EP339: The Marketing Connector: Finding the Right Agency

This is the High-Voltage Business Builders Podcast. Daily intelligence for serious e-commerce…

This is the High-Voltage Business Builders Podcast. Daily intelligence for serious e-commerce portfolio builders across Amazon, TikTok Shop, Shopify, Walmart, and every channel that moves the needle. Neil Toit and his Voltage team, all day, every day, since 2012. Let's get into it. I've done anything weird in school? Yeah, I don't know. I was just coming up with something weird. You know, get people's attention from the very beginning. I've visited 55 European cities. I don't know. 55 European? What is your favorite food? Do you like eat sardines? I mean, is something like unnormal about you? Do you like, you know, you don't like chocolate cake or you hate popcorn? You know, something weird? Give me a second, man. I'm just gonna ask you this question before. What is weird about me? Yeah, what is weird about you? I should make that the first question on every podcast. What is weird about you, sir? Make people, put them on the spot. Yeah. What is weird about me? Oh, you're Canadian. There it is. I just figured it out. You're Canadian. Say A. No, I just offended everybody who's Canadian on my podcast. There you go. That's the hook we needed. That gets their attention. What? You stupid American. He's a Canadian. Ick and nook. Okay, so you do put mayonnaise on your fries and, you know, malt vinegar on stuff. So that's, that's not. Yeah. That's not normal. I do a lot. Now I'm starting to realize like I'm pretty normal as a human other than just doing too many things at once. You're a modern American Canadian. I am a what? You're a modern American Canadian. I'm a modern American Canadian. We are in Vancouver. You're just a northerly cousin to our Portland city. Yeah. We're just friends. We're just friends. Yeah. Just across the border. Exactly. Just right up the river. I don't got anything weird for you, man. I don't. Oh, dude. We'll figure it out. We'll keep talking. There'll be something in there. We'll figure it out. We just started with that. Yeah. You covered ants and chocolate or something. I know it's something weird. But you travel a lot. I do. Why? Do you like to travel? No. So there's something weird. I'd love to travel. I hate to travel, but I do it anyway. I travel a lot, but I don't like doing it that much. Especially when it's like for business. I don't care. I like traveling with my wife. Like that's what I like doing. Oh, do I recognize that? When I left IBM in 2007, I had traveled close to 250 days out last year. And I'm like, That's crazy. No thanks. Two, three cities a week. That was hard. I'm one of the business owners that don't care, doesn't care about scale. I don't care about scale. What? That's crazy. That's totally anti-American, dude. No wonder. Everybody's like, We need more scale. Yeah. Everyone's like, This business doesn't scale. I must change my model. I'm like, I don't care if my business is not scaling. I mean, it's scalable, but I don't want to. What does that mean? Like, does it because of life, family? Is it travel? You're already traveling enough. Yeah, it's balancing life, man. Business is balancing life. You start running, the more and more you start growing your business, the more and more you got to deal with shit. And that's just not. This is absolutely true. I recognize that. Turned down some opportunities in the past so that I didn't have to do that, including what we call firing the man, or burning the boats and walking away from my corporate career because I was done with that crap. Yeah. You've traveled a lot more than I have since then. I think I've traveled maybe like five times on an airplane since then, in 18 years. I don't know. Wow. Well, they're like buses. They became like, you know what I'm saying? Especially in the last 10 years or so, it's just like, everybody's got to go. They're all hyped up. Airports are turning a little crazy. I don't know. You can just tell the people who are really stressed and not feeling their blessings. They're too stressed to be blessed. And they're like out there just crazing and raging with their families on trips and stuff. And you get caught up in the middle of it at airports and everybody's just so like, and I'm like, yeah, I don't really want to be around all that all the time. That's super fair. Yeah. Thankfully I don't have to travel for my business. Yeah, you're lucky. Well, I just created the business I didn't want to travel for, man. Isn't that what we're here to talk about? Creating the business. That's the plan. Okay, so. Yeah, so my actual goal in 2027 is not to travel as much for business. There you go. That's a good plan. Get it all out of your system this year. That's the plan. Legit in the docket. It's already started. Well, you're not traveling for fun as much as business. Where is the business taking you out so much? Because it's just different masterminds and different groups that people invite me to. And you're just like, these are good opportunities to go to meet certain people. That's essentially it. Business development then? BD. Networking? That's basically it. Is that where you're getting more of your... That's what I do. Okay, so it's a different way of client acquisition, I guess, huh? Exactly. Okay, yeah. Well, there's ways to do that without it too, of course. As I'm sure you know, I decided to just write off all of those myself. I don't really go to them anymore. That's the plan for 2026 is to build the system so that you don't have to travel as much and then you just keep in touch with your current network, right? Yeah. Well, I mean, you're a connector, right? So part of getting into that personal aspect is many times getting in a relationship-driven aspect, which is in person, ultimately, for a lot of deals. Although I've done a lot of deals that were never done in person. In fact, I met my partner for the first time three years into our business together at a conference that we held and we met on stage for the first time. So it's doable. I mean, I have some best friends that I never met in person until three or four years after. Yeah. You know what I mean? No, I get it, dude. Hey, do you want to come to Las Vegas for this random conference? Yeah, sure. We're down just to hang out. Yeah. It's very possible. Yeah. I usually do when I want to take the family with me versus just going it alone unless it's gonna be like a two-day thing or it's gonna be in and out kind of thing. I love when I travel with my wife. That's my favorite part. That's awesome. We went to China and Korea last year and she came on the trip and I presented it in China, which is cool. But having her there and having those experiences is so much more fun. Well, see, that's what's weird about you. I just figured it out. Who likes to travel with their wife? Nobody ever says that. I love traveling with my wife. She's the one that loves to travel. So she loves to travel and have adventure. On the interior, she likes to be stable. And then that's what I like to do. You guys have been married for how long? We've been married seven years, but together for 50. So the new smell is sort of worn off and now you're sort of into it. I mean, honestly, I keep loving her more and more, dude. It's like we're 15 years in and I love her more now than I did before and we're still like very close. Probably because we don't have kids. I was gonna say, are you one of those dinks? No, somebody came up with that. I heard one the other day, self-proclaimed, not me, on another podcast, he called himself a dickwad. And I was like, time out. What did you just say? And he says, yeah, we're a dual income, no kids with a dog. I hadn't heard that one before. That was a new one for me. That isn't, that's the first time I've heard it. Yeah, that was first for me too. And I told my wife and she's like, don't say that anymore. I was like, okay. You have to get, that's why the wives are there. Don't say that anymore. Yeah, no, I actually do like hanging out with my wife and my kids and I like traveling with them and I enjoy their company. And you know, I've been with my wife for almost 20 years. We're being married for, she will be 19 years in March. So, you know, I like, I feel like I'm one of the oddities a lot of times, you know? You know, yeah, but it comes down to just having good communication and understanding how each one has to grow. We understand that, like you've been in a relationship for a long time, right? Oh, we're jamming, we're best friends. So where are we gonna meet, Vegas for drinks? Is that where we're going? Vegas, I don't like Vegas that much. Can we choose somewhere else? Well, you said it. I was like, I don't like Vegas. I don't wanna go to Vegas. I just went there just to shower and burn all my clothes and you know, all the normal. No, on my list is Chicago. Is there anywhere else I wanna go in the States that I haven't visited yet? Chicago, it's cold there, man. But they have good food, apparently. Well, they do have some of the best deep dish pizza. That's what you're going after. I mean, I'm there for food. I travel for food. You travel for food. And match, there's your matchmaking, right? Yeah, I travel for food. Like I'll spend like three hours to try to find a place to go eat when we're traveling. So like my wife will travel, plan all the rest of the stuff. I will find the food places. Okay, so then you need to go to Trinidad and Tobago. And there's a little, in a little island corner down there just past where the airport is, there's this really great sandy beach down there and they have shark bake. Shark what? Shark bake. They have these stands where they make the food, like the food trucks, if you will. And then it's fresh shark from that day and they cut part of it off and they grill it up. And then they have this amazing sauce and stuff that's on top of it and it's called a shark bake. And you eat it right there on the beach. It's amazing. Note taken. So I'll reach out to you when I go to Trinidad and Tobago to remember where to go eat this shark bake. It's a great little place, yeah. Well, at least it was before Venezuela. I don't know if it is anymore. I haven't been down there in a long time because there's a lot of stuff crap going on that side. But I don't suppose business takes you down that far south. At the moment, does it? No. No. But you're in the matchmaking space, you're a connector. You're out making deals happen, right? You're the guy that brings the buyer and seller together and gets them to fall in love. While saving 17 hours a week doing it? That's exactly what we built Voltage Business Builders for. It combines the power of experience and being in the right room with the power of AI to compress time and increase your business profits. More than AI for the sake of using AI. It's a room full of senior sellers with over 15 years in e-comm, showing you the ropes of AI, business building, and creating generational wealth through business. Visit VoltageDM.com to see what's inside the Voltage Business Builders room. Go make babies. Yeah, go make babies that make money. Babies that make money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How'd you get into this, man? How'd you become this virtual business matchmaker? Well, I started out as an engineer. Out of all things, I was not even in marketing. So a lot of my engineering work was working with mid-sized businesses, 50 to 1,000 type employer range. So that's where I got to learn about the business side of the world. Learning from CEOs and their teams and making connections on how to build the right roadmap, like technology roadmap. And so a lot of my business consulting sales leadership and technology experience came from that. On the marketing side, the matchmaking side, I was building out websites, Google Ads, SEO initially. Got to a point where I hated doing ADR websites on the weekend. I was like, I don't need to do this. I get paid very well. I mean, you work full-time at some point too. So when you make a six-figure salary and you do a good job, it's fine. But as I was working in the marketing space, I started realizing, oh, I started passing work off to marketing agencies instead of doing it myself and realizing most marketing agencies didn't understand business and most businesses didn't understand marketing. So there's always this gap in the middle and every business would be talking to marketing agencies not speaking the same language. I've come down to about like 93% of marketing agencies are just kind of good, which means they don't do anything. And then 7% are good at one to three things, especially when they're matched well. And so to date, I've talked to over 1,126 different marketing agencies and experts. And I work with about 11% in embedded network and all I do is the matchmaking work because I'm just really good at connecting with people and people together. Any specific types of connections you love to make? I like the connections when you have a business owner that understands how marketing works, that has a good understanding of like, hey, this does take time. There's different channels. I have a marketing strategy, but I need the right people in place. And then when you have the agency that's like, I'm really good at X and I'm really good at this, when you make that match and people like working with each other and they work with each other for like four plus years, those are the ones that feel the best because you just did a really good job of connecting them. Yeah, okay. And do you just, there's a commission fee or something? I mean, how do you make your money? Like, how does this work for you? Yeah, so I get paid referral fees from marketing agencies. It's essentially the same fees that we'd be paying their sales teams. So I take advantage of that. And then businesses do pay me an engagement fee. So usually I'll jump on a call, discovery call, understand what a business needs. And then from there, I charge 1500 bucks to do the matchmaking. And then if they end up hiring someone, I have a small success finder fee and that's essentially it. I just make the connections. Awesome. So you're kind of a marketer, affiliate, matchmaker, not to deride, I'm trying to put this together in my own words, so if it doesn't sound right, please correct me. I've heard things like marketing broker, people have called me a Zapier for marketing agency. Yes, I am a connector. Yeah, that's fun. How'd you get into this? Like I said, man, when I was building out the websites and stuff, like I didn't really enjoy doing it. And the long story was like when I was working with a marketing agency, they were really good at websites, but they weren't good at Google ads or SEO. And so my brain went, okay, can I find an agency that's good at all of them? And as I started meeting other agencies, I was like, oh, this agency is only really good at video creative and doing commercials. They're not good at the other stuff. And as I got to about four to 500 marketing agencies and realizing, oh, maybe the type of agency I'm looking for doesn't actually exist. Like marketing agency, maybe it's the process of piecing people together based on what people need and when they need it. And that's essentially kind of how I got into it. And more and more people kept referring me, my own customers and things like that. And so it just kind of started growing. It was like, you need a marketing thing, you need website paid ads, SEO, go talk to B. He has a whole list and rolodex of people. He'll match make you and then kind of go from there. Yeah, that is cool. And it sounds like it meets your personality type as well as your drive. Yeah. Yeah, everything I like doing is around connection. So I'm starting to realize like every little side thing that I do or every business that I do, it's all around like just one, learning how to connect with people. But then my brain works in a way where it's like, oh, you're saying this, this connects with this other thing. You two should probably talk or have you thought about that? Probably tied to why I became an engineer too. Yeah. Do you still geek out in the engineering back end? Is that still part of what you do? Not as much anymore. No. It's more just like the mindset of like problem solving. You'll start noticing like when you talk to a lot of engineers, they actually end up outside of engineering. Project management, or they start working in different areas. All engineering really teaches you to do is to be really good at problem solving. Cause that's just the way our brains work in the way we were trained. Yeah. Yeah, you're linear thinkers in many ways. It's tough to see somebody expand that thinking process when they've been kind of trained and it's kind of who they are, maybe profile a little bit. It's hard to break out of that kind of segment. And you seem to be a hybrid of the person, the business and the engineering, which is fun. It's a lot of fun, which is why I became a sales engineer. Cause I was like, oh, I can now talk to people, understand what they need and then bridge together the technical stuff without like needing to know the technical stuff at a 10 out of 10 level. Like that's cool. I can be the bridge. It's really fun. It's where I get excited. Do you help strategize with any of the clients that are looking for the type of agency? Do you strategize on the marketing plan and then kind of help them figure out exactly which agency to fit in? Is that part of the consult? Yeah, so a lot of what I'll do is when I'm talking on a discovery call, I'm understanding the business side. So understanding everything that they have. So what their goals are, where they're at today, where they want to head, what kind of resources they have, where they failed before, what they tried to hire for, all that stuff. Based on that, I'll have a really high level thing where I'm like, okay, it looks like you don't just need execution. You actually need strategy. And to do strategy on one call is impossible. A lot of what I do is I get fractional CMOs to kind of come in and I go, look, I think the first piece of this is building out a proper marketing strategy based on where you're at. Once you have that marketing strategy, then we can go and execute on which channel makes the most sense. And so I'll input a fractional CMO. They'll work with a business sometimes for three to six months to build up a strategy and get things organized and in position. And then I feed them the partners that they need to kind of move forward. Whether that's like, oh, we have to reposition our branding because we actually don't even know what we're trying to say to people, right? And then once you do that, then it's a website piece. So you're kind of like sitting there along the roadmap of like, as they're building their marketing strategy and the next piece of execution, I start placing in the partners. Because if I started doing a lot of the marketing strategy stuff, I'd only be able to take on two to four customers and that just doesn't work. Because FCMOs max out, right? Like max two customers that are full time, right? Makes sense. So do you do anything in the middle of that marketing to help find your clients and stuff? Do you do any of the SEO stuff anymore or marketing stuff for yourself? Yeah, so my team does all my own marketing. So I have a team of seven. And a lot of my marketing is around like content, email marketing, like newsletter type stuff, getting people into my environment, running different events for like people in my business network or my marketing network. And just staying top of mind for a lot of people. I've done some SEO stuff before. I'm competing against some pretty heavy hitters in that area. So I was like, maybe I won't keep spending money in the SEO area, but I have tried a lot of channels myself and always trying new ones, right? So the next kind of like two pieces that we're gonna be doing for CJAM is one, working out on the cold email front, but trying to find if we can take more of a human connection approach to it rather than just like a volume of calls. And then two would be on the paid ads front, like the Google ads front, long tail keywords, that kind of stuff. That is awesome. Well, what websites should I go check you out or social media, Instagram, LinkedIn, where do you like to hang out? The two best places is on my website. So www.cjammarketing.com, or you can find me on LinkedIn under beta jam shitty. I post quite often there as well. Well, cool, man. Thank you for coming on and sharing a good word. I appreciate it. Anything else I didn't ask you that you wanted to cover that we didn't like jam on yet? Your favorite other food or something? Favorite other food. A lot of my foods are, favorite foods are Persian, but if you have some kebab and you're having a good time. That's awesome, man. Appreciate you coming on. Thanks for being a business builder and for spending some time with me today, just jamming out. Thanks, Neil. It's great to be here. All right, guys, like, comment, share, engage, as always subscribe, leave snide remarks. Tell us your favorite food in the comments. That'd be awesome too. And always remember that your opportunity begins at the end of your excuses, do something and perfectly and something perfect will happen along the way. Catch you guys on the next episode. Today, Beta Jamshidi shared how finding the right agency can change your business. He talked about how the right partner connects your marketing goals with real results. If any of this hit close to home, you know that managing your Amazon ads and inventory can feel like juggling too many balls. The fix is not more tabs. Most sellers are drowning in tabs, ads, listings, inventory, pricing, reviews. AI looks like the easy fix, but bad data in means bad calls out. You do not save time. You make expensive mistakes faster. That is not freedom. That is chaos with nobody steering. Here is what works. Cayman data pulls your live Amazon numbers into one clear picture, ads, listings, sales, inventory. You see what is working and what is costing you money, not another spreadsheet that eats your week. 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