What Erik Huberman Knows About Marketing That You Don't! 💵 E92

Diversification is a money preservation strategy.

You know, if you look at most people, even Warren Buffett,

he made his money on Geico and like going deep in insurance

and then took that, spread it around.

What are most brands doing wrong on social media?

It's forgetting that people take time to buy things.

The average sales cycle online

is generally between three weeks and three months.

If you're not doing things to nurture

and actually follow up with those people

and stay in front of them and keep them coming back,

you're probably missing out on 75 80 percent of your potential revenue ladies and gentlemen welcome to the money mondays i am very excited for our guest today this is one of the few people that i admire in the marketing space because he's been in the game just as long as i have if not longer longer. And he's just been buying up all of our competitors, buying up all of our friends and doing a full-fledged roll-up in the category.
And right now we're sitting in a parking lot. That's why we're in an RV motorhome.
For busy gentlemen like this, I have to go drive to them. And he was speaking at an event that I'm actually throwing today here in the mortgage industry.
I recently launched Elevator Funding, a mortgage company where we do everything in the mortgage space with e-mortgage capital as our partner and they are throwing this mortgage event with us today here in irvine california and so i decided to bring the rv motorhome trevor brought us out here so that i could catch mr eric huberman from hawk media so as you guys know we cover three core topics how to make money how to invest money how to give it away to charity this gentleman knows how to do all of those things at scale and so i'm really excited to interview him so what we're going to do is have him do the quick two minute bio so we get straight to the money sure uh bio so i mean it's fun because of the path of money i graduated 08 went into real estate one week before the whole industry collapsed and uh made 350 dollars my first year out of college and went this this isn't going to work. So I started working on an online music company, built basically like masterclass for the music industry, built that for two years, got it profitable, hired a CEO, and then built two e-commerce companies consecutively.
The last one out of an incubator called Science that had just launched our shave club, worked with their portfolio, built an activewear brand, sold it to Bally Total Fitness. And then this brings us to about 11 years ago, started consulting and advising for a bunch of brands, saw how broken the marketing ecosystem was and started scaling it.
And so fast forward, it's been 11 years. We've got about 250 full-time people.
We've worked with over 5,000 brands. We've acquired 21 different agencies.
Yeah, it's crazy. We have a venture fund and we're invested in over 100 different marketing tech and e-commerce tech companies.
We're an owner in the women's soccer team in LA, got a family office on the commercial real estate side. And yeah.
All right. So it's not like we're going to need to do seven episodes.
Let's start with the beginning. Hawk Media.
When you decide, and by the way, Hawk is spelled with an E at the end, in case you guys are looking it up. It's H-A-W-K-E.
Tell us about Hawk Media. How did it start? Why did it start? And let's go into that.
Yeah, it was really, I had built the credibility and actual knowledge on how to build these digital brands when it was new. I mean, this was 2013.
I got a call from Red Bull and they're like, how do we do this digital stuff? Like that was a common phrase. What is this digital stuff? I want to do a tweet.
Yeah, exactly. And so I just started consulting and advising and calling myself this outsourced CMO.
And that resonated. And so then I started getting more business and I could handle and I tried to use other agencies to actually execute.
And I just found that 99% of them are full of shit. And so I just after a few burned some of my clients, I went, I can't afford to keep this up.
I got to just build my own team. And so I hired a small team using my consulting fees.
And literally we went back and said, now we can just execute it. Let's keep it super flexible.
We're going to be the best at what we do, but easy to work with was always what we had in mind and how we built it. And that was it off to the races.
So let's say someone out there is a brand owner. Why should they consider using an agency like Hawk or one of its competitors? Sure.
I think, I mean, there's a lot of reasons. One is I'm going to be able to attract and hire better talent than most companies.
There's the really sexy, you know, brands and the high flyers and the really great companies that, you know, they might be able to compete, but most marketers don't want to go work at, you know, just some other company. And so you're a victim of the talent you can attract in that situation.
So that's number one. Number two, the forest from the trees thing is really important.
So, you know, we watch a lot of companies try to bring things in house and that usually lasts six months to a year because it takes about that long to see the degrade of all your marketing starts going south because you don't have that outside perspective. And that's why every Fortune 2000 uses agencies.
And the idea that it's binary or one or the other, I think is crazy. And then for us, we've now built an AI system that's digesting over 8,000 companies, marketing media and revenue data in real time, training AI against it so it can look in an individual company and see exactly what's going wrong and right.
You don't have that yourself. And so all the softwares we have, all the tools we have, all the knowledge we have, you're not going to build that in-house unless you're a Fortune 500 and then go figure all the Fortune 500s use agencies.
So that's a big aspect. i often say is when someone wants to hire in-house they're like i want to hire someone five years experience and does this this and this on on meta someone with five years experience running paid ads is going to sell two thousand dollars a day of waffles and irons and pillows they don't need to come work for you for eight grand a month yep when they can make literally thousands of dollars a day selling knives or selling cutlery or selling freaking bubbles unless they're not actually good at it and then they'll come take that job and they'll come work for you yeah and so i always recommend on the agency side when you're first getting starting out listen i understand but there are agencies actually like hawk which they'll start sometimes with 5k 10k 20k budgets we still do rather than most agencies which are like my agency the 25k minimum mostly because in the influencer space you can't spend five grand and really figure it out i need to actually spend enough money to matter um but for your agency you're able to like really track and really dial in because you own 21 different agencies of all different topics yeah so walk us through why did you go the roll-up route why did you decide i'm going to buy up a lot of the competitors, interesting characters in the media tech space? It's really, it's the same talent conversation.
It's like, I can go and try to find a salesperson that can sell into something and like a great, let's take Amazon as an interesting channel because it's one of the better growing ones we have. So I can go hire an Amazon expert and a salesperson that can support them or try to train my sales team to do that.
And that process is slow. We just talked about this before the podcast.
Like, I want to be the best. Like, marketing world domination is our mission statement.
Like, we want to go for it. And so instead of, like, that slow build where maybe in the next year or two I'll get to the point of what an agency is already doing, I can go find a great agency with really talented people that are already executing, give them my platform and everything we're able to do.
And one plus one can equal three. So it's just at this stage of our company, it's a lot faster and more efficient and just a better process to just go buy.
So on the making money side, someone out there is like, I've got a brand or product or service and I want to make money, but I only have 10 grand to get started. What should they be looking for? They should be thinking about ROI.
Should they be thinking about branding? Should they thinking about hiring experts or consultants? Like what are the first things someone can do when they're like, okay, I'm ready to go for my product is ready. Yeah.
I would say if you don't have a consistent 10 grand a month to spend, don't take it and put it back in your pocket. If you're a founder of a company, you need to go figure out how to drive revenue,

whether it's funding or actual revenue. You got to go build a board.

Yeah,

exactly.

I mean,

I spoke about this the other day at a conference,

like the whole selling things out of your trunk.

It's not a metaphor.

It's a real thing.

Yeah,

me too.

I did it in traffic before.

Yeah.

So I can get that story.

Yeah.

When I was selling lemonade as a kid,

I used to run in front of cars because I knew they wouldn't run me over

and they wouldn't say no. But by the way new york don't do that yeah yeah touche oh hi california it was a small town they were yeah they were they'd stop um i position myself at a stop sign and then they'd stop at the stop sign and i'd walk in front of their car and hold up a lemonade yeah and so they had to say i made them say no um but yeah i mean really is, you got to go figure out how to start building your business organically in the beginning or get someone that's going to fund it, which I think people chase fundraising a little too quickly.
It is easier in the beginning, but my dad used to tell me money's expensive. Like you're giving a piece of your company.
If you actually believe your company is going to be worth hundreds of millions, billions of dollars, why the hell would you give up a piece of your company early on? We've bootstrapped hawk to this point we've never taken outside capital and like if you can avoid it that's great but you have to be real with yourself you might need the funding um and after that again when you can spend a consistent 10 grand then that's when you can get to start running some advertising doing some email marketing people it depends on the product or service it's really what you're going to do. But even influencer marketing, depending.
But it really starts with partnerships and things that don't cost money in the beginning. So like finding someone that aligns with your brand that has an audience that's willing to put it out there, you know, calling in favors, asking for help, hitting up influencers that might give you a shout out, your your commodity at that point is time because you don't have any money.
So use your time to go find ways to get it out there. And then once you see the flywheel going, what's good about doing that, it's not just you need to save the money.
You don't have it. It also forces you to really figure out what is the pitch? What is the value? How are people responding to it? Because when you're that in the weeds that you are selling your product personally, you will learn a lot about your product.
So we're in San Diego, California, passing through Camp Pendleton. And there's those two huge globe looking things on the right of the freeway.
That's like a nuclear power plant. And something happened.
And the freeway was stopped. Like, stop, stopped.
Like, we're not going anywhere all day is the way they explained it. And so I thought, basically, I have hours to go.
But my partner at the time, his dad was the main executive for Rhino Linings, which was doing around $200 million a year for truck bedding back then. And him and the owner of the company were in the car with us.
So as you can imagine, they're very busy guys. They're frustrated because we don't know when this multi-hour trap is going to end.
But I happen to have 60 t-shirts, five dozen t-shirts in my trunk, 12 of each color, All different sizes. So it's not really, that part was a bit awkward.
And so I got in the car and literally started selling t-shirts for hours until I sold all of them. But here's the fun part.
The billionaire guy, the main owner and the dad got out of the car and helped us. Yeah.
And so they walked around and they just, and later they brought it up for like two years how much fun they had yeah going back to their roots of selling i was gonna say that's the thing is if you've got that entrepreneur bug it's it's the game that's fun it's not about like i doubt you made that much money off t-shirts it was just like what am i gonna do with my time i'm gonna go you know flex this muscle a little bit and have some fun with it i still think it was such a fun day yeah 100 we're selling them from 10 to 15 bucks each times 60 so i was like made like six or seven hundred bucks yeah gross not net by the way that's people don't realize gross sales versus net sales okay so on the investing side why would someone as they're growing their business decide to start finally investing outside of their business okay they've started to scale their company now it's time like hey maybe 50 grand into real estate or 50 grand into stocks. Diversification is a money preservation strategy.
I've heard this a lot recently and I believe it. You make your money on being hyper deep and focused.
If you look at most people, even Warren Buffett, he made his money on Geico and going deep in insurance and then took that, spread it around. When I say maintain, I mean outpacing inflation like maintaining according to how money is degrading basically and so to me it's the forced uh function of getting some money out of your business so that you actually create a stable foundation to keep building on because if you keep everything in your business businesses are risky they're always go out, you know, there's companies that go out of business after 100 years.
So it's,

it's crazy to keep everything tied into one thing. And so as it starts to make money,

having the ability to take some of it out and put it away so that you're set, it's the kind of saving

for retirement thing. But honestly, as an entrepreneur, most aren't going to retire.
But

it's still like, God forbid, the business that I've put all my time in ends up not being necessary,

or AI takes it over, etc. I've taken enough money out over time that I'll be okay.
And I'll figure out the next thing. I think it's, it's a, it's a safety net.
So let's say someone listening has built up their company. They're doing $4 million in sales and Eric Kuberman from Hawk Media calls and says, I want to buy your company.
How do they make a decision of what the heck to do? Should they sell? Should they wait? Should they keep going? How do they figure out what to sell for and why to sell? And how do they explain? Like, just walk us through that process or thought process. Yeah, we're a unique buyer.
Like, we're looking to buy people that want to keep growing generally. And if or if they need an out.
But like, we're not a big cash buyer, meaning like we're not just handing them a check and going goodbye. So it's one way or another, they're going to be be partnered up with us and so the people that partner up with us are the ones that are like i i don't have a three-year window or a two-year window on this and i'll explain why i either am out now and i can't hang out because most other than us most companies require an earn out which means you have to stick around you have to keep running it and if you don't metrics, you lose everything.
And so you get a little bit of cash up front. Usually it's like, you know, 15% of the value of the deal, maybe half of your profit for the year you might get in some of these deals, but then everything else in contingent on you growing the business.
And that's how the buyer mitigates their risk on making sure that you actually stick around. For us, we just do it.
If you succeed, we succeed. If you fail, we fail.
We make it a lot more aligned. And so that works really well for people that are want to keep going after those couple of years, because again, after those couple of years, you don't own your business anymore, it's done, or want to get out right now.
We're kind of, you know, in that middle ground where you're like, I'm going to hit the numbers for two years and get out, that might be better. But there's not that many buyers for that at that scale of one to five million in revenue.
And so the real thing for us is we're going to take, like, if you're running a business sub 4 million, 5 million, you're probably the head of HR, accounting, legal, sales, marketing, everything. And so we go, hey, thankfully we got, you know, we had some tailwinds.
We grew this business big. We have a great platform, great executive team.
You get all that. So now you, all you have to do is focus on growth.
We're going to take over the rest of this. And then the thesis has to be, do you think you can grow this a lot more aggressively if we take all the other bullshit off your plate? If you do, it's a good deal.
If you don't, then we it's not a good deal for either of us anyways. So it that is the conversation we have is if like, you want to go make a lot more money.
And I'd say the thing a lot of times are giving up is the idea that they're, you know, if someone thinks is doubling every year, and they think they're going to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars on their own, then it also probably doesn't make sense. It's the person that's gotten it to this point.
It's a lot of headwind and they go, I'm making the cash, but it's not really, an agency under 10 million in revenue isn't worth that much. And so it's like, why don't we just make a lot better cashflow together? And that's really it comes in all right eric so you've had over 5 000 clients over the years for hawk media and ask you a very straightforward question what are most brands doing wrong on social media on social media uh yeah it all goes into the same thing most brands are doing wrong in general and it has to do with social, is forgetting that people take time to buy things.
I say that and everyone goes, well, yeah. But then when they look at their social media numbers, their metrics, they look at how they're selling, their strategy for how they run ads, it's all about buy today, buy now, buy now.
And the average sales cycle online is generally between three weeks and three months. And so like Facebook, as an example on Meta, only tracks a one week sales cycle through any of their clicks.
So you actually can't track as long as you need to track to actually see these things. And most people don't understand that.
And when I say most, I'm literally 99%. Like almost every agency I know, it's like they're still talking about ROAS and ROAS is such a misleading number.
And it's just a terrible stat. It's an okay leading indicator if you understand how that plays into your marketing.
But if you're not doing things to nurture and actually follow up with those people and stay in front of them and keep them coming back, you're probably missing out on 75, 80% of your potential revenue. And literally not, that's not an exaggeration.
So it's like, you know, people, when I see all the struggles the past couple of years of e-com, it's because people just didn't understand these things. And so didn't do all the other pieces of it, like email marketing and SMS marketing and retargeting to actually keep in front of their potential customers.
And yeah, they just, when someone sees an ad and then let's be real, you're sitting bored between meetings or you're on the toilet or you're doing whatever. And you're on your phone and you see an ad and you go, oh, that's cool.
And then you move on. You might have intended to buy that, but you're gonna need to see it again.
And everybody knows this, but then when it comes to actually looking at their marketing, they forget. So what I explain is, I call it, I'm gonna retarget you until you buy or you die.
Yeah, 100%. Once you click on something and then you've showed intent to wanna buy this product or ad I'm serving you, I'm gonna retarget you until you buy it or for the rest of your life.
And it works, I mean, anecdotally, I see it for myself. I'll see an ad and go, oh, that's cool.
And I'll check it out. And I'll be like, I don't have time for this right now.
And I might get served for six months before I go, you know what? I need to just buy that thing. Yeah, I do want that thing.
Yeah. And that's normal.
Everybody's had that experience and then they forget it when they're on the marketing side versus the buyer side. Yes.
Yeah, so when I, similar, when I sit with brands, they're always talking about the return on ad spend or the ROI. Yeah.
Like you don't realize that oftentimes people are watching social media content from the influencer. They're not necessarily like waiting with their credit card out.
Yeah, exactly. Like they do want to see your Fashion Elvis shirt or your Fit Tea out drink or your healthy product or your brand, whatever.
But then they do. Yeah.
But it doesn't mean that they're in the moment to buy when they're next to their significant other.'re at the movies they're at tv show they're in a car at a stoplight there's all sorts of times they're watching and so it's not always and that's also why our agency we do not allow for you to do a one post campaign yeah so oftentimes like oh we just want to do a test and have like 50 influencers post yeah for 50 grand like not going to do anything no yeah. I'm not going to promise you any of that stuff.
Like that's insane because we don't know when they're going to see it. I want them to do three posts each morning, two days later in the afternoon, maybe a week later at nighttime.
So different times for the audiences. I want them to build up a story about, Hey, I just got this product.
Hey, I just used this product. Hey, guess what? The product was so cool.
They let me give you guys a discount. I want to build a storyline for the brand.
I don't want to just be like, hey, buy this protein today. Well, then back to the point, you have to have retargeting set up so that then when they actually go to the site, now, whenever they're surfing the internet, they still see those ads around.
And maybe you're even repurposing that influencer content on those ads. And then on top of that, you're doing email and collecting their email and SMS.
So if they're not ready to buy, you're able to actually stay in touch with them forever. As you said, until they die or buy.
And when they buy, I want them to buy again now. So I'm going to still keep hitting it.
Yes. Yep.
How often do you turn down clients? Interesting. So we, we've always wanted to be the best at what we do and easy to work with.
So I actually, other than obviously we have, this is how much we can, like you said it great too, like 25 grand is what you need for an influencer campaign. For us, 10 grand per channel is really where you need to be.
We can go down to five with certain brands, but other than like, we don't want to go lower than that. And so other than that, the only real role we have about working with companies, because we've been so surprised by products that I didn't think would be good that just crushed it, etc., is we don't work with assholes.
Like, if they're going to be a dick, we're out. Other than that, we're going to do everything we can to help.
Also, people don't realize about the jerk rule about not working with jerks is, nothing's ever enough. Correct.
So even if you go crush it, you're like, hey, we're going to spend 100 grand, and you go bring back 260, yeah and they were hoping for 150 and you bring back 260 like i thought you're gonna do like three or four hundred yeah wait wait and it just gets worse because like that's those are the people that's like threaten legal action do all this stuff that you're just like what are you doing like that's that yeah you just the the sort of nurse if you can if you can spot a narcissist or some uh sociopath before you can work with them or early into working with them, get out. And the stat I tell my team, so three to four percent of people are sociopaths.
It's an actual stat. And so on some level.
And so we have currently about 700 companies we're running marketing for. So if let's say it's three percent, that's 21 companies.
So 21 companies are being run by sociopaths. And that's ifopaths.
And that's if sociopaths don't over-index into entrepreneurship, which is also a thing. So we always know that there's a portion of our client base that is probably a little unhinged, and we try to spot it.
And if they're being irrational and that kind of thing, we do try to very amicably, very carefully just back out. That's how.
But it's hard to spot during the sales process. So on the other side, you've worked with over 5,000 brands over the years.
What are brands doing right? What are they doing good out there? You know, we, 90% of what we do, and I think it's important, is focused on the scalable, repeatable part of marketing. Because to me, it's the pipes that really grow a business.
And then the viral part, the really good brand, et cetera, that's what comes over the top that puts an X factor on everything. And I think where the number one thing companies do really well and the most important part is when you have a great product that people want.
And we both run into it a lot, I'm sure, is the person that started a company for the sake of starting a company, not because anyone actually needs what they do. Those are tough.
but when someone's actually got a great product and everybody likes it um trying to think how

much I can share with this. We have a, I can share the company.
I can't share the partner. We have a company we're working with right now.
It's Vanessa Hudgens and Oliver Trevina's company, Cali water. I don't, you've probably seen it.
And they, they're crushing it. And the reason is we then showed it to a, what is probably going to be a massive partner for them.
And we handed them a can because we have it in our office now. And they would have always cracked it open, took a sip and went, hmm, this is awesome.
Like, it is that simple. Now they're going to be, I mean, very big partner for them.
And so those are the things that like, if you have a good product, marketing is easy. If you have a bad product, marketing is near impossible.
And so that's number one. Again, number two is getting all the pipes in order and getting your net in order.
When I say net, I mean your email marketing capture, your SMS, your retargeting, all the things so that when something kicks off on the sort of viral side, that 10% of marketing, it's about branding and going viral and really building that. When that happens, you're ready to capture all that opportunity and not let anything fall through the cracks and then having something compelling to go build that brand and that differentiator and get the word out there and building that word of mouth and building that culture around it and everything that's big that's actually one of our catchphrases at elevator studio is we can't undo famous yeah like if we make you famous and we have 50 influencers post to you and they got 50 million followers for example there's no take backs yep but we also say we can lead the horses to water we can't make them buy your stuff yep like yeah i can make you famous yep but just because i make you famous doesn't mean that people actually want to buy your stuff if your website doesn't work exactly targeting doesn't work if your checkout button's not working like or as simple as your differentiator for your product and your value proposition isn't really that compelling like's like yeah cool no one cares it happens or another t-shirt yeah exactly it has to be something about your t-shirt to make someone want to buy it so that's the other thing a lot of brands get super excited we got into Ralph's or we got into this chain store we got into this press then they don't realize what it takes to sell through talk us through the actual real actual real life process like especially for beverage brands food brands like what you can get on the shelf at a big chain store yep but you need to sell x percent per week or you're out of there we've seen that a lot because a lot of companies they spend all their time developing product and getting on the shelf and then nobody knows it good packaging is a really big one because people will walk through the aisles.
That's one benefit of retail.

But we've seen, it's funny, there's a very, it's an underutilized part of the market is using digital to drive into store.

When you know people that are the right, you know, psychographic info, right, geographic

info, and they're within two miles of that store, and you can actually compel them to

go in.

We've done this a lot.

You can outpace a lot of their projections because you can juice it without them even

knowing, meaning the retailer, you get into Ralph's or whatever, and now you're in these retailers and you drive some digital ads to get them in. Ralph's doesn't even know you're doing that.
And all of a sudden, your stuff's selling off the shelf way faster. We did this with a toy company with Target and they sold out what they thought would be the three-month holiday worth of, it was a toy company.
They thought the whole holiday season was covered with their inventory and they sold out in a week and so they thought they had 12 weeks worth of product and we sold it in a week and they had no idea why so they just bought 10 times as much and went fuck it great and rolled out into all targets and that there's a balance there where you got to sell that too but you also you get that visibility you get out there it's a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy and then support it with the same type of ad strategy and it works so um yeah i mean being on shelf in store the strategy is slightly different than internet where in internet you're driving for a direct conversion in store you're driving to people so that when they walk through the store they pick your stuff over something else or they see it and go wait i recognize that and grab it it again we can or as far as drive down to the store and pick it up which you can do all sorts of different promotions to make happen and then you have on-site on-premise which we're not as involved in but there's a lot of great strategies with testing and having promotion on-site so there's a founder listening to this right now and they've got two employees themselves and themselves but they're ready to hire someone. Why is it important to invest into people? Yeah.
I always found it's important to remind yourself you're the most expensive employee. So if you can't afford to pay some, once something's taking a lot of your time, if it doesn't make sense for you to pay someone else to do that, you probably shouldn't be doing it either.
And you have to figure out a more efficient way to do it. It's a force factor to me to find ways to scale, because if I can't afford to pay someone to do that, well, why the hell am I doing it then? I'm expensive.
I'm the founder. And so, you know, my first hire was an assistant because it was just like, what are all the things that are taking my time that I can put onto someone that I can train them to do the like, you know, easy tasks that are taking a ton of time, but start there.
And so it's, and then to me, hiring is all about finding what is the bottleneck and who can I put in to alleviate that bottleneck. And the key is not hiring people that are going to take a whole department over.
I see this mistake with sales people a lot where the founder is selling, doing partnerships, generating leads, closing deals, and building partnerships. And then they go hire a salesperson expecting the same thing.
It's like if they were the same, they could do the same thing, they'd be running your company. They're not going to do the same thing.
And so understanding that as much as it's sometimes a negative from employees saying it, you do kind of need cogs in the wheel. And so finding what is that task or that thing that you need someone to take off your plate that could be a full-time job that you can afford to pay the right rate for.
And again, if you can't, you need to figure out your business model better and then continue to scale that way. What's the next thing that's the bottleneck? You know, a good example, when we talk about hiring a salesperson, is it that you don't have enough leads or is it that you don't have enough time to close all your deals? Because those are two very different things.
And with your deals i've seen this with other people if it's closing all your deals work harder stay up nights work weekends close your deals that's crazy like stay up keep up as much as you can and then maybe get someone junior to start training alongside you to whatever it is that's bogging you down that's not allowing you because like it's a very rare company with two people has so much deal flow that they can't handle it unless there's other things that are bogging you down. And so I always believe, you know, especially as a founder, generally you're going to be outward facing.
So anything you can that's not outward facing, you should start to offload. Same founder is listening to Eric right now and he wants to know why he should invest into his personal brand.
Good question. To me, it's another marketing channel.
It's the the same question is like why would i want to do email marketing or why do i want to do social media marketing uh as an individual and we bought a personal branding agency because we saw i they were they did mine and i just have always seen the value and when we should just offer this as another marketing channel where if you an owner of a company can do a lot of things a company can owner of a company can write a book uh weird if you release a book with just the company's name on it um an owner of a company can speak at a conference can be on a podcast can do all these things that are otherwise not doable without someone that's the face and so when you build a personal brand it opens a lot of doors for you and at this point because i've invested in it, we've got our TV show on Annie and Hulu with Cedric the Entertainer and Anthony Anderson called Kings of Barbecue, bestselling book, The Hawk Method, and all these things then open up stages. Yesterday, I was speaking on stage at the Digiday conference with a room full of brands that want to get to know me.
Today, we're at this mortgage conference. And so it's all these different things open up for an individual that the company can't can't do that.
And so you I think of myself as a marketing channel for Hawk, just as much as most founders can be a marketing channel for their business. All right.
So we talked about making money, we talked about investing money and investing into your brand. Let's talk about the charity side about giving it away.
Why do you think it's important for brands to incorporate philanthropy into their companies? I think it's expected now. So I think the days of Tom's shoes, you know, buy one, give one, I think people expect it.
So it's not necessarily a good marketing channel anymore. It helps with buyers remorse and helps with like, I want to like really grabbing your super fans and people that love everything your brand's about and seeing that your values are aligned with them.
Gen Z cares a lot about this more than any other generation. So it's, you know, if you're going for younger demo, et cetera.
But honestly, it's, I think it's more about if you're fortunate enough to run a business that's successful in making money, I think it's an obligation to do well for your society and people around you in some way and give back just because, again, you're fortunate. Like we look at these stats.
I think that we're living in a world of social media where everyone thinks that they make, like everyone's making half a million dollars a year. And the average salary in the US now, I think is 75 grand.
And so if you're fortunate enough to be way over that, I think it's your obligation to find ways to help. And my view of charity has been, we also have a platform.
So instead of like writing a check and being silent and just, and we do that too, but like just giving someone a check, I try to leverage our, uh, horsepower. So we do a lot of pro bono work, a lot of free work, a lot of marketing support for, uh, nonprofits and charities, uh, because I can add so much more value that way than just, yeah, here's 10 grand or 50 grand.
That's fine. But like, I just, I can give someone, you know, half a million dollars worth of marketing services instead and they're going to go raise 5 million off that.
So that's where we just did the campaign with Jane Goodall called Vote for Nature. We gave her a full marketing team for free and she was on Colbert and she parted with Global Citizen on it and we pushed that out for three months and helped her with the whole social strategy and email strategy and campaign around it and messaging.
And again, I talk to my team all the time. We're not curing cancer at Hawk Media, but hopefully one day we'll market the cure for cancer.
This is the place where... That's good.
And I'd say the other piece, because education is really our main focus when it comes to nonprofit work. And it's also about like, I live in this society too.
And I want to help society as a whole, because there is a selfish aspect of that of like, yeah, if I can take care of other people, crime goes down, safety goes up, people are better. Like, it's just like the better, the better we're all doing, the better we're all doing.
And you know, the tide rises all ships. So if you're in a position to be able to give back, I think it's it is self-serving, too.
But it's also your obligation. We have the world's largest toy drive coming up.
So you might get a phone call. Yeah, we got six cities lined up already.
Amazing. We did 11 cities last year, which 15 day period, which I don't recommend.
We're going to break the record again. The Guinness Book.
SoFi again. We're going to do Miami Heat.
We're doing Vegas. We're doing in doing in LA.
We're going to do it back at Hubble Studio again. Oh, cool.
Awesome. And then Phoenix, Salt Lake City, maybe Boston.
Shout out to Vince at Hubble. Oh, yeah.
And then New Jersey, we already have 650 people registered for that one. Excited for the toy drive this year, but it's the same thing, six or seven cities.
So why do you do that? So this will be our 11th year, and I don't ever really try to raise money. This time we actually want to raise money because we want people to go buy the toys in general.
But our first time, there was eight of us on the floor wrapping toys at Hubble Studio. And what drove you to do that? Like what was the motivation? I like charities where you can see, feel, and touch it, where I can get people to actually come there in person, and they can give the toy to a child.
Or someone that

can't normally donate to something can go buy a $3

toy. They don't have to buy a $50 toy.

Go buy a $3 toy. And let them get

through the experience. And if you can't afford the $3,

no problem. Come here and help us wrap toys.

You can afford to sit on the floor with us and wrap toys.

And so, we went

from 8 volunteers to 21

to now there's hundreds of volunteers and now

we do it in all these different cities. And so, to me it's just I want to build charities that people can replicate.
You don't need to donate to my toy drive. You do a toy drive.
You can do it in Wisconsin, Alabama, Arkansas. You don't need me to be there.
You can do a toy drive. Same thing with Thanksgiving food drive, back to school day.
We have a campaign called Two Years Too Long to Give Away Clothes. If it's in your closet for more than two years.
I that hundred dollars we do that too just ourselves yeah we don't yeah a hundred dollar tipping dinners now there's been thousands and thousands of those like i make charities that people replicate that's my goal i don't because then you have a bigger impact it's scalable and it becomes way bigger than me they have no idea that i started tipping dinner they have no idea but that's what's cool you're not doing it for ego which i think is important you're doing it because you want to make the world a better place and what's going to have the largest impact if i do it for ego it's capped at me meaning it can only get as big as me yep if i do it without my name on it it becomes a global thing people can do tipping dinners and toy drives all over the world yep last question yes i ask this question every single time great almost every time and i've never gotten the same answer one day 100 years from now maybe longer with modern technology it's time for eric to finally pass away and you build up hawk media instead of 21 companies you've got 210 companies multi-billion dollar company that's hopefully the next year but yeah what percentage do you leave to your children oh interesting um you know and because i've been through this my dad passed and was a very successful guy and got siblings and transparently he left everything to us and my stepmom in a very even equal way and i know there's a lot of pushback on this but i'm kind of of the the same boat. I've had this conversation with a good friend.
You know, John Hall? I think you've run into each other before. Really talented entrepreneur.
And we were talking about this. I won't say what he said and blow him up.
But what I was saying is, I think the day I die will probably be the richest day of my life because I love the game so much that the scoreboard and the building is what I love. So I don't think I'll ever retire.
I think I'll keep building. And that's part of it.
I think, again, being charitable along the way, I probably will leave everything to my children, other than maybe some side gifts and things like that, with the hope that I've raised them well, that they continue to take care of the world. Because my issue that I've seen, I've been on the board of quite a few nonprofits.
The money's not managed very well. I'd rather manage the money and keep giving than hand it to them.
And so we'll see if that dynamic changes. But both my wife and I are pretty much on the same page that what's mine is my kids eventually.
And hopefully I raise them to do their own thing. And this is a bonus, which is how I was raised.
But yeah, that's that's my view of it. Very cool.
Where can people find you across social media or find Hawk Media if they're ready to go with you guys? Yeah, hawkmedia.com, H-A-W-K-E media.com. And then I'm at or slash Eric Huberman on any social, pretty easy to find.
Very cool. All right, guys, this is one of those episodes.
Again, if you have people that have brands or entrepreneurs or think about starting a brand product or service, this is what type of episode you should forward to them. Check out Eric's content content on social media he's obviously doing speeches really good content teaching about this stuff in a very free and open format because he and i are very blunt when it comes to marketing execution and we want people to do better out there because it's better for our whole society if you guys do better build your businesses there's also an entrepreneurial or sorry charitable element to that if you go build companies and hire a bunch of employees it's almost like like a form of charity to me.
That's why I invest in so many companies. And similar with Eric, he's invested in over 100 companies now in a similar format.
And so we want you guys to be out there moving and shaking. As you guys know, the whole concept of the Money Mondays is to have very blunt discussions with your friends, family, followers about money.
We all grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. I think it's insane.
I think that's why we have massive debt. And so many people don't know how to balance a checkbook.
They don't know how to spell IRS. They don't know what to do for their taxes or FICO scores or anything like those because we just didn't talk about it.
And so this podcast and this platform is for you guys to have these really straightforward discussions. So if you can, share, comment, like, etc.
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