's happening in marketing and business and how to grow from there.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so I, I think we're just gonna do more and we're just gonna post the whole thing to, to YouTube. Um, but even on our own personal YouTube channels, like we're both recording at Visible Audio Studios, it's Entry City. And you're record, when I met with them earlier this week, it's like, oh yeah, Neil records for like four hours at a time. Um, six hours at a time or whatever.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Two.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  Two, two, two to four hours.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Um, no, no, I pay for four hours. We recorded in two.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  Got it. So like same thing for me. It's like, I'm probably, I was doing like one a week. I'm probably just gonna jack it up to like two hours or something like that. But, um, we're, I, I think the thing about our YouTube is that we know that the more time we put into it, the better results we get. Um, and now that we've gotten so many comments out, people just letting us talk and like not wanting us to talk about politics. They said that you, you, you said someone wants to, if they want to listen to politics, they listen to All In. We're offended by that, guys. Okay?

• 17:24Speaker 01

  I'm not offended by that.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  I'm not really offended. Um, but anyway, anything else you want to add to that?

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Uh, I'm with you. I think we're taking over a lot. Um, I use a contracting company to help out with YouTube and then we mix that with our internal. And one of the guys who runs this contracted company, which Eric knows who it is, they say, hey, long time no talk. And because I'm working with someone on this team, but this is the owner, just want to let you know, we got your feedback on slightly heavy handed clickbait style hooks. And confirming we're happy to tone those down on outlines moving forward. Also, please keep giving feedback and sharing experience, uh, on your, on how your experience is going. Love to continue to make sure that we're providing the best possible experience for y'all. And I responded with, I changed two of the videos from the last outline. So they try to give me outlines and then like, or outlines are probably the wrong word.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  They give me ideas and I create the outline, but they'll try to give me like bullets and I don't really even look at the bullets. I just look at the title and then I just riff on whatever I want to riff. And I said, I changed two of the videos and I just literally changed the topics, made my own outlines. I'm like, to be more on topics I want to cover, but it's getting better. What I learned from this batch is use the topics you give and make up my own ideas for the ones I don't like and have your team just work on them. Right. Cause I'll give them script, but then they gotta put the script in order and make it nice and all that kind of stuff. Uh, and then I'm like, by the way, uh, then I actually mentioned, this was random. I was like, by the way, I keep getting an email on invoices not paid.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  If that's the case, let me know. I'll ping accounting, but we typically pay once every two weeks. And then he said, this was interesting. This is a smart move to use in this economy. Yes, we usually send out invoices, minimum of seven days before they're due.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  And this is faster. Yeah. Before their due date and they always do at the beginning of the month. So they start work at the beginning. He's sending them before to get paid before work even starts on their end. We typically pay after the work is done and then we send an invoice and you get paid within 30 days.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  But he wants to collect money before he even starts doing any work.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  Dude, we used to do that with Amazon back in the day when we worked with them and they're like, okay, we're net 60, but just send us the invoices like 60 days ahead or something like that. We're like, okay, sounds good. But anyway, guys, that's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe and we'll see you tomorrow.