Zac Litwack, Partner at Savage Ventures | How to Growth Hack a Distressed Company

Welcome to success story, the most useful podcast in the world. I'm your host Scott D. Clary. The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. The HubSpot podcast network has incredible podcasts for you to check out. Like remarkable people hosted by Guy Kawasaki. Of course, brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. The remarkable people podcast with Guy Kawasaki helps you better understand the changing world with interviews from thought leaders, legends, and iconoclasts. If you are interested in business, leadership, entrepreneurship, he interviews the best of the best leveraging connections that he's built over his career. Here's some of the episodes and interviews that he's done. He's spoken to Seth Goden, marketing god, blogger, author. He's spoken to Pat Flynn, entrepreneur, power podcaster, and popular YouTuber. He's spoken to Jen Lim, happiness evangelist, and author of Beyond. Happiness, he's spoken to Steve Blank, author entrepreneur, and startup whisperer. If you want to listen to incredibly intelligent conversations with some of the most remarkable people on the planet, listen to remarkable people podcasts by Guy Kawasaki, wherever you get your podcasts. Today, my guest is Zach Litwack. He is a partner at Savage Ventures. Now Savage Ventures specializes in the acquisition, turnaround, and rapid growth of established and emerging media brands in the world's entertainment sports, music online culture, and more. Zach is also a serial entrepreneur himself. 2010, he built a music company which produced a gold record in nine figures in music streams. He subsequently grew a healthcare tech company to multiple seven figures in revenue. More recently, he led marketing of the Savage portfolio company Outkick, which he scaled along with his team to seven figures per month in revenue and sold to Fox in less than one year after it's launched. He is a venture capitalist and an operator. He is currently chief marketing officer and owner of American songwriter and total frat move whose properties reached 20 million people per month. He leads marketing, growth hacking, testing, and all of Savage's portfolio companies, some of the things that we spoke about the importance of not only being a VC but being an operator and how he's leveraged his experience with some of the portfolio companies to see the success that they've seen. He walks through how he started scaled and sold Outkick to Fox in less than one year for almost nine figures. We spoke about a general strategy that Savage Ventures takes to build a company and to plan for a successful exit from the start as well as the strategy that Zach and his team use to scale and grow their portfolio companies after they've been highly distressed and what he does to turn them around. So let's jump right into this. A couple of startup lessons, venture capital lessons, acting as an operator as well as scaling growth lessons, all the good stuff. This is Zach Litwack, partner at Savage Ventures. Well, Scott, thanks for having me, Hanman. I've listened to a handful of episodes. So it's almost a humbling experience to be on this podcast. I super appreciate it. So my origin story. Well, I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. I picked up a guitar and thought it was cool. And honestly, I thought the girls thought it was cool too. And so I started practicing guitar more than working on high school assignments. And I ended up going to music school just outside of Nashville at a school called MTSU. It's in Murphy'sburg, Tennessee. And I decided to stick around and ended up actually starting a company in college and music production company at the time, my best friend. And we for the first like four or five years at a college, we didn't make a single dime. I actually maxed out some credit cards and had to call my dad one time for help. And then like our fifth or six year in, we actually started having some success. We produced a couple artists that ended up doing really well. And but at that time, my business partner and I had a terrible relationship. And we like, it dude, it was so bad. It was so toxic. Like we walked into the same room as each other and we like couldn't speak to each other. And so that was us being young. And I think being poor at communicating and honestly going through like four years of like not making any money and like scraping my strains of relationships. It's a start. It's a startup story. But so I sold my share of the company like all of our royalties. We owned a couple of studios to him and basically paid off debt. So I was like at square one like six years into my professional life. I sat on the couch for like three months. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I started applying for jobs at like Sony music. And even though I had some top 40s back in like 2015, 2016, like they didn't want to talk to me excited. No like real music business traditional music business expertise, except like I figured out how to produce these artists and scale them on channels. They didn't even know about it at the time like on digital essentially. And so thankfully my friend called me out of Atlanta and said, Hey, dude, I heard you sold your company. I could use some help with my app startup called split. Do you want to help me? And I was like, Sure, dude, sounds fun. And so I jumped right back into a startup. And I did that for about a year. It was restaurant technology. We were trying to sell to restaurants. And we were trying to acquire app users to use the app within the restaurant to connect to the point of sale. Honestly, we were we would still be too early probably in 2021 with this tech knowing how slow the restaurant industries have adapted technology even through COVID. I thought they were pretty slow to do it. Um, anyways, like I did that startup. I did another startup did another startup did another startup. I failed miserably for how many or five years you just ran it through all these stars. So what would be some of these ideas? Were they were they so almost called ideas you can talk about or what was called my movebook. We basically were trying to make the moving process better. And we actually had an L.O.I with Omnipo at one point in time to like be our one of our premier service providers. That was also a two-sided marketplace where we had vendors. We were doing B2B sales basically signed up vendors and then like moving companies, you know, utility companies, that sort of thing. And then we were going to acquire app users. That company didn't even really raise that much money. We actually self-funded it for a little while and then it fizzled out because everybody had day jobs except for me, of course. And then then I did a couple of other startups. One was called Healthcare Blocks, which is a Hippocompliant platform as a service on top of Amazon Web services. So you could basically launch your app on our platform, which was just basically built on top of Amazon. So this was back in like, you know, 2016-2017 when Hippocompliance was like still this very ethereal like hard to understand thing for everyone, honestly. And so and people started developing healthcare apps. So we made it really easy to deploy apps in a Hippocompliant manner on top of Amazon. That company actually raised a little bit of money. We did a little bit of revenue, but still wasn't a slam dunk. I think it's still around, although and I think I have some stock, but I don't know where it's at. Honestly, I haven't caught up with that company in a while. Let's see what else. There are probably five or 10. I don't think they're worth going into, but eventually I wound up working for a company here in Nashville. That was a healthcare technology company called GoCheck. And we basically built this iPhone app that traditionally that could take a picture of a kid's eyes and basically give you instantaneous feedback as to whether that kid had vision problems. So it was a super innovative healthcare app. And that company was like my first like somewhat successful startup where we grew it from like, you know, a couple hundred came revenue to a couple million and like just over a year and raised a good bit of money. And towards the tail end of that, I was kind of getting burnt out on that company and I was kind of feeling like I could do more essentially because we just had this one product, one market. It was worldwide, but we were basically selling to pediatrics, you know, worldwide. And so I partnered up with my friend Sam to start Savage Ventures last year. And this has been my first what I would call a pun intended quote unquote success story. Very good. So you took the money. So the money that you used for Savage Ventures was from that last success. That was the one that was actually successful. The major some money that allowed you to basically start a firm that or venture capital firm. And what did you, how did you exit that last venture that the pediatric one? We raised a series P and I exited at that point. So I raised at the funding event or excuse me, I left at the funding event. Okay, so then how so what was the what was the for you at least? Why did you want to start funding more startups? Because at this point, you've gone through about 10. You've had one success. It doesn't even sound like you took much time off. It seems like you just jumped right into now being a funding source or an investor for more startups, Greg. Yeah. So Sam, my current business is part of Savage Ventures and I actually started this company on the side back in 18. So I was still doing the healthcare startup started a company called My Doctor Hank, which is a direct consumer pharmacy brand. We specialize in erectile dysfunction medication for seniors and have expanded the product suite a little bit, but still focused on the senior market. And that company was actually doing okay. I threw up a landing page. We found a partner to operate that company down in Florida. He built out a call center. I stood up some Facebook ads. And so we had that company at the like back in 18. We started that company. And then we also got an opportunity to purchase music media company called American Songwriter for super cheap. I didn't have a lot of money when I started Savage Ventures, but it was a super cheap acquisition. So we had these two companies that were doing revenue that were profitable at the time. And then we've been scaling those companies up in June. We got an opportunity to joint venture with this guy named Clay Travis, who's a pretty prolific like sports journalist and reporter. And he had a national radio show and he had a blog essentially called Outkit The Coverage. And we were able to scale that company with him and sell it to Fox in June. So we started it in June and sold it to Fox in June. It was actually under a year in total, which was pretty cool. And then we also purchased TotalFratMove last year. All of our acquisitions and investments so far, Scott have been like pretty small. Like we're writing 500K to a million dollar checks. And a lot of times we're actually not writing them, writing checks. We're creating deals where we de-risk ourselves by saying, hey, we'll buy your company for a million dollars, but we're going to pay you out over three years, right, or five years. So we're writing a $50,000 check or $100,000 check. And if we have high competence that we could scale the company, a lot of times what happens is we scale the company so quickly that we're not actually writing checks. It's just coming out of the company's cash flow. So I think this is really interesting because when we first connected, we were talking about this. And I think that that's something that people with a little bit of extra cash don't consider when they want to talk about how to invest or how to put their money somewhere. So how did you find these deals? What are you looking for? These deals obviously are one of them, TotalFratMove. That's a pretty well-known name. But how did you find these deals? How did you negotiate these setups where you're writing a very small check and you're not just pumping a million dollars plus into these companies so that they can help scale because if you're finding a company that is only worth, for example, a million dollars and you're putting in 50,000, the founder changed the perspective from a founder perspective. I'd be like, well, how is this 50,000 going to do anything for me? I'm already hurting. I'm already not doing great as an organization. 50,000 isn't going to do much at all. So then I have to trust that you're going to take you to the next level while I'm still giving up an equity position. Yes. So American songwriter, let's start there. It was a magazine brand. It was a 36, well, at the time, 34-year-old brand. Very famous songwriters and artists love the mag and love the brand because they grew up reading it and they learned how to help write their per song by reading the magazine. So there's a lot of brand affinity and the brand is just very strong. But we didn't really have digital presence. So that's an opportunity for us to say, okay, this is a match with our skill sets and this company is owned by an older gentleman that was ready to retire and his number was pretty low, like he didn't want that much money to retire. And so that's a situation that was total frat move. It had a lot of words. It was a somewhat distressed asset where in 2016, I think they were doing like million dollar months and fast forward to 2020. They were probably going to do a million dollars at year. And so the owners, and also it's just, I guess they were in a kind of like a life stage too where they started this company when they were in their mid-20s and they were entering, you know, they're early to mid-30s. They have families now. Like, do they really want to be running total frat move? And so they made some mistakes back in 16 that caused them to burn a lot of cash and lose a lot of revenue. And then they were getting to the point in their life where they didn't want to run this type of brand anymore. So we were able to get that brand for cheap as a result. We knew it had words. We knew we were going to have to do a lot of work to scale it. But similarly to American songwriter, it still had a strong brand affinity. Scott, it sounds like you've at least seen the Instagram handle or have heard the brand before. Yeah, yeah, I knew I knew I knew them in university. Yeah, you know, I've moved to a sorority move. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, friends. So those are the types of deals we've done. But what I'll say is there's always like a, and then without kick, it was different in the sense that there was an existing audience. It was Clay Travis's kind of side hustle. He had this blog that he wrote on and he had a couple of contributors. But what he did have was a national audience that he didn't know how to monetize. So we were able to do a joint venture with him. We agreed to invest up to X dollars. And I don't want to say that publicly. Yeah, because no, no, that's cool. I just think that it's a lot of success. But we scaled the company so quickly where we, I only think we ended up investing like 30 grand or something. Like we agreed to invest up to a mouth, but the company was so profitable out of the gate that we didn't really need to invest that much money. So we've made investments that are pretty low risk. Sure, I mean, if total frat bootfails will be on the hook for, you know, four, five hundred K more probably at this point. But that's not a huge deal. You know, spread out over 25 K allotments per quarter or 50 K allotment side. I don't remember exactly what it is. And then so you're looking at it. Go ahead. Go ahead. No, I was going to say so you so you you find you find a stress assets that and you and you immediately understand and take and you look at them and you see an opportunity to move into a different channel, different medium scale them that way. So what? So when you look at an asset, what is the what is the playbook to basically move into another medium or another another channel that hasn't been exploited yet? Because something, for example, like outkick, that makes sense. Okay, so maybe that's, you know, that's a side hustle that you can sort of more legitimize or put more energy into, but something like total frat move where they're already on all social. Like I don't think there's too many mediums that they haven't touched. That's a different playbook. So but you have confidence in scaling either though. So walk me through your strategy for when you take a look at a brand or an asset that you do a deal with and how you want to grow them. Yeah. Yes, total frat move has a lot of social handles, but a lot of them had been pretty much deprecated. Like the TSM Instagram and Facebook hadn't been posted to you in over a year. So but that tells that tells me that there are followers that we could potentially reactivate there. And so we start posting relevant content there and just gauge the engagement. For total frat move that we had I always developed these like high-level monetization hypotheses before I actually drill into the channels. So with total frat move, it's like we could probably do merch because we've got millions of Instagram like very engaged Instagram followers. The previous owners never really did merch and if they did it was with maybe a brand partnership and it was kind of a one-off. So we thought we could scale merch. We've kind of proven that out like we were starting to have low six figure merch months, which is good, which is good start. The second hypothesis I had was that we can integrate sports betting, which will prove out this football season. We haven't been able to prove that yet. We had a lot of success with sports betting on Outkick and total frat move has a similar but younger audience and we have a plethora of learnings from especially on the paid media front by leveraging an existing audience and scaling sports betting more proudly on channels like Facebook. And so I think we're going to be able to do that with total frat move just like we did for Outkick. My third hypothesis was we are going to be able to create a website because they didn't really have a website. It was really just a social being. It was like a social organism as a company. It was super weird. They had a website. It was haphazardly published to sometimes and it served honestly a better purpose for the TFM girls brand than anything. So I kept the TFM girls the old website as TFM girls and I launched a new website. We actually built out an editorial team that's publishing regular content and we're going to try to increase page fees as a result. And then there's all sorts of things that we can do when we actually own that traffic. Like for example monetizing be a programmatic, maybe developing some sort of membership component. But those are our three focuses right now. It's increased audience and distribution as a result of that increasing merchandise sales and website traffic. And then the rest will kind of take care of itself because we get the company for so cheap our hypothesis in general was like worst case we make our money back. Like there's no way we don't lose money here. And so again it was like a really easy decision for us where like literally they were like hey we're interested in selling and we were like cool here's our price and they were like cool sounds good and we like it was two days or something we did it. It was two day acquisition. It's all it's all timing right. They were really ready to get out. The company wasn't doing that well financially. I mean it was doing it was profitable. It was doing some revenue but compared to what it had been even three years four years prior. It wasn't looking good. They had some institutes. Well they had an institutional investor also that had invested a couple of million dollars and he was anxious to get kind of new fresh blood and ownership. And we've got a good my business partner Sam has a much deeper media background than I do. He's had a couple of exits in media too. So like we come with a really deep media track record. I met at the time Alcat was exploding when we purchased TFM so it was it was a good deal all around. We flew out to Austin signed the contract had some drinks and then went to work. Awesome. Okay so this so if somebody I'm just what I'm trying to model out the way you've done this I think it's very smart. So you're not putting in huge investments. You're finding your finding assets at the right time potentially distressed assets. You put in a small check you're agreeing to a deal to purchase it already at a low price. We're putting in even smaller check. You're paying off your investment with actually revenue from the company. You develop like a high high growth playbook for the organization. You're just sort of doing like a holistic review of like their monetization options, different channels and then you're finding new ways or new avenues to explore and then you're executing on that. And you are not just part VC. You're obviously part operator too. So how how how involved are you in these companies? What's your what is your actual role in these as a like a CMO? I was just taking a look at some of the resident chief marketing officer I guess that's my background is even in the music business I was doing a little bit of digital marketing but when I ventured into all the failed startups that's when I really learned how to do digital marketing. Some people call growth hacking. I mean I've been on on the product teams before. It depends on what your goals are acquisition or activation or retention. But yeah so we operate the companies too and it's a beautiful setup because and we're still kind of learning as we go. It's got I mean we're only a year and a half into this thing but it's cool because we've got a bunch of savage ventures employees and those people are all the creative people that you want to stick around for the long term like growth hackers and developers. People that I'm I'm spending a lot of time like coaching and never sharing too to run experiments like I think is the best way to run experiments at least the data is proving that out. And so like the we've got a lot of savage ventures folks that are becoming really good digital marketers and we're building out a dev team so that we can fix technology super quickly if we ended up purchasing a company like TFM and and honestly our growth hackers can do all the technical marketing stuff so that's not a big deal. And then when we sell a company like out kicked Fox that nucleus stays intact and and also it allows us to distribute talent as we really need it so that we're not what so there's no wasted time. I think that like people in big corporations like middle managers and stuff work like 30% of the day but we have so many companies it's a little time like our growth hackers should be working at least you know seven like focus seven or eight hours a day there's too much to work on for them not to be and so it allows us to say super efficient and it allows us to just get a lot of shit done and that's part of the reason I think why we've been able to grow the company so quickly. And then also one other component savage ventures is it seems we have in house HR and accounting and so literally those services again are spread across portfolio which keeps our existing properties are our portfolio companies super lean like we don't have many FTEs for the companies for like a company like Dr. Hank we've we've got a call center and a lot of customer support but for our media properties we've got an intern or any customer support you know we've got obviously writers some of the some of our writers are FTEs but dude our companies are super lean our objects is so low if you take out savage ventures people. Amazing okay I want to walk through I want to walk through the playbook that you deployed for outkick because that was obviously successful so um we can't talk specific numbers but it was a nine almost nine figure exit so like a very high eight figure exit if not mistaken yeah so it was it was a good exit okay so you got in you got into outkick it was uh it was a block that was being uh run I guess yeah play Travis some of the joint venture with play Travis he had a a blog called outkick the coverage that was doing I don't even know who's doing a million sessions per month I don't think it was back in like April mave last year but he had a national radio show so we had a decent sized audience but he wasn't he didn't understand or have the wherewithal to figure out how to get in front of that audience on social and drive that traffic to the website and do all sorts of fun monetization things and so it was a good marriage in that respect where like he had an existing audience we could build off of and not to derail your question but like that's what we look for if there's an existing audience we could scale like I like turning I think we're best at turning stuff from three to 10 versus turning stuff from zero to three just because that's more efficient uh because we know how to go from three to 10 so we've got five more threes and threes could be like we're doing a million dollars per year we want to do 10 right or something like that or we've got an existing audience of like a million people and we want to scale that's 10 million whatever it is it's like 10x ain't and like literally we more than 10xed out kick in like 11 months I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode Shopify and don't you love that sound as a sound of another sale on Shopify the all-in-one commerce platform to start run and grow your business see Shopify gives entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big businesses so upstarts startups and established businesses 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like you can see the library of content that they've created so that is get ab g e t a b dot li slash success so how did you do that so walk me through what what were some of the main some of the main growth hacking digital marketing things that you did with outcook the outkicks you mean they really worked yeah a couple things one is so I think there are three components to scaling something 10 x and 12 months there's people and I mentioned savage mentors earlier so we had the right people we had good growth hackers knowledgeable digital marketers good writers etc and a person that knew how to build out an editorial team Dallas is our like resident chief editorial officer who has a deep background in sports so we have the people then you need the process I have a process called high typo testing which is basically like a can ban board if you can imagine like a trello type of situation where you've got your idea backlog and then you just drag something through this workflow and there's a quantitative system to rank your ideas and all the ideas tie up to whatever monetization levers we're trying to pull or test and so like an idea might be like let's run Facebook ads against you know our membership offering to this audience with this type of ankle or whatever and everything links up to our core like four or five things we're trying to test as far as monetization is concerned and then the third thing it you need timing just like I mentioned timing purchasing these companies you need timing like you can be the best marketer and you could have the best fucking product like my restaurant app that I told you about fantastic product but it was 2015 or something like door dash wasn't even a thing like it was not even an idea and someone's head at that point I don't think maybe they were going through YC at the time I don't know but they I don't think they're around you need timing and so the content that Clay likes to cover is literally like politics and sports and think about where we were in the middle of 2020 when we launched this thing it was just super polarizing content that was very timely and so it presented the right time to scale audience super quickly like I remember we launched our YouTube channel for example like from scratch and we had like 50,000 subscribers in like two months or something it was wild and we had a couple videos with a million views because the content was perfect yes we've got a video production team yes we know how to you know optimize videos you know titles tags etc yes we know how to do we know how to test these channels but like you still need the the timeliness of whatever your offer is right and so those three components existed for Alka we didn't know it obviously when we started but when we started to scale it super quickly we did and so through through that process you basically test different monetization tactics or monetization levers that you can pull we had our membership offering we had driving traffic to the website and monetizing it programmatically we in those are kind of like you know staples and media these days we had merchandise and other staple and media so we were testing all of these things one of our other tests though was sports betting and going back to timing again sports betting had just become legal the year prior and the states in like four or five different states and in another four or five states were about to go online at the kickoff of football season so here we are with a really growing audience that's super passionate and that is a mixture of sports and politics that trust our brand you know I think in October and November we scaled traffic to the point where we were doing definitely probably about 10 million sessions per month so it was a pretty sizable website considering we went from like I don't know 500,000 sessions you know four or five months prior and so we had a bunch of website traffic we had a bunch of eyeballs Facebook also was super interesting in the sense that we were posting again very timely very well written editorial content there and even though we started our Facebook page pretty much from scratch we had maybe like 60 or 70,000 followers we were we had posts that were reaching five to six million people organically the algorithm was just really liking our some of our Facebook content you think it was timely is that you think that's why yeah it was super timely again we were posting content that people wanted to read about because this was 2020 the election was coming up I mean it COVID was happening because and our brand literally is a mixture of politics and sports and it's it's all about the alkyc brand was all about free speech and it still is obviously and Fox obviously was a good partner in that respect where it was conservative leaning it was it was basically free speech capitalism like everybody should be able to do or say whatever they want to do within this gap rules I talked about earlier and a ton of America resonated with it and obviously a ton of America like sports so it was like a one-stop shot for your you know what you believe in and also to read about a game you know it was like really cool and so our fourth monetization test was sports betting and like I said we had this audience and four or five more states were due to get alive and one of those states was Tennessee and Clay's from Tennessee we're here in Nashville and basically long story short is through a lot of experiments and through launching sports betting we got to the point where we were doing million dollar weeks in profit through sports betting a mixture of organic because we had quite a bit of website traffic and we had decent email list and and we had obviously a lot of reach on Facebook and YouTube and some reach on Twitter too but also we were running a ton of experiments around paid media especially on Facebook and Facebook's algorithm is a little wonky these days because of the iOS 14 privacy updates that happen but back then literally I would just target broadly like here are the 10 legal states here are the three creatives I wanted to test here the three copy variations I wanted to test and honestly I could let like Facebook do its thing and around the biggest sporting events like when Tennessee went live with sports betting and I think they had a big promo for like the UT versus Kentucky game or something and then the college football championship and then we get to the Super Bowl which is February of this year we had so many learnings like we had paid media dialed and we knew what organic channels worked the best through what mediums worked the best and so when we hit the Super Bowl we almost did a million dollars I think on Super Bowl Sunday just to give you some con for some texture yeah so basically when you go into immediate property you need timing obviously or any company and you need to test a bunch of different monetization lovers to see or offers is another way to call them if you just have like a singular product they would probably be like angles is what you would test but but you test all of these different things and you find one that that is clearly working and then you like quadruple you 10x down on it you like literally just fill this on that and scale it and that's kind of what we did and foxes one of foxes top three kind of priorities for 2021 one of them was sports betting and because our content also was was a good fit from like a conservative political standpoint it was a no brainer for them to come in and purchase us probably sooner than we would have sold prior so that was actually I was going to ask you did you do all of this with an with an early exit in mind obviously you had some sort of exit you wanted to make your money back um but and the founders probably wanted to like they well they they that founders clay wanted probably to get some money out of his blog um but uh did you did you actually do this with exiting in mind did you think that far ahead were you thinking fox has a you know fox it has been discussing sports betting that's a potential exit partner or was this just a happy coincidence like serendipity that this happened after you when the sports betting you had a brand that was really working well with like the fox brand and um and how did that transaction come to be yeah so any company we take on whether it's total for ad member out kick or america songwriter we want to sell it as quickly as possible we're not in the business of building these big giant legacy companies we we myself and say in my business partner we absolutely like when a company gets large to the point where we have to worry about like HR and we have to worry about like pal ticking and stuff like that we held onto the company for too long so the out kick story is hopefully something that we'll be able to repeat many times over now will they all be less than one year and selling it for almost a hundred million dollars probably not but they could be like two or three year olds I would say three years would be pushing it and it could be a similar story right and so whenever we acquire a company or start a company that's our mindset it's like scale it and sell it as fast as possible and so with the out kick situation sports betting is just such a hot market right now it's like probably top three I would imagine the United States as far as like growth last year and so or at least interest I don't know actual dollars because only ten states are flying right now but the Fox wasn't the only one that was interested there were other companies that were interested other large media companies Fox just made the most sense because of how how great of a fit the content was you know otherwise like if they were just purchasing us for sports betting revenue I don't like what like the other companies were more so doing it just didn't feel right because we have we had other very good revenue streams just a lot smaller like our program at extreme is six figures per month or you know like I said our website traffic's pretty healthy our brand partnerships are our solid I think we did some six figure months and so like we were doing a decent amount of memberships to we had six figure membership months so it's like we had other we had a really strong profitable company it's just a sports betting revenue was by far the largest revenue stream and it happened to be a really hot market and it still is a hot market going into this football season are there are there considerations so say somebody is is doing the same type of thing as what you're doing are there considerations for introducing new revenue streams being sensitive to existing audiences doing it so that it doesn't have a negative impact or is it is it just about testing and and putting stuff and and just ideating on new ways to make money and bringing it to an existing audience is there anything is there any things you have to think about it's all about testing a lot of our a lot of people inside of out kick were very hesitant to like blast our audience with sports betting promos and I was like well we don't know until we know and it just so happened that a lot of our audience was was it shouldn't betting great and you could we could kind of see it organically when we started publishing sports betting content you know people navigating over that we would include it in our newsletter and and I think we did some surveys you could do some things up front that that allow you to like gauge how fast you can experiment with a new offer that you're unsure will resonate with your audience but at the end of the day if they're really loyal fans I don't think it matters too much like if they just see an offer they don't like from the company that they really like and they'll just be like my preference is I don't like this and that's fine I'll continue to consume the other content that I really like or continue to do whatever I do with that company or purchase like there are a lot of companies I'm sure it's got that you you consume their product but you don't like all their products so you don't like some things that they're doing or some things that they're creating are made for you so I'd say go harder than you think you you can go like piss piss people off like get to the go to the point where you think you're going to piss people off and I bet you're not even 50% of the way there I love that yeah that's smart I think the people I think people have to I think founders or well I guess you know in your case a venture partner sometimes you have to get it if your own head is to what your audience is okay with and I think that you won't know until you know that do you have any ideas for people that are more hesitant like how to test and how to how to pull and how to get some feedback just to make them feel a little bit more comfortable even even though I hear what you're saying and I don't disagree with you but are there some strategies that you've seen effective to actually get some feedback from the audience before you launch something though yeah if you well for firstly if you screw up and you do have a loyal audience at least one of your products if you screw up it's a great opportunity for you to be human and say hey I screwed up and it's actually great opportunity for you to start talking you know more in a one-on-one capacity with your customer base at least through email and and maybe it's your customer's 14 that's doing that so I'd say every step of the way you should be as aggressive as possible because you're aggressive like I said it's probably not even aggressive enough for and this is specifically for a startup if you want to be a high-grow startup you've got to run more experiments than you think you should be running or can be running as far as like polling and surveying just send out an email saying or do a twitter poll or whatever wherever your audience is just say hey do you like this like it's super simple people complicate the heck out of this stuff it's pretty simple just have a conversation like you and I are having with your customers see what they like see what they don't like and you can do that obviously be it feel like forms or repuls if you have a large audience and you just need to get a high level aggregate but you could also have some one-on-one conversations if you're just starting out and you're like going through a beta test and what's cool about that is you can actually make them feel like they're a part of the product creation even though like ultimately you have the decision just making them feel like they have a say is super powerful from like an influence and persuasion standpoint and they'll probably be lifelong customers and advocates. I love that man and you know one thing that I'm bringing I keep hearing you say not not explicitly but you you are so okay with testing and trying new things and iterating and even when you know how many founders could stuck in their head and they run the same playbook for five years and it's not working and they keep running that playbook you just go in and and you don't really have you know I think you're actually at an advantage because you don't have that that I guess that love for the company like it's your baby like a founder would have that I actually think can hurt them in the long run because they get stubborn about what's working and what's not like everything you did the founders could have done without you but they they probably stuck in their lane a little bit too much yeah probably that's interesting point about how founders are super close to their product in some cases it's like their life mission or whatever we view it as just we're capitalist so we view it as this is an investment and we're going to try to grow the investment as much as possible and because it's our investment we have ultimate skin in the game and like I told you earlier so far the numbers haven't been crazy like we lose 500k oh well like I probably spent that much throughout the music industry days nah probably not quite that much but it's not like 20 million 15 million it's not like 20 million it's not like we're going to be broke you know and because we have five or six companies it kind of reduces risk in that respect to what I found is certain months like one company will kill it and then the next month like the other company will kill it and some companies won't do as well certain months because of certain factors and so if you've got five or six you're kind of diversified in that respect if you view it that way but yeah dude for like you people need to view their business as their livelihood and they need to think about it through the lens of like capitalism and at the end of the day even though this is your passion project you need to be a viable business and to do that you need to be super aggressive in your good at market plan and strategy and execution especially your execution I am blown away by the fact that I read these like 10 to 15 page strategy Google Docs when the company doesn't even have a customer yet or they have you know like a couple thousand dollars in MR I'm like what the heck are you doing just go out to start testing like literally you've wasted months writing the strategy doc but you don't know what your fucking strategy needs to be dude you don't know that until you go to market like go to market start running experiments launch a Facebook ad anybody can do it like get start getting some feedback that data is going to inform your strategy you shouldn't be creating a strategy into your out like a million dollars plus revenue in my pain just a waste tomorrow okay and and also you have to figure out economics of scale too right so if you do figure out a strategy and you run ads and you that's fine that's great but all of a sudden if you're trying to run a million dollars in ads per month maybe that same strategy isn't isn't valid anymore right there's there's there's there's limits not limits there's going to be ceilings on on a on a strategy you set up and you have to keep figuring stuff out so I think that also people over over-engineer a strategy and then they realize it it's not going to take them from 100k ARR to 100 million ARR it's not going to be the same strategy that you're just going to run throughout the whole life cycle of a company and that's I've seen that actually as well we're okay so we have the strategy actually so again you don't want to name names if the company isn't comfortable talking about this however the company's you for and they were an older company not not not big but older and they were doing you know a couple hundred thousand ARR but they've been running the same playbook as they got them the first 100k and they wanted to scale that up to a million and the economic scale didn't work out the ad conversion the return on Aspen wasn't there I know each self-service software application and they had to completely revamp how they how they took their product to market and it was a mix of even understanding what their brand and how the customers perceived them moving up market to mid market and enterprise just hiring a sales team that was going outbound versus just pure self-serve and all these different things that made the founder uncomfortable but ultimately was what brought them to the point where they could be acquired I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot now the holidays are here and that means client gifts maybe you're a classic type that goes for the champagne or the gift basket or maybe you're a little irreverent and you go for the custom bobblehead or monogram stress ball gifts are a great way to show your customers 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monetization experiment without kick for example or we've got one for American songwriter called it's just our contests we we host these singer songwriter contests and we launched those digitally via paid media last year and those have been transformative to our e-commerce revenue going from like a traditional like old school magazine company into the digital world and so like you and we we've tested like 20 other you know e-commerce offerings right and but just just one is working really well so you might have to test 20 or 30 things but that one thing that works is going to far out pay the 19 that don't do you think that what you're doing now see you're in how many companies are you in now total you're in a like so we've got doctors yeah we're still operating out kick we've got doctor Hank the director consumer pharmacy brand we're going to try to grow that to like 500 KMR in the next 12 months to sell that and then we've got American songwriter which is the biggest question mark in my mind as far as like growth potential and who would actually buy it because with through doctor Hank it's more like an out kick situation where where it's timely right it's like directly to consumer health care it's valued very well right now coming out of 2020 companies realize that they need to figure this stuff out and so it's it's subscription revenue for the most part and then we've got also total frapping which it's still early but I think that thing is going to be a monster merchandise sports betting will build some audience probably not as monsters out kick was but we've got a great brand there with existing social distribution more so then well way more than what we started with out kick and then we've also got Savage Media which is our video production company and we actually are dabbling in real estate we purchased a building in in Germantown here in Nashville that's going to be the Savage Media headquarters we'll have a big video production studio there that will service all of our companies but I think we're going to be launching more shows for Fox and out kick too so awesome okay and and for somebody who wants to follow in your path and just realize that they can negotiate a deal for 30 or 50 thousand bucks which is money that a lot of people can invest can't afford to invest is this something that they could first of all I just love some advice from you for somebody who wants to get into this purchase their first portfolio company or also if somebody is still working do you think if there's something that they could do as a as a side hustle or is this too much involvement for that now this is definitely a full-time thing if you have some digital marketing expertise I'd say get really good at that and then start investing some dollars because worst case scenario you can find you can squeeze out like a over one row as in probably not is that much money if you're like a decent digital marketer if you're not a good digital marketer I'd go find one and then team up with that person like if you've got 50 to 100k that you want to invest in a very high risk more high risk but like interesting things like that might be a good way to start but I'd find a good trusty digital marketer and give that person like partnership level access to your you know portfolio or whatever that's kind of what happened with Sam and I where I haven't really invested a lot of money it's been more so my time and I've got insane digital marketing expertise so and Sam's got a really good he has a really good track record media he has a lot of deal flow and that's one of the reasons why we partnered up is and so like that synergy is super strong where he's got a really good business expertise he's got really good he's got a track record of success of scaling and selling companies especially media so he gets a lot of deal flow he has deal flow I have knowledge on how to scale he's this or take advantage or take action you know execute off the deal flow so it was really good happy marriage so maybe more people out there can find a marriage like Sam and I have yeah it's almost like the it's almost the opposite of when you're trying to start your own company and you're looking for a technical founder now you're looking for a non-technical marketing venture venture partner almost so it's a little bit yeah yeah once if you find someone with deal flow and you could go I just heard I think it was on I think it was on the my first million podcast you know Sam's podcast I think that's that podcast is on your network to your health spot network yeah um yeah I think I heard this this guy came on their podcast I think he's starting this company called micro acquire super I know I know I know I know the founder Andrew okay I'm gonna have him on too yeah so he has a market place for this so you've got 30 or 50 grand and you're very interested in like doing a startup let's say you're in a corporate job and you're interested in maybe doing stars full-time and or you're interested in investing or whatever that might be a good place to start too if you don't have deal flow other than that I would find someone with deal flow and then you would definitely the missing component therapy digital marketing expertise technical marketing expertise all right I want to I want to bring out some rapid fire career questions before we pivot any last thoughts on stuff you're working on now and then also most importantly if people want to reach out to ask you questions social email website whatever you want to drop yes average job ventures is the website there's a contact form there I've read all those inquiries personally and then linked in DMs good I'm more active on LinkedIn than Twitter I'm active in Twitter DMs you could definitely DM me there but I honestly like to stay off a social media I'm on social media all day long for my companies and I personally just too much for me you know all right so let's go things and rapid fire biggest challenge you've overcome in your own personal or professional life what was it how did you overcome it yeah it was leaving the music industry having that barely talks to relationship with my best friend turn business partner and then you know fast forward five or six years you can even talk to each other send the same room as each other we were actually he's the best man in my wedding too basically reinventing myself I had done some digital marketing in the music industry but I was doing more like just producing like I was actually recording the records and producing them and and I literally had to transform myself like reinvent my career because I spent the last eight or nine years before that learning how to be a really good music producer and bass player and and recording engineer and I spent like five percent of my time digital marketing so that was probably I sat on the couch for three months I even cried a couple times like in my wife's arms like can you imagine her like it's okay baby it's okay it was it was now I was not in good state I was super depressed and luckily my friend called me out of Atlanta like I mentioned earlier and I got into the app game the startup game and end up loving it and as a result here I am like another six or seven years later one of the top digital marketers in the world and at least I think so I spent who knew God knows how many hours doing it and had my first like real deal success story in business super cool amazing how did you reinvent yourself how did you how did you double down digital marketing what was your was it just grinding it out where did you go yeah grinding it out you can learn anything on YouTube and YouTube yeah it was it was a thing back then but like I was I would just say yes so for example when I was trying to grow split we had no marketing expertise and I was tactically like our leader marketing sales I was just like oh we need to do this don't know how to do it we don't have any money to hire somebody I'm gonna figure it out and 99% of your answers are on YouTube or on Google and you can go there and find your answers and then that knowledge just compounded over you know a three to four year period also another key to I think how fast I grew as a digital marketer or all fast I transferred my career was not just saying yes I'll do anything and everything related to marketing but also it's working with multiple companies at the same time because during that period yeah I was doing split pretty much full time but I was you know dabbling and this other company that I wasn't even getting paid for I was just trying to do it and so like that's the reason I have like 20 something probably like startup failures is because I said yes to every opportunity I tried it I failed at it and through those lessons I got really good really fast so it's like I went on a accelerated version of like becoming a badass digital marketer by working with three to four companies and at a time I'm saying yes to everything but yeah dude I remember the first time I said yes to like a real deal marketing consulting project this company is going to pay me 30 bucks an hour to run paid search ads I had no idea how to do it I've never done it before I was like yeah I'll do it and that night I stayed up all night I read up about it like everything from like how you modify keywords to how you can test ads and I guess I'm naturally kind of a gifted at marketing in general like it's just like like when I first picked up the guitar like I mentioned earlier marketing like kind of clicked for me too and especially like taking science to marketing which you could do in 2021 but but yes so like I said yes to paid search and it was a little bit of it was a little bit clunky early on with that company that hired me but dude three months later I was making them a crap load of money off the 30 dollars an hour they were paying me I remember they had like a five to ten iOS we were scaling it across like six or seven markets and so every for everyone out there that's trying to get into a new career reinvent themselves or just like kind of feeling down the dumps just start saying yes to more stuff and then what ends up happening is you get really good at something and then you have to start saying no to most things but you you don't get there until like where you are with me right now like where you are my shoes like I'm starting to say no to stuff now but for the last seven years I've said yes to literally everything amazing and then I sleep sometimes well listen man it levels you up really really fun quickly so that's good that's good it's uh yeah you throw yourself into something you know you sink or swim and most people figure it away to swim if they want it bad enough for sure all right let's uh okay next one one person who's been very impactful in your life there's probably been a few but pick one and uh what what did they teach you what did you learn from them I'll just go with Sam maybe because it's like top of my current business partner yeah but he's someone I looked up to in the music industry or excuse me in in the business world um interesting story about how I met him by the way I I was doing some networking as I got a year or two in my digital marketing career I was just interested in networking with other startup people and stuff like that and it this one week I networked like grabbed drinks which I don't recommend doing by the way is describe random drinks unless you're actually going to take action off of like the conversation um a lot of people just will grab coffee and I wait I've wasted thousands of hours grabbing coffee I wish I just was running digital marketing experiments during that time but um I ran into three people so I was kind of I was becoming a decent tactical marketer I was like building websites you know scaling ads and and I was talking to people that didn't even know like what work press was you know and so like they but all but three people this one week said hey dude you should really meet the same guy and no one would give me his freaking information like they were being they were very guarded on his information he's just like internet you know um he's this internet like magician he scaled all his media properties he lives here in Nashville and I parked up to him like this guy's in Nashville because Nashville it's getting better but it's pretty much like a music and healthcare town like there's some good tactical people here but uh now but back in like 16-17 it really wasn't that great and so of course being the good teacher marketer I am I scraped his email using this preimic extension call duct soup but I think we talked about actually we did personally now um and I love them and I was like I was like I've got to make I've got to make this count you know because like this is a guy that I clearly need to meet I'm almost nervous sending this email out and so the subject line was who the fuck is Sam Savage and that got his attention he opened it and responded like 30 minutes later saying dude let's meet for drinks and so what he what he's taught me and we met for drinks you know like a week later we ended up starting a business the doctor Hank thing like a year after that and then obviously we're scaling the crap out of Savage Ventures now together which is cool um he's taught me a couple things one is life is way too short to work with people and to work on things you really aren't don't like to do like you don't have to be like going back to what you were saying earlier you don't have to be super passionate about the companies you're scaling like you know um like it's your it's your lifelong you know like passion or whatever but you need to really enjoy the people you're working with the environment you're working in and generally enjoy like what you're doing inside of the companies like I don't really like a don't or I don't like uh total framp is content anymore being like I mean I mean it's kind of nostalgic I say that but I look at it's like it's like it's really funny it was funny like when I was in college right like uh well I mean it's so funny now and in a style way I just don't yeah don't have time to look at that content anymore because I've got two young kids and a bunch of companies to work on but um so that's one is like life's too short to do something you don't want to do and that could be applicable to your personal life too like if you're in a bad if you're in a relationship you shouldn't be in if you are getting married you really don't want to be whatever it is like get out just do it you're gonna it's gonna suck for like three months and then your life's gonna be like transformed just making those decisions and then the second thing I'd say is like just be don't be afraid like I am I'm pretty because of kind of watching Sam do things he like just has a very not laws I fear but like he just has a a very um he just doesn't have a filter he's always himself and he will like literally call somebody that's like super famous super respected you know or whatever and have a conversation he's just like he's he's he's he's relentless about connecting with people and networking and it doesn't he doesn't get it doesn't he doesn't let it bother him if that makes sense I'm having trouble explaining this one but like no he's just like he's not he's not um he's not uh not threatened but just he doesn't place people on a pedestal he just he treats everyone like like he's he's their friend you know yeah not not a friend but like everyone's on the same yeah and we don't really have like I help like I coach our marketers and stuff but as average ventures were pretty much on an even playing field you know it's that's when we sell a company obviously the contributions will be differently but um but yeah so those are the two big things I think I learned from him that's awesome that's awesome I I respect that I don't I don't know Sam well maybe I'll have to have him on one day um if you can get him on he's I've been pushing him to do more stuff like this but he's a super private person too that's fair that's fair you know maybe I'll just have to be I'll have to be Joe Rogan level and then and then he'll fly out that's probably so he'll do this podcast got him okay he is he is more private I the feedback that I've given him recently though it's like you need to start yeah because we as part of me being on here or just me let's talking about the podcast it's like I really want to get the savage threat ventures brand more out there but yeah we work on our existing our portfolio brands all the time but we have spent no time doing the savage ventures brand other than I had Cliff our designer redo a logo and I threw up one page word press site which is like three pages you know earlier this year other than that really haven't spent any time on the brand yeah and that that will attract more deal flow too if you have that strong bread that will attract some really incredible talent not to say that you can't find it but I mean you will get some startups that come out of the woodwork that that want to work with you because you've had some you've had some really great successes so it's nice to be in that spot right where you can where where you have the ability to choose who you're working with and you're not haunting for more deals but yeah for sure well we'll figure it out man we'll figure it out all right what would be a book podcast audible something you would recommend people go check out that's been it's been useful for you oh man I could go all day long so as part of like saying yes to everything I also became this like I had never really read books up until I started this digital marketing and like entrepreneurship journey and then I I was doing it one point time like a book a week and I think that was part of the transformation process for me just developing a daily reading habit which is usually like 30 to 45 minutes before bed I'd say the top like five books are influenced by chial dini I forgot the exact name it's like influenced how to persuade and influence people or whatever by Robert chial dini it's like one of the most famous marketing books of all time that he didn't write it as a marketing book and it actually it came that he just came out with a new version too which is a lot longer and more updated for the digital age because the book was published I think back in like the early mid 90s that's a really good one but I don't think I have it I might no I don't have it here it's it's influenced I think it's the power of persuasion or the psychological persuasion yeah something like that by Robert chial dini yeah there's a book by Tim S Grover called relentless that I have mixed feelings about for five years after I read it but he was Michael Jordan's coach if you saw the Michael Jordan documentary that was released on he gave us on Netflix last year or whatever he was interviewed in there a couple times that's a really good book about what it takes to actually be the best a lot of people don't want it it's not for everyone and what Michael Jordan could be Brian and Dwayne Wade went through to be the best at their craft and how he coached them through that that's a super good book what else comes to mind those are good those are good books dude I could walk back in the office right now we've got a stack of books I read a book recently that was interesting and it kind of shed some light on our outkicks success in that like we we didn't really realize it at the time but we took advantage of changes of legislation that was passed inside the government and so there's a book called the Clipper ship strategy or chip it's a Clipper ship I think the Clipper ship strategy and basically the Clipper ship strategy was back during the gold rush there was a very high demand on the entire west coast of the United States and then there was there was equipment basically being manufactured at low cost on the east coast of the United States and Clipper ships were these new ships that could go really fast and take all the equipment that they needed basically the pickaxes that they needed and bring them around the bottom half the United States and up to California and so they can manufacture these pickaxes for like you know a dollar or 50 cents or something on the east coast and sell them for like $20 on the west coast and the margins were huge and so it's just like take advantage of different circumstances and he goes into how you can do this with the government in the more recent years and how like there are these funnels of money that are created by the government when new legislation is passed and how you can build companies around that it was fascinating definitely more of like a dry read if but if you're into like if you're die hard about like being entrepreneur and growing companies that might be an interesting read and then podcasts I would read I would I would if you're trying to be a good digital marketer the marketing school podcast is good um you know that I'm prepared yeah yeah with uh with them and then they're soon yeah air sue that's a good one if you're to like just getting started in technical marketing because it's like these five minute sound bites the um the perpetual podcast traffic is good for ads especially Facebook ads I think that's run by digital marketer and then all the all in podcasts which is a newer one which is just basically like four very prolific investor billionaires talk I know I know that's it yeah that's a really good one like Jamal this on there and some other folks yeah um and then I'd say the the fifth podcast I listen to a bunch is Noah Kagan's podcast because he he's got a good marketing mind but he also has like this interesting business uh sensibility to him um and so he talks about like he interviews a lot of fascinating people and he's also just a really good interviewer so that's an entertaining podcast that actually you'll learn something from too maybe your podcast is awesome as well I actually can't it lead did not listen to a bunch of episodes but until we met last week and obviously to prep yeah I know but when I downloaded it it'll definitely be on cycle every week I I listen to podcasts when I warm up at the gym so it's I appreciate that I appreciate it that's how you get it out there man you know you fly a Nashville go to a conference and then all of a sudden you got another download so yeah maybe not the most scalable podcast growth strategy but it works um an airplane flight gets you one day going back to economies of scale I don't think it's very good yeah unless your average down going to work like a couple grand that would be that depends your downloads yeah it depends who downloads yeah um okay uh if you could tell your 20 year old self one thing what would it be don't be afraid like first of all you're young so you should definitely start companies and be a lot more risky even though I'm more risky now and I talked about how we kind of de-risk that but I'm being way more risky now than I ever was in the business world and I should have been doing this when I was 21 22 or whatever in fact in the music industry are like fourth of fifth year and we started having success and when we started having success I kind of shelled up or like you know balled up and I I was afraid to you know take advantage of that opportunity and so and now I have kids and I can't work you know all night because I've got to wake up with kid at 3 a.m. or probably 6 a.m. and and I value sleep a lot more these days uh because again I have kids so like yeah absolutely go all in and like take a ton of risks because worst case scenario you max out a couple credit cards but you'll learn so much from that experience that even if you didn't want to do the entrepreneurship thing anymore any company any could start up with how are you and heartbeat for six figures if in fact you actually learned a lot of great skills like digital marketing skills or development skills or whatever very smart and uh last question what does success mean for you? I mean right now I'm just trying to get to total financial freedom like FU status like so what I do whatever I want to do uh and then obviously that means I can take my family along that journey so that they have total financial freedom I think success also changes as you go through stages of life like my 25 year old self would have said like get married my 21 year old self would have been like success is like getting drunk at a party and taking a girl home you know or whatever right I think it changes so in my mid 30s it's I've built these digital marketing skills that I know I can leverage we have proof that we can scale companies we've got something brewery here um and my three to five year old was to get total financial freedom and then after that success will probably look different maybe it's traveling or with my family or something like that but I'm solely focused on getting financial freedom right now so success in the three to five year time frame would be total financial freedom amazing all right that's all I got man that's it those are cool that was good that was very good you