About Erik:

Erik Huberman is the Founder & CEO of Hawke Media, a full-service Outsourced CMO based in Santa Monica, CA that launched in 2014 and has been valued at $80 million. In just 5 years, Hawke Media has grown from 7 to over 120 employees and has serviced 400+ brands including Raden, BeautyCon, The Ridge Wallet, Buscemi, Red Bull, Evite, Verizon Wireless, HP.

Want to See More of Erik? Follow him Online:

• Hawke Media Website
• Erik’s LinkedIn
• Erik’s Instagram
• Erik’s Twitter
• Erik’s Facebook

Time Stamps:

Useful insights and questions from this episode:

Introduction 0:00

Who is Erik Huberman? 2:12

Starting Hawke Media 3:01

Challenges in Growing an Agency 4:17

How Important is Understanding the

Cash Flow of Your Agency 8:05

Figuring Out Your Business Goals 10:43

How to Increase the Value of Your Agency 12:23

How to Know the Right Time to

Offer More Services to Your Clients 16:38

Process of Adding New Services to the Agency 18:06

How to Manage Employee’s Capacity 19:24

Ensuring Your Team’s Well-Being 21:27

Different Tools and Systems to Ensure

the Performance of Your Business 23:02

Convenient Automated Profitability Software 24:29

What are the Important Core Metrics in an Agency 26:12

Advice to Start-Up Agency Owners 28:14

Blog:

Hawke Media is one of the Top 20 Most Promising Digital Marketing Solution Providers in 2017 and was named at the Top Inc 5,000 fastest growing companies in 2017 as well. Hawke Media has worked with over 400+ brands including Evite, Red Bull, Verizon, HP.

Today, Hawke Media continuously provides exceptional marketing services to the business owner along with their team of top tier experts that helps the different aspects of a business.

Erik began consulting and advising and it was organic when he started an agency. He first sought out help, hired people, until it grew into an agency with over 170 people and is continuously growing up to this day. Understanding a niche that is completely under-served and needed help drove Erik into building the agency that is now Hawke Media.

Despite being offered to sell the company quite a few times, Erik liked the idea of continuing. He loves the idea of working with different companies, helping entrepreneurs, and most importantly he is truly passionate about what he does.

What are the Challenges in Growing an Agency?

It’s not always smooth sailing when it comes to running an agency. And, according to Erik, here are the challenges he faced while growing his company:

• People are volatile and emotional. People have different personalities, wants, goals, and needs.
• Even though their payroll is similar to their monthly revenue five years ago, there are times where they get thin on cash wherein it took a while to catch up with the revenue to make money for the team.

He also shared a challenging experience when they had a $400,000 payroll and $800,000 for a month while having only $13,000 in the bank. Entrepreneurs also said that it could happen again so he better get ready for his business.

“That is very rare that you when you're growing a business like this and you don't have a ton of outside funding and you're not publicly traded, you’ll have so much cash that you're never gonna get thin.”

Erik added, “Don't just let your money sit on the bank, invest it.”

How Important is Understanding the Cash Flow of Your Agency

The very first model Erik used to start his business was paying the flat base salary then giving 30% of what they get paid by the clients.

On the next batch of talented individuals he hired, Erik said that they followed the same payroll model of which they give 30% of what they made in addition to their agreed flat rate. Erik found out that his employees are reactive.

Erik added that they also looked at their amount of expenses on their first year to see how much they spent on overhead, advertisements, payroll, etc. He had a profit of 40% in the first year and from then, he knew it wasn’t sustainable. And, from the data which they have gathered, Erik and his team decided to change their business model, and see which works best for them.

Figuring Our Your Business Goals

The team experienced hitting their benchmark early so they had to find ways to maintain it. Erik's original plan was to get into 10 million in revenue. He didn't have a grandiose plan and now he has a multinational, m...