Welcome to Virtual Assistants, the Agency Growth Machine podcast. Take your digital marketing agency to the next level as we share secrets, strategies and clients success stories. Step back from the DayToday of your agency and activate massive growth using Virtual Assistance. And now your host, Azar Saddiki. Rob, welcome to our show today. It's a pleasure, sir, to have you. We have had a few conversations in the past and I know you are one of our clients as well.
And we are also in the process of using and setting up one of your products, Pay per Click. Ad Labs will get to that part as well. Some amazing things I've heard in the past, a lot of digital marketing agency experience. I'd like to get into a little bit more about who Rob Warner is today. He's coming to us live from UK today from his home. I'm here in Calgary and without any further Ado, welcome to the show. Rob Warner. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it, sir. You're welcome. Rob. Rob.
So without wasting any time, I'd like to find out. By the way, I love the British accent. It's becoming a novelty in the English speaking world. So it looks like that you started out a company back in 2012 called Invisible Pay Per Click. And it looks like that company did really well. Tell us a little bit about I do want to get to that, but tell me a little bit about what happened before that. How did you get into the digital marketing arena? What's the background story on Raw
where Rob is coming from? Happy to. So my background is by training. I'm an accountant, okay. I always went to my own business and I was told before I went to business when I was at school, if you want your own business, you need to know your numbers. Go and get an accountant's. Trading, then you'll always have a good understanding of the numbers. Makes perfect sense. So I went out, got hired by one of the big four accounting firms, got a job, got qualified.
And then a thing happens that once you qualify, they start paying you really well and you start getting good jobs that are really nice and come with cars and bonuses and careers. And so I got to my sort of early thirties and it was where I was like, hang on a minute. The thing that was supposed to be the means to the end has become the end. I didn't mean to still be here doing this.
I decided, right, I'm going to do what I actually wanted to do, which was set up a tech company, always been into tech. All my accounting work, I was building tech the whole way through. So started a software company and it started to do okay. We started bringing some corporate clients. And then you remember the banking crash around 29, 2010, when the property markets collapsed, the banks collapsed. All our clients went with them. So our tech company had just found its fee essentially crashed.
So we thought, Right, what the hell do we do now? We pivoted and decided to sell to government because governments are still spending money. It's like, great, the businesses haven't got money, but governments have. Let's do a version of our product for government sites for those guys, we did. And we started sites like local authorities. So local cities, local counties would buy our products. And then we have the election in 2012. It was. And this new phrase came out.
It's called Austerity, which basically works a shorthand for government stopping spending money on anything in the course. A week's vacation. One month after the election, my entire order book of government business was canceled. And not only was it canceled, they put a spending freeze on, which then I couldn't sign for anybody else in government either. Now, what do I do? So is this a UK market you're selling into? And what's the product, Rob? It was a text messaging product.
It was text messaging for notifications to schools, for colleges. But back then, I would imagine iPhones have come out for three years only at this point. And some of these things massive. When we first built it, we built a piece of that. We built an app. It was for the Nokia 75. I think it was the Nokia operating system. It's called Symbion was the operating system to develop that ruled the market. So we built our apps for Nokia Symbion phones. They were the smartphones of the day.
But then, having realized now I've got no customers, I've got no money. And when I say no money, I mean I was six weeks from losing my house. No money, that's how no money it was. I was thousands of thousands of personal debt funding this company. The last roll of the dice, we decided to run some Google Ads. Much to my surprise, we got a few customers. And then through a chance meeting, somebody said, I've seen your Google ads that you're doing. Can you do those for other people?
And I'm like, oh, I am in thousands and thousands and thousands of debt and can barely pay my bills. If you will pay me to run your Google Ads, I will run your Google Ads. And I'll do my best. And one client became two, became three, became four. Purely by accident and around about someone. Within the fourth of the fifth client, I got approached by an agency, a UK web agency, doing about a million at the time. Look, we've got a ton of clients for SEO, a ton of clients to website builds.
We know nothing about PPC. We don't want to. How about we'll do all the selling and you do all the fulfillment and we'll split the money? I'm an introverted accountant. I don't like selling. Selling is not my thing. I'm like, hang on, you do selling, I do technical nerdy stuff, and we split it. It's like a dream deal. So we did it and it worked. At this point, where were you at with your agency journey?
My client number five. Okay. My agency journey was this guy working in the middle of the night while trying to keep his software company alive, doing Google ads for a handful of clients. And that was just meant to be like a side thing, side hustle for you so that you can keep the lights on, literally to keep the lights on and keep the roof over ahead. Yeah. And I recognize that I was terrible at telling I didn't like it.
So I started buying marketing products, joining marketing Facebook groups, and trying to be helpful about Google in it. What a weird thing happened. Whenever I make a helpful comment in a Facebook group about Google Ads, a bunch of people would go, hey, I've got an agency. Can you do this for me? No. Selling, selling. I'd just be helpful. People would come and ask me to do work for them, and they're predominantly in America.
And by pure accident, I ended up with what essentially was a white label agency working mainly for US based clients out of the UK. And it was honestly that's stupid how it got started. That's amazing. It was an accident. That's such an amazing story. And a lot of times our heroes journey is very different than what Rob just described. But Rob was going through a crunch, and you just mentioned literally six weeks away from losing the home. And we've all been there and we've all seen those.
I literally had days where on a particular day of the month, the first of the month, I had to go in and charge some of my clients credit cards. And if only one of those credit cards didn't go through that day, for whatever reason, sometimes it happens, right? I wouldn't have been able to pay the rent. That's a stressful situation to be in, Rob. And that makes us unique as entrepreneurs. And with Rob's story, it's so evident that Rob figured out a way of making it happen. Keep the lights on.
And then stumbled across something which turned into something amazing and something really fast because there was a demand for that. And you kind of stumbled into becoming a white label agency, Rob. So this is around 2012 and you call the company nice. Here's the thing. I was really good with data, which is what I was good at. Google Ad data structure, organization, measurement. I could do that all day long.
So it was a natural fit for me, which is why I didn't do SEO, because it was kind of like you build some stuff and you hope you get some links. And it was all a bit woo woo. It didn't feel real. Yeah. For the first, I think about four, five years of that business, we didn't even have a website, our website. You went to it during that time. And here's the reason why. A, I couldn't afford to pay somebody to do it. B, I couldn't do it myself, but I managed to get a pager for the WordPress website.
And in the middle of the pet screen, all I said was nothing to see here. And there was a click to a form button for somebody forgetting to it. And that's all I had. Amazing. People would say, how are you credible? You haven't even got a website. We're white label. We're supposed to be invisible. Credibility is your work, isn't it? Like the Word getting around so much so that you don't even need a website for the first five years.
If somebody got to the point in these Facebook groups where somebody would ask a Google Ads question and then immediately a bunch of people will be in there going tagging rubble, and I wake up to a bunch of messages of people asking me to become my 7th client. Great, nice to post anything helpful. People are selling and people listening to us. I think I would really want to relate this because it happens. I've been running my agency for the last 14 years, Rob, in Calgary, Canada.
And a lot of those years have been very, very tough. And sometimes what happens is that you're just around the corner to something that's massively going to be big and that's going to defy all odds. And during my agency days, if somebody told me that I would have to have a waiting list of a client, a waiting client list where we have literally a waiting list where people can have to wait to get a particular type of person from rep stack at this point.
And I would have just laughed at their face because I just wasn't used to it, because I was barely keeping the lights on. Right. And learning from you, very similar thing that you went through, where you're going through your journey as an accountant. And then you come into becoming, working with this software company, making sure that it's working and you still got all bets on that.
And then all of a sudden you try doing something that comes naturally to you, but it comes so naturally that you let your work speak for itself and you turn into invisible pay per click. I'm excited to find more about invisible pay per click. Now, Rob, like what happened? Walk us through that journey and how you scale that. Yeah, that journey got interesting. So I very quickly found that I was having to hire, first of all, just somebody to help me do the Google Ads.
I hired a contractor, then I hired a part time project manager and I then turned them full time. And when I say hire, bear in mind, this is 20 12, 20 13 time. Zoom is not a thing. Mac is not a thing. My business was built on Skype and email. At the time, that was my only two options, Skype and email. And I was hiring people in the US mainly to cover the fact that I've now got clients in New Zealand, Australia, USA, UK, all over.
And I was killing myself doing customer phone calls, going, I've got to talk to somebody in the Pacific. They want a call at midnight my time.
00 A.m. The following morning. I really need somebody. And I had primarily to cover the West Coast of the US on it just so I could go to bed. Wow. And then it grew and it grew. And when I say I hired people, here's my sales pitch. I would like you to come and work for me. I can give you no benefits. I can't put you on a company payroll. I don't even have a company in the US or a bank account each month. I'm going to send you a payment by PayPal. Does that sound like a great deal?
Where were you finding these people? Job boards. So my first thing was I found the first person from a job board and I use them to say, who do you know? And so I hired one person, then hired a friend of them and then a friend of them. Because they're all digital marketing backgrounds, these people are all remote Rob. Or were they looking excellent. I went over to the US to an event to meet my customers. I just about could afford the airfare by there.
And at that event, I got called out by name on the very first morning as an example of a specialist agency that was doing well. I spent three days just swamped with new business. To put it into context, when we grew invisible to its peak, we would onboard up to 70 customers in a month. Nice. Most digital agencies don't onboard 70 in their lifetime. And we were doing that in above, across all Google ads, but across multiple niches. So we have to scale pretty quickly.
So this was a conference that you attended, and this gave you this snowball effect. Huge leg up. It was the best thing ever. Were you speaking at this conference, Rob? No, I was purely an attendee. I knew the event organizer by length. I've helped him out with some stuff in one of his Facebook groups. I didn't know he was the organizer. I didn't even know the group had it. I just helped him and it turned out he was both of those things. So when he gave me a shout out on day
one, the rest kind of took off from there. Oh, wow. We grew from there. We started building software, we grew services, we grew training elements in our business and eventually ended up and if you know, in Google, they have partner levels with their agency. They have what's called a Google partner, your little blue badge that says you got some exams and you've got some spent going through your account. Then about 5% worldwide get this Premier partner badge, which is the best badge.
I said, you're in the top 5%, which is great, or 3%, whatever the numbers. We got invited someone called their channel sales team, which is like the top small percentage of their Premier partners, which means we got to deal directly with Google head office. We got to speak to the people running Google Ads worldwide, all from this tiny little remote business. That was a little bit we were making it up, but yet there we were.
I sat in Mountain View, California, with director level people in Google going, yeah, let's do some work here. How can we help? That's amazing. We'll stick to invisible pay per click just for a little bit more because it's a nice, amazing journey, actually. So one of the things that you guys probably don't need is a marketing budget. Am I correct, or did you guys
start spending any money on marketing? Eventually, no. Well, here's what we did, which was I didn't realize at the time how smart it was. Often a lot of things look smart in hindsight, very much that way. So we're approached by who is now a friend, to build a training course and a software for Google Ads, which we did. And they helped us promote and sell it.
So what we would do is we would run a webinar with a partner to their audience, teaching our way of selling Google Ads with our training and with our tool, and they would buy the product. We pay an affiliate Commission out, and then they would become a customer. And when they got the client, they then use us for fulfillment. So marketing for us was a revenue line, not an expense, because we were effectively charging people to train them how to become good customers, which millions.
That's a beautiful way of doing it, because you're going to be doing that anyways, running your own webinars and your podcasts and stuff like that. You partner with the right strategic people, with their audiences, help them build out these amazing courses and trainings that they can give out to their people. And you offer that service, I'm assuming, for free, to these coaches and other people. We were charging for the training. Oh, wow.
Nobody was buying our training, was paying us anything from six of those upwards. What a value bomb here, folks. Like, instead of spending money on marketing, Rob is actually making it's a revenue stream. Right? Marketing for us was a revenue line. Mine blown right there, Rob, good job. Yeah. And it meant for us. We could often. And here was the thing that we found. I'm about to say something and I mean, it not to be offensive, although it may sound that way.
One of the things we found was that many marketing agencies don't know how to do marketing for themselves. They're great with doing client stuff, whether it's a Facebook ad campaign or SEO. But when it comes to their own marketing, referral is the go to it's feast famine referral. And they don't have organized marketing approaches. And there are exceptions, but out of every hundred, I would say 90 of them would not have a solid client acquisition system gave that to what they needed.
That's amazing. It's so amazing that you bring this point up, because when we're working with agency owners and things like that, that's our biggest struggle to making them identify that, hey, you got to invest on your own marketing, whatever that may look like. In your case, it looks very different. It's an amazing I think we can do an entire webinar on that strategy that you just discussed.
And Jeff Fisher would love to talk to you on that as well, because he's been doing a lot of that and hybrid stuff on that side as well. But the point over here is that doing some of these things and identifying that you need a marketing Department Army. We're doing this amazing job, fulfilling for all these people, but we're not doing it for ourselves. We're not eating our own dog food. We're nearly done.
Rob writing my first marketing book from Repstack site, and we're kind of discussing titles. And one of the titles that I'm enjoying is that how dare you call yourself an agency owner? Because if we're not having doing the same marketing things that we're doing for our clients and we don't have a solid client retention Department with these account managers. I'm assuming that at one point, since you guys have had all these clients now, you kind of
stepped back from managing accounts as well. Rob. Is that correct? Yeah, I ended up stepping back. We have a team of over 30 people. So it grew to a point where I wasn't managing accounts, which is a weird transition to make. But for us, it came down to two things. One, we found a method of getting clients at a profit, which was fantastic. And even the point of those who didn't buy our training still has now a lot of awareness who we were.
So even if a thousand people bought our training, probably three, 4000 had seen our webinars, had seen our 18 emails were in our ecosystem. And that gave us huge kind of leverage to grow and scale. But it also gave us authority positioning. And I think that's one of the things that you talk about, a book, anything that you can do that gives you a market position that's hard for others to repeat. It's fantastic.
Coaches still to this day often look to invisible PPC for their fulfillment because an agency coach such as Josh Nelson or John Logan or anybody else, the one thing that matters to them above everything is that they have a safe pair of hands for fulfillment. They need to know that if they teach their agency owners how to go out and get clients and some of them do a fantastic job at that. The last thing you want to happen is it all to fail because the agency couldn't fulfill.
And so a safe pair of scalable hands is really valuable. Yeah. They need to be able to trust you before they'll put their name on the line and recommend you. And Lo and behold, something really bad happens. And it comes down to that thing when you could go to a freelancer who are more expensive than a freelancer. But if you said to us, you take on ten clients tomorrow, we could always say, of course we can. There's a pretty good chance for freelancer couldn't do that.
If a freelancer takes a vacation, your work stops. If they go sick, your work stops. And so there's this trade off. And we were never as cheap as a freelancer, but we provided that consistency of service, that scalability, that is really important to agency owners. So there must have been a lot of work that went on from 2012 to 2020. But let's jump to because I want to get to pay per click Ad Labs as well. That's a product that we're just setting up right now. We're so excited about that.
But before we do that, can you tell me, Rob, what did you grew the invisible pay per click business to and how did you exit that business? So we grew multi seven figures, which was nice. And ultimately what happened was, as I said, right, I was an accidental agency owner. I'm naturally an introvert. I suddenly got a team of 35 people that need managing and clients and people. And that for me was an awful lot of people to handle on a daily basis. I found it exhausting.
And having done it for nine years, I got this thing in my ear going need to build software. I need to build software. I need to build software. I really want to get back into doing the thing that got it all started in the first place. Yeah. And so 20, 20, 21 came. Kobe was here. The world was weird. I wish I started building software again initially as side things to solve problems that I had internally, not to make a SAS business or anything like that, just to solve internal problems.
And then came to conclusion actually trying to grow SaaS, which we're just trying to grow SaaS and trying to grow agencies are two very different things. They're very different needs. And it's like trying to ride two horses. It's not easy. And I felt my time as an agency and it was done. I knew I was neglecting it. And that's not fair on anybody.
If you know, you're not investing and neglecting and you're neglecting your business, you're not giving it your emotion, you're not giving your attention. You're not giving it your brain space. That's not fair. On your customers. That's not fair on your team. They're relying on you to lead them. And if you're not personally engaged and invested, you shouldn't be there.
And I reached that point mentally where I was like, I need to not be here now because I am not the best thing for this business anymore. So I started a search. We had a broker to work with us with a specific brief of finding the right buyer at a fair price. It was never about getting the best price. We could have taken offers for people who wanted to throw the staff away. Just take the customers, take the list, but take the operation apart.
I don't want to look at any of my team members in the eye and go, Right, I've got my check. You've lost my job. Have a nice day. Yeah. I didn't want that conversation. So finding the highest price was never our issue was finding the right buyer at a fair price. And we found a really good company in Austin, Texas. And we closed the deal last November to sell Invisible. Nice. Now the new owner is exactly he should be infused, is engaged, building a great team.
He's already got an existing business to brought it into. And I still consider myself the biggest champion. And I'm still very proud of what they're doing. That's amazing. Not me. Now, such a great story because a lot of these companies that we build by chance or sometimes with shared grid, they have our DNA in them. Right.
You spend like almost a decade at that company, and there must be so much a big part of you that's part of that company on how the processes and systems are working and handing that over to somebody else is a big decision. And for some people, it comes easily. For others, like me, that was never an option. Like, I just wanted to continue doing my agency. It's going to work. It's going to work. It's going to work.
And right now it's coupled up in a ball with some of my very good best friends here in Calgary who are clients of mine still. And they refuse to without any attention. Like you said, most of the clients, they kind of went away as I started focused on focusing on rep stack. But I still have a core group of clients who are also friends and things like that. And I've been working with them for the last ten years. And I have those setups ready to go for them, and it's working.
I have clients on the Invisible PPC books who joined Invisible at that event in 2013. Nice. Still there when I left. Nice. That feels good. It does in agency years. That's like 100 years. Yeah. I was really proud of that fact that some of those original people were still there, even right at the end. And that was, for me, really satisfying. And the only thing that I kind of have a regret is the wrong word, but a sort of frustration with it.
As a white label agency, you're kind of a dirty little secret. There's no agency, and everyone wants to go to their clients and go, oh, no, you can't meet the guy who's doing your actual campaign. That's not a company I outsource to, because the first thing the client says, well, why am I paying you then? Why don't you go direct to them? So agency owners, on the whole can't admit to white labeling or outsourcing.
So similarly, you don't want to publicly give a testimonial because you don't want to be the face on the website. The company that tries to apply for concern doesn't exist. Exactly. So it's a really weird thing. That would be really nice. And one of the reasons we're enjoying what we're currently doing is actually be able to put a name up and go, we're building this. We're really proud of it, and hopefully you will do it. Nice. So, yeah.
So let's walk into Pay per click ad Labs and talk about that a little bit. So you've always wanted to create software, and now running an agency for ten years, I think you have a better understanding of building software than anytime before this. So how did the Pay per click adapt idea came about? And how is it doing right now? What's going on? Are you excited for the future? Honestly? So Cadillac was in other happy accidents. So here's the thing. Invisible. We brought out products.
It was a master class specifically for the plumbing industry, where we showed agency owners how to get plumbing clients. And one of the deliverables we promised in that product was 1000 plumber leads to give you a starting point if you didn't have a list. And particularly we were focusing on people who were advertising. And having made that promise to deliver it, we then realized actually finding a list of plumbers advertising on Google is really difficult to get.
None of the tools we tried, and I'm not going to name them, but you can probably look for the tools that are out there that claim to find all the people. They just don't. They don't very little. So as an act of desperation, I hired a contract and said, here's a process I think might work. Can you get me a CSV? And he did that's fantastic. Can you get me another one?
And I went back for another one and about three or four iterations, and he went, Rob, would it be okay if I just built you with this user interface on this then rather than you asking me every time you want to get a new CSV, you can just get it yourself. That would really help. So he got me this little user of interface that's really clever. I could put in a keyword, I could put in a location, and I get all the advertisers back.
And so last May, Joe and I went out to have our quarterly management meeting. Because of Cobweb, I couldn't get into the US, he couldn't get into the UK. So we met in the Dominican Republic, which is not the worst place to go for my education. I like that idea. Five days working in a Beach Cabana. It's looking at all our priorities and we laid them all out. I've got this little thing that I'm working on that I think it's kind of got something in it. I'm not really sure, but I think it's a thing.
Can I carry on with it, please? Just as a spare time project. And so I did and I built PPC Ad Lab. And now PPC Ad Lab does a few things, but primarily you can give it any location, any search terms you're interested in and it will find you in real time. All the people who are advertising the advertisers that will find their ad, copy their ad schedules, it will tell you what devices they're bidding on, it will tell you what their contact information is.
It will even send them personalized emails and that kind of thing. So it really is kind of the agency owners prospecting tool of choice now because one of these we know is that some of the highest value prospects out there are those already advertising. And the by far the highest advertising spent tend to be Google. So you have to view clients that just about any service. If you know they're spending money on Google ads, they're probably willing to spend money on other things.
Brilliant lead resource. Yeah. So what I got from this is that you also decide was this intentional Rob that you guys decided to sell to the same market that you were before. So I think the thing is, as you like, we've been in this space for nine years and I think invisible. We had a really unique perspective. And what I mean by that is most agency owners see their agency. They might work with a coach who sees several agencies, but we actually worked directly inside well over 1000 agencies.
So we got to see the problems that these agencies have. And it's like a once a quarter get together or a once a month Zoom call. We will be speaking to most of them on a weekly or bi weekly basis. We really knew what agencies had issues with and we mentioned before about the sales issues. So what Joe and I and our business partner set out to do is let's build solutions for problems that the market hasn't solved. If it already exists, let's not build it.
But if it doesn't exist and it hasn't been solved at scale, let's build the solution for it. And Ad Labs really the first example of that where it's a tool that quite honestly, in my opinion should have existed years ago. The tools that claim to do it don't do it very well. Yeah, we measurably find ten times more data than they find. So we know that we do a better job. So we become very intentional.
We launched it with a really basic, embarrassingly basic version last summer, and it's done great. It already has a substantial valuation, and we're excited about it. Nice. That's so exciting. This worked out really well because for a digital marketing agency, it's so important. We're doing all these cutting edge things right for our clients. And you're launching these amazing campaigns. And everything is really dependent on a solid quality lead list. And that is still in you know what, right?
Pretty much, because you're hiring data scrapers still on Fiverr and Upwork, and you're getting people to kind of go through Google and build these lists out for you. Imagine how many things can go wrong there. And they do. But the version that you guys can like, I can't imagine a digital marketing agency operating without a too, like pay per click ad labs, because it gives you immediately at your fingerprints any market that you or your clients are going to be entering in.
You can pull up a list and you can start working on that highly qualified list here's the thing with that as well. What we allow our agencies to do now is to go to a market. So imagine this scenario on a Monday morning. You go find me all the plumbers in Tampa gun. You leave it running, runs in real time. So we'll find them over the course of several days, it says.
And then when you've done 20 checks on Google, for example, start looking at the contact information and email them personalized emails going, Dear Mr. Plumber, you are ranked number five plumber in Tampa, Florida. Do you want to know who's beating you? We've just produced a market report. By the way, would you like to see the most popular app, Copy, in your market? We're showing them data they've never seen before. So rather than a generic cold blast, we're leading with value.
We're leading with insight, and people are generally blown away. It's got a CRM aspect to it as well. Yeah. Is there a plan to kind of build the CRM system out or are you guys going to be giving integrations into other CRM? We're building integrations currently. We're building integrations into things like high level and those kind of places. So, yes, we have an email also outreach system, but people might want to use ours and might want to use their own sophisticated. But it's getting better.
I think integration with a tool like high level because high level is primarily a digital marketing agency tool would be great. My brother ATAR is actually at a high level mastermind in Dallas right now. Okay. He's having a great time. And what you said earlier, some of these events that you did and how you co branded your trainings and stuff like that, that a lot of people already knew who you guys were and gave you authority. And Author is having a similar experience in Dallas right now.
Even though we're not speaker, we're just attending the mastermind. But our marketing Department and things we've done with Josh and other people have kind of accumulated that a lot of people in that room already know who Athar and Rep Stack is, and we're having a good time there. So these strategies do work. It's the nicest way to market, to grow relationships, and you're leading with value, building a reputation within community. It's a wonderful thing.
I love going to events where I just get to hang out and speak to people like that because it's just such a nice opportunity. We discussed a bit of marketing. You have some amazing ideas about marketing, and we also discuss how you are retaining clients using account managers in your previous companies. But we haven't really talked about sales. Rob, what's your philosophy behind sales? You guys have a sales Department set up right now. What's going on in there?
So if we talk about our software business, as it stands right now, the closest thing we have to sell is somebody I would describe as our customer attention manager. And his role essentially is to make sure that when somebody comes into our trial, he catches them during that trial period because it's a new tool. So sometimes the user interface can confuse people. Sometimes they don't know how to get what they want.
So his job is to make sure the user gets what they want during the trial, gets a ton of value for it, and hopefully becomes a paying customer. Then his job is to make sure they get success with the tool. So if they start with a small plan, they ultimately buy a bigger plan because that's how we win. But it's also how we win it. Our success is tied to our customer success, which is exactly where it should be.
If they're getting value out of the tool, if they're using it well to bring on people, then they can buy a bigger plan from us. They get more customers, we get more revenue, and that's what we do. We sell to people who are already in our ecosystem. We still run. We still run part of the webinars. And we find that for us is a really nice way of doing it. We get to spend an hour somewhere. We get to educate, we get to teach, we get to train, and we get to make an offer at the end of that webinar.
But it's not where nobody can give us any money. What we're saying is, here's the thing that can get new customers. Go and take a free trial. And very worst, you'll get several hundred prospects, names that you can use in the future. It's a really nice thing to be able to sell. Joe always says, I do invisible selling. It's selling without selling because there's no need to actually pitch anybody. The software sells itself when people are in. Yeah.
And then in a time where a company like yours, you do need to make phone calls, 120 phone calls. Is there a plan for that? Go ahead. Yes, there is. We just started it now and we've started it with a rep Stack rep, which is fantastic. We're excited about it. So we're going out to the outside world, as you said, we're eating our own dog food. We're running ad lab jobs finding prospects.
And our reps, that rep is calling them to make sure the right contact information say, hey, we're running 500 tests on the Google advertisers in the plural advertising on Google in Tampa. Would you like a copy of the report? And it's booking a sales appointment. In fact, the very first one came in yesterday, and we've got a race of four out of five to convert them. Nice. Awesome. I want to interject over here because this is obviously near and dear to my heart as well.
What recently we started doing about three, four months back is that we really wanted to buckle down on the type of clients that we're working with. And one of the things that we stopped doing was that there's always like when as agency owners, when we think about growing our businesses, the first thing that comes to my mind is that I need to hire a salesperson. I need to get this person on phone calls and get him to start dialing. But I tried that in my agency career for 14 years.
I can promise you it never worked out. And the only time it works out is when you're sitting on a goal. Mine of a list like pay per click ad lapse is going to spit out. And just imagine these are already pre qualified. Like, this just gets me excited because these are not the type of people Rob and I are talking about. These are not people who are just career cold callers and they're just sitting like robots in a dungeon somewhere and doing these calls for you.
These people are actually these people have a potential of become career executives. That's the type of person that we want to bring to the table to a company like Rob's and these intelligent people starting out just even today, I believe if you want to start out at Goldman Sach and you get an unpaid job, commissions only, you start out on the floors and you start selling stock like everybody else, and then you move your way up. Right.
And it ends up becoming a partner, whatever level that may be. When a smart person, the right person comes in as a sales development rep or what Rob is trying to do is and they come and they have this gold mine of data in front of them. Now it's up to them to go through that 100 and 2150 calls a day, make sure they're hitting their targets, booking one to two discovery calls a day, and maybe even more depending on the type of data that is spinning out.
I think you guys are doing a great job, especially because of the pay per click ad lab that I'm just interested. It's a really good tactic. It just works. We're delighted to do with you guys because I'd say this because it's true, not because you're the person on the other end of the call. We have awesome data and awesome ability to collect data, which is highly valuable and makes prospecting an easier activity to do. Prospecting is always hard work.
It's a hell of a lot easier if you've got valuable data to give away. Leaving with a give, not an ask, it's a lot easier. But then we take that data and repairing it with a really smart, articulate rep who can lead with value, leave with a good impression of our business, engage a prospect, think on their feet, and book a call. And those two things together, it's a really powerful combination that we're in the early days of testing it.
But hey, at the moment, as I called up today, we have one from one, and I'll take that all day long. It's awesome. I love it. Rob, it's been a pleasure. I think I would love to have some kind of joint venture on a webinar where we can kind of host it and have you guys come in and maybe walk us through on the basics of an incredible list building because that's every single one of our clients. I can promise you we all can use a better quality list.
And what better way of doing it than with pay per click ad labs? I'd love to have something scheduled in the future and get that out to our audiences. I think it will be incredible for me. It's been a pleasure. My friend Michael. I knew these conversations from time to time. It's been incredible learning about your journey, a very unique journey. And a lot of times I can relate to you.
And a lot of times there are exciting things that you mentioned that when things get going, they really get going right when you least expect them. You know what? It's one of those things. It would be really easy to come on a call like this, tell a wonderful narrative story how we did this, we did that. We did that, and it all grew. What a brilliant plan. Nine times out of ten. That's not the truth. We make the best. We have the information we have at the time, and
we back ourselves to make our next best bet. Yeah. Oftentimes we're not. That gets us to where we're supposed to be. That's my belief on it that the stories are very rarely as clean and as neat and as high as people would have you believe. Yeah. So true. Rob Warner, thanks for joining us today. It's been a pleasure, sir. And we'll keep you updated.
This has been the virtual assistant the agency growth machine podcast by Azar Sadiqi co founder at rep stack if you like today's episode, you can find more and subscribe at rep stack co thank you for listening.