Client Acquisition Tips, How We Became Entrepreneurs, And The Most Interesting People We've Met

Welcome back to another episode of the Diamond Download. Chase is in point because I always wait for the for the Zoom lady to go, recording in progress. And then I start talking and whenever he clips it up there's always the exact amount of time that he clips it every single time. I think I always nail it to the second, but we got Carter Mason here. How's it going? Chase Diamond. No way in diamond. How you doing, bro? But there is an and in download, right? I've learned that recently. I'm doing great, bro. How are you? I'm doing good, man. I'm having a chill week. Things are good. I mean, it's not chill. I'm just very zen. You know what I mean? There's a lot to do, but I'm zen. Heck yeah. I got topics, but dude, off camera we were just talking about how all of a sudden you're making money with your LinkedIn business. Do you want to talk about it? Yeah. It was, in my mind, doing fine and decent without me having to do a whole lot of work. I think maybe two or three weeks ago on the pod you were like, dude, just run it up. Just do it. I'm like, ah, maybe. And then as soon as I watched it back, I'm like, what am I doing? I might as well run this up and just employ more people and just help more people. Dude, I'm up to like 65 or 70 clients now, so I've added 15 to 20 people in the past week and a half, two weeks since you've lit that fire under me. I'm doing a webinar tomorrow. I guess by the time this goes live, the webinar will have already happened. Got a few hundred people signed up with just one LinkedIn blast. About to hire a third employee. At this point, let's just do it. I might as well. I'm going to shift a lot of my time and attention here to just make it happen. I appreciate you. Let's go, man. Chase Diamond's rich again. Finally, bro. I wouldn't say that, but I'm having fun. All right. Let's jump into this stuff. The first one I got here is client acquisition for nudes. Basically, just ways for beginners to try and get clients for an agency or for freelancing that isn't cold email or cold DM. Those are kind of obvious, but is there anything creative? I know you had a couple of creative ways that you were landing clients back in the day. That's interesting. Funny, I haven't told you this, but before I answer that, I've had so many DMs and emails lately from people in copy MBA or people that are watching your stuff where you've mentioned me. They're like, hey, so your friend Cardinal Mason sent me, or they'll be like, I saw you on Cardinal Mason's course, or I saw you X, Y, and Z. I'm probably getting five emails or DMs a week when people are mentioning they found me through you, or hey, Chase and Mason last week talked about the podcast about needing someone for Lose the Very. Let me slide in and do that work for you. Every time we talk about something, I'm getting the emails and the DMs. Not that those are bad, but let's talk about other things. It's kind of funny. You didn't know that, right? I did not know that. Sorry. I told people not to hit you up, but I got a guy for you for Lose the Very. He's a savage. Actually, we've been in draft of this, but anyway. One of the things that we did well that I think would still work today that maybe you were alluding to is early on, other than cold email, the big way that we got clients is we just found medium to large size agencies, and we're just like, look, we are absolutely focused on this one thing, which in our case was email. We know you guys offer every single service under the sun. Let us make you look good. Let us come in and offer email as an extension of your team. We were being white labeled by medium to large size agencies, and they were just playing an arbitrage game. I don't know exactly what they were charging, but they were probably charging a client five to ten grand, and they were paying us two to four grand. They could be making anywhere from one to six grand a month just by us doing the service. I think that's a really interesting one where you have a lot of these agencies that start with a single service, and they get really big, and they have a lot of services, and the quality of each service, I think, as you get really big, diminishes. If you could go to them and just be like, let us work with you, for you, as an extension of your team, or just refer us to business, I think that's a big one. Those referrals or white labeled ones, I think that's the first one that comes to mind. What are your thoughts? I like that. I've done that. Kind of white labeling, but also just affiliates and referrals. You were great for that. There are a couple other people that were super generous and just fed me a lot of deals, and it was awesome. It feels good to be able to do that for other people, too. Now I'm in a position where I can just be like, here, take this. That's cool. I think one of the other ones you talked about was using marketer hire, right? Back in the day? Yeah. I was one of the first marketers, if not the first marketer, definitely the first email marketer on marketer hire. Marketer hire is a freelance platform where it connects brands and agencies with vetted marketers. I think those are still good. There are a lot of wait lists for some of these things, and there's just so many people that need to want it. I think you need a way to stand out. How do you do that? You just, A, make an effort. Try to get to know the team. If there's certain people on the inside that know and like you, they're going to try to route more deals to you. I think, like we talked about last week about just being likable, I think if you're likable, people want to send deals your way, whether it's a platform like marketer hire, whether it's another agency or freelancer. I think that that's a really interesting one. Marketer hire is cool. I think you might have talked about this on Alex, where just forming little pods and communities of freelancers or agencies that are just going to tackle clients together or going to pitch together or refer business back together. I think kind of almost creating like your little mini tribe or your cult. I don't know if that's your words, but that's kind of how I'm describing it. Of people that do, I think you were saying like, hey, if you're a copywriter, go team up with a designer or a marketer or XYZ and go pitch together and go service together and kind of start like these quasi agencies, but everyone's independent. Is that kind of accurate? Is that how you explain it? You have such a good memory for all my little Alex in my inbox little things. Yeah. So back in the day, I was a copywriter. I didn't know how to do email or design. And so there were a couple of clients that I took on with my little pod. It was Denard DJ. You interviewed him pretty sure. I haven't talked to him in forever. I don't know where he's at. Shout out DJ and then Francesca who used to work for you. So that was like my little squad and we were just going like we had like little deals and I was like sort of like the creative brain behind it. And then I was sort of like again arbitrage just them. Yeah, that was fun. Yeah. And then I actually got a couple of cool deals from Denard too. He was awesome, bro. Yeah. So yeah. Fire right off the bat chase. Okay, I got one. So I people kind of talk about it, but like Facebook groups and Slack groups often get forgotten about. I remember I got two or three clients when I was an email geeks. So this would have been like end of 2021 when I was an email geeks and that Slack group like 5,000 people in there. I think when I was in there big, there's a lot of people in there and people go in there and there's like an opportunities channel and there was one guy that I heard of and knew of and I reached out to him literally within like a minute of like the thing going off. I like I had a thing ready and I just fired it away. So super fast and so yeah, I've gotten a couple of like cool snags from that and as long as yeah, as long as you're super fast and personable like people like you can stand out like it's really not that hard to stand out like people should see what my DMs look like or your DMs look like or I'm sure there's like a couple of easy ways to just like get ahead of everybody else and yeah. Yeah. That's like one of my rules like for my team and for anyone like in a sales or marketing role like you have to be quick. Like I think if you're slow you lose deals. If you're swift and you're quick you're going to win majority of the deal but just being responsive and on top of it. If you take forever and you're slow they're going to assume that like your process is slow and that your work is slow and obviously right like there's on the other side of being quick like you don't want to make any errors but I don't think clients think that they think that you're organized and timely and on top of it if you're quick to respond and I've done the same thing too. I didn't even think about that. Facebook groups a lot more in the past a lot more of it now has been I guess Slack or kind of Discord but it's the same exact thing where every channel or every Slack typically for business has like a channel called like help wanted jobs and opportunities right roles available something like that and people are always looking to hire folks full-time freelance contract part-time agencies and if you're quick to respond and like you're personable dude you have such a leg up. So that's a great one. Nice. Alright let's move on. Next one I had for you was when did you decide to become an entrepreneur or when did you sort of it was there like a moment that you look back on and you're like that was like when it became sort of real for you or what was it? Yeah I mean I think it's a couple things like throughout high school and college I was like always trying to start stuff like I didn't know what I wanted to do so I was just trying to start a bunch of random things. Nothing ended up really working out super great but I had a lot of attempts and kind of shots on goal. I would say when I went to work for someone after college I loved it. It was great but I got really close with like the founder and then there was a separate CEO and I just saw like the difference in lifestyle between like the founder and then also the CEO. The founder really never came into the office. He was always traveling. He was making tons of money. The CEO was really freaking cool but he was in there every day. He was grinding. He was hustling. At the end of the day he reported to the founder and the chairman. So I just thought like that delineation between like the amount of money that you can make and kind of the freedom that you could have. So I did that and then I started working for someone else, started working for someone else and I just started realizing like how people taught their employees and also how they treat their employees and I just felt like there was this massive opportunity to like be the owner and there's like that quote, I'm blanking on the exact verbiage but it's like if you don't build your own destiny of freedom someone else is going to employ you to kind of build theirs and I wanted to be the person that like employed the other people to build my dreams versus building someone else so I think just working for other people and just seeing and kind of understanding how much money you could make and the type of lifestyle that you could live really led me to be like I want to be the big boss. I don't want to have to report to anyone. Of course I started an agency and every single one of my clients was the boss so that was a little bit different but I think that was it for me. What was your kind of silver lining kind of aha moment? I think everything you said is so important by the way like and it's not really about like just being the big boss and kind of doing whatever you want like there is a big responsibility that like you know people that you have to take on if you're going to be the boss like now I got people that are working for me that are going to buy a house in the next year or two and I got to make sure that I don't stop making money so that they can keep making money and you know what I mean and coach them and make them become someone that's bigger than they are now so it's not something that is for everybody but you know it takes a lot of balls to sort of like take that risk and be like no I'm ready to do this because you have what a heck of an account of like 200 probably now? Yeah less I don't know the exact number but probably 120, 140, 130, 150 just on that business and then you know trying to build up some of these other ones that have 1, 2, 3 people so all in across all my businesses probably 150 between like employees, contractors, freelancers you know consultants 80-90% of those are probably W-2s yeah? Yeah I'd say yeah it depends like everyone in the US and in our business on the agency is W-2 and then everyone else works for us full time more or less but they're in like Canada or other places in the world, Philippines, India so it's a little bit different where like they are salaried but the actual way in which we set it up is a little bit different but yeah a lot are full time, I don't know about all but a lot are People don't realize how scary that is bro like people don't realize that this is a big responsibility like when I got my first employee which is Abby, like real employee because everyone else before that was just contractors like freelancers they had other stuff going on so if like my stuff slowed down it was like alright whatever but like you feel it like bro the pressure's on, you gotta like make sure they got benefits you gotta pay their taxes anyway I had a bunch of different moments for me one of them was I realized like if I was gonna make money doing anything like even like low six figures like between 1 to 130 a year, there was no one who was gonna give me that opportunity unless I jumped through a bunch of hoops first and I just didn't want to do that, it was like part ego part like I was just straight up unqualified like I I don't have a degree I wasn't really interested in finishing that and then I don't know I just thought like if there was anyone who was gonna like make me wealthy it was gonna be me so I had to go and do something about it so yeah I think like that was when I kind of realized I was like alright it's time to do this bro like stop being a wuss and also I think too like I just I thought about what my life would look like if I just never took any risk and just like not even played the safe route, just like did everything wrong like what if I just like was super lazy and just did nothing, like there's a lot of people that do that they wake up and they're 50 and they're living in someone's basement and it's just like not a nice way to live, I never wanted to live like that I was really scared of that so I kind of ran from that, that was like what sort of drove me forward, what were you gonna say? Yeah I was gonna say and sorry to cut you off I was gonna say I don't know if it was from like the book Think and Grow Rich or someone had told me a while back kind of related to that book that there's two ways to make money, one is to be in sales or two is to own the business right and often times you're in sales if you own a business so that's kind of the combination so I remember like from an early age someone telling me that I'm not super salesy in the fact that like I couldn't go sell you a car I couldn't sell you you know XYZ service but as a business owner starting a company you know you obviously are always selling and I believe in myself and I believe in my team so it's a little bit easier of a sell I just remember also too like having that ingrained in my mind like the two ways to make money is start a business or be in sales, I didn't realize starting a business meant you were in sales but you know that was kind of also ingrained with me like from an early age Yeah cause yeah you can say it that way like with sales but I would argue that like stuff that you know copywriters do too is like the way to think about it is like the closer you are to the money the more you're going to make right so these guys are super close to the money cause they're dry like they're literally accepting payment like on the phone or in person or something like that copywriters are feeding the people the leads who are going to end up closing over the phone so like you have a higher position of leverage like it's you know if you're not there like what does the business look like kind of thing so like that's that's kind of like the fundamental rule get close to the money is what I remember I heard that years ago Yeah and I think again there might have been an Alex on this too but like when I think about sales people I think about like in person on the phone more verbal communication where I think there was an Alex that you had wrote or there was something that at least we talked about where like copywriters are sales people via written word right like they are influencing these decisions so they're almost like the ones that are priming or they're the ones that are actually selling close in too so yeah this was a good one we have one more topic is that right yeah so I had this down as the most interesting person you've ever met and you can kind of take this any way you want I know it's kind of a hard question I'm having trouble thinking of one right now yeah it's interesting I don't know that's like the most interesting person I met but the most recent person I met that was really interesting I went to a friend's 30th birthday two weekends ago and it was at like one of their family friends house it was on a island in Newport Beach really cool spot it was on a corner lot and literally like pretty much 360 degree views I guess maybe 270 like from the garage in the back of the house you couldn't see it but majority of it was ocean view or bay view I guess you'd call it and the guy that lived there that owned it was a single dude it was in his 80s you reminded me of like the grandpa from up and just like hearing certain revenue streams he had so in Newport Beach I guess there's 1100 docks he owns 6 docks he has one in his house he's got a bunch of others and he rents out docks to people that want to park their boat dude he makes 100 grand a year just renting out 6 docks and on top of it he owned it wasn't clear to me but he owned 750 properties I don't know if that was 750 units 750 doors but he had 750 something in real estate and he was one of like the bigger real estate guys in you know Orange County Newport Beach they had articles written about this house that he built it was like this Mediterranean Spanish type house and just kind of hearing about like the ways in which he made money and how he just kept accumulating real estate and he just kept buying and never ever sold I wouldn't say he was the most interesting but just seeing like what he's built and whatnot and I don't think he ever was married never had kids everything that when he passes is gonna all go to like the church I think he was saying so it's just kind of interesting just to see like how people decide to choose it there's no right or wrong but for me like I would only want to be that successful if I had people to like share it with that I loved and cared about and I probably wouldn't want to be so successful to the point that like I didn't have those things so I don't know I was just kind of going through like there's no right or wrong way but that's a really cool way but my way is a little bit different what about you who have you met don't you kind of get excited about being old like don't you kind of like I'm kind of excited to be an old man I'm not gonna lie like that like the idea dude it doesn't matter like 90% of old dudes are pretty cool like I don't know like I think you get to a certain point where you just like don't give a ---- anymore and like I don't know that guy like he's probably at a level of wealth where it's just like literally doesn't matter what happens because like I don't know he's probably got like 10 years left probably healthy which maybe you know not gonna work longer but I mean yeah like guys like that where it's like they're on the back nine and they're like you know whatever bro like whatever happens happens like that's my favorite sort of like thing about old dudes and it makes me kind of excited to be there one day yeah and one other story he actually told me that there's a lot of really interesting stuff like something I can disclose something I can't but one thing that he told me that was like it's just like it was so ridiculous that I'm like dude really so in Newport Beach the city charges or at least they yeah I think they still do they charge $25 a year as like your doc tax so very cheap right like pennies and a couple years back I don't know five ten years back however long it was they wanted to raise the tax to $75 or $100 or something so $25 it was they wanted to charge you $100 annually so this guy that lived there plus the girl's dad they're both kind of in Newport Beach politics they started a campaign and they raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to basically be like Newport Beach F you you're not going to raise their tax by 50 or $75 a year so all these rich people end up donating 10 20 40 50 thousand dollars to tell the city to F you instead of just paying an extra $50 a year for the rest of their life so like they end up paying probably 10 20 50 times more just to tell the city like F you then to just like keep quiet and pay it so it was just like this really interesting thing where like they're talking about like just when you have money and like when the city or the county or the state tries to mess with you like they really kind of like unionize and form and they kind of have this mentality of like if we give in on this thing you know it's more the principle it was less about the $50 the $75 per year that they're going to pay and more just the principle of like hey if you do these types of things you're going to get the mob like we're going to we're going to push back so there he was just kind of telling like any time the city is messed with them all the rich people just donate way more time and money than it would have cost them otherwise just to be like no no this is not going to happen and I thought that was kind of wild it's cool I like that yeah yeah yeah what's what's your answer who who's really interesting or was that look like for you I got a good one I think that'll carry both of us that's it that's all we got bro I was thinking I was going to come up with something like before but I just never did so that was awesome you killed it I appreciate that thanks for thanks for holding it down might we wrap up let's do it well cool man well everyone thanks for listening and watching the diamond download I'm Cardinal Mason you can find me on Twitter or TikTok at Cardinal Mason oh I have a YouTube video now I have a YouTube channel so if you want to watch my first YouTube video heck yeah on the Chase's comment in my comment section go find him and comment saying what's up Chase this is Chase Diamond at ecomchasediamondnoanddiamond check him out he's pretty smart knows a couple things appreciate you brother Cheers