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In this episode of Confessions of a B2B Marketer, I'm joined by an influential business growth expert Mike Kamo of NP Digital to share how he scale an agency from bootstrapped, tips for hiring people, outbound vs. partnership, and why scaling operations for service-based business is crucial.

When Mike Kamo founded NP Digital in 2014, he had no idea that it would become one of the most successful digital marketing agencies in the world. With just $26,240 and a lot of hard work, Mike was able to bootstrap his agency and grow it to 2200 clients today. The journey of NP Digital began with Mike’s passion for digital marketing.

He had been working as a freelance web designer for several years before deciding to take the plunge and start his own agency. With limited resources and no outside funding, Mike used his own money to get started.

He invested $26,240 into the business which he used to purchase equipment, hire staff and develop a website for his new venture. Mike’s first step was to build an online presence for NP Digital by creating a website that showcased their services and portfolio. This allowed potential clients to learn more about the company and contact them if they were interested in working together.

In addition, Mike also focused on building relationships with other businesses in order to gain referrals and increase their client base. Once they had established an online presence, Mike began focusing on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as well as PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising campaigns in order to drive traffic to their website from search engines like Google or Bing.

This allowed them to reach more potential customers who were searching for services related to digital marketing or web design. In addition, they also developed content marketing strategies such as blogging or creating videos which helped them build trust with potential customers while also increasing their visibility online through organic search results.

They also implemented social media campaigns on platforms such as Facebook or Twitter which allowed them reach even more people who may be interested in their services or products. By 2016 NP Digital had grown significantly due its focus on providing high quality services at competitive prices combined with its effective digital marketing strategies mentioned above .

By this time they had over 500 clients from all over the world including some of the biggest names in tech such as Microsoft or Apple .

Today , NP Digital is one of the leading digital agencies worldwide with over 2200 clients from all industries . The success story of this bootstrapped agency is an inspiration for entrepreneurs everywhere who are looking for ways how they can turn their dreams into reality without relying on outside funding .

Thanks for listening and hit me up on
if you have any questions!

Episode transcript

I would probably put that at number one. Like for, to have really amazing leadership, especially you have to give them a path to make more money. You can't just cap them and be like, I expect you to work as hard as me. It's not gonna happen.

All right guys. We got a hot one today. We have Mike Camo, who is actually not the ceo, which I got wrong in this interview, but manages the CEO of NB Digital, which is Neil Patel. And Mike's marketing agency, a hundred million revenue, roughly a thousand employees. Such a cool story. They essentially started with all the intention and fame that Neil has built up, and then built services on the backend.

Mike digs into recruitment, sales, operations, international expansion, how and why they're buying software products, et cetera. Really cool interview. Let's jump right in, and the first voice you'll hear will be that of Mike.

Thanks for having. I'm super excited about this discussion because we're not gonna dig into like actual B2 marketing stuff, but we're gonna talk about why, I believe, to be all the important things around that. Whether you run a B2B marketing team, or you have your own marketing business, because you may be one of the best possible people to talk to about this, would you agree?

I don't really like to talk about myself, brag about myself, so there's probably a lot of better people out there, but yeah, I've got a lot of experience on. On everything that goes on around marketing, not as directly related to marketing itself for sure. And for those that are not aware, Mike is the current c e O of NP digital and a couple of other things around the NP brand that we're gonna dig into.

And so the first thing I'd love to talk about is just to understand the origin or the start of the journey with NP Digital. Cause I know that Neil Patel, if people don't know, I guess, had his personal brand, his audience, et cetera, and then he started offering services. So at what point do you join the.

Sure. Yeah, so Neil and I were friends 12, 13 years ago. Just friends. We weren't working together yet, and I was really intrigued with what Neil did because I was actually working in the car business. and back then the internet was getting really popular. The car business was sort of a lot of hours, take weekends off.

That's the most busy time. And as I got closer to Neil and kind of realized what he was doing, he had software companies, recurring revenue. He was making money, quote unquote, in his fleet. And so I had a conversation with them where I said, look, I think that what you're doing is really the future. I don't know that I wanna stay in brick and mortar and do this and grind it out for a really long time.

So if there's ever an opportunity, like I'm here and what I'm good at is sales, operations, recruiting. I'm good at running a business, I'm good at monetizing. This is everything that I did in the car. And so one day an opportunity presented itself and I started working with Neil and I kind of like learned marketing, some marketing prior to that so I could be ready for the day that Neil called me and said, Hey, there's an opportunity.

But we ended up just traveling the world together and I watched some speak and just, uh, dead. I sat in meetings. I didn't know anything. It was kind of a foreign language to me, all this marketing stuff. But eventually I learned a good amount and we started a few c. I would say none of which were super successful.

But initially my goal was to monetize Neil's brand. He had a blog QuickSprout that was, uh, pretty popular at the time, a marketing blog, and he was offering like a $99, like an ebook, and there was a 15 minute. Like or 30 minute free consultation with Neil if you bought the ebook. And so the first thing that I said to him, just because I'm always thinking about like how can you be more efficient, was like, how much time are you spending on these calls because you sell like a hundred thousand dollars a month's worth of eBooks.

and he was like, let me check. And so he looked at his calendar and he came back and was like, I think I'm spending like 20 hours, 15 to 20 hours a week. And I'm like, that is absurd. Like that's the halftime, that's almost half of a full-time job, . So I said, have you tested like just removing the option for people to have a consultation with you?

And he is like, no. And so he tested it and it didn't affect his conversions at all. And so I was like, cool, I just saved you 20 hours a week. So let's continue. You know, what else can we. So then we did, we initially, we like as the blog got more traffic, we had a lot of people asking for help with consulting.

And we initially, because neither of us wanted to do an agency, uh, farmed the leads out to other companies. And so I started by hiring four different companies that were, some were enterprise companies, some enterprise clients, some service to smb, kind of across the board so that we could give the right leads to the right people.

And. We did that for a couple of years and it was good. Like business was great. We didn't have to do any work and we made good money from it. But Neil is, I would say he's someone who's never, like he's, it just business is a game for him. And so he's never like, feels like it's over and he's never satisfied and he's never, you'll never hear him be like, okay, we're making enough money, or The business is good enough, like ever.

And so his first thought after a few years was like, we've plateaued. Like this is depressing. What should we do, ? And so kind of the next natural progression was to do our own agency because when we looked at the people that we were giving leads to, and they were good agencies, but we just believed that we could do sales better than them, we believed we could service clients better because we saw their retention numbers, because we were getting paid out on monthly on those contracts.

And so since we thought we could do it better, we just decided, and this was late 2017, that we were gonna do it ourselves. And so we started taking on the leads ourselves and just that's how the company was. Got a awesome, awesome story like getting the affiliate revenue, but then you were like trying to capture, I guess, more of the process or to ultimately get more revenue and profit and also like, I guess try to fulfill your ambitions because you're now able to build a larger company.

Right. So before we like dig into specifically like Salesforce recruiting, In MP Digital. I just wanna understand where there are a couple of other things. So we have Uber suggests, I believe in HelloBar and then also MP xl. Mm-hmm. . How do they fit in with MP Digital and when did they come about? Yeah. MP Digital is a parent company, so they all roll up to MP Digital, not Hello.

HelloBar is a totally separate business, but, uh, Uber suggests an MP xl. Uber suggests is like the software division of NP digital. So, I mean, they also have their own sort of tool that they sell, which is kind of a competitor of HFS or S E m Rush, but it's more of a watered down version. NP XL is the SMB division of NP Digital, and so Uber suggests, I think we acquired it in 2017 or so and it wasn't monetized at the time, and so we really built up the audience first, and then we started to monetize it.

NP xl. We launched in 2019 because we saw how many leads that we weren't unable to service with the original NP digital that we created. Like when we first launched the agency, we set out to service clients that had, that were the large enough companies to spend at least a hundred K a year on marketing.

And so what ended up happening is we had like thousands of leads per month that were. We can't help you. Sorry. Eventually we decided to launch like a whole another division. Cuz we operate them very se very, they're very separate because it's a different type of delivery. It's a little bit of a different service, but yeah, that's kind of how they all fit in.

Makes total sense. And I bet both of those kind of child companies are able to feed leads up into MP Digital. Yeah. Especially Uber suggests like whole tool, et cetera. Must go like a shed load of traffic and there must be a nice, I assume like smooth there is like process . There is. There's definitely a lot of people who come from Uber suggest initially and end up becoming agency clients for sure.

And obviously of course you then have Neil's blog as well, which is still a massive like content machine. Right, right. Cool. Yeah, we've kind of flipped the model upside down. If you look at the holding companies, like the big, the big, big agencies, they make all the, and you look at their revenues. Some of those, these agencies are doing 10 billion a year in revenue.

But then if you look at the software companies like the HubSpots of the world, they're way, way smaller in revenue, but they have much higher valuations, and they're smaller in revenue because they're charging like a hundred bucks a month or 500 bucks a month. Whereas these bigger agencies are charging sometimes millions of dollars a year.

So we were like, how can we. Something where we have a software component that drives a lot of people, but then we sell them on more expensive services, which is where the agency works together with Uber suggests. Makes total sense. One point on kind of personal branding and how that relates to the brand of the agency.

What I find is super interesting is, I guess the traditional approach. More recently has been to try and take the founders brand almost away from the company. So it has like standalone value, but you guys are just embracing it. We're trying not to, so it's sad to hear that that's still the perception, but we're working on it.

So we were originally Neil Patel Digital and now we're NP Digital. I know it's not a huge Ah, okay, nice. It's not a huge move in that direction, but we are definitely, I feel like we've taken a lot of steps towards trying to. Just make the brand less dependent on Neil and his name and you know, it's very difficult to do because Neil.

He's like so famous in the marketing space that it's so hard to remove him. But we are trying to reduce that sort of, that keyman risk that we have with Neil. Makes total sense. And the other cool thing that I think you guys are doing is just like fully embracing the services model as opposed to just trying to go full SA or doing something else.

The reason I think it's quite clever is because the services model has become like unsexy in the last, I don't know, five years, which means that it's easier to compete, therefore helia profits easier to grow, which you guys have done significantly. Yeah, totally. And a lot of the companies that we're now competing against, which are like the biggest agencies in the world, they don't do things the way that we do.

They're not as lean as us. They're not nimble, like, They don't have software like we do, and we use a lot of our own homegrown software to help service clients, which helps our margins and so we can service clients better. So we have a little bit of an edge on some of those bigger brands. They've been around a lot longer, so they're a lot bigger than we are, but we're trying to catch up.

But they are, they're like bloated, have like lists departments that are completely useless. Do you know what I mean? They, they've been around for 20 years. They don't understand the internet live. Yeah, I mean, we hear it all the time from people that we take from those companies. . So it's recruiting from some of the big agencies out there has been relatively, I don't wanna say easy, but those companies that they're coming from are making our jobs easier to recruit.

All right, cool. So let, if we go back to when you guys first decided to be an agency, We have the, I guess the first lead that comes through the blog. I assume that you guys want to test the services for like, I assume Neil isn't delivering the services. Like have you already hired people to take that on?

Like how did it start? Yeah, so my agreement with Neil and my pitch to Neil to get 'em to even work with me, cuz I mean, how do you get somebody who's already. Kind of made it to work with you when you don't really have a lot to offer yet. So I had to have a really compelling pitch and it was like, you don't have to do anything but marketing.

Like that's it. You're great at marketing, you're great at driving leads. I will figure everything else out. And so that's really how we launched the business. in that fashion. So Neil was in charge of content. He does a lot of YouTube and Facebook, all the different content channel. To drive traffic and leads.

And initially it was me, I hired a sales rep. I hired one person as a contractor to be an account manager, cuz we didn't, we really bootstrapped it like we put $200,000. So I, I don't wanna say we didn't do it with nothing, but we took put 200,000 of our own money into a bank account. And said like, this is all we have and we're gonna try to build this business with this 200 K.

So I couldn't even hire a full-time account manager when we launched. I had a contractor, a contract account manager, who we paid like on a per project basis, but that was how we started. Got it. And then literally from the lease work coming through, through the software, through the blog, And you were then just scaling the team out?

That's from 2017 to today, essentially? Yeah, pretty much. I mean, it was like your typical startup story where every time we would close 120,000 or $150,000 contract, I'd be like, okay, like we can get an office manager now. Wow. Now we need to figure out hr. And initially we used like outsource companies for everything, but yeah, like we slowly started to bring more revenue, which allowed us to bring a lot of those things in.

So were you doing the sales at the start? Initially, and Neil would help me too. Neil's great at sales. I, I don't know if like people see him really sell very often. He sells himself well, but Neil, me, myself, and then a sales rep, but I was really trying to build the business to scale because we had like the opposite problem of most startups in which we had thousands of leads every month.

And like what startup does that, right? Most startups are like, how do we get leads? Like that's the first question, right? And so when you're trying to start a business and you have a lot of people who already wanna work with you, like, then the problem becomes like, how do I scale to this? How do I service all these people on day one?

So I tried to build us, build it for scale very early on. And so the first salesperson that I hired, Him and I sat in a room and like we built out the entire sales process. We set everything up in HubSpot. We created all the SOPs for more to add more staff, and then like we slowly started to add more and more sales people.

Makes sense. Any tips on hiring salespeople? I assume you've hired a few. Yeah, it's not easy. But I would say that the, probably like some of the better things to the best things to think about are one, like really being good at digging deep to figure out how well did that person perform in previous roles.

Like this is if we're talking about salespeople who already have experience in sales, not like somebody who is doing an entry level sales job. And so there's ways like on LinkedIn when you're recruiting, like you can search with specific keyword. And so one keyword that you can search for is like President's Circle or President's Club, because if somebody made that in a company like that, typically, usually means that they were one of the top performers in the company.

A lot of people don't put that on their LinkedIn profile, but so what you wanna do is you wanna really drill down when you're interviewing and be like, okay, how big was your sales team? Like, that's your 30,000 foot question and you wanna drill down all the way from how big was your team to what was the quota?

What do you think like the average person did? What did you do? Where did you land? Every. If you are on the leaderboard. And so if that person can like really break down all of those things and has a good understanding of the numbers, then you can assume that they're not full of it. Like if they really can explain those answers well, and then you just look for people who were, I would say like some of the top performers at previous companies.

Got it. Yeah. Makes total sounds like understanding if they performed before or trying to get the truth about how they performed before to inform future performance. Sure. I mean, always make somebody do have somebody do a demo. Like give them a hypothetical situation, give them a fake client and say like, this is a website, a company, here's their revenue, here's their information.

I want you to put together a presentation and I want you to present it to us. And so they don't have to be amazing. The things that you can teach them, right? If you're selling seo, they don't have to be the best, most knowledgeable SEO person. Like you have people in the company for that, that are not in sales, but they have to have good presentation skills.

They have to be informative, they have to come prepared. Like there's other things that you're really looking for like that. But yeah, I think it's kind of risky when I see companies hired based on either gut feel or other things without actually. Putting someone to the test. Yeah, I think I saw a job ad, I dunno how recent it was, but hiring someone to run or be an outbound salesperson, which suggests to me you have enough operational capacity for all of the inbound.

Could you tell me a bit more about the outbound function? Yeah. I mean, truthfully, outbound was one of our failures this last, we probably did it for a year and a half, and I would say Neil and I commit to a certain amount of money every year that we're gonna spend on experimental. Things to try to grow outside of what we're already doing, and outbound was one of those things.

It just didn't work out well. We just couldn't get the economics to work out, right? Like we did close a lot of revenue, but the amount of costs were significantly higher than where we needed them to be for it to be profitable. So I can't recommend outbound for our industry. What I found that works really well for an agency is partnerships, and we have a separate division that does partnerships and we've done incredibly well from.

Yeah, outbound was definitely a failure for us. Yeah. I probably didn't test it on the scale that you guys did, but I couldn't get it to work either. I think maybe it can possibly work when you have SaaS margins because there's just so much more cash to eat up the cost. Okay. Partnerships, so because like you guys do, I think every different type of online marketing.

What kind of partners do you have? Because if you're like a niche player that if you're seo, you can get the paid agency to refer, but hey, what kind of partners work for you? Yeah, so some partners that have been effective are like, we do email marketing, and so we have Omnis send as a partner. and when Omnis Send has clients or customers who, like they promote us on their newsletter, like in different areas.

And so when they have customers who are looking for hands on help, like they don't offer that service, right? They're just a software. So that's been a really fruitful partnership for us. So I'd say any SaaS partnerships that sell a product that fits well with our service, those have been really good.

Other partnerships are educational, so like Digital Marketing Institute, we did a partnership with them where we did a, like a collaborated marketing course, and that was really interesting. It's still early on, so I can't tell you like the results yet, but the plan was to create this course. They would have students enroll, some of the students will be people who.

Employees at companies. And so they're not really, like, there's not, I mean maybe we can try to, those could be leads potentially for us, but some of the students are just students and so those, like we thought it could be a really good, interesting recruiting opportunity for us. They finished the course, they're looking for an internship or like an entry level job to marketing, so that was kind of the plan going into it.

Yeah, that makes total. It makes like just basically I, I assume Neil's name like really helps you get into like conversations with any person in the marketing world because of that fame. It makes total sense. And then in terms of the deal for partners, I assume it's similar to what you used to offer people where they would get paid X percent of revenue or maybe some other metric for X period of time.

That roughly how it works. Yeah. Partly it depends on what the partner wants, and so different partners have want different things. Like some partners, they're just looking for a partnership that they can monetize, they can make money from. And so if we do, we have a, a referral agreements in place with them and we can pay them referral fees.

Other partners want brand exposure and we have the luxury of being able to offer that because of our blog. So it really, or they want, Neil, like you said, some people like, they really want to do something with Neil, so they'll, if it's a big company, Then he may agree to do a webinar with them in exchange for them to put us in their newsletter or to promote us somehow.

So it really just depends on the partners. So I think it's good to have a handful of different things that you can offer to them and kind of say like, pick from this menu of, of what you like the most. Makes total sense. Now moving on to ops, I think like obviously a massive challenge for any service business is getting past, I don't know, the 1 million a r mark or like the 40 person mark, you guys, from what I've read at around a hundred mil and have, I think close to a thousand employees, what would you say is the secret

I know there probably isn't one, but what would you say is important to end scaling ops in a service? Yeah, good question. So there's a book that was really helpful for me and so like I read this book early into starting the company and we don't use it anymore actually, but because I feel like you just evolve and you start to do things a little bit differently, but I feel like they were great training wheels.

And so this book is called Traction. You may have heard of it. And so it's basically gives you like an operating system for your business. It tells you how. Create your core values for your company, how to, how to run meetings. It gives you spreadsheets for how to actually like structure the meeting and how to create goals each quarter and you do your KPIs and all of that stuff.

And so initially I feel like Traction was probably like we ran the business on that and that got us to a certain point. I think that really probably got us to the first a hundred, 150 employees. After that, it gets a little bit easier because you have multiple layers of. and operations, I feel like is a lot harder when you don't have that because it can just get really messy.

You have so many people wearing so many hats, and so when you get to a certain place, you have enough management and then you have operations people in every department and it really makes a difference. Got it. Yeah. Traction will link to that below. So what's the way you're saying is when you have grown to a sufficient size to have, I guess, enough management between you?

Work. Then your job, I guess is just managing the managers. Yeah, exactly. . Cool. Which I think is another word for leadership. So that leads very nicely onto my next point. You, I assume, manage, I guess a small group of people that directly reporting to you. Do you have any insight on how to engage them, get the best out of these direct reports?

Yeah, so I actually, I know you said at the beginning that I was CEO o, but I, we hired a CEO O now, oh, who runs most of the company. But I still have a few direct reports and he's one of them. And I think, look, I mean, to get people that report to you to like really wanna work hard, one thing that I'm just gonna say is really important to most people is giving them the right compensation plan.

If you expect to pay an employee like a C-level employee, a hundred K or 150 K or even 200 K, and give them a 10% bonus, and there's no more upside beyond that for them, you're not gonna get the best people because the best people, they are very typically coin operated. They care a lot about growth, not just personally or career, what title they have, but how much money they can make.

And so you have to offer some. Incentive structure that doesn't necessarily give them, I don't wanna say no ceiling, but like it allows them to make a lot more money and feel like they have skin in the game. And so I, I was really reluctant to giving out to doing sort of equity or profit sharing early into the company because I just didn't have experience with it.

And I felt like it just felt weird to like share that. But as we got bigger, I realized that like I couldn't recruit certain people that I really wanted to come and work for me or retain certain people that were already working for us without giving them some sort of path to either a future exit or just making more money on an annual basis.

And so that's, I think, I would probably put that at number one. Like for, to have really amazing leadership, especially you have to give them a path to make more money. You can't just cap them and be like, I expect you to work as hard as me. It's not gonna happen. I think it's a classic, uh, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger thing, isn't it like always focused on incentives?

Incentives, incentives. So that makes total sense. What if your day-to-day role then, if you're not the ceo? I don't know. I mean, I do a lot of random things. Neil and I probably talk on the phone for three hours a day, every day about the business. Yes. Like my wife makes fun of me. Like she's like, says that Neil's my wife, not her because I'm always on the phone with them, but we just love to talk shop and so we we're always talking about ways to grow the business.

So I think that's most of what him and I do now is just. It's strategic, it's coming up with what should we do next, and then helping kind of piece together the strategy for the team to execute on it. So for example, I'm very involved in international expansion and in the last year and a half we've launched in Canada.

In the uk, in Australia, and we're about to launch in Germany and we had launched a few years before that in India and in Brazil. And so we're really expanding this international thing and it's going very, very well. So we are probably gonna launch another six or six to eight countries next year. So I'm very involved in that, especially because I have the pretty strong recruiting background.

I'm doing every interview for when we're hiring somebody to run one of those countries. I'm very involved in Acquisi. We haven't done any m and a of another agency yet, but we do, we love software. So we acquired Uber Suggest that was all Neil. I wasn't even a part of that acquisition. He, he did it on, on his own, but more recently we acquired another company called Answer the Public.

It's another very popular marketing tool that's, it gets more than half the traffic that Uber suggest gets, and Uber suggest gets a lot over a million visitors a month. So it's a lot of traffic. So I'm very involved in m and a for the company. and then that's, those are mostly what I do. I go to in-person events when, when we have company like sort of like leadership meetings because I just want to get to see the leaders face-to-face and hang out with them just to keep the relationship healthy, but, I don't do much more than that anymore.

Makes total sense. Yeah. So on the software AR acquisition side, I assume we we're taking profits on the agency. We're finding these tools that maybe we can get underpriced that have, that could be monetized or not, but have a shed load of traffic. You guys consume them into the organization and then I assume use that or aim to convert that traffic into agency leads.

Is that roughly the strategy? Yes, it's exactly what we do, but we also, I think we do a pretty good job of growing the revenue of those software businesses as well. But yeah, the goal, there's really just two goals. One is more leads for the agency, and two is to grow the SaaS revenue of those businesses.

Makes total sas. I have a question about international expansion, and this may be because of my limited understanding. Obviously you could have the core like UF team that could serve a client in the. And you wouldn't have to have an office in the uk, you wouldn't have to do UK tax, et cetera. What is the upside of having an office and a leader in all these.

Yeah, good question. There's a few for us. One is, there is a while back, we, we had LinkedIn as a client. I think we still do, but it's not a big contract. It's a huge company, but the contract is relatively small. We were invited to pitch them on an R F P that was like way, way, way bigger. It was, would, would it be our biggest client?

And I was speaking with my c e o about it and he's like, we can't pitch this. Like we're not prepared a and b, like the require. That you have to be in whatever the number was, 40 countries or something like that. So as we started to discuss more, my c e O came from I prospect. And so you know, he's got, or he already has a lot of experience working with all these giant brands that do marketing in a lot of different countries and we can't even pitch.

A lot of these big companies, we're not even in the pitch process because we're not in those countries. So that's like one of the things is as soon as we get in those countries, at least we can be at the table and we can have a conversation and try to win some of that business. So it really opens up the door for a lot bigger of contracts for us to work with bigger clients.

And the second thing is our blog, the traffic that we get is actually, it's global. It's not just in the US and we translate a lot of it as well. It's like we have a ton of traffic in Brazil cuz we translate so much of the content. . So if you look at our blog, like when I looked at it at our Google Analytics, what I saw through my eyes was, wow, every one of these countries could be an agency.

There's so many people going to our website in uk, in Australia, in Canada, and India, in Brazil. Like we could just launch an agency. Like these are leads, these are potential leads. And so that was the second thing to, for us, is we have enough leads, like as soon as we turn lead gen on, to be able to actually start an agency from scratch in those different countries makes total.

It kind of baffles me like what LinkedIn would want a marketing agency to do. Do they like, you have to tell me the exact work if you don't know, especially, but are they like they want someone to do f e O for their site? Like globally? Yeah. I can't say, but a lot of these big companies have internal marketing teams.

Most of them do. And so they have people who are an SEO team, they have media teams that work on different channels. We are oftentimes an extension of their. And they're just collaborating with us because we're the experts and we also have a lot of knowledge that we can bring to them. That they couldn't get on their own because their employees are working in only in their company.

So we've worked with a lot of their competitors, like we have a lot of knowledge in that industry that's valuable to them that we're able to bring. Makes total sense. Awesome. So I assume I probably know the answer to this question, but I assume the future for the NP organization, it's just gonna be more growth.

Cause that's what you and Neil talk about every. Yeah, I mean we get, I get hit up probably once a month from different investment bankers or m and a companies, brokers trying to get us to be a part of a roll up or trying to get us to sell the company or take an investment and we're having a lot of fun.

It's really, I like to call, what we're on right now is like we're on a rocket ship and we're experiencing like rocket ship. It's just not of interest to us right now. I think there will come a time when we feel like, hey, maybe we should do something for, there's a lot of reasons why it could make sense to take an investment eventually, but we're having so much fun that we don't want to be doing anything else right now.

Aside from the 200 K, you haven't taken any other cash, right? Well, we take distributions. Then you haven't put any, there's been no other investment into the business. Oh zero. Yeah. It's privately, it's independently owned by Justin, Neil and I. That's absolutely incredible. Yeah, it's crazy. I, I know there's not a lot of independent agencies that get to our size, but, so it's been fun.

And it seems like both of you have done a pretty good job of like engineering your roles to things that you just love doing. So you have work you love, you don't have a boss, just assuming you're making 10% on the hundred mil, there's definitely enough cash to go around for to live, right. So that it doesn't seem like there's massive upside from selling.

Yeah. Yeah, totally. And also like we love the brand, we love the people in the company. Like maybe it's just cause I don't have any experience with m and a that I'm naive and I'm saying, I'm afraid of it changing the culture, but I care a lot about the culture that we've built. I don't want somebody to come in and like, and change something that's, that.

We feel so good. Oh, what a great story, Mike. There's so many things I love about this. I think that the first one, which I think is probably the thing I love the most is how you guys have, or like got the attention first, built the trust, built the fame, and then it like the, I obviously haven't been an easy journey, but it's been five years of like what seems like incredible growth because you've had that problem solved.

And the second thing is just you and N and this whole thing, this pretty significant agency business with just the two of you and how you've managed to take yourself essentially both the operations, I think is super cool. So A, that's really, really cool. And then B, thank you so much for being so open and sharing all the things you have on this show.

Yeah, of course. No, I, this is like the first podcast that I've done. In a long time because I always ignore podcast requests just because I don't like to be the person that's like, I like to be the person behind the scenes. Neil likes to be the person on video, you know, he, he's great at it, and so I don't even bother.

I was like, there's no value in me doing these podcasts to try to drive leads when we already get plenty and, but, The reason that I responded to you and also just like kind of made a commitment to myself to start doing it more is because the only reason that I am where I am today is because of Neil.

Like, sure, like I worked really hard to get to where I am and I've always been like entrepreneurial my whole life, but. He gave me this opportunity and like he taught me so much about entrepreneurship when I was like 22, 23 years old. And so I feel like it's my obligation to just give back. And so now I like, I want to help people just mentor.

I mean, I already do all the time, especially with close friends. They ask, they call me all the time with who owned businesses and say like, what should I do? What? But you know, if I could spread this like across a bigger audience and just help out, like it makes me feel good, I. For sure. That's a, it's a noble mission.

If, obviously, if anybody's looking for marketing mp digital.com, I assume. Yep. Mp digital.com or Mike Camo on LinkedIn. If you wanna connect with Mike anywhere else people can find you. I said I'm working on a one page website right now, but it's, oh, nice. I'd say under mike camo.com. It's under construction, so it's getting there.

all of those links will be in the comments. Mike, thank you so much for your, Thanks so much, Tom. I really appreciate it.

All right. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks, Mike. Shout out to Neil. Shout out to MP Digital. That was an awesome interview. If you have any feedback, please go to Apple Podcast, leave a rating or review. Send me a screenshot and I'll get it read. Out at the end of the show in an outro. I'll also give a shout out to your business.

Of course, let's give a massive shout out to href Webmaster Tools completely free. Go check it out. You get three things. First thing you'll get is a backlink tracker. Second thing you'll get is visibility of which keywords you rank for. Third thing you'll get is a site. Audit all three Google hres webmaster tools and you will find it.

And then finally, thank you so much for.