Business Partnerships & Exit Strategies Money Is Funny Podcast

🎙️ I went on Money Is Funny — and we got REAL about what happens to your business if you're not there tomorrow 😳💼

Hey, it's me, Brandon Leibowitz, founder of SEO Optimizers! 👋 I sat down with Michael Anthony and Ahmad Kroon on the Money Is Funny podcast, and let me tell you — this one got good. 🔥

We dug into the stuff most business owners avoid until it's too late: 👇

✅ Real exit strategies you can actually use
✅ How to value your company (and why you NEED to) 💰
✅ Buy-sell agreements that protect your family if life throws a curveball 🛡️
✅ Building systems that make you replaceable — in the BEST way possible 😎
✅ Learning to delegate so you can finally take that vacation 🏝️

Oh, and I dropped a few marketing gems too 💎 — including my favorite remarketing tricks 🎯 and the ONE YouTube ad rule that can save you money instantly. (Hint: if they skip before 30 seconds… you don't pay a penny 🤯💸)

Whether you're just starting out or building something you want to pass down one day 👨‍👧‍👦, this episode is packed with the kind of playbook I wish someone handed me back in 2007. 📈

🎧 Hit play, stick around, and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss the good stuff! 🙌

👉 Free gift for listeners: seooptimizers.com/gift

#MoneyIsFunny #ExitStrategy #SmallBusiness #Entrepreneurship #SEO #DigitalMarketing #BrandonLeibowitz #SEOOptimizers #BusinessTips #Remarketing #YouTubeAds #BuySellAgreement #Delegate #PodcastEpisode #BusinessOwner #MarketingTips

Transcript

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What happens to your business if you're not there tomorrow? And how do you build it in a way that buyers or even your family actually want it? In this podcast episode, we break down real exit strategies you can actually use, how to value your company, set up buy-sell agreements that protect your family, and build systems that make you replaceable in the best way possible, of course. We also get into smart marketing moves like remarketing and one YouTube ad rule that saves you more money immediately. I'm Brandon Liebowitz, founder of SEO Optimizers, and I sat down with Michael Anthony and Ahmad Kroon on Money Is Funny to dig into all of this and more. If building an exit-ready business matters to you, stick around and make sure to subscribe See, don't miss the playbook. Welcome to Money Is Funny, where we have a relaxed but important conversation about money and life and how we can make the best of both decisions. I'm Michael Anthony, and we're with my man Armand Crume. We got Brandon. Speaking of exit strategies, we got a— we got somebody, a great CEO, that we talk about building company on. Matter of fact, let's stop talking behind his back. Armand, why don't you give him a great introduction? So, all right, we got Brandon on the on here now, and he operates an SEO optimizer. He's been operating SEO Optimizer since 2007. He is a digital marketing company that focuses on helping small and medium-sized businesses get more online traffic, which in turn converts into clients, sales, and leads. How you doing, sir? I'm doing well, thanks for having me on today. So, Brandon, How do we take a company and how do you build it up? There's a lot of different ways to build it up, but I focus more on the digital side of things. And the way to build it up is get more traffic, get more sales, more leads, more phone calls. Traffic doesn't really matter. It's all about getting those conversions. That's really what matters. And there's a lot of different ways to get those conversions. You could do social media, you could do paid ads, you can do email marketing. You do search engine optimization, which is what I focus on, and try to get you that free traffic from Google. But you might get as much traffic or get as many leads as possible. And the more leads you get, the better. And you want to try to use all those different sources to see what's going to work. Offline marketing, do print, TV, radio if you want to try those out. But it's all about just kind of throwing everything against the wall, seeing what works, pushing more money into that, pulling money away from what's not working, and just testing. Because you never know until you try it. Now when it comes to like internet ads, how do you feel like that works as opposed to actual regular ads on TV, radio ads? Or, you know, is that just more of the wave now, or you think that's a little bit more what the market that you're trying to— the demographic you're trying to go into? No, it just depends on your budget. If you're trying to run TV ads, it's probably going to be a minimum, maybe $10,000, $100,000. I'm not sure what it costs to run TV ads. Whereas with Google Ads, you can run an ad on YouTube, which is the second most popular website on Google— or I mean, on the internet, YouTube is the second most popular one out there— and you can run ads on there for a $5 a day budget. And with YouTube though, the nice thing about those ads is you could set it up so Somebody watches your ad and then skips it before 30 seconds, you don't pay a penny. Then after 30 seconds, then you pay like 10 cents a view. And you can get a lot more targeting with YouTube and all these other platforms versus TV. It's good, but it doesn't give you— like, Google knows too much about you. They know what you're doing, they know what websites you've been on. TV just knows what TV shows you've been watching. They don't know the ins and outs of who you are, or even if you are watching that TV, because maybe your wife or your brother's cousin was watching TV and now you're sitting there, and they're going to target ads that aren't targeted towards you, to thinking that you're that person. Whereas with Google, they know too much. You're logged into Google or Gmail or some way you're logged into Google so they can verify it's you, then they know who you are, and then they could send out really targeted ads. Brandon, you just dropped a bomb as far as advertisement go. Say it again, people that advertise on YouTube, if they don't watch more than 10 seconds, they don't pay a penny. 30 seconds. Oh, 30 seconds, it's even better. And even if they listen, if they watch it or listen to it for 29 seconds, skip it, they still heard your message. So yeah, you just got some free ad space right there. But the biggest part is you gotta get them hooked within those first 5 seconds. True. Otherwise they'll skip it. But after that, 30 seconds still free, which is pretty nice. So, so when you're dealing with different small companies, do you take the, the same strategy with all of them, or does it depend on the industry? Do you usually go with the paid ad? What direction do you normally go in? Just depends on the industry, depends on who they're targeting, where their potential audience is. That's the main thing is who's your audience and How do we get in front of them at the right time? You don't need to be everywhere. They're not on Google, we don't need to be on Google. I mean, most of the time it will be Google, but if you're like a musician or like something like that, or a sports team, maybe social media is going to be a little bit better for you. But it's all about just knowing who your audience is and where are they, how do I get in front of them. So, so for instance, I actually met a very interesting person. I'm not sure he's in the same industry as you, but he runs the marketing and advertising and the technical technology side of art sales and deals with selling these art. And he said the way you sell art is you basically make it popular to the masses, even though they're not the ones who are buying it. The masses aren't buying it, but the rich, the really rich, and they only want to, you know, buy what the masses who can't afford it buy, right? Is that about what— is that the same thing? Like sometimes you want to make things a little bit popular to the masses Kind of like what we're talking about Rodeo Drive. You want to— you want the masses to want this purse, and the— but you make it $5,000 or $10,000 a purse so that people can flex and buy that purse for $10,000 and say, see, I own this purse. Is it— do you help build the excitement for a product? No, I'll help drive the traffic there, but they gotta record the video. They gotta do it themselves. They gotta make it authentic. If I'm sitting there recording a video for them or doing all that it's gonna lose authenticity because they know the product or service better than I do, and it's gonna show through. So you gotta let them kind of take care of that and let them put that authenticity out there. And I'll help with script writing, but other than that, they gotta take it from there. They gotta take it from there. So they'll, they'll, they'll make the the ad per se, and you just know where to place it and have them get the traffic from it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. So go ahead, go ahead, Mike. No, I was going to say, so once you have the ad, you feel it's hot, it's great. So where do you go with the ad from there? Then we just throw it up on whatever platforms we think that would be where your audience is at. And if none of them, then we don't throw up any ads and we try a different form of marketing. But with ads, you want to test it out. You gotta think like, is my audience on Instagram? Like if I'm a dentist or an SEO company or a lawyer, no one's really going on social media looking for me. So I could try running ads on Facebook, but it's probably not gonna work. But you might wanna test it out. But I would run 'em on Google. Google owns YouTube, which has banners and display ads as well through Google. And Google, people searching on Google, they're searching, whereas on social media you're just kind of interrupting people. Based off interest doesn't mean they want to use your product or service. It just means they're interested sometime in the past or in the future, but doesn't mean right now. Whereas Google, they're searching. So can you give me an example of like a company you worked with and what was their, you know, what did you use? You use Google Ads, do YouTube, you know, what, what exactly, when you tested it out, what it looked like was the best avenue for that product? Well, we could talk about mine. I do SEO, so I try to get myself ranked on Google, get that free traffic so I don't have to spend money on ads. Focusing on that search engine optimization. But half the traffic that comes to your website is going to leave immediately, no matter what industry you're in. It's called the bounce rate. So then you gotta remarket to them, so follow them around with those ads. So anyone that's been to my website but didn't fill out a form or didn't go to a specific page, I'll follow them around with a set of ads. Anyone that's been to my website and maybe watched some of my classes, I'll send them a different set of ads. And these will be banner ads that follow them around on wherever, or run them on YouTube, or run them on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, and just try to stay top of mind. Because someone's been to your website, they know who you are, they're probably just seeing your product or service, something distracted them. And if you keep— you keep yourself top of mind, you could probably convert that person later on in the future. Also trying to capture the email addresses, and then also you can run ads against your competitors' traffic. So anyone that's gone to like Yelp looking for an SEO company, I could target that traffic and remarket to that traffic, which not a lot of people know about either. And you can do that on YouTube and you get 30 seconds free ad space to target your competitors' traffic and they'll never know about it. Wow. Okay, so when you say follow them, if they've been to your website, you follow— how do you go about following besides email? No, like you go on Amazon, you look at a product, you don't buy it, those ads follow you around doing the same thing. Yeah, the bots, the bots. But I thought like they see you on the website and those advertisements follow you, and I thought they were like little bots or what, like they call them bots or whatever when you land on a website. Or maybe like cookies they put, or cookies, yes, to track you. But yeah, no bots, but no bots tracking you. Yeah, yeah, bots are what social media has. There's no bots for the ads. Oh, there might be some ad There might be some bots where people buy it and maliciously click on competitors' ads, but Google's pretty good at cleaning that up. They could see through that because, yeah, too many people have done that in the past. They're just like, oh, I'm gonna click on all my competitors' ads and bleed them dry, which is not a good time. So let's talk about business partnership a little bit. Did you partner up with anyone with your company? No. In the past, I've partnered up with web developers because I do SEO, so I get people traffic, but a lot of times their websites they aren't the best website, so they need a little touch and cleaning up to get that traffic to convert into clients. So partnering up with web developers, and then the web developers, when they build a website, they need to get traffic somehow. So they usually say, hey, there's this SEO company, they could help out with SEO, paid ads, or you could just try it yourself. But usually you gotta have— because you could spend millions of dollars building the best website, but if nobody knows about it, it doesn't do any good. You gotta drive awareness. Okay. Okay. And, you know, we're talking about exit strategy. Have you decided on an exit strategy for your company sometime in the future, or have you given any thought to that at all? Yeah. And I'll probably just keep it and just keep going and building it up and then pass it down. You know, I run into the same situation with my financial planning company, right? So, you know, I'm building it up right now, and I had actually had it evaluated. So I have to have— I have to have mine evaluated. And then I also have developed like a buy-sell agreement just in case something has ever happened to me. Right. And so a lot of people don't think about like getting their company evaluated, making sure that there's some kind of exit strategy for their, you know, their company, their business. Because I have 3 daughters. I don't know if you have any kids or anything along those lines. My hope is that one of them wants to take over Daddy's business. As I was talking to my nephew today about my business, his eyes glossed over and it was like, boring, I don't want to do that. And then we were teasing him that he was going to grow up and just be a stripper one day and not want to do what I do. So do you have any kids? No, not yet. But I mean, with business, so it's like SEO, not my first choice. It's like, oh, John wants to Digital marketing, search engine optimization, not my first choice, but after a while you realize it's not that bad. And with the business, like having your own business gives you a lot more freedom, flexibility versus working in corporate offices. Like I've worked at a lot of advertising agencies and it's a lot better being your own boss and take some time, but they'll fall into it and someone eventually would, or you just kind of just let it go, or I'm not sure. But the exit strategy is a good idea to have some plan in place to figure out what to do in the future just in case. Who knows what's gonna happen? Absolutely. I think having a plan in case is always best play. But I've also kind of— when I hear the word exit strategy, I feel like, especially if it's something that you thought about forming a business, you're already kind of planning to fail. Can you speak a little bit about that? Yes. Having the exit strategy just means you're ready to just sell it, get that money, just try and make that quick dollar versus trying to really build a brand and keep it for long term? Well, you know, for me, I don't think I was, you know, I don't think I planned for failure per se. I think it has more to do with the fact that, you know, I have a wife, I have a kid, and if I die tomorrow, I want to make sure that my wife makes money off of this, right? Or my family makes money off of this. So you're developing an exit strategy, and on top of that, you also want to make sure your clients are taken care of. So, you know, Brandon has clients, you know I have my own clients. So what you want to do is you want to make sure that there is a Plan B for your clients, that they get taken care of in the event that I get in a car accident, right? That they're not floundering about or whatever the case may be. Like, there's somebody who can back me up on top of that, who can, you know, because when you're— when you talk about an exit strategy for your business you end up having to sell it. If you die, your wife needs to get some of that money. So what you usually end up doing is setting up what is called a buy-sell agreement with somebody so that if you die or you become disabled, they will buy your business from you, and then your family get the money from it versus you building this thing up and it just basically just going away because your business is obviously worth something. My business is obviously worth something. And so that's why you always want to try to have an exit— not an exit strategy like, you know, I'm gonna go work for advertisement after this or whatever the case may be, but more so if something happens to me or I can't do this any longer, everyone is taken care of. And that's why I was asking if you had like a partnership, a business partner that you work with Do you have someone that you work with who you can hand it off to if need be? Or if you're on your own, do you have someone lined up in the event that something might happen to you? Okay. Yeah. Or have you worked with the company to build themselves up and do the same thing? No, that makes sense. Yeah, no, I thought you meant partnership in the past. When I first started doing digital marketing, I was like, all right, I need some help getting clients. Let me partner up with web developers, they could pass me on leads and I could pass them on leads, but don't have any official partner where it's like, if worst case scenario, emergency happens, never know what's gonna happen in the future. And yeah, no, so that's where I've gotten in place where I have people that help me out that I could pass it on, but still, I still need to be there. It's not like I could be completely hands off, which is ultimately what I wanna be able to do in the future is be able to, in case anything happens, step away and or go on vacation and not have to be constantly checking emails and be working while you're on vacation. So that would be ultimate goal. But yeah, don't have any in place right now. In, in terms of exiting, like when you like a situation like that and you've done sold the company or sold whatever business or assets or whatever and you still have somewhat as a you still on as a consultant Have you ever seen or heard anyone to actually say, never mind, I want to go back and take back the business? I mean, yeah, I've seen some times where they sell it and then people that take it over just completely ruin it. Like Vans shoes. Let's listen to this autobiography about Van, the guy that created Vans, and said that he's pulled it off. I forgot when, but like in the '80s Sold it and then they just kind of took it in a whole different direction where before he was like really customizing shoes and being personalized, like, all right, if you want this, we'll sell you one shoe at a time to like some people. So he was like really taking care and then it became like really just standardized and it wasn't that same personal touch. And then I don't know if he re-bought the business, but he came back from retirement, like he was a consultant for a few years, left, took the money, and then he saw what was happening, came back on, tried to fix it. I don't know if he bought the company again. It's right, might be expensive to do, or it might have dropped in price so much that it was just easy way to get it back and then rebuild it up and build it up to what it's at to now, back to where Vans, you could see it's like the classic shoes that almost everyone has those or has worn those in the past. So, but yeah, I know they really revitalized it, revamped it, which I didn't think that had happened too often. But then I think like people buying these businesses, they don't necessarily, they don't Sometimes they're just looking at the dollar sign. They don't care about like the true core value of the business, which is what you hold. I feel that the same way with more or less like with, with, with fashion and even now with entertainment. You know, a few years ago George Lucas had sold, you know, Lucasfilms and sold Star Wars pretty much to Disney, $4.1 billion, you know what I'm saying? So he's going to be taken care of. I'm sure the people that was at Skywalker Ranch financially would be taken care of. But as far as like clients and fans of the Star Wars franchise, they may feel a certain way with the integrity of how the films have went away. But you know, we have spin-offs with the Boba Fett and The Mandalorians and all the other films. It would be— I guess, I guess it would be in bad form for him to turn around and be like, no, I'm gonna— because he— I'm sure he's— I'm not saying he spent the $4.1 billion, but I'm not gonna say like, all right, let me buy Star Wars back and then I don't really see that happening, do you? I mean, yeah, when it's that much money, I don't think you could say I want to buy it back. Take it, it's all good, it's fine. Go ahead, Mike. I'm just gonna say, and think where he's at, where he was at the point, he was just completely done with, you know, the franchise. And he was like, yo, I've done this for the last 20-plus years, I'm completely done. And now where someone, or like The fans are actually upset with where the films have gone and some of the places. Like, I'm still a fan. I, I've watched the shows and I can see how some things— but it's just entertainment. And where I feel like some businesses, they, like you said, if they get about the dollar and, you know, you had an idea, you were making things out of toys and you turn that into a $4 billion profit industry, I think you've won. I think you want, and I guess to learn where you basically bow out and not let your ego get where your dollar signs is at. And I think where artist integrity and dollar signs meet, I think people have a hard time sleeping with that. Well, you know, with the companies that me and Brandon are, you know, talking about the small and medium, it becomes really personal. I think Vans is like the bigger company where still kind of personal, right? And so, you know, what— tell that to the Star Wars fans. You don't think there's Jedi Knights? There's kids taking Jedi Knight classes, you know what I'm saying? There's people, there's people practicing to speak Wookiee. Well, what— well, I'm also saying it's personal to the people who are building the business, right? So the people who are working with Brandon, this is personal. This is our baby. This is you know, we're trying to build this up. This is something that we believe in. And, you know, the point I'm trying to make when we're talking about an exit strategy is when you're creating this baby, right, you're building it up, you also need to think about the other side of it too. Like, hey, and kind of like what Brandon says, you know, a lot of, a lot of people need to learn to delegate more so that you are not the centerpiece at all times. And you need to train people to do what you do so that you can take a vacation, so you can do these things. And then if, God forbid, something happened to you, right, that your family is taken care of and your clients are better taken care of. But if you have a chokehold so tight on your business, right, then if something ever happens to you, ever, it can just go down in flames and go into the direction that the way you did not want. Am I Do you agree, Brandon? Yep, yep. No, you got to have, yeah, that backup plan and just have something in place. But yeah, the more you delegate, the better. So I've learned over the years, because frustrating sometimes training people could be like, all right, now I have to train this person and do my job and then fix their mistakes. But you find the right person and then you just realize, all right, they're just taking so much off my shoulders where now I can focus on more important things or working on the business instead of working in the business, which is a lot of people kind of get stuck in when they're in the startup or smaller, medium-sized business, just stuck working in it and not growing it, which you gotta do both. But you shouldn't be working in it as much. You should just be overlooking everything and delegating to other people. Yep. And to be honest, and to be honest with you— oh, go ahead. I was going to say, if you don't, if you don't have these other people in, in place take take the reins, you're gonna have the last season of Succession. You're gonna have people not being able to take care of the business. You're not sure if it's gonna be family, if it's gonna be a complete stranger, and then it's gonna be hell. And then you end up with Will going back and taking the company back, which is pretty much was that last season. So, well, yeah, and what I was gonna say is, you know, you know, I'm training someone right now and it's— it can be a little bit difficult, you know, because you know it so well, you know what you need to do. I was actually training someone to do a financial plan, and he was doing it for like an hour, and I was like, look, all you need to do is boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I was done in like 10, 15 minutes. I'm like, this is easy. But you have to take that step back and go, I've been doing this every day for 17 years. So for me, this is breathing. I can look at it and see. But it also speaking to people who are nervous about partnering up with people or delegating or having that exit strategy, you know, she's also seeing things that I don't even see anymore because it's so familiar to me. I'm so close to it that they figure out ways to improve my systems and improve what I'm doing because it's just a fresh pair of eyes. And so there's ways that you can do this and partner up with people and have that exit strategy and be able to delegate to people and improve your company at the same time. And, you know, if you're going to hire Brandon to help you build up your, your company, you need to kind of try to do it all at the same time. And, you know, one of my old mentors said 33% of my energy needs to go to building my business, 33% of my business needs to be maintaining my clients, and 33% of my time should be administrative. So, Brandon, if people wanted to get a hold of you, how can they get a hold of you and try and possibly help you help them If you can possibly want to help them boost up traffic and get their website or even any of their products out, how can they reach you? Yeah, so everyone that's listening or watching, I created a special gift for them. If they go to my website, seooptimizers.com, that's SEO-optimizers.com/gift, they can find that there with my contact information. And I do free consultations. So if they have a website and want me to check it out from an SEO perspective, I can see what's working, what's not working, and how to get them to the level that they want to be.