The link to the podcast can be accessed at the top of the page. A full transcript of the podcast can be accessed below. Thank you for listening, and happy marketing!
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Jeremy Sonne:
Welcome to the Agency Founder Podcast by Moonshine Marketing. Every single week, we interview successful founders of marketing agencies at different parts of their journey to pass on their victories, defeats, challenges, and lessons learned to help you take your agency to new heights. This week, we’re speaking with James Isaacs, the co-founder of Chat Cloud, a messenger marketing agency, and Gym Zag, a gym and fitness studio marketing agency. James, thank you so much for being with me here today.
James Isaacs:
Hey, thanks so much for having me, Jeremy. And hello to everyone.
Jeremy Sonne:
I really appreciate it. We’ve known each other for a little while. This is the first time I’ve heard Gym Zag, which is exciting. This is the big debut, right? My podcast is turning into a debutante ball, essentially, I think. But yeah, that’s new for you, right?
James Isaacs:
Yeah, 100%, man. I mean, we literally, right around the new year, said you know look, we need to take a new strategy, a new approach. That’s sort of how Gym Zag was born.
Jeremy Sonne:
That’s really interesting. We’re going to dig super into that. But first, for all the folks that don’t know you, tell me a little bit about yourself. How did you get into all of this? What’s your background? How’d you end up in the salt mines of Facebook ads like the rest of us?
James Isaacs:
I love it, man. The salt mines of Facebook. Yeah, when I was eight, I started a lemonade stand. That’s a total joke, you told me to say that. So I was like, I’m just going to say that.
Jeremy Sonne:
I didn’t tell you to say that, I gave it as an example.
James Isaacs:
Actually, on a sunny, serious note, I mean, I’ve always had an interest in business. Just by way of explanation here, nearly a year and a half ago, I was active duty military, I was a Marine. I had a 16 year career with the Marine Corps, very successful. My last duty station was at the Pentagon. All that was wonderful, but you know how it is. You just have this burning desire, deep in your heart. You’re like, I love what I’m doing, I love service. I’ve served, and I’ve worked in a service capacity my entire life, and that’s how I approach agency work, actually. Just as a side note. It’s a form of service, right?
James Isaacs:
Really, what precipitated a major change for me is just this burning desire that I’d had for many, many years. Going all the way back to my college days. I used to tie dye tshirts, you know, when I was in school. I worked at a couple side gigs. I wanted to roll around the Grateful Dead concerts, I’m dating myself here, and sell tie dyed tshirts. I made some pretty kick ass tshirts back in the day, by the way.
Jeremy Sonne:
Right. Well I don’t know that much about the Marines, but that seems kind of like the opposite of the Marines, you know what I mean? Tie dyed tshirts and Grateful Dead concerts. I don’t know. Tell me about that. That’s an interesting mash-up though. All entrepreneurs have those interesting mash-ups of interests that lead you to that road. So you were rolling around selling tshirts at Grateful Dead concerts. What was that like? That’s really fascinating me.
James Isaacs:
Actually, I tell you, if I didn’t have people at the time advising me to do differently, I was prepared to leave school entirely and just make that my full-time thing. Because it was quite lucrative. My product was very good. I could sell it at a really high price point. Looking back on it, in a way, I was sort of doing POD before POD. You know what I mean? I did custom designs on the front and the back, all that stuff.
Jeremy Sonne:
Yeah, like manufacturing on demand onsite.
James Isaacs:
Yeah. Manufacturing on demand, I like it. MOD, that’s cool. Anyway, I did that back in the day. But at some juncture I was like, hey, international development, now we’re really getting crazy here. International development is more where I wanted to focus my attention. For a brief time there, I was doing things like starting investment funds. We were investing in small and medium enterprises overseas. The idea there being, look, you go into a place that is poverty-stricken, you create jobs and opportunity, and empower people basically to build businesses that let them take control over their lives, and build the financial wherewithal to determine their own destiny, in a manner of speaking.
James Isaacs:
Then 9/11 happened. I’m fast forwarding a few years there. I was in the very first class of Marine officers to go through training, and that was three weeks, right after 9/11. So that’s kind of how that came about.
Jeremy Sonne:
That’s really intense, it sounds like. I’m sure there was a lot of emotional highs. I guess an interesting question I have, just regarding your background. You’ve been in business for about a year and a half. Are you seeing a ton of crossover from your days in the military? Tell me about that. Is there a lot of transferrable skills and attitudes and approaches to process and things that you think are kind of giving you an advantage over some of the other folks? I’m actually, genuinely curious. I think that there could be, kind of from an outsider looking in, but I’d love to hear from you.
James Isaacs:
Actually, that is an awesome question. I can and I will talk about that at length. If you’re cool with it, I want to interject a quick point before I do. Which is to basically talk about business is, in a lot of ways … When I was coming out of the Marine Corps, right? It’s one thing to have this fire, this desire. I want to get out, and I want to be in business. But then the next question you’ve got to answer is, what are you going to do? That seems like, for people that have been in it, that seems like hey, no big deal, right? Or maybe they have arrived at the thing they’re doing, that’s been an organic evolution for them.
James Isaacs:
You have to understand, the Marine Corps, military service in general, I think this is probably true, sort of consumes your entire life, right? Right up to the day that I was getting out, other than this optimistic idea that I was going to start a business and be successful, which I still believe is a true statement. Right up until that point I was thinking to myself, yeah, I’ll just go into business, I got this. Just that total sense of confidence. Part of that, coming back to your question, that’s part of the answer. What you learn in military service is just a total sense of confidence in your ability to get things done.
James Isaacs:
Come hell or high water, you’ll figure it out. I think that is definitely a strength that I bring to what I do today.
Jeremy Sonne:
Absolutely. I mean, grit and determination is massive. I see so many people that are right on the cusp of success, and they just pack it up, go home, too hard, you know? I think that I definitely can see how that transfers over.
James Isaacs:
Yeah. I mean, you’ve got to labor away, you’ve got to labor away, you’ve got to figure it out. You’ve been there. One of the things that I respect and love about you is, you just have this ability to jump into virtually any ad platform and figure it out, and get really good results. I’m like, “Hey man, have you ever done this?” You’re like, “Yes I have.” And I’m like, “Holy cow, tell me about it.” You’re like, “Well, I did this, that, and the other.” I’m like, “Oh man, I couldn’t get that kind of experience if it took me two or three years.”
Jeremy Sonne:
I’ll tell you what. I think in my case, it’s a lot less romantic determination and grit and get it done attitude and more of a naivete, but you know, just willingness to go for it and see what happens. I like to think I have good perspective in that, what’s the worst that could happen? But yeah. That’s really fascinating, though. So you’re doing the military, you come out, you say, “Business.” Right? How did you actually land at marketing agency? What was the process that said, “Okay, I’m going to do a business, right?” And that’s totally legit. When I started, I was going to do tech, right? I was mostly going to do tech because I saw that movie the Social Network and was pretty sure by now I’d be a billionaire with groupies. Which I don’t know if my wife would super appreciate.
Jeremy Sonne:
Yeah, then I did tech, and I was like, okay, I just dove in. That was a good experience because I had no idea what I was doing, then I did some more tech stuff, and I had a little bit more of an idea of what I was doing, but still mostly not. Then marketing organically evolved for me as the thing I was good at. Then I started getting clients kind of organically and it went from there. But how did you arrive at marketing agency?
James Isaacs:
Right before I got out, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, that’s the top dog, four star general. He takes a trip to southeast Asia. At the time, I’m his special advisor for Asia. I go with him. We’re cruising around Thailand, I’m doing stuff to support his official visit. Right at the end of it, I had worked out a deal where I basically would stay for a week and do some, we call it language and cultural refresher training. He comes back. I stick around. And during that time I’m like, okay, I don’t know if I’m getting out, but I’m pretty confident, I think I am. I hadn’t quite made the decision. So let me scope out some things.
James Isaacs:
Well guess what I came up with? I was going to import coconuts, fresh coconuts.
Jeremy Sonne:
I love that, that’s awesome.
James Isaacs:
Yeah, straight up. I was going to start a fresh coconut brand, and that was my big plan. I took a couple day trips, networked with some people, went and found a manufacturer. There’s a province in Thailand that makes the most delicious, amazing … The species that I’m speaking of only grows in that one province in Thailand. Just, the best coconuts in the world, absolutely.
Jeremy Sonne:
James, I’m going to Thailand next year, so you have to tell me where the best coconuts in the world are.
James Isaacs:
Dude, I’ll even introduce you to the supplier. She’s still there and cranking it, she’s really good at what she does, yeah. But that was it, man. Happy to.
Jeremy Sonne:
Okay. So you’re sitting there and you’re like, coconut importer, that’s cool, I love it. Fast forward, marketing agency. What do those steps look like? Did you start actually working on the coconut importing? Because you still had time left in the Marines, right?
James Isaacs:
Yeah, so that was the problem. There was a little bit of disjointed there, stuff going on with respect to timing. I come back from that trip, it’s now March. I make a decision within a week after getting back, yeah okay I’m doing it. If you or your audience have done anything around the military, it’s not as simple as, “Hey, I’m going to leave now.” “Okay, great, here’s your papers. Have a good day, bye.” It doesn’t work that way. It’s a lengthy process to get out. I had to go through a series of … They essentially wanted me to wait six months. I was like, no, no, I’m not waiting six months. I want out within the next two to three months.
James Isaacs:
I had to go get special permission. There’s a whole series of bureaucratic things you had to do. I couldn’t’ really focus on anything except that process until the day they let me go. Then once they did, the prime opportunity to make things happen, because the summer season here had already eclipsed. Two things happened there. One, I realized I don’t know how to actually bring this to market. In the Marine Corps, I was a logistics officer. Working out the logistics arrangements of stuff, I’m good at that. Organization and so on. But trying to do this in a business context. In other words, take things to market successfully, I hadn’t done something like that in over 16 years, because I had been serving the entire time.
James Isaacs:
This is where potentially your audience is going to have a little chuckle. And I invite them to, because looking back on it, I kind of chuckle. I was looking on YouTube, how do I get people to buy coconuts? I found the video by Neil Patel, of all people, and he basically opened my eyes to, hey, look, the world of marketing. Using online tools as an option for that has totally changed. Fast forward, I realize, hey, look, I’ve got to really get deep in online marketing. I’ve got to get good at it. I’ve got to build a team, competent, capable, people. My core idea there was essentially to have a marketing team, then I could launch brand after brand after brand, and scale and grow that way.
Jeremy Sonne:
No, it’s smart. Yeah, that’s a smart approach.
James Isaacs:
Well, when it eventually comes together. We’re not quite there yet. Although, it’s interesting that we’re having this conversation. Because a year and a half later, that’s actually what I’m trying to do. That’s what I’m in the process of doing.
Jeremy Sonne:
So you’re putting together this marketing hit team, right? I assume at this point, you’re going out looking for partners. I know you really emphasized, when you were getting everything together, kind of the co-founder status, and I love that, teamwork makes the dreamwork, right? So you’re putting the marketing hit team together, tell me about that.
James Isaacs:
That one’s actually, a continual work in progress, is what I would tell you. Because as you know, you see opportunities, you work them, you work them. It’s like Jiu-Jitsu, dude. Have you ever done MMA or Jiu-Jitsu or anything like that?
Jeremy Sonne:
Yeah, actually, my old sparring partner was on Ultimate Fighter, the show. I think he was only on the one episode, he went home right away. But yeah, great fighter, and yeah, kicked my ass up and down.
James Isaacs:
Well you know, that may be true. But I’m sure you had glory moments, is what I’m going to say.
Jeremy Sonne:
I did, actually. He fought in Bellator for a while, and I got him to tap a handful of times. Every time he’d fight professionally I’d just be like, “You see that guy? I got him to tap.” Like six years after the fact, but yeah.
James Isaacs:
I love it.
Jeremy Sonne:
Yeah. It was funny.
James Isaacs:
That’s good stuff. I see team building as your glory moment, right? You’ve got your ups and downs, but sometimes you’ll get into that position and you know, okay, I’ve got the advantage, I’ve got the wind. All I’ve got to do is, I’ve got to work it. I’m right here, now let me just work it. Right? Let me dig in a little deeper until this settles in and they can’t take it anymore, boom, tap, they’re out. Just as you’re about to finish yourself, right? You’ve given it everything to hold that one positional advantage you’ve got, and you don’t quit. That’s what I’m talking about. So team building, that is team building.
James Isaacs:
You’ll have moments where you’re like, okay, I’m working it, we’re in there, oh yeah, glory. It’s all, everyone’s happy. Everyone’s got a high. We’re killing this shit.
Jeremy Sonne:
I’m literally in a chair, we’re working it, we’re working it, oh yeah, glory. If you know a clip from this episode, that’s the leader, we’re leading with that.
James Isaacs:
I told you before we got on this, you don’t know what you’re getting into.
Jeremy Sonne:
That’s hilarious. Yeah, I get what you’re saying though, right? You fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, then right on the other side of, “I don’t have enough,” is where it actually is, right when you push yourself to that place.
James Isaacs:
That’s always where it happens, is when you think you’re at the end of your limit, that’s when the breakthrough’s about to happen. Doesn’t matter, really, this metaphor applies to everything. But it’s true of teamwork, definitely.
Jeremy Sonne:
Yeah, for sure. Okay. So you’re watching Neil Patel videos. You’re going to launch all of these brands, right?
James Isaacs:
Not all at once. Not all at once. But yes, that’s the long term vision.
Jeremy Sonne:
No, no, no, not all at once. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, the long term vision is this portfolio of brands. How do you actually get from there to marketing services? What were the early days of that like?
James Isaacs:
Man, you have to go deep here, don’t you? Okay now we’re going to get into some emotional scarring territory, all right? I realized very early on, I didn’t know anything about anything. I was very honest with myself about that, right? For better or worse, this is what I chose to do. I went deep on Cat Howell’s material. I forked out, I’m sure a lot of people have done this. I’m hoping a lot of people have done this so it’s not just me. I forked out a lot of cash, and I worked 18 hour days, and I basically have done this up until just a month ago, I was working 18 hours a day, seven days a week, in order to learn, apply, and build. That’s everything. That’s systems, that’s my baseline knowledge.
James Isaacs:
I have spend gobs and gobs and gobs of cash on two things, one is training. A little bit on coaching, but not a lot. I’ve done a little bit on coaching. But definitely the training. The other piece of this is actually, I hate to say this, but spending my money for the purpose of not wasting a client’s. Does that makes sense? What I didn’t ever want to have happen was, I bring on a client, promise them results, and then not actually know whether I could achieve it. That was a major concern for me.
Jeremy Sonne:
No, definitely, I’ve had to do, I think any marketer that runs any sort of agency has had to do a make good at some point. Obviously you want to minimize those, but it’s an integrity move, to be sure. I think that we’ve all been there. I know, I’ve had to do it in the past for whatever reason. Yeah, no, I think it’s an integrity move if you do that and bring it up. So yeah, good on you.
James Isaacs:
If I go net, net, where do I stand a year and a half later? We’re profitable, but nowhere near yet where I want to be. Does that makes sense? Still an investment.
Jeremy Sonne:
Congratulations. Yeah. I mean, that’s an incredible Herculean achievement, right? To even hit profitability. Many, many businesses don’t. That’s a big achievement. The early days of getting started, you’ve got your co-founder, right? You have a co-founder? How did you all meet?
James Isaacs:
Where everyone meets their co-founders, on Facebook. Isn’t that how it works?
Jeremy Sonne:
Yeah. I think so. That’s true. But yeah, no, that’s cool. So you met on Facebook, like in a group or something? Tell me about that.
James Isaacs:
Yeah. As I’m going through and I’m trying to build up my ads management knowledge, my messenger marketing knowledge, and things like this. One thing that was always clear to me is that I don’t want to be the person making the stuff. Or to some extent, I want to know how to do it. I want to be able to get in there and do it myself. But I’ve always had … This is coming back to one of your earlier questions about how the military can be helpful, right? I was an officer and in a leadership position. It was always clear to me that I should bring on experts that are way better than me. If I invested 5 or 10 years, I wouldn’t be at their level. Or even two years, I wouldn’t be at their level.
James Isaacs:
That’s actually how you and I first connected. Because I’m like, hey, this guy’s a freaking whiz, let me talk to him.
Jeremy Sonne:
I don’t know about that. I think I’ve just hung out long enough to learn the buzz words.
James Isaacs:
Naw, come on, man. You’re just being humble. But that’s the thing that I’m getting at. I go after people that are … And this is the promise that I make my clients, right? Hey, you don’t want me managing your ads, you want my team managing your ads. Or different aspects of your marketing. When we talk teamwork and co-founders, that’s kind of how I work. I’m a super networker, and that’s one of my super skills. People that get to know me over time, they’re like, I’m looking for a solution to problem Y. Let me go talk to James, I bet he knows someone. That’s how that plays out.
Jeremy Sonne:
Yeah. It’s surprising, that actually is a huge, huge, huge part of this whole process that a lot of people, unfortunately, don’t talk about. Which is just being a helpful resource, and especially if you work with small, medium-sized businesses, or even larger businesses. They’re really just looking for outside help. It’s around marketing, right, because that’s what we do. But the number of times I get asked for lawyers or accountants or whatever, because really it’s just all about community and being there for each other as much as you can. No, that’s great. So your day to day of running the agency, you started with this mindset of, I am going to delegate as much as humanly possible?
James Isaacs:
Right.
Jeremy Sonne:
Cool. So what does your day to day look like right now, as somebody that’s really embraced the agency owner, team leader sort of role? Not to say that, you of course, know what you’re doing, and can roll up your sleeves and get in there if you want to. But it sounds like your focus is really on the other side of it. So tell me about that.
James Isaacs:
Brother, that is a great question. Let me preface it with a 10 second interlude. It took me probably six months to where I was like, okay. I started off as Blue Kaiak. To be frank with you, I was just getting started. It took me about six months to really go, okay, I have a foundational set of knowledge, I have a direction that I want to go with it. We’ve really tabled the Blue Kaiak brand. We haven’t really done anything with it in over a year. I partnered with my current partner, and we launched Chat Cloud. We wanted Chat Cloud, in the beginning, to be a messenger marketing agency focused on e-commerce brands.
James Isaacs:
One of the really cool things that I learned throughout the past year is knowledge development learning should be an ongoing activity and effort. But it’s got to be secondary. The main thing you’ve got to be doing is building the business, doing the money making activities. One of the key points of us hitting that a moment ago is this idea of, you want to partner with people that are complementary to you, they don’t have the exact same skillset. They bring other skills to the table, whether that’s through personality or knowledge or a combination of the two.
James Isaacs:
This is kind of where military life, again, helps. I’ve always had this in my mind. That I don’t want people that are like me. I’m kind of the vision person. I can build systems and structures and all that, and I’m actually quite good at it, but it’s not natural for me. What’s natural for me is what we’re doing right now, which is talking and communicating.
Jeremy Sonne:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a lot of self awareness, right? To say that my approach is great but we need some diversity of thought and approaches when it comes to building this thing, and that’s really important. That’s really interesting. I’ve loved learning about all of this. If you could boil it down to one or two of the best lessons you’ve learned, things you wish you did earlier. Then one or two things that, if you had to do it all over again, you wish you could’ve just avoided. You know? Obviously everything’s a learning experience. But if you could rewind and change the journey a little bit, what would you change?
James Isaacs:
If I were to rewind a little bit and go back, I think that I would’ve focused on sales more aggressively from day one. If I could’ve gone back to the beginning. Because I didn’t really make that my core focus. So as an agency owner, what I’ve learned is the brand is essentially going to survive if I’m working to bring in the business, right? A lot of the techniques I was using to do that were just too slow. Dude, in the last six months, we landed some major deals where we essentially were going to take equity in companies for running their marketing, right? I mean, really big deals. Potentially multi-million dollar deals. That was not the right thing for who we were at the time, and it nearly crushed us.
James Isaacs:
Because we were investing enormous time and energy in these equity deals, and we needed cash, right? I didn’t have enough cash reserves to do the six month investment.
Jeremy Sonne:
Right, yeah. I think that every marketer thinks about those sort of deals, right? But in essence, you’re almost becoming like a venture capital fund, and you have to be properly funded yourself if you’re going to take a route like that. It’s a great route, it can be, for sure.
James Isaacs:
That is the long term vision, actually. So the long term vision for what I’m doing, this comes back to where we started. Chat Cloud, now I’ve got Gym Zag. The long term vision is, we’re creating a single agency brand around a single vertical. As we achieve scale, and can put a team and a core pillar, in terms of, that team is generating the business. That team is fulfilling, they’re getting great results. It’s like a self contained module, then we go to the next agency brand and we do the same thing, and we just replicate and replicate.
James Isaacs:
If I had anything that I would change, this is point number two, is instead of saying hey, messenger marketing is already a niche, which in a sense it’s like I’m offering one core type of service, but it’s not really a niche, does that makes sense? We’re working with everyone. We’ve worked with e-comm brands, we’ve worked with CBD. We’ve worked with HVAC places. It’s just, we were all over the map. Every time we found ourselves doing that, it slowed our roll, because we had to reinvent the wheel for that vertical.
James Isaacs:
This is the number one thing that led to Gym Zag, is that basically we’re verticalized. We have a really solid offer, we have a really solid service, we know exactly what to say to them and how to talk to gyms and fitness studio owners, and we know we can get results, 100%, we can get results. It’s like this verticalized agency concept is more the direction that we’re headed. Maybe one day, it’ll go from 1 to 10, you know what I mean?
Jeremy Sonne:
No I love that. I think that it’s interesting, the niche within the niche. In a way, it is really the right way to think about things. I think that you can definitely go vertical. But yeah, you’re right, you end up reinventing the wheel, whether it’s e-comm or whatever, you’re focused on the platform. But I get what you’re doing and I think it’s really smart. I think people get freaked out because they think, this is too small of a niche. You know what I mean? It’s too niche. And I’m not going to be able to make it work. But the reality is, is that once you dig in, it’s actually a lot bigger than most people think.
Jeremy Sonne:
So I think, would it be fair to say that you’re kind of lesson learned of things not to do is not be afraid to over-niche, in a way? Is that kind of a fair summation? Or would you rephrase that differently?
James Isaacs:
What I would tell you is, if you were fairly new to the agency space, niche down as fast as possible. Because you’re going to learn very, very quickly that you don’t want to offer 20 types of services. You want to offer one or two core offers that you can easily fulfill on, then scaling your agency, at least for the first 50k or so per month, is all going to be about the sales and closing process. If you don’t know who you’re talking to and what you’re telling them, and you’re not able to do that in an effective way, they’re not going to work with you.
James Isaacs:
I’ve closed deals left, right, and center with all kinds of different businesses. Now that we’re focused on gyms and fitness studios, oh man, my pipeline is so easy. When I get people on the phone, I don’t have to think too hard. I just ask the right questions, I get the right answers back, I give it back to them, I mirror, to some extent. And so on, right? Yeah, I would definitely say, start broad to some extent. Figure out what you like, then niche down as fast as possible, if you’re taking more than three to six months to do that, you’re taking too long.
Jeremy Sonne:
I love that. I think that’s really, incredibly powerful advice. Honestly, this whole thing has been really interesting to kind of learn. I think you have a really unique perspective, compared to anyone else I’ve had on here, and I love it. I really, truly appreciate your time, truly appreciate you educating our audience and me on your approach to things. Truly, thank you. I always give everybody a change to pitch something here at the end for one or two minutes, so I want to give you that opportunity now.
James Isaacs:
Cool. I wish I had prepared beforehand. But here’s what I’ll tell you, okay? One of the things that we’ve done is we’ve launched a platform called LAMP. It’s the Lead Automation Marketing Platform, okay? It’s built on Go High Level, Go High Level is a CRM, funnel builder, SMS, email, multi-channel messaging platform. We’re taking LAMP, and it’s essentially meant to be interesting. LAMP, right? Shine a light on things. It’s meant to be interesting. But at the same time, generic enough that other agencies can get on there, use it. But look, here’s the main point, if you’re an agency owner and you would like to learn more about that, or you’d like to learn about how it can help you with your agency work, come talk to me, okay?
James Isaacs:
For example, right after this call, as soon as I get off, I’m going to meet with an e-comm expert and we’re going to talk about LAMP, Go High Level. She’s got the option, she can build on our platform or she can go straight to Go High Level and do it there, and we’ll support her. So that’s what I want to offer you.
Jeremy Sonne:
Absolutely. Well that’s wonderful. I think I would definitely encourage folks to check that out. James, thank you so much again for your time. For everybody out there listening, take these lessons to heart. Really learn from James’ unique perspective. Learn about, don’t be afraid to over-niche. Focus on process. Get out there and grow your agencies.
