Luke Van Der Veer - SEO Expert & Entrepreneur | Ranking (and Renting) Websites With SEO

A lot of business owners think I need a website and as soon as I have one it's automatically to bring it to. A website's just a business. It's not doing anything just sitting there. You could have a $30,000 website and it's going to sit on page 10 with everybody else until you can see Luke. Luke. Luke. Vandervere. Vandervere is earning six figures per a month with rank and rent S.C.O. Luke. Try to vote. That is 24. That's working at GD. My first 9-5 job. Everybody I know, they're all stuck trading time for money. We just now work and I just never accepted this idea. I was like, I can't do this. I'm not doing this. There's got to be a way out of it. Warren Buffett. I really know what he's quote. He's just like, whatever your paid is just what the market thinks you're getting somewhere. I've always liked doing things on my own. I'm like, these websites are looking at what I'm doing for the clients. I'm like, why do they have control over my time? They have control over my time is I'm working for them. I'm like, but what are they getting at? All they're really getting is peanuts. I'm like, how can I have it where I've got it? It's like the perfect solution. What was the biggest mistake that you made when you first started trying to build something yourself? Oh, God. There's so many mistakes. Welcome to success story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. They've been supporting the show for over two years now. And when it comes to running an incredible business, HubSpots got your back now. If you're an entrepreneur, you know that nothing matters more than generating revenue, but sales people aren't just closing deals. They're tracking down leads. They're forecasting growth. They're whipping up reports, managing contacts, creating content, crunching numbers. The list of tasks goes on and on. With Q4 around the corner, there's a better way to win. It all starts with the new HubSpot sales hub. Now with the HubSpot sales hub, your data, tools and teams are fully linked inside a smart and highly customizable platform that feels good to use. It's easy. Turn prospects into pipeline and close your deals all in one place. Plus sequences and smooth workflows help reps, streamline tasks and spend more time on what they do best, connecting with customers. With sales hub, closing big deals is simple. Try it for yourself at HubSpot.com slash sales. When I was working at GE, it was my first real job, first nine to five job after the MBA program at Albany. I was there for a few weeks trying to get used to that type of company. Just a true nine to five human resources department, lots of smart people and just a lot of work. As you'd imagine at a multinational company, six largest in the world or whatever at the time. Talking to some of the different colleagues, I noticed that most of the people in the department were a lot older than me. Like I was 24. Everybody was nearing retirement. They're all late 50s, early 60s and person after person after person was telling me the same two themes. I don't have enough money to retire or I haven't been able to do the things I've wanted to do over the past 35, 40 years. And one woman in particular was one I was really close to. She was the person who was kind of training me to get me up the speed to be the subject matter expert for the benefit stuff I was handling. And she was just talking about not being able to see her daughter and how important this was to her. And I just kept hearing this from everybody and I just was sitting there adding up the years in my head. Like I don't want to do this for 30, 40 years and not have money and not be able to do any of this stuff I want to do. I want it now. Like while I'm young. So I mean that was the thing for me. It was just kind of a trigger like I can't do this. I started getting immediately stressed. I'm like I have to make a change. So that was the thing for me. I'm like I'm not doing this. I decide to do something. I don't know what it is yet but I'm going to do something. You know you had this like you had this moment is like crisis when you were just starting out at GE but the fact that you took the initiative to go build something I think it's so commendable because everyone has like this different entrepreneur story when they're like I just had to do it but a lot of people they didn't get that bug when they first started working. A lot of people went through a lot of shit before they decided to build something themselves or they came from a family that was entrepreneurial. What do you think was different about you that made you want to build something yourself? Like you have this stress, this pressure. A lot of people feel that though. It was just a you you you looked out and you saw the 40 years and you're like no I'm not doing that shit. I can't I'm like I can't do it. Maybe it's just growing up. I mean my father is a small business owner. He's a chiropractor started his own practice. My mom would be an employee. She's a clinical nurse specialist, a psychiatric nurse. My brothers are both just employees right. Everybody I know all has the same thing. They all they're all stuck trading time for money and it was something I never wanted to do and I would never understood you know we go have this great time at school but after that we just now work forever and I just never accepted this idea. So as soon as I get on there I was like I can't I can't do this. I'm not doing this. There's got to be a way out. If I there's other people I see that can do this. I don't know them but there's other people that are out. So there's got to be a way. I'm going to find out where it is. What was the biggest mistake that you made when you first started trying to build something yourself? Not? Oh God there's so many mistakes. It's a true question. Unlimited mistakes. It is a question. There's so many. Not clearly defining what I wanted. So I spent years focused on just making money. I thought money was the ticket. If I just had a lot of money I don't have to work. Like it doesn't have to be like power ball money but enough for it's like millions. I don't have to do anything then I can just hang out or do whatever but going into different business models like all the different things I tried drop shipping in Amazon and MLM and trying to create a Facebook ad agency and all these different things with just trying to make money I never really realized that time was what I wanted. I didn't care about the money. I want you need some but I needed time because I want to control of what I'm doing with my schedule and having to ask somebody for permission to take vacation makes me feel like a kid in class and building all these different business models and getting to a reasonable amount with each of them I realized that I don't care about the money if I can't use any of it. So I eventually found my way to something that gave me that time back but only after screwing up with so many models not knowing this just to plan it out. So plan it out in advance would have been the smart move. So all the different things you tried these are all like the typical side hustles right so you spoke about building an agency drop shipping MLM whatever it is is a very typical side hustle and these can all be valid businesses. I think that there were points in time when some of these worked better than others because you know you had first mover advantage or you're one of the first people to try the thing the drop shipping you're running a Facebook ad agency but now saturated marketplace because everyone and their mother has tried these side hustle businesses but they all kind of work to a degree but they're what I have an issue with with all of these types of side hustles it's for some reason they're marketed as passive income they're all marketed as passive I don't know actually now that I'm thinking about it when the concept of entrepreneurship and passive ever was aligned and and in sync because from my experience entrepreneurship is like okay we'll get ready for 80 hours a week that's what you're going to be doing and I think it's this you know you look on Instagram and you see people that promote these types of things and I think to get people to buy into their concept they show this beautiful lifestyle where it's like working for more ever I have a laptop in front of a pool and I run a drop shipping business and I don't have to do any basically nothing and I'm making millions of dollars but these are very these are not easy businesses perhaps people optimize them and they remove some of the problems and logistics that a traditional business would require but it's still a business if you're building it if you're building a drop shipping site you're still spending up a website you're still finding product you're you're basically doing a gamut of marketing activities all the time you still have to make sure they're fulfillment customer service I mean at agencies you're finding new customers you're running ads for them maybe there's some parts that can be automated or outsource but it's like you still have a business it's still a bit which is fine but it's hard and entrepreneurship is very hard and people build themselves jobs right I've done it multiple times so I'm aware so you've gone through all these and like when you go through them all like you make money but you're not free because when people build businesses they have to spend more time in the business they don't have time for their family it's like almost like worse than working a nine to five in terms of time and freedom it is it is it started with MLM that was kind of the first one I spent three and a half years on that that was the first one that I kind of hit and it makes sense because in the beginning you didn't have as much money well I didn't so it you know 400 bucks get in start your MLM company so I'm in there and I mean you you learn things from it I guess it helps me become a little bit more focused on self-education I was really self-conscious speaking in front of people so I never would have done this a million years but you know you keep screwing things up and I was worried about being judged but the people who are making all the money said you have to just push through that don't worry about it and just get good at this so I just kept trying to practice presentations or whatever I'm talking in front of people we're doing presentations at people's houses I'm always wearing black just in case I sweat like crazy and I actually know them thinking about I'm still wearing black because it's ingrained in me now but just like putting all those reps in like made me good at that but I'm listening to the people on stage that are talking and they're saying yeah you know if you get up to this big team you get to have your team working and then you don't have to work you could just sit back and relax and I was like all right cool so I learned how to do it I listened to them a goal this training I recruited a ton of people and I had my big team now so I was like all right I'm gonna try to do this and I just stopped working everybody else stopped working too and then I realized I'm supposed to be leading by example so of course if I stop they're going to too so it was a lie it's like it's not really passive at no point can I walk away and just have them continue it because they're looking to me so that business model is flawed so I'm like okay that one's done so we try something else so I try eBay and I'm like this might be a good one self stop on Amazon and eBay and with my partner and I we built this up we're selling the liquidation products we get it up to like 35 grand a month but we're pulling we're pulling 15 hour days 70s a week we have no lives so that was another terrible thing it's like I don't care about 35 grand a month when you have to pay taxes split it with him eBay fees and just all of our time disappears but it did teach me that I didn't have any leverage so that was something out now I have to look for so it's like program after program I learned all the things that I was missing that I should have known up front but I didn't know and I had to learn it through that experience until finally I hit SEO and that was kind of the the difference maker I started investing in programs and mentors to learn SEO and I created an agency but once again like you mentioned created another job for myself I can generate leads for anybody anywhere but now I got all these people that are asking me for reports and hey update this picture on my website send me this send me that and it wasn't until a client called me at midnight on a Sunday complaining about his rankings which were fantastic where I just snapped and I was like I got to find a way to get out of this there's got to be a way to do that's where I don't have to be involved all the time I'm just laughing at somebody complaining about the rankings on a on a on a Sunday at midnight he woke me up I was sleeping I was like I have a bedtime for myself I he just woke me up out of a dead sleep I was like confused like what's going on I saw the name it's like not clicking and like why is this person calling me right now and he was just complaining about call volume and like mind you two months before he's unlike page five or six in Google and like if you've ever seen the actual statistics on this nobody goes past page one it it makes sense right you're googling for something you say you want a plumber why am I going to go seven pages back and look at 70 different companies I'm gonna pick one of the first few or a person with some good reviews I'm not going seven pages back and I don't have time for that and that's what everybody does right and this guy was nowhere to be found and I had him on page one for like 30 different terms he's getting four five six seven calls a day from nothing before and now he's complaining about this I was like you ungrateful I had some choice words and then I just fired him on the spot I'm like we're you're done I'm not that's that we're done and then it's just the next day I got up and it's like we got to do something different so that was kind of the transition I just started thinking about this and I'm like I can if I could do this for anybody why don't I just do this for all the same niches I'm already in with these clients and I will just rent the sites to them I own it so I'm in control I don't have to do reports for anybody I don't have to change anything because it's my site and then you follow my rules or you're done and I'll find somebody else because if I have the leads that's what's valuable so I just started treating it like a rental property and finding tenants instead of going out and finding clients and that little switch made it passive for me because now I got something I can just build it up rent it out and then I'm done move on to the next one so I want to understand this process a little I want to understand your mindset too because so the two things that I think of when you so you thought build a website rent the whole website out to a brand right when you can you explain that and what I mean by explain it is a website has a brand attached to it how is it used for another company is it just your passing over leads yeah we're just exclusive leads so I get a differentiated couple things so first thing a lot of business owners think I need a website and as soon as I have one it's automatically going to bring in leads which is not a case a website's just a business card you it's not doing anything just sitting there you could have a $30,000 website and it's going to sit on page 10 with everybody else until you do some search engine optimization or SEO to move it up to the point where people see it so that's the first thing and then once you have that asset whether you know the business owner owns that or I do whoever's got that asset people are going to see it right if I'm ranked number one for New York City for the term New York City plumbing when somebody needs plumbing New York City and they type that in they're going to see me and because there's a ton of people in New York City and everybody searches that term that website whoever's getting that traffic that's worth a crazy amount of money so if that's a business owner cool he could use it for himself is that's me I have to find a way to get that to the business owner so I essentially just started creating generic brands so I would create something like New York City plumbing so if anybody just called that they're not really going to remember it it's not anything as a memorable name but it's generic enough where I could send it to another plumber and he could just be like oh yeah that's one of my marketing sites or oh yeah it's just you know that's that's my my DBA and I would just send all the leads to that business owner exclusively using some call tracking call forwarding software and then that keeps me out of it so now the leads are coming in from the organic rankings I've achieved I'm no longer involved because it's basically sitting there unless I pick a super competitive market the leads being sent from the business or from the the website to the business are out of my hands because that's all automated with the systems and the business owners just getting call volume so now I'm just renting the exclusive rights to all the leads that come in because I'm not a plumber but I could still make money off if I treat it like real estate so this this strategy for the business owner when when they do this they're they're getting access to these leads and I think it's a really it's a really smart idea I've never heard of it before but it's an incredibly smart idea to do this so you just know how you know how to build like lead generation machines again and again and again building lead generation digital assets and digital assets website generally yeah now I am curious so how your mind went to this because when you were when you had your SEO agency like why did you not just hire out like a COO director of operations hire out an operator literally things we're talking about before we jumped on the call with equity why how did your mind go to this because this model I don't think I've ever really I've heard of lead generation services of course but like it's so specific it's like website rental it's it's something new I just a couple things so number one I'm not great at dealing with people I've always liked doing things on my own so the idea of having employees and having to hire people is the opposite of anything I'd want to do so that's probably why that went to the back of my mind the other thing was I'm picking these websites looking at what I'm doing for the clients I'm like why why do they have control over my time they have control over my time because I'm working for them I'm like but what are they getting out of it all they're really getting is the leads I'm like how can I have it where I've got the leads and I'm like I could just build the site and then I'm like okay but then I have to find a way they they have to like rent it from me I'm like I guess I could just do it exclusively and like I knew of home advisor and thumbtack I know like gigantic multi-million dollar companies and they take leads and they'll sell them piecemeal to multiple companies but then it's kind of like a shared thing right those companies all fight over one lead that's not good but if I had everything myself and I found one company I could send it to it could be like an exclusive deal so it's a hell of a deal for them and then if they're renting it from me since I'm in control of it I can do whatever I want so now I control over my time again it's like the perfect it's like the perfect solution yeah and and when you build these out when you when you build up these sites because a lot of people that are listening to this are for sure thinking like I have enough time I haven't I've a hard enough time building out one website that generates leads how how is this guy doing it like he wakes up in the morning build a site generates leads can rent it out like no problem because building out a site is like building out a company it is a business card but then you have a brand attached to it but it's a generic brand okay understand that but you know the content the keywords like all the SEO pieces how much content how much time all these different things that it takes to build out this website generates leads but you do it like again and again and again and again and again and again so are there right certain categories certain niches that work better than others what's the sort of the the strategy because obviously going into this you probably it was a it was sort of like a thesis a working thesis now yeah hindsight is 2020 you kind of know what works what doesn't yeah I mean I started with the niches that I was already in because I had clients and all the niches I was doing I'm like let's try water damage let's try roofing let's try concrete but I learned things about each of the niches as I was trying to use them and that a lot of them were really difficult and I'm noticing a thing a pattern between some of the niches and some of the city sizes and I started trying to narrow it down to see if I could find something where it's a niche that's high value something that everybody needs something that has a really short sales cycle so I can basically convince somebody to want to work with me fast right like for example if I generate leads for like pool construction like that's a six month process somebody wants to get a pool design they go through the design the construction all this stuff that's going to take forever so if I give that to a business owner he's not getting paid on that for months so I can't really convince him to do that right away and I'm knowing I'm not good at sales I have to find a way to do this where I get something really fast and they can see the money quick so then I can keep doing this and I mean it's kind of a crap shoe just testing out different niches and things but I've kind of narrowed it down into something that's phone driven so people are calling in for the service and then whatever that contractor is or business owner will go out to them to do it so not like a nail salon I want something where people are calling in so like a plumber a tree service concrete those are okay but then I also want that short sale cycle I want something where there's not a ton of competition in whatever area I'm doing it right like I'm not going straight for New York City because although it's worth a ton I'm gonna have to do so much work in competing against other marketing companies to do that and just because I can't doesn't mean I should right I would rather find the mom and pop business who has no idea what they're doing and they put up a website because their best friend told them to and they're the person who's ranked at the top because I know if I go into that market even if I screw up everything I can still beat them and I also won't have to do very much work ongoing which is the passive piece because I don't want to work after I build this and get it all going I want it to be minimal I want to get it up get the thing ranked get it rented out and then I want to just be able to sit back and just collect checks so and it can work like that if you pick the right niche in the right market so that's I think that's a that's a huge sort of that that's a secret sauce that makes this more of a passive thing than an active thing yeah that's very important and the reason you know when I when I think about this this business model I'm thinking like holy shit if I had 10 websites that I'm renting out I have to be posting articles back linking to these all the time and then so so you know but explain that though because when you think SEO that's immediately what you think like when how do you SEO site you're putting up an article every day if you can or multiple times a day right because that's how you keep putting up new articles so this is where it comes down to right niche right category right city right demo right geography because those don't require that level of commitment right yeah so I mean like without any without having experienced that most people will pick the stuff that comes to mind immediately right they'll pick the things that they think make a lot they'll pick concrete they'll pick trees plumbers electricians lawyers personal injury lawyer like oh that makes a ton of money yeah okay so you can generate leads for that but your work is going to be ongoing because you're competing against other marketing companies right you have to know if the the personal injury lawyers they're paying thousands and thousands of dollars a month five ten twenty grand a month to keep their website where it is so it's like you could do that by posting all these articles and constantly adding new links and all this stuff but why it's so much work instead we want to look at something obscure so personally I like blue collar stuff like excavation in Des Moines Island just some random niche who know it's not sexy right it's boring nobody cares about that and that's why I'd rather be there I want to fish where people aren't so that I have a shot and it makes it easier and then I don't have to do that constant posting I can just throw up a site with a few thousand words of content I don't have to do the blog posts I can get some links going I can get all that up and going and once it's at the top I'm done there's none of this continuous blog posting and linking and all this and then I could just watch the rank tracking software and if it dips occasionally okay I'll send another link or two but it's not a constant thing where if the higher people to keep managing it that's the what so what's the effort required like if you're actually trying to rank some of these like what would be the the ideal setup for you like how many blogs how long would it take you to set one of these up I mean to build a website 10 minutes now I mean originally the idea was I would build something get the website up and then once I had kind of a structure I want which is basically like a home page five service pages and about in a contact all with a ton of content I'm just going to take that structure I'm going to duplicate it or template it and then reuse that template over again now the content I have to create again because I don't want duplicate content in Google but that's easy enough to outsource and then I could just plug and play my template in five minutes so then I could just have that done for me by somebody else's too like a and just repeat it place after place after place so my time is just spent trying to figure out what place is worth it what place should I do it in so I get the most right get the most effect of use of my time so let's let's let's let's uh let's talk about like the the financials and the commercials about how to build up this business you build this out leads are coming in like how do you price this out like what is I'm super curious as like a business model like how you scale this out like how much can you charge a business for this what's the potential because it's it's very very again it's very smart and I always wonder why people over complicate entrepreneurship so I am curious about how how you monetize this and how much it makes you if you want to talk about it fine if you want to just give vague numbers also cool but I am very curious about how much it can make yeah I mean I've made several million with website rentals so you can the sky's the limit with this it's just how long you want to keep doing it you don't really need many to create a really big income in terms of pricing I mean the average across the students is around 1500 bucks for people I've coached on this yeah you're kind of all over the map with what you want to charge my personal philosophy is charge enough where the business owner gets a pretty massive ROI so I like to try to give a business owner a minimum of a 10X ROI because at that point it's stupid for them not to use me and when I do that I find that it's more passive for me because they don't bother me because they know they're getting such a good deal so some people don't like doing that because they want to be able to maximize how much you can charge for every site I don't care I'll just do it over and over and over again so there's like competing thoughts on this because obviously it's everybody's own business you could do what you want with it if you have this skill set and you know how to use the model right but like I've seen people rent one site out for 6500 bucks a month that was one two people worked on together super cool that's somebody's annual income from one site they just did most people are going like thousand bucks a month 1500 bucks a month but even at that thousand bucks a month is 12 grand a year so five six of those and you could replace a full-time job for sure no and I've seen business owners do it I've seen nine to fiveers do it it's just a way to get to really build wealth and get your time back without having to put continuous work in it's just the work upfront as you all know the success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network which has incredible podcasts for entrepreneurs business leaders people just wanting to upscale themselves one of my favorites that you need to go check out is my first million hosted by Sam Parr and Sean Perry they have incredible guests Alex Hermosi Sophia Amaruso Hassan Minhaj all sharing their secrets how they made their first million and how to apply their learnings to capitalize on today's business trends and opportunity go listen to my first million wherever you get your podcast um I'm I'm so curious I was listening to other podcasts one of the stories you spoke about was a car wrap story yeah I want to understand when you were building out this this business concept which is super novel like again like it's not like you're going on YouTube and you're seeing people that are posting videos about again how to start a website rental company so you had this idea you started it I want to talk about you know that story with the car wrap story but also like what solidified this is yes this makes sense for me yeah so the car wraps one I had um I had some ideas of what niches I wanted to do something obscure and it's just kind of going through googling online like what niches for I don't even remember the exact search term but just like niches for internet marketing or something um and I saw a person drive by with a wrapped car and I was like I wonder about car wraps so I started looking around the country I just randomly kind of picked phoenix I don't really know what the idea was for that that was just a pretty random pick and just looking at phoenix I saw that there wasn't a ton of competition and I was like okay well maybe I can do it for this one so I started googling um and I looked up some of the other companies that were kind of ranking at the top and I used some tools SCM rush is the one I was using to just look at the top competitors and what keywords they were ranking for and I noticed that a lot of the words sounded like company names or like they could be a company name and then I was like all right let's just do something related to Arizona and like I probably would do this differently now but Arizona I was like all right easy I'm like I'll just do easy car wraps so that was just my main name by the way that is absolutely phenomenal name thank you thank you that was a random pick so I was just kind of doing this and I built a I built a site for this I'm like I don't know anything about car wraps some looking at everybody else's sites and trying to like take all the top competitors and see what the commonalities are between what they're talking about and some people had like FAQs some people had the pricing some people had like service areas and like all right what if I just take all of it and I put it all on mine I'll just create like the Wikipedia of car wraps but I'll try to make it like a business and that's what I tried to do so I just had a massive homepage with like tons of information on it I built out services for all of it I had like a commercial page like what else can we use wraps for them like people wrap buildings they wrap boats they wrap all kinds of things so I was like all right let's just write about all of it so I put all of it on the site and it started getting some organic traffic without me really doing anything and then I was like okay now how do we push this so I started doing the links and like I had this kind of experience for my SEO agency so I'm like let's kill the content first really solid foundation on to make the link building easier so then I started building links to it and the thing just kind of was like not really doing anything for a while it was kind of slowly moving up but on the surface it's not getting any calls but the rankings are improving and then eventually around like four-month mark somewhere in there the rankings just jumped I hit page one for some of the really big terms in the market and then all the sudden it's like flood of calls and I'm like all crap I got to find somebody to do this because they're like calling me for car wraps and I'm like I don't know this so my phone's like ringing and ringing your ringing I'm like what do I do with these people and so I just kept answering and I'm like oh yeah hey how can I help you and they're like I want this and this and this you know how much I'm like oh let me get back to you and just person after person after person so I'm like writing all this down I got all these leads my cool all right we got to find somebody to send this to so I just was looking for companies I'm like I can't send it to the top guys they don't care because they're already overloaded I'm like I got to find somebody's buried so I just went way back in the search results I started calling people that were like five six pages back in Google because they're not getting any business so called up those people and I was trying to like pitch them I'm like listen I got all these leads you gotta like you should take them this will help you grow your business and they're like who the hell is this guy trying to like pitch me these leads like this just gotta be some kind of scam and I'm like no I'm like just I'm like I'll give you them for free just for like one day two days I want to just send you some of these people and we'll just see how it goes they're like all right cool so I started forwarding the leads to them and they're just closing all these deals so I'm like all right I want 400 bucks a month 500 bucks a month they're like all right 500 bucks a month it is I'm like cool so I have my first person 500 bucks a month and that person is still with me and I've never raised their price since I could probably charge them 15 times that now because they get way more leads than it used to get but I just it was kind of like the proof of concept I got paid for it and I'm like I'll just do this everywhere for everything I'm just not gonna do it for car raps because that niche I don't like it there's a lot of price shoppers and there's other problems with it that I found out it's so interesting but you learn about this stuff as you go on stuff yes yeah I'm also curious about you know the the strategy really revolves around SEO and organic and a lot of people myself included think about SEO and organic is like a 12-month 18-month strategy not like a three to six month and again it depends on what you're selling I get that but you're so heavily focused on organic I'm curious as to why this is the strategy business it should focus on versus maybe not not instead of but if they're going to prioritize something prioritize organic instead of paid instead of social like I know there's a lot of nuance to this but a lot of people a lot of business owners focus on paid immediately they focus on paid and I've seen entire businesses being built on paid completely neglecting SEO organic like completely completely not even a blog post up and I don't think it's really that scalable beyond a certain point I think can you get to a million yes can you get 10 million revenue yes totally with paid but I think there are ceilings on it I think that keywords become so damn expensive but I'm curious about your experience with other types of marketing and why again organic was such a main focus for you having tried to build the Google ads agency and a Facebook agency I know how much money that is and I think people do it because of course you can get leads really fast so you could just pay for leads and you could have some in a week or maybe a few days if you get pick right but long term I like the organic strategy better because you like build up and put all this work in but then you get paid on it multiples of what you can get paid paid and it's just I think a better long term strategy it's a better ROI because you put in all that work up front and then you're getting paid on it for years so like if I kind of related to that car wraps example that site still pays me now so if you look at like a per hour I spent versus what I get paid I'm making like $2,800 an hour something like who gets paid so like as an organic strategy I really like that just SEO just because I mean it may take a little while but it's great the ROI is insane later on and also from like a customer perspective I think the customers are easier to close like I don't know about you when I look at ads or I'm looking at Google and I see stuff pop up it's like unless I have some kind of emergency thing I need right now the ads are more of a nuisance 100% actually I personally avoid them now because I know that they're paying to rank I actually funny enough if I'm looking for something I look for the first non-sponsored ad and I know as they rank and I know that there's a reason why they're there I look for the most reviews or that's exactly it so it's it's psychology right it's like you're looking at it as a customer and you're thinking like okay they're paying for that spot but this guy right here this person must have earned it now the cool thing is you can manipulate this with SEO so did they earn it yeah I guess but not in the way they're thinking but everybody thinks like that they're like well if they're number one it must be for a reason Google put them there for a reason the reason is they're good at you know following Google's guidelines or whatever to get them there um no but I mean it's it's listen when you're building a business you play into consumer psychology it's it's it's not a bad thing it's it's a required thing I mean every every part of marketing is is is is dancing around consumer psychology right so it's it's it's the game you have to play but the other thing that I'm curious about just because you're so much involved in this world is when you build out these websites so uh downturns in the market um does it affect organic um google algorithm updates how significantly does that affect organic all these different things that I mean I've never I've never bothered to ask people about this because most people don't focus on organic is their core marketing strategy so how does it affect uh the business a lot of people focus on ads is like they're their primary source of leads in organics like a second nice to have which is obviously the complete 180 of how you built this out so all these different nuances how does it affect it yeah I mean I like organic and then paid as icing on the cake exactly I know I know you're the opposite of most business owners which is that's why it works because it's it's it's there's longevity to it I mean like so interestingly enough like the pandemic is a good example and it it hit some of the sites so different things affect different niches so I'll give you an example and when the pandemic hit 2020 whatever that was I had seven sites all around the New York City general area um they were related to restaurant cleaning and New York City announced that all restaurants are shut down so that completely eliminates the need for cleaning right so all of those rights although they were all ranked number one for a ton of terms immediately were now worthless but it was only for a period because as soon as it opened up again they came right back but during that period those seven sites they income from those disappeared but it didn't affect me because I was in so many other niches that I would consider essential that I don't care if I lose those seven sites for seven grand or whatever a month because I got so many other ones that it didn't do anything to me and as soon as the ban was lifted all the restaurants are open again like a year and a half later the call volume came right back because of course everybody wants to go back to the restaurants and then they need the cleaning services again so that was right back but like the point was the essential services you can diversify and like hedge your risk of like your income disappearing by diversifying your niches and some of them are just not going anywhere like plumbing is a good example right if my toilet breaks I'm not a plumber I don't know anybody does plumbing I'm not gonna take a crap in the backyard I'm gonna call somebody and they're gonna come fix my toilet it doesn't matter if there's a recession or you know I just my 401k took a hit because the economy is going down somebody's fixing the toilet right so that one's not going anywhere and if you find stuff like that you can hedge your risk and pretty much eliminate it if you have enough different things you're in I love this um now something that's really interesting to me that I know you're working on right now um and maybe for people that aren't investing in businesses also it could be very interesting to figure this piece of the lead generation revenue generation puzzle out you're using this strategy you're using your own business to do an acquisition right now have you done multiple acquisitions or is this the first one or this is the first one okay so walk me through okay so now you've built this so so how you've progressed is notchpreneur you have this income stream coming from these pieces of real estate online real estate generating businesses you started this coaching program teaching people how to do this um and we'll drop links as well so people can go in like they want to learn more and they want to follow like step-by-step how to do it and maybe actually just speak about like what you teach people but then I also want to learn about the investing and the growth and the acquisition thing that you're working on right now I love that so yeah so so with the actual coaching more or less to make it very straightforward it's teaching people the system that you deploy correct yeah yeah it's it's teaching a combination of SEO and how to use how to apply it to the website rental concept that gorgeous okay perfect that you can create an active income or a passive income whatever you want amazing okay so that we'll drop we'll drop those links in the show notes now what you're working on right now with the acquisition so you're going through a two million dollar acquisition um I love the I love the evolution of employee to entrepreneur to investor because I mean like we're very similar in in our career journey actually to be quite honest but uh so what was it what was the rationale what was the thought process here you you're now dabbling in private equity basically yeah yeah so there's kind of uh there's just a little bit of an evolution so I started as the employee I started doing the website rental the website rental gave me my time back and a lot of money and I was like this is really cool but the clients I used to have at my SEO agency before I started doing website rental were all like if you're not gonna teach or if you're not gonna do this can you just teach it to us and I was like I mean yeah I guess so it's kind of like the evolution of coaching program because I didn't I wouldn't intend to start this they just asked me like can you teach me this and I was like yeah all right so I started doing that and then I found out people were getting an impact and I was like oh this feels cool it's like fulfilling it's nice I can like watch people make a change and then that brought in even more so now I got multiple streams coming to animal like all right cool but I still have all of my time I'm like I can't just sit so I'm like let's let's do something bigger and I was talking to my my CPA like what can I do to not pay taxes and she knows you can you can either buy real estate or you can acquire business and like of course everybody thinks of real estate but I'm like do I want to spend two three hundred grand to get like fifteen hundred bucks a month and I'm like no I spend that same two hundred grand I can make like five million with website rental so I'm like let's let's try business acquisitions see what this is about so I paid a person to like get to this event I learned about acquisitions and I was like this this sounds really cool let's let's try to do this and I started looking for businesses in that one to five million range because that's what kind of forward and my original thought was let's find some kind of business where I could install an operator I don't have to be involved and then I'll just give that person half the company to keep me out of it so I could have my half be passive and I can use lead generation to grow the business so I'm like I got to find something one five million range and I can afford and something where I could apply lead generation to it has a lot of potential and where I'm not involved and that's how we landed on one that I'm doing so so I'm I'm super curious what the business is that you're actually acquiring because I'm assuming that the business you're acquiring is like the perfect example of a company that would benefit from the from the strategy to play because that's I'm sure that's how you're thinking you're like I need this to be perfect it's a it's a it's a pretty good example but it's not it's probably not perfect it's close it's just the best one I can find so like I should say before I before I say that one I want to mention paving just as a niche because it's something that I almost turned into a company it would it would work perfectly for this I had built out a site for paving and it was in my hometown and I was like I had a bunch of leads coming in for people are calling me and I'm again I'm like I don't do paving I get to find a paving company and I'm trying to find somebody but in my hometown the people who are really good at it are overwhelmed with leads and then there's a lot of people who stink at it that don't have any leads and I'm like I need the person who's really good but doesn't have any and I couldn't find it so I'm like calling all these companies and the the great ones are like not getting back because they don't care and the other ones are doing crap work so I'm like I got to figure out how to do this so I poached a subcontractor from one of the great companies I just found out where they were going to be doing some work and I talked to one of the subs and like you want to have your own company because I can get you the leads and I just started sending him leads and in the first month or the first week it made a grant a grant for me so like I don't remember what the revenue was but my cut was easy you did like a sticky do like a split on it no so like I just he told me he was going to do the work for two dollars a square foot or was it three bucks it was either two or three bucks a square foot and then I had a person walk off the yardages like for the people's houses and the driveways and all that and then I charged four bucks a square foot and I just take that out of us so he made quite a bit and I was just keeping the difference without me being involved so I was just kind of like coordinating it and instead of that website paying me you know 1500 bucks a month it made a grant in a week so it's like that type of company you could literally create a company out of thin air with just the website with this skill set and this model but I didn't I just I didn't really want to do that I didn't want to run a paving company so I just kind of like handed that off to somebody else and let them run with it and I was like I just want the little pass of peace give me my a couple thousand bucks so I transitioned out of that the one I'm doing now is I have to be careful because I'm under NDA okay sure but it's a multi thing a multi-state ice cream business so it's like the novelty trucks that go around and they play a song and then everybody comes out to buy overpriced ice cream yeah you know like the screw-all and the spider-man face all that yeah so I just I was trying to buy a different type of business that was more in line with my lead generation skill set and when I got into the acquisition or well trying to do the due diligence for it I found that the person was fudging their tax returns which I know people do but I can't buy a business off fake numbers because the bank only loans off what they say so if it makes you to make it look like you're poor the bank's not going to loan on it right so we ended up not going through with that business but I met the broker and the broker hooked me up with this person who was selling the ice cream business and the ice cream business was making millions but they had no website no advertising no customer list no CRM no processes and like how are you making this money like this it's like oh the customer just comes to the truck just a wild business model oh my god how is this possible and I'm just looking at this and I'm like if he can do that with nothing and it's growing 20% year over year over year I'm like if I apply lead generation to this I have no idea I think I got to be able to blow this thing up but explain to me explain to me how lead generation how would that work for an ice cream truck I mean so I can just generate leads for all of the business services so he's looking at it the consumers coming to the truck but what about events corporate events business events weddings catering all this other stuff that's a whole untapped side and I can hit all of that with lead generation and like I've done I mean I can do it with SEO but I can also do it with the Facebook ads and the Google ads I won't personally do it I'll find somebody who can do it just hand it off because I don't want to deal with it but all of that can be applied to this and then you have a choice do I keep that cash flow or do I sell this company off for like a four or five X multiple and like the company is two million now without anything sell that for 10 15 million a couple years down the road so it's just a it's a cool thing that I'm working on now and we're we're supposed to close on the 7th but our lawyer is going on vacation so it's going to have to just be another couple weeks as long as as long as there's no billable hours while he's on vacation no I didn't plan that well that's amazing I'm so curious have you have you ever done the math and and seen like the potential uptick in business revenue like what what what what is like a great number so if you have a business I again super subjective but you have a business yeah and they're doing nothing online when you apply your strategy to it and they have leads coming in what is the what is the multiple what is the percentage that you see the businesses grow oh my god the multiples are stupid high I'm terrible a math so I don't even know the numbers but I'll give you an example the first one that comes to mind one of the first guys I had as an actual client was a tree service and he was paying for home advisor thumbtack and Angie's list which is now Angie and he was paying them for work he was making like 70 grand a year or so just single guy no family no kid no wife or anything he was just working by himself and he was kind of like cherry picking the leads he wanted so he would go up he'd do like a single tree a package of trees he can't really do any commercial work because he wasn't he didn't have like any crew it's just him and I met him and we started working together I built this process out started renting a website to him and his next year he did 370,000 or 320,000 get out so I don't know what that percentage increases that's wild that's what I've times what he made the year before and his the business model completely changed he called me at one point like a year and a half and he's like I'm getting a lot of leads that are commercial would like I can't do these like turn it off and I was like turn it off I'm like who do you know that don't commercial work and he's like I mean this other guy I know does it I'm like like a competitor and he's like yeah and I'm like call that dude and tell him you're gonna give him all the commercial work and just take a cut and he's like what and I'm like yeah just give him the work I'm like you don't want it right you want the the homes and the residential stuff that you can handle I'm like cherry pick it who cares give him all the commercial stuff and just tell him you want 15% and you could just give him all the work see if he'll go for it and they like they had a conversation he's like yeah all right he's taking it so we just started diverting all the commercial work to that guy who's technically competitor and he just takes all the stuff he wants so he does the things he wants knocks it out quick does whatever he wants with his time just kind of like half does tree stuff and half spends his time doing whatever fishing I think was the thing and the hands off all the rest of the work to other people I love this I want to I want to ask just some some questions some some questions on on your views on entrepreneurship because I love the way that you sort of built your life I really admire it because we sort of spoke about gold and handcuffs before building yourself a job why do you think people over complicate entrepreneurship so much I think it's it's it's it's tough it's because it's like everybody tells you it's hard and it's supposed to be difficult and yes there are parts of it that are hard but honestly I think your mindset is the the hardest part to get once you get that right the other people's opinions and your whole all your friends and your family that don't believe in you and all that none of that matters anymore because if you only care about what you think and what you want for yourself you could focus on that then you could find somebody who aligns with that I know I want money and time and the people that I have in my life don't know how to do that they're not examples of it the people I'm learning from at school don't have that so I'm listening to them I have to find somebody who does and go like seek that person out tell them to teach me how to do it because they've been there and I think shiny objects and all this stuff on YouTube and all these there's so many things you can focus on it's really tough so it's almost like you have to define what you want focus on that first and then once you figure that out you can come up with a path to get there I think a lot of people who build something they don't realize how much energy it can take and I think that people want lifestyle but then they don't realize that entrepreneurship may not be the path to the lifestyle that they want like you look at the most prolific entrepreneurs you look at the Elon Musk's of the world the I think he was you know still sleeping in an office in Twitter offices when he made the acquisition right like like these are not people that have time for in some cases family in hobbies pastimes things outside of building and that's okay but I don't think that that a lot of people want to be like Elon I don't think a lot of people understand what it's like to work that much for the entirety of your life until you die and you know you have to have a number two like how much money do you need and that's not to say that a million is a lot because it's not in 2023 millions not a lot 5 million 10 million how much do you have to have liquid to be happy and once you hit that number though do you need to do you need to have a hundred million dollar exit you need to have a 500 million dollar like where do you want to go and I think that a lot of people don't have clarity they just think that if I'm not in a company it'll be okay but it's like not okay because they have no they have no idea the direction they're going and I think you were very purposeful about it it'll evolve it'll evolve over time right what you want I think initially my I was an employee first so my thing was just get out of my job it all costs so cool what do I need to replace my job I don't know for it random month 5 grand a month just to be comfortable and not have to worry about anything but then it changed to okay now I have that I don't really have the work because I already kind of built it up where it's not it's more me just kind of looking at it to make sure nothing falls apart now what do I do I can't sit and I did the thing I went to travel and I did you know hang out with the girlfriends spend time with the family and do whatever I tried the laptop lifestyle thing but I found for me I can't just sit like two days into chilling at the Bahamas I'm like okay what can I do for business to make this go faster it just became like fun to build businesses and figure out how to do lead generation and all this and working for myself I just I don't I like it better I don't care if I have if I don't have to but I could work 80 hours a week and I would still be cool with it because I'm the boss that I can do what I want I can go leave I don't have to ask anybody for permission it's like I've taken control of my life and now I've decided here's what I'm going to do with it and I think that power is really really nice and then you could do what you want if it's fulfilling talk to me about your evolution in your mindset from employee to entrepreneur owner to investor what's the difference that you have to the how do you think differently as you go through that career journey I think just focusing on self education has been the thing that has helped me the most just because mindset is so important in our education system as we have it now is a little messed up in 1902 John D. Rockefeller creates our general education board it's like the foundation for our school system today and there was a quote from him that was kind of disturbing and it said I don't want a nation of thinkers I want a nation of workers he knew then that for his oil company to be successful he needed good employees people who just show up and do what they're told he doesn't want entrepreneurs he doesn't want people who think for themselves and he did that strategically right because then he'd have competition the problem is the school system that we have now is still based on that so society and our school system is set up for this same thing school doesn't teach you how to be rich or how to build wealth it teaches you how to be a good employee somebody who pays the taxes feeds the system and I mean I went to college and grad school so I get it but why are we listening to people who don't have the life we want right like that's not what I want why am I listening to the person tell me this they don't know it's like asking the broke friend how to make money they have no idea or they'd already be having right so it's like we need the doctors and the lawyers and the contractors and everybody who's doing employees like an employee job but that's not what I want my definition of success is having time and money and if my goal is to build wealth and have true time freedom then I need to learn from someone who's already done it and I'm not going to learn that it's so would you so it's like why the education the alternative education exists and I mean that's what I focus on and I've grown so much just focusing more on that than traditional if you if you could go talk to your your 20 year old self would you would you tell them not to go to school or would you tell them to do anything differently what would be the the lesson it would be figure out what you actually want because school works for some stuff like my brother wants to be a surgeon right so he goes to school he becomes that right my my dad wanted me chiropractor he went to school and became that but some stuff like for me I didn't really know what I wanted to do I went to school for marketing and when I got out I ended up doing human resources is my ultimate goal to be helping people in the human resources department no I don't think so so you know time and money for me was the thing I wanted because I wanted to be able to spend time with family and be able to hang out go travel and have enough to live the lifestyle I want and for me I didn't have to go to school for that I did but had I known I probably wouldn't have it would have been an argument argument with my parents um but you know if that's what I have to do to get what I want that's what's gonna happen I actually never told my parents that I started doing this like when I still had an agency like before I quit I just quit and I didn't tell them for like a year they just found out randomly because I answered the phone at a time and I probably would have been working normally so you know if you have to you know not tell somebody then don't tell them I think I think to your point like all this comes back to lifestyle design like how are you building the life that you want and we're talking about okay we're talking about how many hours you want to work how much money do you want to make but there's other components to lifestyle too and sometimes it's it's setting expectations with relationships of people most close to us and family I mean you can't really get rid of family so that's fine but I mean there's people in your life as you're going through like an entrepreneurial journey that don't serve you in a meaningful capacity doesn't mean you like have to kill those relationships but you do have to prioritize where you spend your time and I think that this whole lifestyle design it's okay to be a little bit selfish with what you're building in your life and if you expect things that none of your friends have then there's a good chance that they're not going to they're not going to help you get to where you want to be and and even like parents like if parents don't understand what you're building you still love your parents respect your parents but I mean you're not going to be going to them for career advice if they've only ever worked a nine to five job and you're not you're not going to be going to for entrepreneurial advisor or how to raise money or how to close clients if they've worked in a nine to five job you got to you got to understand that like they mean best but they also don't know they don't know what you're doing and there is a way for you to succeed in it but it won't be through your parents teaching you what to do it'll be through a peer who's done it a mentor whatever it is so I think that there's a lot that that you know like you sort of like checked all the boxes of why why are you like why are you personally successful it's because through your crew the trial and error you know you've architected your life you made the money you want you figured out the time work balance you've you've built relationships with people that actually have done these things before so you know like who to go to for help with this that and the other like I'm sure you have your own you mentor people but I'm sure you have tons of your own mentors and people that you look up to like this is this is how you grow you people are not stagnant people have to try new things and do different things that are uncomfortable but at the end of the day it's uncomfortable to become comfortable yeah I mean you got to get uncomfortable to grow yeah I really like um everybody knows Alex from dizzy yeah I really know this quote he says you don't want to invest in the S&P 500 you want to invest in the S&Me I love that yeah we put that money in your self education there was another one from uh from Warren Buffett he's just like whatever you're paid is just what the market thinks your skills are worth so you want to make more you gotta up your skills so if you go seek that out then you do whatever you want um is there anything that any last lessons anything that you want to leave the audience with that we didn't go into um floor zero so whatever whatever you want to end with I think every decision we make or don't make has an opportunity cost and when there's something you want to do and you do nothing you're making an active choice to give up whatever that other thing is you could have had and I'm guilty of this too we say things like you know I need to think about it I have to look at other options I want to do some more research it's not the right time any number of excuses I've learned that we never have all the information the timing's never right the fear is always there that fear of failure people judging you whatever so it's better to trust my gut instinct and just take it take the leap of faith anyways so that you can live the way you want to live as long as possible because all that time it's like you could have had it but you chose not to I love that um where should people go to connect with you uh you can send them to the website also please drop your social so they can follow you and whatnot um but where should they go to learn about everything that you're working on yeah absolutely um Luke Vanderbrier.com is a good place to start you know that talks a little bit about kind of my story and what I'm doing now um and website rental coaching.com is more about the business model and how that works good perfect um socials what are you at what do you what's your best at it's at Luke Vanderbrier.com is uh Instagram Facebook is uh don't don't do them all I'm trying to say no no one one is good and the website has everything else on I just want to make those one in particular that's that's totally cool okay and then I I mean you've touched on this several times throughout um but I'm just gonna ask because I ask everyone I close this out so you've had incredible career you've had you know the the season of the employee the season of the business owner entrepreneur the season of the investor um what at this point in your life to success mean to you it's it's just having enough money and the time to do what I want when I feel like it with whoever and I know people say that but it's when you can actually experience it it's like otherworldly it's just really cool like just middle of the week I don't want to work I'm just gonna go out take the jet ski out with my girlfriend you know what maybe I'll fly to Costa Rica for a month and just hang out people you can decide to become the person who can do that it's just the choice it's an active choice you can make the choice to learn how to make enough to be able to do that and then you can do that