TikTok Marketing: Why your accountant matters…a $300,000 wake-up call (podcast episode #122)

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“Incorporate lessons from others' mistakes into your business strategy.”

I read this lesson in a recent podcast guest application and I thought, ‘well, that is actually a pretty good summary of what we do here on How I Made It In Marketing.’ You can tune in and learn from others’ mistakes so you don’t have to make them yourself.

And, of course, their triumphs as well. What fun would it be to only discuss the mistakes?

So I talked to the man behind that podcast guest application – AB Lieberman, CEO and Founder, Clicks Talent – to hear the lessons from his triumphs and mistakes, along with the stories behind those lessons.

Hear the full episode using this embedded player or by clicking through to your preferred audio streaming service using the links below it.

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Stories (with lessons) about what he made in marketing

Act Fast

Lieberman was stoked to get a deal from Vigo Video offering him a massive salary increase, three times what he was earning at that time. Once he received the contract on a Friday, he put off signing it to spend time with friends over the weekend. When Sunday came around, he sent the signed contract. Lieberman received a message by the end of the day that the deal was no longer happening. Later he found out the same company was acquired by ByteDance and was shut down.

Just like that, the deal was off the table.

Lesson learned: Sign contracts immediately (once they are fully vetted and all terms are agreed to) – opportunities can vanish overnight.

But acting fast is more than just signing contracts promptly to avoid missed opportunities. It’s also key in influencer and social media marketing. For example, Lieberman says Ryan Reynolds exemplifies the power of fast marketing, turning swift content creation into a competitive advantage.

Location matters

A year after that, Lieberman moved to China for the opportunity to expand his business. Boy, he was wrong. Living in a different country majorly impacted his operations, ultimately losing access and communication with all his essential tools like Instagram and WhatsApp. Revenue dropped and he hit a low point. It was a tough time, but he managed to adapt and saw that TikTok was rising. Lieberman capitalized on reaching out to artists to promote their music on the platform.

Those experiences were used as case studies to lock in deals, which became his pivot point to start an influencer marketing agency representing TikTok talents – specifically, the first-ever TikTok influencer marketing agency, which is Clicks Talent today.

A $300,000 Wake-Up Call: Why your accountant matters

In 2022, Lieberman received a massive tax bill that nearly wiped him out. His then-accountant, who assumed his business would fail, neglected his taxes for years. Lieberman’s ignorance left him shocked and devastated. He learned it is important to have a good accountant and don’t stick your head in the sand.

And also, to keep ~25% of earnings aside for taxes to avoid financial shocks.

Lessons (with stories) from people he collaborated with

Incorporate lessons from others' mistakes into your business strategy

via Avi Wolicki, CEO, Benchmark Labs

Wolicki taught him firsthand a lot about what NOT to do – taxes, management, share allocations. Through consultations with him, Lieberman was able to learn from Wolicki’s mistakes, and thus, protect himself to make sure he did things well.

The customer is always right and make sure they are always happy

via Daniel Lieberman, CEO, Viral Hub Marketing

His father, Daniel Lieberman, is a huge inspiration to him as AB runs his business. Daniel’s main philosophy revolves around “The customer is always right and make sure they are always happy.” His father gave him the foundation he needed when starting his own company to make sure he would always deliver top-notch customer service. Almost 10 years later, his father’s principles resonate with him and it push him to deliver the best experiences for his clients.

Look at the person, not at the product

via Alex Bouaziz, CEO, Deel

Bouaziz – who is incredibly funny, smart, and successful – was Liberman’s first-ever client. He taught Lieberman the importance of having fun and not taking things too seriously. And he also taught him that you should never underestimate anyone. Bouaziz ended up closing down the company that hired Lieberman but later approached him proposing to get Lieberman’s influencers involved on an unpaid stint, for his small startup company, Deel.

Lieberman declined the offer as he did not want to do anything for free. Presently, that small startup today is worth $12,000,000,000. It made Lieberman realize that he needed to look at a person, and not at the product.

He made similar mistakes a few more times in his life. So, he really wonders when he will start noticing talent early on.

Discussed in this episode

Copywriting: Every word matters in these marketing case studies from AAA, a consultant, and a real estate company

Help, Don’t Hype: A guide to customer-first marketing

Marketing Experimentation Strategy: Define and differentiate between experimentation and execution in marketing activities (podcast episode #93)

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Transcript

Not ready for a listen yet? Interested in searching the conversation? No problem. Below is a rough transcript of our discussion.

AB Lieberman: My first accountant, in my opinion, didn't believe that I was going to succeed. And that is what I that's that's my hypothesis. My assumptions are based on the actions he took, which was you kept pushing off my taxes every year. And multiple times you mentioned, like, oh, I didn't expect you to make so much money this year.

Like, wow, that's really surprising that someone your age can do this. And that you've been a red flag and it wasn't, having an accountant doesn't do you can make any money. Isn't exactly the best type of accountant to have. But, what ended up happening is taxes kept getting pushed off until, one day I woke up with an almost $300,000 tax bill, but I didn't have that cash on hand moment.

I wasn't expecting to pay $300,000. I had that money allocated to other aspects of the business.

Intro: Welcome to how I made it in marketing. From marketing Sherpa, we scour pitches from hundreds of creative leaders and uncover specific examples, not just trending ideas or buzzword laden schmaltz real world examples to help you transform yourself as a marketer. Now here's your host, the senior director of Content and Marketing at Marketing Sherpa, Daniel Bernstein, to tell you about today's guest and.

Daniel Burstein: Incorporate lessons from others mistakes into your business strategy. I read this lesson in a recent podcast, Guest Application and I thought, well, that is a actually a pretty good summary of what we do here and how I made it. Marketing. Right? You can tune in and you can learn from others mistakes, so you don't have to make them yourself.

And of course we share their triumphs as well, right? What fun would it be to only talk about the mistakes? So let me introduce you to the man behind that podcast guest application that you can learn from today here to share his career lessons from his career journey and the stories behind those lessons is AB Lieberman, the CEO and founder of Clicks Talent.

Thanks for joining me, AB.

AB Lieberman: Thanks for having me.

Daniel Burstein: All right. Let's take a quick look at AB's backgrounds and who I'm talking to. You. He founded clicks talent ten years ago. He said he's paid out $1 million to influencers in the past year through clicks, talent and clicks. Talent generated revenue in the mid seven figures every year. AB himself oversees a team of nine full time employees at the company, so give us a sense, AB, what is your day like as founder and CEO?

AB Lieberman: Usually I'm up around 6 a.m.. I get my son ready with my wife, get him out to, to to daycare, drop him off a daycare. Usually around 8 a.m.. Head on over to the office. Stuffed full day of meetings, emails, meetings, WhatsApp messages, more emails, more meetings. And then, and the day I pick my son up from daycare, go home and, that's, that's that's about it.

It's it's pretty, pretty simple. I do take two days off a week. One day just for personal errands. Sorry, three days off a week, one day for personal errands, one day for family, and one day for myself. So I do only work four days a week. But, those four days are pretty action packed. In the sense where I just don't have a second debrief, but pretty boring in the sense where nothing exciting really happens.

Daniel Burstein: Boring can be good, and that's good. The four day work week I've heard people talk about, it's trending. I like that you're pioneering it. Yeah. Let's take a look at some of the lessons from the things you made. As I've said in my like before, like, I like that we as marketers, we get to make things. I've never been anything else.

I've never been a pediatrician or an actuary or something. But I don't feel like they get to make things like we do. So let's see some of the lessons you learned from things you made. Your first lesson is act fast. How'd you learn this lesson?

AB Lieberman: So I, one of my first ever contracts was for an app called Vigo Video. It's pretty big in India nowadays. But at the time they were launching in the US, and, they were going to hire us at a $10,000 a month contract. This is right after I started my company. I was barely breaking $2,000 a month.

And to have something like this was, game changing, even life changing. I would say, at such a young age. And so early on in, in my company's history, and so I got, I got a contract on Friday afternoon. I got super excited, $10,000 more money than I ever saw my life. And, went out party with friends, celebrated, spent some money, got drunk, had a I had a nice, long weekend and, Sunday morning rolled around and I was, I log into my email and, I go find the contract, sign it, sign the contract, send it back.

And here, nothing. Over the next two days, I'm following up, following up, and, I finally get an email saying, hey, so sorry. This is going to work out in the end. We're we're not going to continue with this project. And out of nowhere and, I did a little bit research, and I found out that ByteDance bought the company on Sunday morning and, taught me a very powerful lesson that that I unfortunately had to learn a few times through my career, because that wasn't the only time that something like that happened.

But, when you get a contract, sign it and don't wait. Don't hesitate, because if you sign the contract and the client code signs that contract, then even if the next day something changes, guys are already locked in that at least the first part of that contract. So these are getting some of that money. At least you need some of that project.

And the minute you wait an anything can happen and can take that contract away.

Daniel Burstein: All right. Well let's balance that though. When you're talking about a contract, right. You want to make sure this is the right partnership. You want do that due diligence. So I was doing due diligence thing. You need to.

AB Lieberman: Balance I'm talking about more in the sense of, don't go out and party and don't start counting dollars. Obviously whenever you get a contract, you should be doing your due diligence. You should be making sure, contracts are done. Well, we have our own in-house counsel that reviews contracts, usually within an hour of receiving them.

Most of the time, terms are fine. Fair. Make sense? If there's any any feedback, anything that needs to be changed, we go we go back and, and let and like and let the client know the things that need to be changed. And obviously you shouldn't, rush that, but I'm talking more about when, when things look good, when things feel good, when everything is written.

Well, Get going. Don't don't wait. I had a similar situation recently where, we we had a contract from a client, and we were facilitating it for a big celebrity. And the celebrity didn't want to sign because of some apprehend reasons that I would say were misplaced and weren't justified. And they and and even though they had those apprehensions, they took two weeks to come up with a solution to those apprehensions.

By the time they came up with the solution, the client pulled the gig and contract was gone. And it's just it just really shows that, like, unless there's something it's really a deal breaker. Especially if it's a large contract. You should just get things moving.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah. Okay. Well, here's another lesson you learned. Location manners. How did you learn location manners?

AB Lieberman: Location matters.

Daniel Burstein: This is when you move to China.

AB Lieberman: Right? Okay. So, appreciate that, little, so where we we we lived all over the world. We lived in China for about six months. And it was it was a a great learning experience. Also very challenging experience. So in China, everything's banned. WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Google, everything's banned. And so, living in China, trying to run a company that relied on Google Docs and Gmail and WhatsApp and TikTok, proved to be extremely hard.

We lost, all of our clients. Revenue dropped at one point only $700 a month. It was a really hard and challenging time, and it really taught me, the importance of being in a place that is accessible and that has access to what you need in order to run your company. And that you really need to take that into account when thinking about where you're going to move and where you're going to live.

When we lived in L.A., that was extremely, fruitful for our company. I lived in L.A. for almost two and a half years, and, we, we had access to parties and events and networking opportunities. I met multiple large celebrities, there that I was able to get contact info and then work with in the future.

And, time zone wise, a lot of our clients at the time were, were on time. So being a local time is a local phone number that anyone could call, really helped us get more involved in the celebrity and, talent world of LA and Hollywood.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah. And that's a great lesson because, you know, we live in this digital marketplace where we can be all over the world. Right now. You're in Amsterdam, Netherlands. I'm in Jacksonville, Florida. We can do this together. You know, people forget the. But the physical location can still matter. So I like that example. But let me ask you this.

You're talking about that for your SAP, your business. Do you have any specific examples of how you use location in your marketing? So for example, I wrote a case study with a real estate company where a local landing page drove a 47% higher conversion rate versus a non location based landing page. Right. Very small change. Just having the location in their 47% increase.

That's real estate obviously that's an industry where our location would matter a lot you would think. But does it matter for TikTok marketing. They do have any specific examples where you use location.

AB Lieberman: Go ahead. Absolutely, absolutely. So my my team is completely international, based all over the world. And even the ones who are based with me and here in Amsterdam are internationals. And that what what that allows us to do is, and number one, be online available for our clients 24/7. So, I know that the average response time for most of my competitors when a client contacts them is 7 to 10 days before that client is getting a response to their email.

And this more so for the bigger competitors. But even even for the smaller competitors, I've seen that response time. Can be up to a week. And, our average response time is anywhere between 12 to 24 hours of receiving an inbound email. And the way we do this, we just have so many people involved, all over the world.

So I have somebody always working at any point in time, regardless of if I'm sleeping or I'm awake or they're sleeping their way, somebody is always on, somebody is always doing something, and it's proven to be extremely helpful for our campaigns. So like we have clients in Europe, they don't want to wait for someone in LA to wake up and answer their messages and get on phone calls with them and handle their projects.

So we have people local, based in Europe that can handle their projects. Then in the US and in South America, we have people that are based over there in order to handle those time zones and be more and be available locally for them. So having different locations of people in different locations is proven to be extremely helpful, for running campaigns and just, operating in general.

Daniel Burstein: No. So I guess so these are good business operation lessons about where you're looking. I get that, but what I'm asking is what about location in the actual TikTok videos themselves? Does that matter? TikTok is a global platform. Like does it matter? So like as the example I said with a landing page, there are two landing pages for real estate company.

The location specific one and a 47% increase. You would expect that for real estate. I am not a TikTok user, I'll admit. I see the videos on my daughter's watch. They don't seem specifically location based. So like is it just a global economy now in TikTok location doesn't matter. Or do you have a specific example of no. Here's how we use location and it made a difference.

AB Lieberman: So location definitely matters in that sense. You have to understand that when you're when when somebody posts a video, it's shown here to two groups of people. Number one is people in their immediate vicinity. So somebody posting a video in London, that video is going to be shown mostly to people around London. But then number two, it's shown to people that have an interest in the topic of that video.

So if there are a bunch of people in New York, for example, that are interested in the content posted about a guy in London, then then you'll have a large New York based audience for that London based influencer. And we have a lot of examples like that. We have influencers that are in Moscow, that are in London, who create mostly comedy, entertaining and entertaining content that, that are, that aren't, specifically tied to a local language or local culture.

It's more general content. And they both have large U.S audiences, even though neither of them are based in the US, or live in the US. And, so it does matter the location when doing TikTok marketing, if you are promoting a UK product, it doesn't make sense to advertise with us influencers in general. Obviously, if if we have a specific influencer that has a large UK audience, then it would make sense.

But in general we we tend to see that that audiences are mostly in the location of where the influencer is located. That goes for, for English, but if you're promoting an Indonesian product, then it makes no sense to use an English speaking influencer. You should be using Indonesian speaking influencer or an Indonesian based influencer. So location definitely matters when it comes to influencer marketing.

A TikTok or any influencer marketing in general. And it definitely needs to be something you take into account.

Daniel Burstein: All right. Here's another lesson you learned. Again. There's some really good business operation lessons here. You know, when somebody, just comes on, they think about this, oh, a TikTok marketing agency. They just fly by the sea, their pants like, no, there's a lot of good business operation lessons you have here. And I love this one. Reliable accountants are valuable.

So it sounds like you probably learned this lesson in a painful way. How did you learn this lesson?

AB Lieberman: So I've had a few issues with accountants. The main issue I had was my first accountant. In my opinion, didn't believe that I was going to succeed. And that is what I that's that's my hypothesis. My assumption, based on the actions he took, which was he kept pushing off my taxes every year. And multiple times he would mention, like, oh, I didn't expect you to make so much money this year.

Like, wow, that's really surprising that someone your age can do this. And that should have been a red flag. And it wasn't, having an accountant doesn't think you can make any money. Isn't exactly the best type of accountant to have. But, what ended up happening is taxes kept getting pushed off until, one day I woke up with an almost $300,000 tax bill, but I didn't have that cash on hand at the moment.

I wasn't expecting to pay $300,000. I had that money allocated to other aspects of the business. So it was it was a little bit hard. We got we got hit with multiple years of taxes from multiple different countries, all in one shot, all over the course of three months. And it was a big blow.

We ended up, taking on a little bit of debt over the next six months, paid it all off and got out of it.

Daniel Burstein: Okay. So that's a great lesson for your business in general. But gig gig workers get into this, this problem a lot with taxes. Do you have any specific advice to gig workers about how to find a good accountant? Because I've never been like a TikTok gig worker, but obviously working in the advertising marketing industry, a lot of ad a lot of my colleagues would freelance write freelance is a big thing.

And here in America, I don't know about any other. Taxes is the big thing. When you go to freelance is you got to make sure that you're making your quarterly payments to the IRS because you don't have an employer anymore to make those payments for you. And if you don't, and you get to that end of the tax or whatever, like you said, you can have some whopping tax bill that you can't pay because you didn't realize that element of freelancing.

This is why I like some of these business lessons as freelancers, as marketers, we're like, oh, I'm a writer. I'm an art director. Let's focus on the creative part. But if you if you mess up those basic business details, you get the contract wrong. You get the county wrong, can really mess you up. So now TikTok workers, if you're a TikTok influencer, granny influencer, you're in the same boat.

You are a gig worker as far as I know, according to the US government. And you need to pay those payments based on that. So do you have any advice for them? I mean, I know like a lot of influencers are the younger people. They're not really thinking about business element, like how they can get the accounting part right.

And there's other elements.

AB Lieberman: Absolutely. There's two main things that they need to do. Number one is always put money on the side for taxes. I was stupid, I was told by my account, you pay 5% in taxes. I was like, damn, I've got a great accountant. No one has that good of an accountant. I think your taxes disappear. Don't be naive. Put the money on the side.

Ask your accountant. How much money should I be putting on the side in taxes? Any normal accountant will tell you, x percent, depending on where you're based. I don't know about the US, but, in the Netherlands, for example, it's 25%. In Israel, I think it's 21%. You take that and you put that on the side for your corporate tax, your income tax.

Again, you're talking about freelancers. So income taxes is less relevant. Or actually in the US specifically income tax is relevant. So you want to find out what the average is based on your expected income. How much should you be putting on the side every month to make sure that you have that payment realm ready? For businesses, it's a lot easier.

For businesses, it's usually a flat, a flat corporate tax rate. And you just take that percentage of your profits, put it on the side. It's not that complicated. Freelancers, are a lot more complicated, a lot more complex. You need to, assess how much you're going to make and then prepare to put that on the side.

Or you can just decide to take a very large percentage every payment you receive from your clients and just put that on the side and taxes put it in a high yield, interest, bank account, like capital One. You can, I think like 4.5% interest and leave it there until it's time to be paid. That's number one.

Number two is do your research nowadays. You have. I, I didn't have ChatGPT when I started, going to, just ask it. What do I need to know? How much should I be paying in taxes? Learn the basic rules of your tax code in your country and the the basic rules of your, set up, whether it's corporate or freelance, and just have a general understanding so that when your accountants come and say something that makes no sense, be like, wait a minute, that makes no sense, and question them.

Don't expect your accounts to be this all mighty, all knowing entity. They make mistakes. They don't always know what needs to get done and, feel comfortable questioning them on it.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah, well, and that's all I want to bring up. If you are a, an influencer in some way, you are essentially the company you are like back then, copywriters were freelancers, you know, like you are that freelancer. You are the company. You need to know these things. It's not just how to like, you know, pulling people off your TikTok videos and Instagram.

Alright, so we just talk about to AB about some lessons, about what he learned from the things he made. In just a moment, we're going to talk to him about some lessons he learned from the people he collaborated with. But first I should mention that the how I Made It and marketing podcast is underwritten by Mech Labs.

I the parent company of Marketing Sherpa. You can get conversion focused training from the lab that helped pioneer the conversion industry in our AI guild. Grab your free three month scholarship to the AI Guild at Joint Mech Labs ai.com and join that MSE labs. I.com to get ideas for improving conversion with your AI works for influencers. Tip. Let's take a look at some of the lessons I learned from some of the people you made things with.

The first person you mentioned was Avi Wolicki, the CEO of Benchmark Labs. You said from Avi you learned incorporate lessons from others mistakes into your business strategy. First of all, I thank you for letting our listeners do this right now. You've shared some mistakes very graciously so they can learn. How did you learn this from Harvey, though?

AB Lieberman: So Ivy is a good friend of mine, who was, consulting me, was and still does still today. Consults me on, on my business. Gives me advice, just bounce ideas off of him. And, he started multiple different companies. He got screwed out of his own company. He made a lot of mistakes when it came to shares, investments, running companies, tax is Social Security, the list goes on.

Guy didn't really have anyone to to learn from, and he was just trying to kind of figure it out on his own. And he made a lot of mistakes. And I learned a lot of what to and not do. Just by, speaking with him and seeing what he did and then being like, okay, I'm not going to do that.

Okay? So basically pay my Social Security on time and don't be late. Otherwise I'm going to be fined and they're going to come after me in two years and be like, hey, you haven't paid in two years. Got it. Understood. And just like all these, like, little lessons, of things to and not to do when starting a company to, to to help me better understand what I need to do.

It also gave me an appreciation for failing and making mistakes. I understood that the only way to be successful is to mess up. If you don't mess up, you'll never be successful. So, I've embraced messing up. I embrace making mistakes. It's honestly my favorite thing to do when something goes wrong, I know. Great, now I know what to do to make it go right.

Daniel Burstein: Okay, well, you know, coming along with that failure mistakes. Like, do you ever intentionally do experimentation? Because, you know, it's funny, when I see your name, I can't help AB. I just think about a/b testing right away. Like, this should.

AB Lieberman: Be the guy that is.

Daniel Burstein: A/B testing. It is in his name. So I know that when we're talking about something like TikTok or influencer marketing, it's not the same. Like a landing page or an email or an ad where it's easy to ab test and have, you know, statistical significance, some of these things. But still, it seems like these, these kind of new, platforms are a great way to experiment and kind of get a sense of what's working.

So. So how do you experiment with influencer marketing, with social media marketing? And do you do that at all?

AB Lieberman: Yeah, absolutely. We do. I would say every project is an experimentation. So, we learn a lot from every, every, every time. The more projects we do, the more we're learning. So we, we see something doesn't work. A few times we start doing something different. We see it does work a few times, start implementing that in our projects.

And so we're constantly learning, we're constantly learning post project. We're also constantly learning Mid projects. So we'll assess how projects are performing mid mid project and then tweak them and maybe switch out influencers, switch up the content style of the marketing concept. The timing, the, the spread, all the different aspects of the campaign.

We'll sometimes change them up during the campaign or we'll see what worked and what didn't work after the campaign and then, implement them into our future campaigns. So every project we're doing is constant experimentation and constant ab testing, basically.

Daniel Burstein: Can you think of the most surprising thing you learned from an experiment from maybe test? Because I love when I interview experimenters, A-B testers, it's always, you know, not the thing they think would work. Like for example, I remember we interviewed the Obama reelection committee team, the team that did the analytics for it. Nothing political about it. They just did tons of A-B testing.

One of their most surprising wins is their most effective campaign. Fundraising subject line was hey, like just hey, that's it. And it was so big it became this meme and it like, became a thing. And they told me, like when they were experimenting, they said, you know, you think we're experts. We would know what would work. But we were working in chance, like flipping a coin did better at what we assume would work.

And so that's what I love about kind of that experimentation that a b testing that failure mindset is, hey, this thing actually surprised us. We thought we thought something work, but it didn't. So you can you think of B like your most surprising, most surprising lesson, something you thought would work or wouldn't work or.

AB Lieberman: Yeah, absolutely. So, we as an agency, we got access to a special feature with TikTok, that allowed us to put, links in TikTok videos. And so I thought for sure this would help conversion rates. People are going to click. We're going to get crazy amounts of clicks. Video. The link is in the video and it's blocked tremendously.

We barely got any clicks. We got less clicks than we would have gotten if we didn't put a link in the video. And it was just very confusing. So the link was right there. People didn't have to go out or anything. And my, assumption was that people just weren't used to clicking on a video. It's just not, it's most videos.

Most, influencers don't have the option to put a link in their video on TikTok. People just weren't expecting it. So they didn't click it. They didn't check it out. They just kept going. Which was very interesting that because hypothetically, it was easier to convert from inside the video than it needed to go to an influencers bio.

But because it was something people were so, used to, it just completely flopped.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah. That's true. I mean, every platform has its own conventions, and if you're not using those conventions properly, then you're not going to get people to act. Here's the another lesson you mentioned. The customer is always right and make sure they are always happy. You learned this from Daniel Lieberman, the CEO of Viral Marketing, who is also your father.

So how did you learn this from your dad?

AB Lieberman: My, my, a lot of my, customer, support come up then. Customer experience mentality comes from my dad. My dad worked in, customer support for, I'd say probably, to, over two decades already. In, in multiple high level, director and VP of customer support and, he's really, drilled it into to me and my siblings and everything that like, as a consumer, when you're paying for something, you deserve to get, some you deserve to have an enjoyable experience when you're paying for it.

If I'm giving you a few thousand dollars, I shouldn't have a horrible experience when giving you that few thousand dollars. Just doesn't make sense. If you're if I'm paying a service provider, then their job is to provide me a service. And if they're not providing me a service, then their family. And so when I became a service provider and, and honestly, in any of my jobs, I worked, I had my own catering service.

I worked in restaurants, I worked as a babysitter, even all of my jobs my entire life. My goal was always to give my 100%, regardless of what I was getting paid, whether it was $2 an hour because I was 13 or it or was, $1 million for from a client, hiring to do their project.

Regardless of the amount of money, if I accepted project, if I accept to take on something, then I need to deliver the 110% the absolute best that I can deliver. Because that's that's my duty. And and there's no, like, that's just it's just obvious to me, like, that's what you do. Somebody is paying you to do something.

You do the best damn job that you can do no matter what. And that's that, that.

Daniel Burstein: So on how I made it. Marketing. Sometimes what we do, we challenge the status quo, right? We take a look at the other side. We we think all these things are true, right? But we try to unpack them. So I'm going to ask you, the flip side of that is just is to make this a bad I agree with serving a customer who wouldn't agree, right?

But sometimes like is the customer wrong and you need to drop them, they're not the right customer for you. And I see this because for example, I've written before, but our goal should be to help, not hype, right? That's our goal as companies practice customer first marketing, but customer first marketing only works if you're working with the ideal customer for you, right?

If the customer is wrong for you, they're going to ask you things that are going to take you away from really serving a value proposition. So I wonder, can you think a be like, was there ever been a time where you're like, no, this customer is under the wrong. They're just wrong for us. And so what they're asking is going to take us in the wrong direction.

We need to say no.

AB Lieberman: Saying no is extremely important. I'm not saying don't say no to your clients. I'm saying once you accept something, you're doing it and you're okay with it, and it works and everything is good. Make sure that they have an amazing experience while you're doing it. It's not just giving the best price and not and being the quickest and getting things done efficiently.

It's also making sure that overall, they have a great experience that every time they talk to you, they have somebody who's in a good mood. If you if you if you're not feeling the best that day, it shouldn't come out on to the customer. It's not the customer's job necessary to make you feel better. It's your job to make them feel good.

Like, my whole idea is that once you're doing it, do it the best. Now, if you're talking to a customer and the customer is rude, or the customer doesn't align with your goals, or the customer wants you to do something illegal or anything that would justify going like, hey, no, we can't do this. Absolutely say no. Set your boundaries, don't be pushed over.

Don't be spoken down to, If a customer curses you out, which we've had in the past, don't just be like, oh, I'm so sorry. Absolutely not. I'm not saying to be a pushover and to let and let customers walk over you when a customer needs to be put in their place, put them in their place, that's fine.

But don't start a job and then decide, you know what? This is a this is hard. I don't really feel like doing it. And then give a mediocre service because of that. It doesn't matter if it's hard. You committed to doing it. You accepted doing it. If the customer is unhappy with with the results and, I'll give I'll give a more, a more clear example.

If you tell a customer, hey, I can do this for $1,000, customer comes back and says, sure, let's do it. And then you come back and go, actually, it's $1,500. Sorry, I made a mistake. And the customer goes, yeah, but I allocated $1,000. Can you do it for $1,000? That's the point where a lot of people will be like, sorry, I can't do it a thousand times.

I'm going to take a loss versus me where I'll go, yeah, I'll take that loss. I committed to doing it for $1,000. I want you to have an amazing experience. How are you going to have amazing experience by me telling you? Yes. Sorry, I made a mistake. So now you need to spend more money. Or by going. You know what?

I made a mistake. But don't worry, I got this. I'll cover the difference. I'll make it up. I want to make sure that you're happy. And then that's what will keep them coming back for more. And that's what I mean when I say the customer is always right, make sure that they're happy. I mean, just deliver an amazing experience, whenever you possibly can.

Daniel Burstein: Sure. I agree with that. I hope everyone listening is having amazing experience. But how do we decide when? Again, I a customer is just wrong for a value proposition? So you mentioned yes, if they ask you to do something illegal. But what about if just what are some red flags where influencer marketing is just not right for their company?

So I remember, for example, when Facebook marketing was becoming a big thing, I was at this conference, I forgot it was an industry conference, and someone had asked me because, you know, just marketing guy, hey, should I do Facebook marketing? I was like, well, talk to me about your product or company or some manufacturing B2B thing. And he's like, well, you know, we're like a cocktail hour.

I buy from that guy over there, and I sell to that guy over there. I was like, well, you should probably not be doing Facebook marketing. And that guy's right there, and that guy's right there. Go talk to him. Right. So I mean, what what advice would you give a company or like when you're kind of bringing people on, they're saying like, well, you know what?

Influencer marketing is probably just not right for them. We should sign them as a, as a, as a customer. And we're not gonna be able to serve them well. We're not gonna be able to get that great resulting experience.

AB Lieberman: Usually I do that when a client is looking for immediate sales. So someone that would be better off suited with, Facebook ads or Google ads. I'll usually direct them to that. Now, I don't do Facebook ads or Google ads. But if I don't think that I can deliver a service that's going to actually benefit my client, then I'll tell them, like love, don't spend your money with me.

You're throwing money in the garbage. I don't want to take your money and and lose you. My, my entire philosophy around business is, lock in deals for the next ten years. Don't worry about what you're going to do in the next year. If you're always planning for the next ten years, then you always have money for the next ten years.

You always keep making money, and by not focusing on the immediate, you can make quality business decisions that will help and that will help, that whole mentality of time for the next ten years, actually, come into play and actually, happen by, by constantly thinking like, hey, if I do this, will that make my clients stay with me for the next ten years, or will I, by doing this and get a client right now but never have them again?

And so when I have a client telling me like, oh yeah, I want immediate sales, I want to, I want to spend $50,000 and I want $100,000 in ROI. I tell them, look, as much as I'd love to take your $50,000, don't spend it with me. Come back to me. When you're looking to raise awareness of your brand.

And sales are important, but are a secondary focus for you, not the main focus for you. Because at that point, influencer marketing will be great for you. And that's what I'd love to take your money, impress you, and then have you as a client for the next ten years.

Daniel Burstein: No. That's great. I mean, again, not everyone's their ideal customer. We only have a powerful value proposition where we focus on an ideal customer. That's the only way we can really help customers, not hype them. Right. So, here's another lesson you mentioned. Look at the person, not at the product. And you learned this from Alex Baez's, the CEO of DL.

So how did you learn this from working with Alex?

AB Lieberman: I worked with Alex, a few years ago. He had a different startup at the time. It was a social media startup. We were working together, and, that that that worked out well. It was great, great, great guy to work with. And, the, the the the platform didn't end up being as successful as they were planning it to be.

Ended up shutting it down. And then he came to me, with his new startup idea, which was deal. And he wanted to give me, like, free access and, to get me in on my influencer set up on it. And, I didn't take him seriously. And so I was like, nah, I'm good, thank you very much.

But, a lot of people now, deal's one of the biggest unicorns in the world right now. Worth, an absolute shitload of money. And I actually went back to him, later on. Wanting to hire him and use his services. It was actually just too expensive for me. And it was just kind of ironic that, like, I had the, the option to use it for free, and get early access to it, and I gave up on it just because I just because the guy's first idea didn't work, and I wasn't willing to, take a risk.

I was too egotistic. I thought that I was, that why would I waste my time doing something for free? I'm making so much money now. Like I'm not going to use your platform and help you for free. And it was a very, bad mindset. My mindset. Right now is a lot more about collaboration. Like, there's something that I could use that's helpful for me.

There's something you could use. It's helpful for you, even if there's no money involved. Let's connect. Let's see what we can do for each other. Let's help each other out. Because this industry is really about making connections, networking and providing value to other people. And not just about making next buck.

Daniel Burstein: How do you use that philosophy when it comes to your hiring, when you actually bring someone on? Right. So, for example, when I interviewed Tom Amity, co-founder and chief executive officer of Entail, one of his lessons was provide talented yet inexperienced people with frequent short training sessions and the support as they tackle new challenges. And the story he gave was, he said, you know, new people in the Air Force.

It's like into the Air Force doesn't go out and hire experienced Air Force fighter pilots, right? What do they do? They they hire people that have a lot of potential, and then they train them. Right. And that's the approach he took. So we talked about, you know, collaborating and there's kind of business partnership so to speak. But what about with hiring.

How do you like do you learn anything with hiring.

AB Lieberman: So most of the hiring is actually done by my partner. She's the CEO of the company. She deals with interviews, hires. I always get the, the last, like, say, like, I'll, I'll I'll give the final say, but my final say is kind of, ceremonial. Whatever she says goes, because it's really her domain.

She's really, really good at it. She knows what she's doing. And I don't have the best history when it comes to hires. And, so, I mean, my my philosophy is like to just kind of, have people shadow the other people like the, the previous employees and learn from them by doing. And that works for some people, but it's not always the best.

So. So my partner is really good at like, figuring out the best strategy for training and for what works for who and then implementing them. She's really much better person to talk to about that than me.

Daniel Burstein: All right. Well, overall, you know, you shared some lessons from your career about all the different things that you feel like it takes to be a marketer. If you had to break it down. What are the key qualities of an effective marketer?

AB Lieberman: Being able to innovate and adapt. Speed, I would say so. So the biggest things about being successful marketer is, being able to track market trends, take in large amounts of information, or have a team that helps you take in those large amounts of information. Be aware of what's going on in the world. Be aware of trends.

Be able to adapt your company the focus of your company, the focus of of your clients. Projects change all the time. Change what you focus on. Change how you do things. Change what you're doing in the moment that you're doing it. So really being able to adapt and innovate is extremely important. And doing things fast, fast marketing is, is, is a very popular trend nowadays.

Ryan Reynolds, I think does it the best. With all of his fast marketing campaigns, and fast marketing is extremely effective. And it even if you're not jumping on the trend that was viral yesterday and you're not doing it tomorrow, getting on that trend within the first week or two weeks and or implementing it in your project in some way or another is extremely important.

And just being aware of what's going on, being able to adapt, being able to move fast, I think are the key. Key components of being a successful marketer.

Daniel Burstein: Let me ask you a follow up question about a fast marketing. Do you what do you have as a as a company leader, as a business owner, infrastructure set up to take advantage of fast marketing? Because you mentioned Ryan Reynolds, and I actually have you, the co-founder of Mint Mobile, and that's something we talked about fast marketing, and he talked about how they kind of have it set up and so how they're able to hop on that quickly.

And, you know, an example, where is a guy from this show, NewsRadio, and how he'd said something about Mint Mobile. And within 24 hours, you know, they were shooting a commercial because they've got they had kind of an infrastructure set up with their agency and with their internal company to be able to do that. Right. It's not it doesn't.

Things don't just happen. It's we've got the business process set up. We're able to hop on these things. So for you, for fast marketing, is there any infrastructure or any specific processes you have set up to be able to do that?

AB Lieberman: So it's it's a little bit less relevant to us because we usually we're not we're not usually a retainer. We don't work on retainer where we're like kind of hanging around and, and we have a client that's paying us every month, and then we're like, yo, guys, we need to do this and promote your company by doing XYZ ASAP.

It's usually more like a company comes to us and plans out for next month what they want to do, and it isn't very relevant to trends. Where it does come into play is where when the influencers creating content in the moment to promote the specific, company, we like to we like to make sure that it's, it's relevant and that there's potential for it to go viral.

And so we help influencers with their content direction and will take influenced by whatever's going viral and relevant in the moment. So my entire team is constantly on Instagram and TikTok, just consuming content. They're told to watch content at work and have and to consume the content whenever they're free, whenever they can, so that they can be aware of what's trending online, what's what's actually happening.

And then at the same time, my entire team is subscribed to multiple different newsletters, where they get updates on what's happening in the market, what's happening in the world, what's happening in influencer marketing specifically? And this helps us all kind of stay up to date on what's happening. We then have a social media group where we share ideas of what's trending so that we can help, influence other managers in the company on what to do, on their projects with they influencers.

And that's all all kind of the structure that we have in order to kind of implement things while we're running projects. But we're not kind of we're not really in a position where fast marketing is so relevant to us. It would be more relevant to us as a company if we want to do fast marketing for ourselves and just kind of create content that's trending for our own social media pages, that would be relevant.

And that's something that we're working on but haven't fully set up yet.

Daniel Burstein: Okay, great. Well, thanks for it's relevant for our listeners that you need to hop on fast marketing. So thanks for sharing. So maybe thanks for sharing. As I mentioned, you, you know, honestly sharing some of your failures along with your successes. So thanks for sharing today.

AB Lieberman: My pleasure. It was great. Great being here and appreciate you having me.

Daniel Burstein: And thanks to everyone for listening.

Outro: Thank you for joining us for how I made it and marketing with Daniel Burstein. Now that you've got an inspiration for transforming yourself as a marketer, get some ideas for your next marketing campaign. From Marketing Sherpas extensive library of free case studies at Marketing sherpa.com. That's marketing rpa.com speaking.