How to Make Millions with Pay Per Call

Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Alex Micol 00:00

This is Adam and he's the owner of Ringba, one of the fastest growing companies in the affiliate marketing space. What could be at the enterprise value of Ringba?

Adam Young 00:09

I'm not going to tell you, but my goal is to hit 10 billion in enterprise value and I see a clear path to get there.

Alex Micol 00:19

Ringba is a software company that functions as a tracking tool in the paper coal industry. And since there's no other company that does the same thing, he technically controls and tracks the entire industry.

Adam Young 00:30

When I was a kid, I lost everything and this industry saved my life. I made my first million dollars as an affiliate in my parents' basement. I made my second million dollars as an affiliate in my parents' basement. Obviously I don't live there anymore,

Alex Micol 00:43

And this is because he decided to build technology in an industry where the exit multipliers are crazy. And why is it so profitable? It's because you work directly with Fortune 500 companies.

Adam Young 00:56

These companies always want to grow and they're not going anywhere because they sell things that people need. And so the campaigns just simply don't go anywhere. And so if you're a big company and you invested $150 million into call center infrastructure, you're not going to stop buying phone calls or marketing to get people on the phone. This is how you power this gigantic business,

Alex Micol 01:18

And that's why paper call campaigns generally don't tend to die off as opposed to gadget campaigns because the companies behind these campaigns are massive companies that will always have the need to continuously reach their targets in revenues. So they will always continue buying leads from US affiliates. And in this video we will disclose what the top verticals are in the paper called Legion Space right now and how you can start making millions of dollars every time I'm on YouTube or there's a conference in this industry, there's you guys, so you're everywhere and it's fun to see it. And it's cool because I remember back in the days, it used to be volume, like the big thing in the industry as a trucking software. And I remember company was going crazy, et cetera, and now there is rba, you doing the same thing in the most hyped vertical at the moment in the fit industry. So it's cool to see that there's a new type of tracking for a new vertical focus on that back then. I think a lot of it, I mean they were using volume for literally everything, but I think it was a lot to do with, I mean a lot of blackhead was running through volume, a lot of weird traffic sources, but this is the 2.0 version in the industry that is 10 times better and also very different. But it's cool to see how you guys are spreading and quite fascinating to witness. So

Adam Young 02:48

Yeah, it's a labor of love.

Alex Micol 02:51

Yeah, and I was checking out the pricing just now. I remember there was a monthly, but I suppose a lot of it comes through the fixed prices on the minutes that you charge.

Adam Young 03:03

Sure. I mean everything we do is incremental. So as our customers grow their businesses, we make more money too, and we do it that way because we want to be incentivized to help our clients grow. So our mission at Ringa is to help our clients grow their businesses and it's something we're super passionate about and it's something the entire team works on and it's the reason for our success. And so I literally just did a podcast here with a good friend and customer of mine, Manny Elli. He got a hundred million dollars, got award for making a hundred million bucks using Ringa inside of a single year on a single campaign.

And I remember when we first met at a Leads Con five or six years ago and it was just him and he wanted to do something different and was working on some things and we talked and I've had the pleasure of watching his business grow over the last five or six years to massive scale and just love how we were able to be a part of that. Take credit for it. Manny is such a hardworking guy, but it's just super fulfilling to know that we played a role and that's something we're really proud of and I think that's why we found the success we have. Our mission is not about us. It's not about how we make money or how we do anything. It's really about our customers and how we help them scale and grow, make more money. And when you think that way, it really drives the type of technology you're making, the type of support you want to give, the type of leadership that you hire.

It really drives everything about the business and it's really all we think about every day. We have a policy directive at RINGA that basically says we want all of our people to make decisions and the question they should ask is not to go to their manager or whatever, what do I do? The question they should ask is, does this decision benefit our customers, our colleagues, and the numbers now and in the future? And if the answer to that is yes, we don't need to have a committee meeting about it. And if the answer is no, then we talk about how we can change the direction so it turns into a yes. And we generally don't like to do anything that isn't like a hell,

Alex Micol 05:28

But the decisions then happen on an individual level all the time or there must be some sort of group call where the hell comes jointly out together? No. Or how did you mean that?

Adam Young 05:42

We do have meetings like any other business, but we try to avoid them as much as possible. We want them to be as short as possible. I am completely okay if someone leaves the meeting if they're like, this doesn't, I'm not learning anything. I don't need to be here. I can't add any value. They shouldn't be there. They should leave and go work on something that's most important. When you're building a business, you really have two options and I think that new entrepreneurs are trying to outsource or find the cheapest way possible to do something right. They want to find someone that can do something for them cheaply that they can delegate to. And generally what happens is you never get the work product that you really want and you have to go back and do more work. So when we think about recruiting people, we want to recruit people that are so good at what they do that we learn from them constantly. And when you let someone like that run off and make decisions the same way that the mission drives them and our culture drives them, they just make good decisions. It's really hard to scale company culture, but I think finding the talent that's as incredible as possible, teaching them the rules of the culture and how you expect them to make decisions and then they buy in on the mission and your values and your process. You just let those people run off to the races and they're going to deliver really great results

Alex Micol 07:10

That comes with experience. I bet. How did you start? I mean, it wasn't always like this. I mean, you have a lot of experience as you told me, you did a bunch of things, but it wasn't always like this. No. For example, on me, I can see now I'm starting to understand this more. I always sucked at hiring, but slowly I'm finding people where I'm in a position where I'm just listening and learning constantly and it's so empowering. Then you're actually hyped about the hire you just made versus I take someone and I micromanage everyone, but I way for record. When did you start business? Just to have a reference? At what age and how young are you now?

Adam Young 07:55

I started my first business when I was 14.

Alex Micol 07:58

Oh wow, okay. Same boat and now you are, how young are you?

Adam Young 08:01

40.

Alex Micol 08:02

40. Okay. So you've been Well, it's It's many years.

Adam Young 08:06

Yeah. I really haven't had many jobs or one or two when I was a teenager. I'm a builder. I always wanted to build also, I barely made it through high school. I have no college degree. I was a mess when I was a teenager and into my early adulthood. I partied a lot. I got a DUI when I was 21 for sleeping in a car drunk and granted, that's not an excuse. I engaged in bad behavior and I was a mess. And so I always wanted to build, but at the same time, I really had no other options or choices or anything like that. It was almost impossible for me to get a job. I had no real experience. I am not somebody who's a good follower. I don't follow rules, I don't listen authority, do what I don't want to do. It's really me having a job is a nightmare for somebody if it's not a leadership position where I can make decisions because I just, yeah. And when I was younger, I wasn't calm. So

Alex Micol 09:12

Yeah, you need to channel the energy somewhere. No, I get that a lot. I never had a job. I think I had some sort of a partnership once where I had a sort of a boss back when I was 15, but it didn't last long there because I couldn't execute what I wanted. So I feel like some people are like us and it's not that many and the majority prefer to follow even though they don't like it all the time, and we also don't like to lead all the time, but it just necessary because we're like, we need to get it done. Doesn't matter if it's pretty or not, but at the same time, we will never be comfortable in another position, as you say, to follow. When did you feel like there was this sense of confidence in hiring people that more in a leadership position and let them guide you versus the opposite? Was it always like that or you grew into this and understood that this was the better way? I love the fact that you avoid meetings. I love the fact that you hire people that just tell you what has to be done and therefore they make better decisions. But how do you get to that point? When did you start transitioning into this? Was it always like that?

Adam Young 10:18

No, when I was younger and an affiliate, I also owned some other businesses and I generally tried to find the cheapest labor possible. Some of that was because the businesses weren't making a lot of money and you have to pick and choose how you're going to allocate your resources. But even when I had some resources, I still tried to find the cheapest talent possible, and it was really hard for me to wrap my head around hiring expensive talent. Part of that was because I would just think in my head like, man, a really great software developer might cost, I mean today $350,000 a year, 150, definitely 150 plus in America. And even then sometimes they don't work out. But it was just so hard for me to wrap my head around that because I figured I could hire someone and mentor them and get them to a place they could do what I needed and really grow the business.

And the reality was those businesses didn't grow. They've all failed, or I sold them at some point and they didn't have the ability to scale to anything that now in my life, I consider a success. And I want to preface this. When I was in my early twenties, I wanted wanted to maybe travel more and I wanted a Mercedes and I wanted to live in a nice house. Okay, yeah, exactly. These things are okay. And that's how I thought. And today I don't actually care about any of those things. When I moved to Miami, I lived in a really shitty hotel room for 45 days, and then some small Airbnbs. I had a suitcase with clothes that were 10 years old. I don't shop, I haven't bought. People see me wear different watches sometimes. And I think it's funny, one of my friends said, oh, I like that watch.

You're full Miami now. And I laughed and I said, I bought this 16 years ago. I haven't bought a watch in forever. I didn't have a car for 10 months when I moved to Miami, and I've lived most of the last decade without owning a car. And so I don't really care about those things. They can be useful, but they don't motivate me anymore. And that mindset shift really changed how I think about talent. And so to be candid with you, the question I'm asking today is how do I grow ringa to 10 billion in enterprise value? I see a clear path to doing that, and the way you do that is you convince the smartest, most talented people who are willing to listen to you to come work on your team and whatever is necessary to get them to do it, people can deliver. I think your mindset around what your goals are and what you want to accomplish also really drives how you're going to recruit or think about business. If I want a Mercedes in a nice place and to have a couple million dollars or whatever, I can hire some mid mediocre talent and build a business and make some money and then yolo laptop lifestyle, whatever. But if you want to build something incredibly rare, you have to find incredibly rare people to help you do it. And so I literally think about this all day, every day I dream about it.

Alex Micol 13:53

How many years have you been in this mindset

Adam Young 13:56

Before Ringa, Harrison and I had a really successful business. It was an eight figure business with a team of four margins were pretty high, and we did very well and we were making a lot of money, but we weren't building anything, right. I made a bunch of software to power the business and we had things that we built, but we weren't building anything. If we died, the business was over. It was

Alex Micol 14:18

Pure affiliate

Adam Young 14:20

Kind of. We were affiliates, but we had a partnership with a big company, and so they built us a custom backend and we had our own software as well that was powering portions of this. It relied heavily on Google search feeds, which the big company had permission to use.

Alex Micol 14:39

So you were doing content arbitrage sort of or

Adam Young 14:43

No, no, no, no. We were doing apps downloadables, browser extensions, toolbars, and getting

Alex Micol 14:52

Paid per commission basically as a model?

Adam Young 14:54

Yeah. Well, no, we made money on the backend, so we negotiated a deal where we weren't just an affiliate getting a CPA, we were getting an LTV as an affiliate, if you're not getting an LTV, you're not doing it. And so we had

Alex Micol 15:09

This business in the defense, sorry, just on this in the defense, the payout, the commission can be calculated as an LTV just upfront for affiliate it. The partners, for example, I work with, we don't have an LTV agreement, but they bake it in right

Adam Young 15:26

Away. I think when you know where your quality is, having an LTV is really important. Also, this partner we were working with, and I'm not going to disclose, but the partner we were working with really wanted the growth volume and the revenue for other reasons. They were trying to grow their business. They were raising funds and doing other things, and so they gave us an incredibly strong LTV, like 95%. Okay,

Alex Micol 15:56

That's great.

Adam Young 15:58

And they had a team of 45 or 50 people that worked on this product for us. We were the majority of their volume, the vast majority, almost all of it. And it was a great business. We were doing really well. I was having a lot of fun. We were making a lot of money, but I had really no purpose. I walk out into the living room and I'm eating some cereal and my phone starts ringing in my pocket and I notice all the TVs in the living room monitoring all the server infrastructure. It was like 300 million clicks a day or something stupid. It was all stopped. And so I was like, is the internet out? Did Amazon go down? What's going on? And then I realized that the campaign was over, so Google and Microsoft and Yahoo all in that period of time changed all their search feed rules.

It's not that we were doing anything wrong, they just didn't want this business anymore, and they were getting much more restrictive over people who had search feeds. And anyone who was in the industry knows this. Google took search feeds away from everybody basically. And so our business was over, it was done. You've run campaigns, they disappear, they come up, they go down, they come up, they go down. And I was just so sick of doing this. I was just like, I don't want to build another business that's going to disappear. And so that's when we started looking around how do we build a platform that powers other people's businesses that provides really amazing opportunities and then can give back to the industry we love, but also is sustainable, has enterprise value. And by the way, building a software company is fucking brutal. I don't recommend anyone does it, like 98% of them or something fail. It costs a fortune. We didn't raise funds, we paid out pocket, and I could have retired on the money that we spent seeding ringa straight up. I could have just been done and still living off of it today for the rest of my life, just like whatever.

Alex Micol 17:53

But that's boring. And do you, you look at the ceiling all day.

Adam Young 17:58

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's funny you mentioned that. I mentioned to my girlfriend something about a retirement account and she said, what do you need a retirement account for? And I was like, I'm a conservative, practical adult, and she's like, you're never going to stop working. Retirement for you is like, what? You're going to work eight hours a day investing in startups or doing So she's like, yeah, right, you're going to be 90 years old on conference calls. And I'm just like, she kind of has a point.

Alex Micol 18:32

Yeah, I mean sometimes it's like this topic thought that I guess we all have like, oh yeah, I'll make this amount of money, whatever it is, and then I'll retire by this age and then then after a year, you're tired. Even me, I had this life changing momentum happen a few years back and I'm like, okay, pretty much that's it. I calculated how much I could spend a month for how many years. I'm like, dude, I'm good. And I'm like, after that groom, I was like, wait, but that's it. No, there's so much more there. And I would never, my idea was I want to have a hundred million dollars by the time I turned 30, which is in three years, and then what? I would go absolutely nuts. Maybe I can be a father for a couple years, but then I don't know.

Adam Young 19:20

This is why mission is so important.

And so I've talked about this in some masterminds, and this is my progression too. Most people's progression, you start out and you're trying to make money so you can buy cool things, a Lambo or a house, or in my case, I wanted a Mercedes, and then once you get the thing, you're like, this is no longer fulfilling anymore. It was fun for 20 minutes. I'm like, cool. And so in my case, I ended up buying another Mercedes. It was like I have two and then three, and then I had five cars. And then I'm like, wait a second, I don't even drive. Why am I doing this? This isn't getting me anywhere. Then the next progression, people generally have, like you said, as they start a family and they go, well, I'm doing everything for my family. And I think that's a much more heartfelt sort of respectable mission. Not to say that there's anything wrong with wanting to buy things. I'm not talking shit about that.

Alex Micol 20:13

No, but it's more fulfilling as a man to have a family. You buy anything materialistic. It gets old tomorrow.

Adam Young 20:22

Exactly.

Alex Micol 20:22

At least you build out a family and you have kids, and it's a biological fulfillment. It's a beautiful thing to have, which I don't have, by the way. Do you have kids? Actually,

Adam Young 20:31

No, I don't.

Alex Micol 20:32

Okay, so we are just advising here. We imagine what it would be like.

Adam Young 20:39

Well, I have a lot of friends that have kids. They tell me I should have 'em all the time. I also have a ton of employees I mentor regularly. Maybe that's like kids, I don't know.

Alex Micol 20:48

That's sort of a family, but

Adam Young 20:51

I think so once you are like, Hey, my mission is to support my family, you can actually attract better talent. You cannot attract great talent if your mission's to buy a Lambo, that talent's like whatever, I'm going to take this person seriously.

Alex Micol 21:05

But

Adam Young 21:06

If you do it for your family, you can attract better talent because other family people will be like, wow, this is a good person. They care about their family, so they'll care about my family.

Alex Micol 21:17

It's a much stronger alignment. It's deeper. It's more stable. People with families think about stability. They're more serious about their decision, and they think more long-term while a 23-year-old kid, the ones are worried today and God knows what happens tomorrow. It's not a deep, how do you say?

Adam Young 21:39

Exactly?

Alex Micol 21:39

It's not deep. And

Adam Young 21:40

Then the top of the pyramid here is where I'm at, and it's that you create a mission for yourself that is bigger. For instance, at Ringo, we help people make billions of dollars, which is pretty incredible to me. I never expected that. But our mission to help our clients grow is not really fluff. And I think a lot of companies put in a mission and values. No one cares, no one talks about it. But at Ringa, we ask ourselves all the time, does this conform to our mission and does this help us succeed in the mission? And when people see you take a mission seriously, that is bigger than you, that isn't about you, that's about something bigger. You can start to attract really high quality talent. Because here's the thing about ultra high quality talent, let's use you and me for an example. If I come to you and say, Hey, you're living a great life.

You don't want a job, I want you to come work for me because I want to buy a yacht. You're like, no. But if I come to you and say, Hey, Alex, listen, I want to figure out a deal where you and I can do business. I want you to come work for me. I want to completely disrupt the industry we're in and provide this incredible opportunity for affiliates and other businesses to make billions of dollars, which affects hundreds of millions of consumers a year. And we can have a sizable impact on improving people's lives, scaling businesses that use our software so that literally hundreds of thousands of people will have jobs and be able to build a future for themselves. And I'm willing to compensate you in a way that gets you excited. Now, you don't want a job, but you just heard the words that I said, and if I actually pitched you that, you would take a pause and you would think about it for a second.

Alex Micol 23:24

A hundred percent.

Adam Young 23:26

And I think that's really the difference. The Googler can get a job anywhere. Why would a Googler come work for you? And the answer to that question is they really need to believe in what you're doing and what your mission is. They can work anywhere and get paid. And so the mission really drives your ability to talent.

Alex Micol 23:46

But when would we get the yacht that I didn't get, by the way? Sorry, just for the record, can you explain in a nutshell what Ring BBA does for the ones we don't know?

Adam Young 23:57

Yeah, of course. So Ring BBA is a call tracking platform. We service four different kinds of customers, affiliates who sell calls, so sellers of calls. We service companies trade calls or broker calls, for instance. They buy from one party and sell to another. And then we service companies that buy calls and some companies do more than one of those things. And then our technology also services professional marketers, so agencies and companies that do internal marketing. And what our software does is it helps people get the most money out of every phone call that they're getting through advertising.

Alex Micol 24:40

I heard you saying, and I really liked that bit in this industry, in the pay per coal industry, because you're selling to Fortune 500 companies like you sell the leads to Fortune 500 companies. The campaign never really dies. Why

Adam Young 24:55

They don't die?

Alex Micol 24:56

Yeah. Why? Yeah. I mean, I want to hear it from you.

Adam Young 25:01

Well, there's hundreds of verticals in paper call, and the thing about paper call verticals is they're all something that people need and sometimes in certain scenarios, they're legally required to have. In the United States, if you have a car, you have to have auto insurance, and so it's not going anywhere. The law literally states that every human that owns a car in the United States has to have auto insurance. And so these companies have a sort of a legal monopoly on their industry and they're not going anywhere. And the number of people who need that are in the hundreds of millions, and they're always looking for different deals and better deals and want to change and buying and selling cars. And so there's always a reason for them to need new insurance. The same goes for health insurance. It's legally mandated, but then there's these other industries that aren't, if you have an infestation in your house, you need to get rid of it or it's going to destroy your house.

And so you need to call a pest control company to do it. You want to remodel your kitchen, great. Your garage catches on fire. Great. People need people to mow their lawns. People need dentists. People need doctors. People need all sorts of things, and they're always going to search to find them. And so these companies always want to grow, and they're not going anywhere because they sell things that people need. And so the campaigns just simply don't go anywhere. Also, for the really big companies, they have to invest millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions. I mean maybe even billions of dollars into infrastructure to sell their products and services over the phone. And so if you're a company and you invested $150 million into call center infrastructure, you're not going to stop buying phone calls or marketing to get people on the phone. This is how you power this gigantic business,

Alex Micol 26:55

Which is the main difference with working with some smaller brands that just launched a new gadget and they might run off inventory, run out of stock. They're not making enough money. Well, these companies, yeah, that's the biggest difference. And also,

Adam Young 27:08

Or they mismanage their finances or the marketing doesn't work anymore, or they just say, wait a second, I can just copy what the affiliates doing and do it ourselves. Big companies don't do this. And

Alex Micol 27:21

Even if there are more than one that are enormous companies, so even if a buyer goes down like what happened? I mean, okay, the whole vertical would hit a bit to the a CA space, but even there are alternatives and you can resell the coal to another one.

Adam Young 27:36

Yeah, I mean to be transparent with you, we have not seen a dip in a CA traffic.

Alex Micol 27:40

Yeah, I heard, but it's probably going to be stricter in the future like they did with sids, with Medicare and all of that. I mean, it makes sense. You cannot deceive people hardcore. And that's a bit the stigma.

Adam Young 27:55

This is a great thing. Affiliates or companies, they freak out and panic. I go, this is amazing. They're going to regulate a CA more. They're going to tighten it up. The market's the same size, the companies are going to be better, they're going to be more sustainable.

Alex Micol 28:09

Less players, probably less. Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Young 28:12

In Medicare, this happened. And overall we saw volumes increase, not decrease, increase. Now granted, there are losers every time this happens, some affiliate who's just ripping off someone else's ads probably can't keep running their business. But anyone who's trying to do something legitimate has this incredibly huge opportunity. Anytime something like this happens, I predict based on what we've seen before, that these verticals are going to keep growing and get much bigger, much more sustainable just like Medicare did.

Alex Micol 28:42

But you need to become a more advanced affiliate, not just a kid that drips off ads and launch them and uses Biden and their ads, but respects the rules, grows up, establish a better business, and that creates more stability. Boring is good. Kids start a field wanting to make the quick buck right away, and they like these spikes, but I feel like boring is the best way for me. The last four years have been extremely boring working with in the health sector in general, boring. But it prints that's important and it's actually beyond that. For me. It's more about keeping my partners happy even though I'm just an affiliate in this case, in the affiliate industry, I'm not building a business or a trucking tour or anything. But even then matured and it feels it goes beyond that.

Adam Young 29:36

Well, I think the formula is you try and get rich quick and then it doesn't last, and then you're not rich. The alternative is to get rich slow and then it keeps going and it keeps getting bigger. And then sooner or later you're like, wow, you can be really rich. And that's what building a business is. I always think it's funny. People ask me like, wow, ring is everywhere. It's so big. What's it like? When are you retiring? When are you going to sell the company, whatever. And they don't realize how much pain and suffering and labor went into doing what we're doing, how many sleepless nights, how much back pain, a panic attack, just crazy amounts of stress to actually build something. They only see the success on the other side,

Alex Micol 30:25

On the trading floor. And so

Adam Young 30:27

Yeah, it's a really different adventure. And the answer to that question,

Alex Micol 30:31

How's your morning? You wake up, do you get when you look at your phone, some instant anxiety every now and then?

Adam Young 30:38

I mean, it depends. I do. If I have a message from one of my partners or an email, that's a really big problem. Usually I'm up out of bed on it. Most of the time that doesn't happen every day,

Alex Micol 30:52

I hope.

Adam Young 30:53

So. Sometimes I get a phone call, I got a phone call at four in the morning on a Saturday or something, and it was one of our partners that works in telecom, and they're like, hi, Adam, good morning. And I'm like, why the fuck are you calling me at four in the morning? Why me? And they're like, we have a problem and you need to go wake up. And I was like, I'm not waking up developers. I'm going back to bed. And then they're like, wait, wait. And then they explained the problem, and this is the CEO of a very large company who called me. I was like, okay, all right, hold on, I'll call you back. And so then I wake up a bunch of developers, we spend three hours working on the problem, and then we all go back to sleep. So these things happen. No one sees it, and you have to be that committed, otherwise you can't build a real business. And I think that level of commitment and discipline and pain tolerance as a business person is very different than what most affiliates are willing to suffer through.

Alex Micol 31:55

But it's also interesting to see that you grew into this person. You have been that kid before and I think it's needed to go through that as well. I think some people maybe have this if we compare ourself with Zuckerberg and he was a billionaire, even younger than me, sometimes it's hard to imagine someone that had that type of focus and discipline so early on, but at the same time, it's bad to compare. And actually it's a good example to see that everyone has a different journey, and as you went through stages, everyone does. So it's cool to hear. But yeah, waking up when I wake up sometimes it's not every day. It's the same thing. Sometimes I wake up and I get, because I work in different time zones and I get 10 messages that need critical thinking, and I'm just like, holy smokes, that's heavy. Let me get up and get some coffee. And some other days it's just like, okay, whatever.

Adam Young 32:51

Well, I think people would really be surprised by my morning routine. If I don't have a meeting, I usually get up around 9, 9 30 in the morning eastern, which I think people are like, what? And the reason for that is I'm on 24 7. Last night at dinner at eight o'clock, I was out with my girl and I started getting slack messages that I needed to deal with, and so I'm like, Hey, hold on. And then I spend 15 minutes dealing with it at eight o'clock at night and then at 10 30 at night, someone on the West coast team hits me up and it's like, Hey, we need to deal with something. It just doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter. I want my eight hours of sleep. I end up staying up late. I work the best at night. And so my morning routine is generally that I get up at 9, 9 30, I go to the gym some days. I also do Pilates classes four days a week, and three of 'em are at noon. And so I take two hours in the middle of my day and go do that, which other people might think like, wow, that's crazy. Right in the middle of the business day. But when you're running a remote organization that has teams on different time zones, you're mentioning as the CEO, I'm always available, and so I have to be aware of what my priorities are and what I need to do to be healthy so that I can be on 24 7.

Alex Micol 34:20

I got to maintain. Yeah. That's why I also don't care. Whatever I need to do to stay healthy, I'll do it. And I know that anyways, it will work maybe at 1:00 AM maybe at 9:00 AM every day is different, and I think that's beautiful. I think that's the new era. I feel like with all these remote companies, that will become a thing. Of course, there are strict times we all need to respect from CEO to employees, but it's kind of like the new way of living, especially as a CEO that has employees all around. Are they all in us, by the way? Is your team in US mainly or

Adam Young 34:54

No, we have people in North America. We have people in South America and we have some people in Europe. And they're

Alex Micol 35:06

Mostly sales or

Adam Young 35:07

That? No, no. We have a couple high level engineers, former Microsoft engineers that live in Europe that work on one of our teams.

Alex Micol 35:17

Netherlands or Whereabout

Adam Young 35:19

Netherlands.

Alex Micol 35:20

Yeah, they're all there. They're all there.

Adam Young 35:24

Yeah. And so they make time to hit the meetings, like you said, even though it's a weird hour for them, but then they do the meetings and they deliver what they need to deliver more on a reasonable time for them as a leader. We talked about I trust my people to make decisions. The minimum expectation I have for our team is winning. And so I just very clearly communicate and expect people to deliver what they need to deliver. And if that means that they drop their kid off at school in the morning and pick them up at 3:00 PM so that they can have a better family life, I'm fine with that. I don't care at all as long as they're delivering what they need to and then they communicate. I asked someone for something the other day. They're like, Hey, I'm picking my kids up at school. I'll be back in an hour and a half, then I'll get that done for you. And

Alex Micol 36:17

I'm like, cool. Is this from top to bottom or more? I mean, it sounds like it's top. Okay, so it's not just leadership

Adam Young 36:23

Roles. Yeah, it's top to bottom. Some of our roles require more attendance, like support for instance.

Alex Micol 36:31

Yeah, that's where I was going.

Adam Young 36:34

So we have guardrails around some of that, but we'll reorganize their schedules if they want. And I think just being very flexible, as long as people are completing the work is a really great benefit. And then also people are less likely to get burnt out, which is the number one concern. And we have a lot of people at Ring B have been here for a really long time, and so if you don't allow that type of flexibility so that they can be with their families and do the things they want to do, then they'll get burnt out and they won't be able to produce anymore. How many are you actually, I think 75 and hiring for everything.

Alex Micol 37:16

I can't imagine. Yeah, I mean it also sounds like you're all good humans in there. I also don't understand companies. It's old fashioned, definitely not in our industry. Maybe some, but I don't know of them too much, but around all these strict rules and not remote working where my dad works is for example, still like that and it's like, damn, not even after that.

Adam Young 37:39

Let me touch on that. I think there's a huge amount of value in meeting with smart people in person to come up with ideas and do things, and that's why we're holding a Ring Book company event this year. We see each other at trade shows. We have a new CTO now. He recently joined and he wanted to spend a lot of time in person just going over culture and strategy, and I think it's really powerful to do that and we probably should do more of it at Ringa. On the remote side, that's a really challenging equation because if you hire people who are mediocre, they won't work and they won't be able to produce and deal with the distractions of working at home, and that's a really big challenge for a lot of people. We actually have had really poor success with hiring someone who wasn't working remote already into a remote position, and more often than not, that person failed and we had to make a change

Alex Micol 38:45

Because they need to readapt. They don't know how to handle themselves. It's weird for them to sit home alone. Yes, a lot of people need that

Adam Young 38:53

Or the discipline, they're not disciplined and at the office they have a babysitter

Alex Micol 38:58

Or they get in the zone, they just know they leave the house, they leave everything behind. They go there and they just work. There are less distraction at home with kids. I don't know, it could be. That's where Mask for example, forced everyone to come back to the office and just stay there, which I can see how it can benefit. I think there are pros and cons, but I share more of the culture of having disciplined employees to do the work, self-manage themself, because it's just a more human way to live nowadays. But I feel like as you said, it's important to hire people that are already used to that, already share that vision and can just easily adapt and us, we can just continue living our life, go to the gym at 12 if needed.

Adam Young 39:42

Yeah, exactly. Well, and it matters who you hire in that regard. You can't hire the cheap talent to work remote. They're never as productive. And a good friend of mine, Chris Shire, went to a mastermind I held and we talked about ranking an A, B, and C player on your team, and we did a deep dive into how to score people and how to reorganize teams. And he came back afterwards and said something really interesting. He expanded on what I taught a C player is somebody you give a task to and they're probably not going to complete it, and if they do, it definitely won't be on time and it will not be to specifications. It's just not going to be good work, right? A B player is generally someone would prefer to do a good job but probably isn't going to. So they may want to be good at what they're doing, but they likely will not deliver on time or they'll deliver an incomplete result, but no matter what, the result is going to probably be 80 to 90% of what it should be.

And so it's not what you want. And then a player is someone you assign a task to. They end up asking a ton of questions. They deliver it early with a better result than you actually ask them to do. And when you find those people, you can let 'em do whatever they want. Sure, you want to work on Saturday instead of Tuesday, you want to drop your kids off at school every day, you want to take Wednesdays off. Those are the types of people that we seek out and they're never the ones that are in the affordable category because they know they deliver great work. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs shy away from hiring those types of people because expensive and it's a big risk, but you make incredible hire on your team when you're small. It can change the outcome of your future and move you towards a much better outcome.

Alex Micol 41:44

It's more expensive not to try that approach in the end.

Adam Young 41:47

Yeah, exactly.

Alex Micol 41:48

It's way more expensive time.

Adam Young 41:49

Yeah, way more expensive

Alex Micol 41:50

Stress and then all the results, but even just the time, I mean as an entrepreneur, it's so hard to make something work from the ground and if you can kind of find a shortcut and that is hiring the right people without being cheap, that is a huge safe. Let's forget the money. It's just like the mental power that goes into it every day. You need to power it in order to make it work.

Adam Young 42:16

Yeah, it's a lot. And so we were talking about this earlier, but I just simply do not want to work with people who aren't way better than me at whatever their role is. Someone needs to be so good at what they're doing that I just know I'm never going to be that good at that. And then have the humility to take a step back and let those people do what they do and to listen, which I think is also really hard for a lot of entrepreneurs. As your business grows, you actually want to give up more control. It's not about holding onto it. Scary thing to do. Yeah, super scary thing to do,

Alex Micol 42:54

Extremely scary thing to do. I think that's one of those things that as an entrepreneur, you need to grow into and let go and let go is always the easiest thing to say, but the hardest thing to actually do, and I think that's where more growth comes. I think again, it's stages and I feel like I'm on that stage in many ways. I keep hiring people firing, and it sucks. It sucks in both ways. Sucks because you hire someone, you invested time and energy in that person, turns out it's not a good hire. You didn't only lose, let's say the money you spend, but also you occupy that slot for a few months with the wrong person. So I feel like that's where I'm at too. Get comfortable with that, then just continue doing it.

Adam Young 43:42

I think defining culture and values in a really concise clear way helps a lot with this. Generally speaking, we hire based on values first and talent second, and I think when people really resonate with your mission and your values, and if you don't have a mission, that's okay, you just have to come up with one and why you're doing what you're doing. But when people believe in the mission and they believe in the values, it's usually very clear whether someone's going to get excited about it or not. And if they're not excited, don't care about the mission and values and they're just like they don't have the energy around it, then you already know they're not going to be a good fit. To your point, I think some of the worst mistakes we've made have been letting people stay that we knew weren't a good fit. We care about people and we want them to be successful, so we'd invest more time when we shouldn't and we're better about that now. I think Netflix's model of hire slow and fire fast is the correct one. If someone's not a fit, it's better for everybody to send them on their way so that they can go find a place where they can deliver great results and be happy and fit in.

No one wants to struggle,

Alex Micol 44:55

No one. Yeah, so hire slow as in involve them step by step and give them a fractional task of a bigger job.

Adam Young 45:04

No, no, no, no. So for instance, we just brought on a new customer success executive who's going to work with a lot of our big clients and learn more about their business, talk to them regularly. We knew she worked for a former well customer of ours. She used to work there. She's not there anymore, so it's not a conflict of interest. She spoke with our recruiter. She then spoke with someone on the sales team. She spoke with me. We knew she knew our software back in front. We knew what her role was at the previous company. Our team had previously worked with her as a customer and we still put her through three. It might've been four interviews. I think that's the point is not everyone is going to want to go through four interviews. In fact, we have a lot of people who drop out of the process and say, I'm not doing another interview.

I'm not doing a code test, I'm not doing these things. And we go, that's amazing. Thank you so much. We really appreciate your time. Time. If someone self-selects, that's the best you can hope for. And so what you want to do is give people enough opportunity to self-select to say, wait a second, if these people are going to do five interviews and a code test that's two hours long, and then the CTO wants to have a strategy call to run through complex technology for two hours, that's a seven hour commitment to trying to get a job here. Nah, I'm out. And that to us is a gift. We're like, great, so the person does not like,

Alex Micol 46:39

Yeah, doesn't fit.

Adam Young 46:40

The person does not want to find a place where they're like, hell yes, this is incredible. I want to do this. They just want to find a job and that's not what we're looking at.

Alex Micol 46:49

It's funny, I had that scenario just recently where I was hiring someone to manage all the production, the content production, and also manage the content shoots for ads. So basically the head of media and we talked to some incredible minds and there was this guy, I was like, oh, he's going to be a fit. And because we put them through three, four calls, he didn't even show up at the end and I was like, oh, it's probably a good sign then it's fine. I don't want to even entertain the thought of hiring that person anymore. I think that saves time. Going back to a bit to Ringwood, I know a lot of people, by the way, this was incredibly insightful also for me, selfishly speaking, I wanted to talk to the community about ask a bunch of questions, but this was also incredible insight, which I'm sure a lot of people are going to appreciate. But also the juicy question, what are the hot verticals right now? Did you see that the affiliates can tap in and start making money almost right away? I said almost.

Adam Young 47:51

I mean all of them,

Alex Micol 47:52

Right? But which one do you see? It's the, let's name drop a few where you see, oh, this has, I know everything can make money because everyone needs these things, which is amazing. Where do you see, if you had a tight budget and you would need to start today as an affiliate, where would you start and why?

Adam Young 48:11

I would start with what I already know. Literally, people are making millions of dollars in every vertical. It's not like, oh, which one's the easiest or whatever, which one do you know already? Does your uncle have a sanitation company? Is your brother a health insurance agent? Is your dad a plumber? What industry do you already know so that you can understand what the consumer's mindset is in? Or did you recently pop a tire on the expressway and had to change the tire and give up and then call a tow truck and understand the experience, how shitty that was. Now you know how to attract the consumer and get into their head, so there's no secret here. I think that the high level is very simple. The bigger the outcomes, the more competitive it's going to be. You want to get into the one that has the largest potential. It's also going to be the hardest, the most restrictive on compliance, the most expensive to get in. You're going to lose the most money. You're going to have to do the most business development. You're going to have to do the most testing. You're just going to have to have much bigger budgets across everything.

Alex Micol 49:29

That's what I was asking. Yeah. Maybe

Adam Young 49:31

You say to yourself, I wonder if I could dominate the paper call space for kitchen repair in metro Philadelphia,

And if I were an affiliate, what I would do and what Harrison and I always did to make the most money is go where no one else wanted to do the work and where there was a lot more work to do. And so the affiliate mindset is generally a bad one. If you want to get rich and that mindset is go find where everyone else is making money and copy what they're doing. That to me is the last place I would start. I would ask myself, where are the affiliates not? And then go quietly own that space. It's going to be much higher margin. There's going to be no competition. It's going to be set and forget. It is going to require more work though. If you want to create your own network of gutter repair companies in Pennsylvania, you're going to need to call companies and say, Hey, I have phone calls of people who want gutters on their house.

I have so many that I'd like to give you some for free. Can I send you 10 customers for free? No questions asked. I'm just going to send these people to call you. Is that okay? And you're like, sure. Send 'em the 10 calls. You listen to the recordings and you're like, wow, they booked four appointments. You call the office manager back, Hey, you booked four out of 10. That's crazy. What are those worth to you? Oh, they're worth three grand an appointment. Okay, cool. I'll sell you these calls for X. Let's do the thing. Now, that's a ton of work for an affiliate to do because you're going to have to call every single gutter repair company in a city or a state, but once you do it, then you can run a campaign that maybe 80% margin has no competition. That makes a lot of money.

And that's really where I would be looking. I would be asking myself, how do I do gutter repair, direct mail campaigns nationwide and have thousands of buyers of phone calls that I'm making 80% margin on? That's what I would be doing. I wouldn't be saying, how do I go on Facebook ads that are going to piss people off to try and break into Medicare? And that's not how I would do it because there's so much opportunity that the other places people aren't thinking about. You can just make a ton of money. I mean, look, Angie's List public company, absolutely massive. All these home services companies are absolutely massive. And there's generally, if I were going to do one of the more saturated verticals, I would be asking myself, where are the affiliates not, are they not sending direct mail? Are they not using yard signs?

Are they not doing marketing methods that are non-digital? And I talk about this a lot in my book, the Paper Call Revolution, how to break into non-digital marketing channels because they're high margin. There's no competition. And the thing about a phone number is you can put it anywhere. It doesn't have to be on the internet. And a great example of this is when I first moved to Miami, there was a chain link fence across from the condo I was renting, and on that chain link fence every 30 feet was a sign that said, need movers phone number. And I took a photo of it and I called it, and it clearly went to a call center. It was not some local moving agency. Then walking around Miami, I saw these signs on other fences and they had different phone numbers, but they went to the same place. I immediately realized, these are people's zip tying signs to fences in major metropolitan cities offering moving phone calls. Their cost of acquisition is two zip ties and a 20 cent sign that sits there for what, six months. They get four phone calls. Their margins are 95%. It's just like crazy.

Alex Micol 53:31

And putting yourself in the shoes of a European kid or someone that lives outside of the US that wants to run Facebook ads, for example, for these type of campaigns in the us. That's where I was coming from as well, because they could do it locally. It doesn't mean they have to do it in the us, but let's say they would want to, because I know it's very hot. Everyone speaks about us. It's very scalable.

Adam Young 53:58

There's two types of paper call campaigns. You have one that is a need and one that is an interruption. And so if you're going to do Facebook or YouTube, I mean YouTube, you can still make stuff work, but are you interrupting someone to sell them something or are they searching for what you're offering if they're searching for what you're offering? Google ads retargeting on YouTube and Facebook, that type of thing works extremely well. And so a tow trucker, a gutter repair or a problem, if the user has a problem, Google ads being ads, those are really the best places to start. And then to use things like YouTube, TikTok, Facebook as retargeting, if you're sending people to a landing page and then retargeting them with similar ads that have more content, right? Because once you already know that they have the problem, you can continue to market to them for a certain period of time.

If it's a tow truck, probably not. But if it's got a repair two weeks, you probably can retarget them. If it's something like a CA or Medicare final expense, life insurance, mortgages, financial services, debt consolidation, these are going to be more interruption style campaigns like a Facebook, a TikTok, a Snapchat, a YouTube, and all those channels work for all those types of campaigns. And so I think the best way is to first look at the available campaigns you may want to run, decide if it's an interruption or a need, and then choose your traffic source accordingly. Yeah.

Alex Micol 55:33

Cool. And you have a book there? Can you show it to the camera? I think it's fully in. Yeah, I've seen it everywhere. All my affiliate friends were posting it. Yeah.

Adam Young 55:45

Well, I released the book and I didn't expect it to be a best seller, but it was in 48 hours on Amazon from the marketing category, so that was pretty incredible. We've sold and shipped thousands of copies of the book. I ran out, we just had another 10,000 copies printed. They're going to be gone in the next couple of weeks. And I'm actually excited. I'm back to running ads again for the book, not for calls and the book's amazing. Like, look, I'll be straight with your audience. Harrison and I spent a ton of money on this book. I wrote it. He supported me for it, but we spent a couple hundred thousand dollars producing it, and we will make $0 on the sales of the book. We will never get our money back on the sales of the book. And the reason I wanted to do it is when I was a kid, I lost everything and this industry saved my life.

Performance marketing literally saved my life. It helped me become very successful. I made my first million dollars as an affiliate in my parents' basement. I made my second million dollars as an affiliate in my parents' basement. Obviously, I don't live there anymore, but I really wanted to give back to the industry and show affiliates and people that you can build long-term sustainable businesses that have real value. And if you do it properly, you can literally become wealthy as opposed to like an affiliate that's selling a broken air conditioner, swamp cooler thing or something. Right? I think my good friend Anthony, has a great story here. He sold his business to a public company for $50 million in cash. All it was was a couple guys who were really great affiliates running pay per call.

Alex Micol 57:34

Guess who's texting me right now? He is waiting for me. It's Anthony.

Adam Young 57:42

Well, tell him I said what's up.

Alex Micol 57:44

Yeah.

Adam Young 57:46

But yeah,

Alex Micol 57:47

Yeah. The story is incredible. The enterprise value on the Legion stuff that he was doing, it's a great story of not just building a campaign, but a business that has enterprise value. By the way, last question, juicy one. I don't know if you want to disclose it, but what do you think A guess what could be the enterprise value of Ringba right now?

Adam Young 58:13

Well, I don't need to guess. I know the answer to that question. I'm not going to tell you.

Alex Micol 58:20

Ah, that's for the next time when we met in Miami,

Adam Young 58:24

But my goal as an entrepreneur is to hit 10 billion in enterprise value and I see a clear path to get there.

Alex Micol 58:35

Adam, thank you so much. Thanks for joining us and pleasure to share this so epic.