August 10, 2025 • 30 mins
John Ghiorso is a serial entrepreneur and seasoned marketing strategist known for building and scaling high-performing digital agencies. In 2008, he founded Orca Pacific, a full-service Amazon agency that grew into one of the world’s leading Amazon and eCommerce firms. After more than a decade of growth, John successfully led the sale of Orca to Media.Monks (S4 Capital) in 2020 and remained on board through 2023 to complete his earn-out.
Now, John is the Founder and CEO of VantaFive, a venture studio dedicated to launching and scaling marketing services companies. With a focus on matching specialized operators with high-demand market opportunities, VantaFive is building the next generation of niche agencies from the ground up.
So far, John has launched:
-
Influent – a full-service LinkedIn agency helping B2B brands grow through content, engagement, and advertising.
-
Longbow – an AI-powered outbound messaging agency delivering scalable, high-impact cold outreach.
With a new agency launching every quarter, John’s mission is to build five successful ventures by the end of the year—all while building in public and sharing the behind-the-scenes journey, wins, challenges, and lessons learned along the way.
During the show we disscussed:
- What you should be doing now to start scaling your business quickly
- The importance of systemizing scalable growth
- Why it’s challenging to scale digital advertising—and how to succeed
- The need for dedicated resources and experts to guide your ads strategy
- How to identify the top three advertising channels for your business
- How to generate free leads from organic LinkedIn posts
- Using modern cold email strategies to accelerate growth
- The benefits of building hyper-specific niche audiences
- How to overcome obstacles that slow down your scaling efforts
- Key insights for producing viral-worthy content
- Lessons from building five new companies in a single year
Resources:
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Welcome to the Business Credit and Financing Show.
Each week, we talk about the growth strategies
that matter most to entrepreneurs.
Listen in as we discuss the secrets to
getting credit and money to start and grow
your business.
And enjoy as we talk with seasoned business
owners, coaches, and industry leaders on a variety
(00:22):
of topics from advertising and marketing to the
nuts and bolts of running a highly successful
business.
And now, to introduce the host of our
show, financial expert and award-winning author, Ty
Crandall.
Hello, and thanks for joining us today.
Today, we're talking about scaling your business.
We're actually gonna be talking about the fastest
track to scale your business quickly.
(00:44):
And we're gonna talk about how to do
this even if you are on a bootstrap
budget.
So with us to have this discussion today
is John Giorso.
John is a serial entrepreneur and seasoned marketing
strategist known for building and scaling high-performance
digital agencies.
So in 2008, he actually founded Orca Pacific,
a full-service Amazon agency that grew into
one of the world's leading Amazon and e
(01:06):
-commerce firms.
And after more than a decade of growth,
John successfully led the sale of Orca to
MediaMonk's S4 Capital in 2020 and remained on
the board through 2023 to complete his earn
out.
Now, John is a founder and CEO of
Vantafive, a venture studio dedicated to launching and
scaling marketing service companies with a focus on
(01:26):
matching specialized operators with high demand market opportunities.
Vantafive is building the next generation of niche
agencies from the ground up.
So, so far, John has launched Influent, a
full-service LinkedIn agency helping B2B brands grow
through content, engagement, and advertising, and Longbow, an
AI-powered outbound messaging agency delivering scalable, high
(01:48):
-impact cold outreach.
So with a new agency launching every quarter,
John's mission is to build five successful ventures
by the end of the year, all while
building in public and sharing the behind-the
-scenes journey wins, challenges, and lessons learned along
the way.
John, what's up, man?
Thanks for joining us today.
Yeah, thanks, Ty.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, most of us are struggling to grow
one company, so kudos to you, taking that
(02:11):
five.
Yeah, I mean, check it in a year,
right?
Like, we'll see how it goes, but it's
so far so good.
That's awesome, man.
Well, listen, from what you do, I mean,
you obviously work with agencies and have experience
in launching agencies, right?
So in doing so, and building seven, eight
-figure businesses in this space, so in doing
so, you have a ton of experience on
scaling and growing.
(02:32):
So that being said, what do you think?
Like, you've had successful exits.
What do you think are some of the
basic foundational things that entrepreneurs should be doing
right now to kind of get on that
fast track of scaling their business quickly?
Yeah, so I think a lot of entrepreneurs
that are in like the seven or low
eight-figure range, especially if they're bootstrapped, they
probably have a great product or service, fundamentally,
(02:53):
right?
Or let's say you're a $5 million business.
You wouldn't have gotten to $5 million if
you weren't really good at what you do.
What I've seen, though, happen frequently is, I
don't wanna say too much attention is paid
to the service or the product, because obviously
that's the critical component of being successful, but
not enough attention is paid to the growth
(03:14):
side of things, and typically not enough resources
are going into growth.
It's, in most cases, these companies are sort
of mostly running on referrals.
Maybe they go to a couple events.
They have a few partnerships.
That's not a bad thing.
But frequently, the reason you see a company
that's at $5 million and they're not at
$20 million is because they haven't effectively systematized
(03:36):
growth.
There's sort of what I call is sort
of like level one of growth, and a
lot of companies, they're around for 15 years,
and they never really go beyond that because
it takes a much different sort of skillset
and mindset to effectively approach it.
You need to sort of quantify this stuff,
and you need to start A, B, testing
new channels.
You need to kind of insert a lot
(03:57):
more math, and then there's some individual people,
or at least resources, if you're hiring contractors
or agencies that need to actually deploy a
lot of these things as well to kind
of effectively get you to that next level.
I found that, surprisingly, in this journey, scaling
is one of the hardest parts.
And I always honestly thought it was one
of the easiest parts, but especially platforms like
(04:19):
Facebook and ads, they make it really hard
to do.
You dial in a campaign, you get your
ROI, you scale it, and they just start
intentionally messing with the algorithms to get you
significantly higher costs than when you tested everything.
It seems like the more money I spend
on platforms, especially like Facebook, this happens.
So what is happening?
Why is that happening where it seems like
(04:40):
the more you want to spend with some
of these platforms like Facebook, the worse results
they ultimately give you?
So there's a couple things happening there.
One is a lot of these platforms have
some kind of plateau and diminishing returns, right?
So like, take Google AdWords, for example.
Probably the first $1,000 you spend is
gonna be really effective because it's kind of
(05:00):
the lowest hanging fruit.
If you go out and spend 10 grand,
you're not necessarily just gonna 10X your results.
So that's one factor.
Another factor is as you move through time,
a lot of these platforms start in a
way that's sort of misaligned from a supply
and demand standpoint, meaning your ROI is going
to be quite good.
(05:21):
Like, there's all these stories of the first
people to ever do Facebook ads, the first
people, and I was one of them, to
ever do Amazon ads.
And like, the CPC rates are 5 cents.
And you're just like, your return on ad
spend is 50X, right?
It's just completely insane.
And that's always sort of like a moment
in time thing.
I really like this concept of seeking alpha
(05:42):
in marketing.
I mean, it's applied to investing, right?
People know the concept.
Alpha is sort of outsized.
Returns, beta, is just sort of standard market
returns.
In marketing, most of what you'll do is
beta.
It's not that it doesn't work.
It's just that the returns are sort of
like just good enough to justify the spend,
right?
It's like technically maybe positive ROI, but it's
(06:03):
you're spending a buck and you're getting a
buck and 10 cents back.
What happens though is there's oftentimes, and this
can vary by industry, definitely varies by sort
of the moment in time you're in, by
platform, but oftentimes, there's a couple alpha opportunities
that may only last six months, 12 months,
maybe 18 months, but you can get a
10X return if you kind of play your
(06:25):
cards right.
The problem is, if you go read a
book on this from 2017, all the advice
is gonna be wrong because the world changes
really quickly.
Because there's no barriers to entry and marketers
tend to be pretty quick and smart.
We all watch each other and we go,
oh, this is the thing and then everyone
jumps in and all of a sudden that
alpha return goes to beta because you have
everyone jumping in and you hit an equilibrium
(06:45):
point.
Classic example of this is like efforts in
SEO, Google AdWords, Facebook ads, stuff that's been
around for a long time, probably with a
few exceptions still.
So I think it's really important when building
a marketing strategy to test, you don't wanna
test 50 things because it's not cost effective,
but kind of have a thesis, test the
top five channels.
(07:06):
And most companies that are seven figures that
are crushing it, they're not doing eight different
things in marketing.
They're doing like one or two that are
working really well.
And there's nothing wrong with that because most
of them, you can absolutely build a kind
of a substantial growth curve from a seven
figure run rate if you just do a
(07:26):
couple things really well and they have a
really high return.
The key is identifying those and when you
do identify them, doubling down and doubling down
again and doubling down again.
What is the best way to identify those?
Because I've seen ever since this separation of
third-party data, Cambridge Analytica and everything that's
happened since, it's hard, man.
(07:47):
We used to be able to really hyper
-target the perspective lead that we wanted.
Now, no matter what we tell Facebook, no
matter what we tell, we can literally say,
here's the exact clients that we got from
you.
We want more of these people.
And it just gives us the opposite, completely
unqualified people, no matter what we throw at
it.
So what are solutions like that?
(08:07):
Because I find a lot of the entrepreneurs
I talk to, it's just harder and harder
and harder to do digital advertising.
The costs are going up and you're getting
a worse lead.
I mean, it just sums it up, man.
It's like you're getting a worse lead for
a higher cost.
Yeah, so to zoom out even from advertising
and just say marketing in general, if you're
not a full-time marketer, right?
(08:28):
And if you're a CEO or founder, you're
by definition not.
Either you have someone in your team that's
their entire kind of mission in life is
to focus on this and figure out this
question.
And if you don't, what I would recommend
is finding real experts in your industry.
And when I say in your industry, I
mean, either like tangential or literally in, if
you're in real estate, find real estate marketing
(08:48):
experts.
People that aren't just trying to sell you
something that really are being objective and kind
of truthful.
I would triangulate their opinions, whether that's an
internal person or someone you listen to on
a podcast or whatever, like learn enough to
figure out, okay, I think this is where
the world is and I think this is
where the world's going.
I would find like three to five channels
that you think are really compelling and then
(09:09):
I would test them.
And I would do enough of a test
to get real data.
If you half-ass a test, you're gonna
get half-ass results and then you don't
really actually know, was this good or was
my test just not serious?
So take a real shot and then follow
the data, follow the numbers, follow the ROI,
right?
Try to kind of, if you can, normalize
the return profile because different channels have different
(09:30):
data sets, et cetera, and to determine kind
of what channels you think are really the
highest leverage, highest ROI, and then pick like
one to three of those and then establish
a CAC in that channel that you think
is low enough to justify continuing to invest
and then literally just keep dumping money into
(09:51):
that channel until you hit a point of
diminishing returns, which will always happen, but it
might be so high that you never actually
see it.
What are some of the favorite channels that
you're loving right now?
Yeah, so I really like LinkedIn in specifically
organic content on LinkedIn.
It's not an instant on, but if you
take it seriously for three to six months,
(10:12):
it can be really high leverage, mostly because
it doesn't cost you anything, right?
I mean, it costs time and effort.
And if you hire an agency, you have
to pay them, but you don't pay every
time you post like an ad, right?
You don't have to pay every time someone
sees it.
And if you really are an expert in
your industry, and most people are that are
running a business, you probably have a lot
to say about it.
And if you kind of test messaging and
(10:34):
kind of follow what's resonating with your audience,
you can get like real traction and real
leverage point from doing that.
As a kind of sub point to that,
I wouldn't necessarily recommend spending like a ton
of money on LinkedIn ads, but you can
strategically use ads to amplify organic content.
So you build organic content, you find the
(10:54):
posts that start to resonate with people, and
then you boost those.
So instead of connecting with like an audience
that's not necessarily in your control, 7%
let's say of your TAM, you can just
feed it to 95% of your TAM
through page.
So that's kind of one strategy.
Another strategy that is working really well, and
I think a lot of people scratch their
head when I say this one, is I
(11:17):
would call it contemporary cold email can be
very effective right now.
Now, there's a really important caveat to this,
which is most cold email is terrible in
terms of its performance right now.
It's worse than it's ever been.
It's almost a total waste of time.
But if you use the right AI tools,
the right kind of strategic approach, what's happened
(11:40):
is email's more competitive than it's ever been,
but the ability to craft really highly personalized,
customized human messages at scale is now really
a thing that can be done with AI,
where two years ago it was pretty theoretical.
That can really resonate.
And again, it's one of those channels where
(12:00):
yes, you need to pay an agency or
you need to put effort into it yourself
and there's some tech costs, but you send
10,000 emails and then you send 20
,000, you don't double your cost, right?
So there's real like scale there as well.
It's not like ads where you double the
ads and double the cost or maybe even
worse.
Those are top two for me.
There's another concept.
(12:20):
This one's a little fuzzier, but especially if
you're a B2B company or even a consumer
company, building kind of hyper-specific niche audiences
through, and I think both one-way and
two-way.
So think one-way is like podcasts, newsletters.
And then two-way is events, community groups.
(12:41):
Say you start a Slack group and then
you start a virtual event, webinars, even in
-person events, like building a really kind of
highly engaged audience.
You're not like directly monetizing it, but you
become kind of the go-to brand and
source for information in this, in whatever niche
you occupy.
Again, that's a little bit of a longer
(13:01):
game like LinkedIn, but same thing.
Once you build it, once you put in
this sort of upfront infrastructure costs, it can
keep growing.
It doesn't necessarily cost you more and more
money.
So to me, those are probably the top
three.
There's then some specific, like industry-specific things,
like for example, and I won't go deep
into this because I don't think it'll resonate
(13:22):
with a ton of your audience, but it
like TikTok shop is like working really well
if you're a consumer product brand.
Like there's some sort of like these moments
in time foothold things that obviously if you're
in real estate, this is totally irrelevant.
But there's versions of this that are industry
-specific as well.
There's almost always, again, like a couple things.
(13:42):
If you really find a path, you can
do real, real damage with us in a
good way with that sort of alpha strategy.
I find that LinkedIn, it's really hard to
produce content that people engage with.
And I mean, for me personally, it's impossible
to get ads to produce ROI.
Like I don't know what the deal is.
We've been trying for years and years to
(14:02):
run ads and they are so expensive to
get a lead from a LinkedIn ad.
And then they don't convert any better than
a lead that's a 10th of the price
to another platform.
Any thoughts, any feedback on how we can
do better on improving in LinkedIn?
Yeah, so I mean, I'm not, I work
with people that are experts in this.
I'm not an expert.
My high level thoughts here are LinkedIn ads
(14:23):
are notoriously expensive.
I think what you have to generally keep
in mind is that the value of that
person on the other side that you're serving
an ad to, for your company may represent
a certain number, but for another company could
be a much higher number.
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(14:44):
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(15:06):
For example, if it's a VP of procurement
or something that you're trying to get ahold
of, maybe you're selling them a $5,000
solution, but there's some enterprise tech company that
if that person responds to their ad, that
has a $600,000 lifetime value, right?
So that can, if you're not at the
top of that kind of value proposition, it
(15:28):
just means your costs are like relatively really
expensive.
So that's a phenomenon that's important to keep
in mind.
I do think though, most people throw stuff
at a wall, for lack of a better
term with LinkedIn ads, they don't use LinkedIn
ads experts.
And LinkedIn now, the ad side of the
business is sufficiently nuanced and complicated that you
(15:51):
need, actually you need a LinkedIn ads expert.
It's like a pretty niche thing, but if
you just take the person that does your
Google ads or Facebook ads and go, oh,
you just figure out LinkedIn, just realistically, they're
not gonna have the skillset to kind of
find the path to ROI.
There is typically a path to a positive
ROI, but it takes kind of real strategy
(16:12):
and expertise.
And there's the, honestly, when one of the
companies in the portfolio, when I talk to
the ad guys about this, I like understand
20% of what they're telling me, which
I'm not a dummy, right?
But it's just a level of kind of
like domain specific knowledge that that in and
of itself is like, oh yeah, okay, that's
(16:32):
like, there's very much expertise now here that
is important.
What about cold email?
We use like instantly for cold email and
it's pretty effective.
Like we're starting to get good, really good
positive engagement, getting them to take an action,
like schedule an appointment is a little bit
hard, but man, there's no way I can
scale a company with cold email.
(16:54):
So I'm interested that, I think it's interesting
that it made your list of those top
three, because like, it's really hard.
I mean, will we get customers out of
it?
Sure.
And will we get parts of ROI?
Yeah.
But man, we couldn't scale with cold email
that I can see.
Is that because you're, are you driving a
significant amount of leads, but then those leads
aren't converting or are you not even, are
(17:16):
you not driving a significant amount of leads?
I think we initially hired and out, we
outsourced it and then they didn't get very
good results.
And then we, then we came in and
we did it ourselves and we're still getting
things warmed up and stuff like that instantly.
And then we would get lead, we would
be able to send it out, but we
wouldn't get positive responses.
Now we fine tune the messaging and we're
getting positive responses.
(17:37):
They're just not taking the action.
And we've tried multiple actions like scheduling an
appointment.
So we're progressing and making it through there.
But man, I don't know how you could,
you could make it so effective with cold
email that it would be enough to scale
a business to seven, eight figures.
Yeah.
So I'll add some nuance here.
So you have the best framework to think
(17:58):
of cold email or this kind of concept
is through the lens of a human driven
full stack outbound sales team.
So think like at scale, right?
You're gonna have five SDRs, five BDRs, three
AEs.
And what those people are going to be
doing is they're going to be soliciting leads,
(18:19):
like getting the lead.
Then there's a whole step though.
And it's not like a step, it's a
series of things that happen between the lead,
which the lead is literally just like, yeah,
maybe who are you?
Some like very vague response, maybe they fill
out a form.
It's like guys riding by on a bike
and you yell at him and he stops.
Okay, now what do you say, right?
(18:40):
It's not like, and I think a lot
of companies confuse this with inbound leads, which
inbound lead is like, oh, I heard you
guys are great.
What's your pricing?
Can we talk, right?
Very different thing.
Then there's a whole series of things that
happen.
You're going to do an audit, you're going
to send them Loom videos, you're going to
have some kind of like initial chats before
they even get into the sort of like
(19:02):
sales qualified, they're actually in a sales conversation.
What I see typically happen is even if
companies are good at driving leads through cold
email, I think that's like the first big
step if you use kind of the human
analog to it, right?
They then just don't address that middle step
at all.
So they do drive leads.
(19:22):
And then they go, yeah, but the leads
don't convert, they don't want to book meetings.
It's because, again, to use my stupid analogy,
right?
A guy's ridden by on a bike, you've
yelled stop, he's kind of, okay, stopped and
looked at you, and then you're like, hey,
do you want to come over for dinner?
And it's like, no, who are you?
This is weird.
And they just ride off, right?
So it's, you've technically gotten the lead, but
(19:44):
there is a lot of work that needs
to be done between lead and like, okay,
here's our A, we're going to actually like
get into pain points and start having like
a real sales conversation.
This is what we do, et cetera.
The problem there is historically, if you didn't
already have full outbound sales team, there's no
way to really address this in a cost
(20:05):
efficient way, like other than going out and
hiring a bunch of actual salespeople.
I think we are now entering a world
where you can effectively build mostly technology driven
system without people to address that kind of
second stage in the process.
You can also just do it with humans.
I don't mean to say that like, that's
(20:26):
not an addressable problem.
If you're a small company, you can hire
one person and they can do a great
job at this.
And you pay them, you know, 80 grand
a year plus commission, right?
Like, so it can also just be addressed
the way it's always been addressed with a
good BDR, but you can also now build
effectively like systems that address this.
But usually what happens is cold emails hard.
(20:47):
So it's hard to even get the leads.
Then a lot of the time when the
leads do start coming in, the company either
fires the agency eventually, that's driving leads, because
they go, you're driving leads, but the leads
suck, they don't convert.
Or they're doing it themselves and they just
abandoned the initiative.
They go, yeah, we drove like 70 leads,
but we didn't close a single deal.
So this is just pointless.
(21:08):
Like this is, it's a vanity metric.
And I mean, sure, if you're driving random
non ICP leads, sure, that's not effective.
But if you are driving ICP leads, there
is a way to actually turn those into
real customers or clients.
But there, again, there's this whole sort of
typically a missing middle step.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me.
(21:28):
I never really thought of it that way,
but it is a really smart way to
look at it.
What are some of the biggest mistakes you're
seeing people out there that are making right
now, especially on the digital advertising side where
they're trying to scale their business, they're just
not succeeding?
Because what I'm seeing, John, is that COVID,
a lot of businesses blew up.
I mean, really grew.
Then they drop.
(21:49):
It's like when they experienced this COVID drop
where they saw the substantial drop in revenue,
kind of back to where they were before
COVID or close to.
So what are you seeing some of the
mistakes that people are making out there in
the digital marketing landscape that they should correct
to be able to get back to scaling?
So I think the industry largely has gotten
(22:10):
too obsessed with the math and the quantitative
elements, which sounds weird because obviously that's important.
I'm not saying it's not important, but they
haven't focused enough on the qualitative or the
creative side of things.
And this applies to small companies too, right?
Like the ad creative really matters.
(22:30):
In fact, I would argue a way to
think about ads is it's just a distribution
mechanism for creative, right?
So if you think about like organic creative,
whether that's like LinkedIn content or a banner
ad or whatever, right?
Like just the content itself, the message, the
pictures, the videos that go along with it.
The only difference between organic content and paid
(22:53):
is just that you're paying to drive it
to people versus an algorithm is deciding to
serve it to people because it thinks it's
relevant in most cases, at least in a
digital environment, right?
So like there's this thinking that, well, if
you pay, people should pay attention because you're
paying for them to pay attention, but you're
not.
All you're paying is to get them to
see it for a split second and decide,
(23:16):
do I stop long enough to read this
or watch this 15 second video or not
look away when the video plays that I'm
forced to watch?
And therefore the creative is really important.
Here's a way to think about it.
If the creative is not good enough to
go viral organically, you shouldn't be running spend
against it, in my opinion.
I think that if you think about it
(23:36):
in that way, it will significantly raise your
own bar for creative.
And my guess is when most companies aren't
seeing a good return from advertising, that's the
reason because we are obviously in this world
where attention is harder and harder and harder
to attract and to nail down, but people
still do have attention that they focus on
(23:59):
specific things, right?
But you're not gonna, yeah, you're not gonna
trick them into paying attention.
It needs to genuinely resonate with them.
And again, easy to criticize, hard to do,
right?
Like creative is hard, but I think that
tends to be the bottleneck.
Any advice from what you've seen of what
is kind of viral worthy content right now?
(24:20):
Ooh, I mean, that's a billion dollar question,
right?
And there's people that are far more qualified.
I'm not a creative guy.
I have the black t-shirt.
I've been in the agency world, but I'm
not, I've worked with really brilliant creatives.
I'm not a creative guy.
There are people that, people in companies that
do extremely well just monetizing creativity in this
way.
I think for me, it's, if you're doing
(24:41):
it in a sort of scrappy way, I
think it's trying to be really empathetic and
put yourself in the shoes of your ideal
customer or client, and just saying like, I
were them and I saw this, would this
be interesting to me?
Would it be interesting?
Would it be educational?
Would it be funny?
Would it be entertaining?
If it's not like one of those things,
then it's not good enough, right?
(25:03):
Would you stop and spend the requisite amount
of time to consume that content, whether you
were paid, it was paid to be shown
to you or not?
And I, again, I think that's at least
kind of the starting point and framework I
would use.
And then from there, I mean, there's, you
can find people on Upwork that can do
creative work for 30 bucks an hour.
(25:25):
You can go hire WPP and pay them
$7 million a year, right?
So there's like a massive, massive range of
the way to actually resource this.
You can do it externally, you can do
it internally.
And there's every flavor of kind of resource
you could think of out there in terms
of the creative industry is pretty big.
(25:45):
But at a minimum, I would view it
as at least kind of half of the
equation where I think most people, when they
run ads, because they're used to like Google
AdWords, there is no creative really, right?
I mean, maybe a little bit, but once
they get into other sort of advertising domains,
they just don't take it seriously enough.
So I think even that mindset is like
a good shift for a lot of people.
(26:07):
So I'm interested, five companies in a year,
that's a huge feat.
Along this journey, what's probably one of the
most important lessons that you think you've learned
in doing what you're doing right now?
I feel like all the lessons I've learned
are like obvious, but for me, the right
people is one of, if not the most
(26:27):
important variable of success here.
The vision I think is important, the domain
is important, the sort of financing model, the
operating model, those are all important, but ultimately
like you can get all that right and
you can get the people wrong and you're
still gonna fail.
And you can get the people right and
you can be kind of half baked on
the other stuff and still probably find a
path, right?
(26:47):
So like people are incredibly important.
I think that's been a big lesson.
Establishing product market fit, like really being realistic
about, we either have it or we don't.
I shouldn't say we don't.
We either have it or we don't have
it yet.
I think it's also critical.
It applies to every business, not just SaaS
or tech companies.
I think that's super important.
(27:08):
You might love the idea.
There may be a ton of demand, but
you need to make sure it really thrills
clients.
And until it does, you just gotta keep
working on it, keep working on it, keep
working on it.
Again, probably obvious, right?
But like, it's funny.
All this stuff is, I'm like seeing the
movie over and over again now.
Cause like I did it once and I
did it over 10 years.
(27:28):
It was one company.
Like most people run one company, which is
kind of the normal way of doing this.
And now I'm doing it like rapid succession.
So it's interesting to actually see like, there's
a little bit more pattern recognition now, which
is kind of fun in a way, I
guess.
So yeah.
Don, great stuff today.
Where can everybody go to learn more and
to maybe talk to you and your team
(27:49):
about being able to scale their business?
Yeah, for sure.
So you can, we have a very simple
website that kind of links to the companies
in the portfolio, vantafive.com, or you can
just find me on LinkedIn.
That's probably the best place to find me.
Search my name, there's only one of me.
And yeah, I try to be pretty active
and build in public and kind of at
least share some of what we're working on
(28:11):
there, so.
I love it.
Thanks, John, for joining us today.
Yeah, thanks Ty, appreciate it.
All right, so listen, if you're watching this,
make sure you go to vantafive.com, that's
V-A-N-T-A-F-I-V
-E.com.
It's a real simple site.
If you go to vantafive.com, you can
already get to two companies that John has
launched.
You can access them, get all their information
(28:32):
and access their resources to be able to
help you start growing and scaling.
You can even kind of see the other
three he's working on and the stage that
they currently are as he's actually getting ready
to launch those as well.
So it's really cool.
You got to check it out.
You've never seen a site like this before.
Go to vantafive.com.
And also make sure that you find John
on LinkedIn.
You want to follow his content.
(28:52):
I mean, let's be honest, you've probably never
in your professional career had a chance to
watch somebody behind the scenes, what they're doing
to launch five different companies at the same
time.
And that's something you uniquely can get just
by watching John.
So make sure you find him on LinkedIn.
His last name is spelled G-H-I
-O-R-S-O.
So it's John G-H-I-O-R
(29:13):
-S-O.
Let me say it over there.
G-H-I-O-R-S-O.
So make sure you go find him on
LinkedIn as well.
And then follow his journey.
So I think there's a lot of things
you'll learn to be able to scale your
business, to be able to watch somebody else
scaling five of those businesses.
So make sure you find John on LinkedIn
and also make sure that you visit vantafive
.com.
Thanks for tuning in.
Take care.
Have a great day.
(29:41):
You've been listening to the Business Credit and
Financing Show with your host, Ty Crandall.
Watch for our next episode to get even
more insight on financing and growing your business.
And don't forget to check us out online
at creditsweep.com for even.
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Welcome to the Business Credit and Financing Show.
Each week, we talk about the growth strategies
that matter most to entrepreneurs.
Listen in as we discuss the secrets to
getting credit and money to start and grow
your business.
And enjoy as we talk with seasoned business
owners, coaches, and industry leaders on a variety
(00:22):
of topics from advertising and marketing to the
nuts and bolts of running a highly successful
business.
And now, to introduce the host of our
show, financial expert and award-winning author, Ty
Crandall.
Hello, and thanks for joining us today.
Today, we're talking about scaling your business.
We're actually gonna be talking about the fastest
track to scale your business quickly.
(00:44):
And we're gonna talk about how to do
this even if you are on a bootstrap
budget.
So with us to have this discussion today
is John Giorso.
John is a serial entrepreneur and seasoned marketing
strategist known for building and scaling high-performance
digital agencies.
So in 2008, he actually founded Orca Pacific,
a full-service Amazon agency that grew into
one of the world's leading Amazon and e
(01:06):
-commerce firms.
And after more than a decade of growth,
John successfully led the sale of Orca to
MediaMonk's S4 Capital in 2020 and remained on
the board through 2023 to complete his earn
out.
Now, John is a founder and CEO of
Vantafive, a venture studio dedicated to launching and
scaling marketing service companies with a focus on
(01:26):
matching specialized operators with high demand market opportunities.
Vantafive is building the next generation of niche
agencies from the ground up.
So, so far, John has launched Influent, a
full-service LinkedIn agency helping B2B brands grow
through content, engagement, and advertising, and Longbow, an
AI-powered outbound messaging agency delivering scalable, high
(01:48):
-impact cold outreach.
So with a new agency launching every quarter,
John's mission is to build five successful ventures
by the end of the year, all while
building in public and sharing the behind-the
-scenes journey wins, challenges, and lessons learned along
the way.
John, what's up, man?
Thanks for joining us today.
Yeah, thanks, Ty.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, most of us are struggling to grow
one company, so kudos to you, taking that
(02:11):
five.
Yeah, I mean, check it in a year,
right?
Like, we'll see how it goes, but it's
so far so good.
That's awesome, man.
Well, listen, from what you do, I mean,
you obviously work with agencies and have experience
in launching agencies, right?
So in doing so, and building seven, eight
-figure businesses in this space, so in doing
so, you have a ton of experience on
scaling and growing.
(02:32):
So that being said, what do you think?
Like, you've had successful exits.
What do you think are some of the
basic foundational things that entrepreneurs should be doing
right now to kind of get on that
fast track of scaling their business quickly?
Yeah, so I think a lot of entrepreneurs
that are in like the seven or low
eight-figure range, especially if they're bootstrapped, they
probably have a great product or service, fundamentally,
(02:53):
right?
Or let's say you're a $5 million business.
You wouldn't have gotten to $5 million if
you weren't really good at what you do.
What I've seen, though, happen frequently is, I
don't wanna say too much attention is paid
to the service or the product, because obviously
that's the critical component of being successful, but
not enough attention is paid to the growth
(03:14):
side of things, and typically not enough resources
are going into growth.
It's, in most cases, these companies are sort
of mostly running on referrals.
Maybe they go to a couple events.
They have a few partnerships.
That's not a bad thing.
But frequently, the reason you see a company
that's at $5 million and they're not at
$20 million is because they haven't effectively systematized
(03:36):
growth.
There's sort of what I call is sort
of like level one of growth, and a
lot of companies, they're around for 15 years,
and they never really go beyond that because
it takes a much different sort of skillset
and mindset to effectively approach it.
You need to sort of quantify this stuff,
and you need to start A, B, testing
new channels.
You need to kind of insert a lot
(03:57):
more math, and then there's some individual people,
or at least resources, if you're hiring contractors
or agencies that need to actually deploy a
lot of these things as well to kind
of effectively get you to that next level.
I found that, surprisingly, in this journey, scaling
is one of the hardest parts.
And I always honestly thought it was one
of the easiest parts, but especially platforms like
(04:19):
Facebook and ads, they make it really hard
to do.
You dial in a campaign, you get your
ROI, you scale it, and they just start
intentionally messing with the algorithms to get you
significantly higher costs than when you tested everything.
It seems like the more money I spend
on platforms, especially like Facebook, this happens.
So what is happening?
Why is that happening where it seems like
(04:40):
the more you want to spend with some
of these platforms like Facebook, the worse results
they ultimately give you?
So there's a couple things happening there.
One is a lot of these platforms have
some kind of plateau and diminishing returns, right?
So like, take Google AdWords, for example.
Probably the first $1,000 you spend is
gonna be really effective because it's kind of
(05:00):
the lowest hanging fruit.
If you go out and spend 10 grand,
you're not necessarily just gonna 10X your results.
So that's one factor.
Another factor is as you move through time,
a lot of these platforms start in a
way that's sort of misaligned from a supply
and demand standpoint, meaning your ROI is going
to be quite good.
(05:21):
Like, there's all these stories of the first
people to ever do Facebook ads, the first
people, and I was one of them, to
ever do Amazon ads.
And like, the CPC rates are 5 cents.
And you're just like, your return on ad
spend is 50X, right?
It's just completely insane.
And that's always sort of like a moment
in time thing.
I really like this concept of seeking alpha
(05:42):
in marketing.
I mean, it's applied to investing, right?
People know the concept.
Alpha is sort of outsized.
Returns, beta, is just sort of standard market
returns.
In marketing, most of what you'll do is
beta.
It's not that it doesn't work.
It's just that the returns are sort of
like just good enough to justify the spend,
right?
It's like technically maybe positive ROI, but it's
(06:03):
you're spending a buck and you're getting a
buck and 10 cents back.
What happens though is there's oftentimes, and this
can vary by industry, definitely varies by sort
of the moment in time you're in, by
platform, but oftentimes, there's a couple alpha opportunities
that may only last six months, 12 months,
maybe 18 months, but you can get a
10X return if you kind of play your
(06:25):
cards right.
The problem is, if you go read a
book on this from 2017, all the advice
is gonna be wrong because the world changes
really quickly.
Because there's no barriers to entry and marketers
tend to be pretty quick and smart.
We all watch each other and we go,
oh, this is the thing and then everyone
jumps in and all of a sudden that
alpha return goes to beta because you have
everyone jumping in and you hit an equilibrium
(06:45):
point.
Classic example of this is like efforts in
SEO, Google AdWords, Facebook ads, stuff that's been
around for a long time, probably with a
few exceptions still.
So I think it's really important when building
a marketing strategy to test, you don't wanna
test 50 things because it's not cost effective,
but kind of have a thesis, test the
top five channels.
(07:06):
And most companies that are seven figures that
are crushing it, they're not doing eight different
things in marketing.
They're doing like one or two that are
working really well.
And there's nothing wrong with that because most
of them, you can absolutely build a kind
of a substantial growth curve from a seven
figure run rate if you just do a
(07:26):
couple things really well and they have a
really high return.
The key is identifying those and when you
do identify them, doubling down and doubling down
again and doubling down again.
What is the best way to identify those?
Because I've seen ever since this separation of
third-party data, Cambridge Analytica and everything that's
happened since, it's hard, man.
(07:47):
We used to be able to really hyper
-target the perspective lead that we wanted.
Now, no matter what we tell Facebook, no
matter what we tell, we can literally say,
here's the exact clients that we got from
you.
We want more of these people.
And it just gives us the opposite, completely
unqualified people, no matter what we throw at
it.
So what are solutions like that?
(08:07):
Because I find a lot of the entrepreneurs
I talk to, it's just harder and harder
and harder to do digital advertising.
The costs are going up and you're getting
a worse lead.
I mean, it just sums it up, man.
It's like you're getting a worse lead for
a higher cost.
Yeah, so to zoom out even from advertising
and just say marketing in general, if you're
not a full-time marketer, right?
(08:28):
And if you're a CEO or founder, you're
by definition not.
Either you have someone in your team that's
their entire kind of mission in life is
to focus on this and figure out this
question.
And if you don't, what I would recommend
is finding real experts in your industry.
And when I say in your industry, I
mean, either like tangential or literally in, if
you're in real estate, find real estate marketing
(08:48):
experts.
People that aren't just trying to sell you
something that really are being objective and kind
of truthful.
I would triangulate their opinions, whether that's an
internal person or someone you listen to on
a podcast or whatever, like learn enough to
figure out, okay, I think this is where
the world is and I think this is
where the world's going.
I would find like three to five channels
that you think are really compelling and then
(09:09):
I would test them.
And I would do enough of a test
to get real data.
If you half-ass a test, you're gonna
get half-ass results and then you don't
really actually know, was this good or was
my test just not serious?
So take a real shot and then follow
the data, follow the numbers, follow the ROI,
right?
Try to kind of, if you can, normalize
the return profile because different channels have different
(09:30):
data sets, et cetera, and to determine kind
of what channels you think are really the
highest leverage, highest ROI, and then pick like
one to three of those and then establish
a CAC in that channel that you think
is low enough to justify continuing to invest
and then literally just keep dumping money into
(09:51):
that channel until you hit a point of
diminishing returns, which will always happen, but it
might be so high that you never actually
see it.
What are some of the favorite channels that
you're loving right now?
Yeah, so I really like LinkedIn in specifically
organic content on LinkedIn.
It's not an instant on, but if you
take it seriously for three to six months,
(10:12):
it can be really high leverage, mostly because
it doesn't cost you anything, right?
I mean, it costs time and effort.
And if you hire an agency, you have
to pay them, but you don't pay every
time you post like an ad, right?
You don't have to pay every time someone
sees it.
And if you really are an expert in
your industry, and most people are that are
running a business, you probably have a lot
to say about it.
And if you kind of test messaging and
(10:34):
kind of follow what's resonating with your audience,
you can get like real traction and real
leverage point from doing that.
As a kind of sub point to that,
I wouldn't necessarily recommend spending like a ton
of money on LinkedIn ads, but you can
strategically use ads to amplify organic content.
So you build organic content, you find the
(10:54):
posts that start to resonate with people, and
then you boost those.
So instead of connecting with like an audience
that's not necessarily in your control, 7%
let's say of your TAM, you can just
feed it to 95% of your TAM
through page.
So that's kind of one strategy.
Another strategy that is working really well, and
I think a lot of people scratch their
head when I say this one, is I
(11:17):
would call it contemporary cold email can be
very effective right now.
Now, there's a really important caveat to this,
which is most cold email is terrible in
terms of its performance right now.
It's worse than it's ever been.
It's almost a total waste of time.
But if you use the right AI tools,
the right kind of strategic approach, what's happened
(11:40):
is email's more competitive than it's ever been,
but the ability to craft really highly personalized,
customized human messages at scale is now really
a thing that can be done with AI,
where two years ago it was pretty theoretical.
That can really resonate.
And again, it's one of those channels where
(12:00):
yes, you need to pay an agency or
you need to put effort into it yourself
and there's some tech costs, but you send
10,000 emails and then you send 20
,000, you don't double your cost, right?
So there's real like scale there as well.
It's not like ads where you double the
ads and double the cost or maybe even
worse.
Those are top two for me.
There's another concept.
(12:20):
This one's a little fuzzier, but especially if
you're a B2B company or even a consumer
company, building kind of hyper-specific niche audiences
through, and I think both one-way and
two-way.
So think one-way is like podcasts, newsletters.
And then two-way is events, community groups.
(12:41):
Say you start a Slack group and then
you start a virtual event, webinars, even in
-person events, like building a really kind of
highly engaged audience.
You're not like directly monetizing it, but you
become kind of the go-to brand and
source for information in this, in whatever niche
you occupy.
Again, that's a little bit of a longer
(13:01):
game like LinkedIn, but same thing.
Once you build it, once you put in
this sort of upfront infrastructure costs, it can
keep growing.
It doesn't necessarily cost you more and more
money.
So to me, those are probably the top
three.
There's then some specific, like industry-specific things,
like for example, and I won't go deep
into this because I don't think it'll resonate
(13:22):
with a ton of your audience, but it
like TikTok shop is like working really well
if you're a consumer product brand.
Like there's some sort of like these moments
in time foothold things that obviously if you're
in real estate, this is totally irrelevant.
But there's versions of this that are industry
-specific as well.
There's almost always, again, like a couple things.
(13:42):
If you really find a path, you can
do real, real damage with us in a
good way with that sort of alpha strategy.
I find that LinkedIn, it's really hard to
produce content that people engage with.
And I mean, for me personally, it's impossible
to get ads to produce ROI.
Like I don't know what the deal is.
We've been trying for years and years to
(14:02):
run ads and they are so expensive to
get a lead from a LinkedIn ad.
And then they don't convert any better than
a lead that's a 10th of the price
to another platform.
Any thoughts, any feedback on how we can
do better on improving in LinkedIn?
Yeah, so I mean, I'm not, I work
with people that are experts in this.
I'm not an expert.
My high level thoughts here are LinkedIn ads
(14:23):
are notoriously expensive.
I think what you have to generally keep
in mind is that the value of that
person on the other side that you're serving
an ad to, for your company may represent
a certain number, but for another company could
be a much higher number.
And now a quick break to hear from
our sponsor.
(14:44):
Hey, it's Ty Crandall with Credit Suite.
Many of our subscribers want to get the
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Whether you're looking for startup capital, low interest
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(15:06):
For example, if it's a VP of procurement
or something that you're trying to get ahold
of, maybe you're selling them a $5,000
solution, but there's some enterprise tech company that
if that person responds to their ad, that
has a $600,000 lifetime value, right?
So that can, if you're not at the
top of that kind of value proposition, it
(15:28):
just means your costs are like relatively really
expensive.
So that's a phenomenon that's important to keep
in mind.
I do think though, most people throw stuff
at a wall, for lack of a better
term with LinkedIn ads, they don't use LinkedIn
ads experts.
And LinkedIn now, the ad side of the
business is sufficiently nuanced and complicated that you
(15:51):
need, actually you need a LinkedIn ads expert.
It's like a pretty niche thing, but if
you just take the person that does your
Google ads or Facebook ads and go, oh,
you just figure out LinkedIn, just realistically, they're
not gonna have the skillset to kind of
find the path to ROI.
There is typically a path to a positive
ROI, but it takes kind of real strategy
(16:12):
and expertise.
And there's the, honestly, when one of the
companies in the portfolio, when I talk to
the ad guys about this, I like understand
20% of what they're telling me, which
I'm not a dummy, right?
But it's just a level of kind of
like domain specific knowledge that that in and
of itself is like, oh yeah, okay, that's
(16:32):
like, there's very much expertise now here that
is important.
What about cold email?
We use like instantly for cold email and
it's pretty effective.
Like we're starting to get good, really good
positive engagement, getting them to take an action,
like schedule an appointment is a little bit
hard, but man, there's no way I can
scale a company with cold email.
(16:54):
So I'm interested that, I think it's interesting
that it made your list of those top
three, because like, it's really hard.
I mean, will we get customers out of
it?
Sure.
And will we get parts of ROI?
Yeah.
But man, we couldn't scale with cold email
that I can see.
Is that because you're, are you driving a
significant amount of leads, but then those leads
aren't converting or are you not even, are
(17:16):
you not driving a significant amount of leads?
I think we initially hired and out, we
outsourced it and then they didn't get very
good results.
And then we, then we came in and
we did it ourselves and we're still getting
things warmed up and stuff like that instantly.
And then we would get lead, we would
be able to send it out, but we
wouldn't get positive responses.
Now we fine tune the messaging and we're
getting positive responses.
(17:37):
They're just not taking the action.
And we've tried multiple actions like scheduling an
appointment.
So we're progressing and making it through there.
But man, I don't know how you could,
you could make it so effective with cold
email that it would be enough to scale
a business to seven, eight figures.
Yeah.
So I'll add some nuance here.
So you have the best framework to think
(17:58):
of cold email or this kind of concept
is through the lens of a human driven
full stack outbound sales team.
So think like at scale, right?
You're gonna have five SDRs, five BDRs, three
AEs.
And what those people are going to be
doing is they're going to be soliciting leads,
(18:19):
like getting the lead.
Then there's a whole step though.
And it's not like a step, it's a
series of things that happen between the lead,
which the lead is literally just like, yeah,
maybe who are you?
Some like very vague response, maybe they fill
out a form.
It's like guys riding by on a bike
and you yell at him and he stops.
Okay, now what do you say, right?
(18:40):
It's not like, and I think a lot
of companies confuse this with inbound leads, which
inbound lead is like, oh, I heard you
guys are great.
What's your pricing?
Can we talk, right?
Very different thing.
Then there's a whole series of things that
happen.
You're going to do an audit, you're going
to send them Loom videos, you're going to
have some kind of like initial chats before
they even get into the sort of like
(19:02):
sales qualified, they're actually in a sales conversation.
What I see typically happen is even if
companies are good at driving leads through cold
email, I think that's like the first big
step if you use kind of the human
analog to it, right?
They then just don't address that middle step
at all.
So they do drive leads.
(19:22):
And then they go, yeah, but the leads
don't convert, they don't want to book meetings.
It's because, again, to use my stupid analogy,
right?
A guy's ridden by on a bike, you've
yelled stop, he's kind of, okay, stopped and
looked at you, and then you're like, hey,
do you want to come over for dinner?
And it's like, no, who are you?
This is weird.
And they just ride off, right?
So it's, you've technically gotten the lead, but
(19:44):
there is a lot of work that needs
to be done between lead and like, okay,
here's our A, we're going to actually like
get into pain points and start having like
a real sales conversation.
This is what we do, et cetera.
The problem there is historically, if you didn't
already have full outbound sales team, there's no
way to really address this in a cost
(20:05):
efficient way, like other than going out and
hiring a bunch of actual salespeople.
I think we are now entering a world
where you can effectively build mostly technology driven
system without people to address that kind of
second stage in the process.
You can also just do it with humans.
I don't mean to say that like, that's
(20:26):
not an addressable problem.
If you're a small company, you can hire
one person and they can do a great
job at this.
And you pay them, you know, 80 grand
a year plus commission, right?
Like, so it can also just be addressed
the way it's always been addressed with a
good BDR, but you can also now build
effectively like systems that address this.
But usually what happens is cold emails hard.
(20:47):
So it's hard to even get the leads.
Then a lot of the time when the
leads do start coming in, the company either
fires the agency eventually, that's driving leads, because
they go, you're driving leads, but the leads
suck, they don't convert.
Or they're doing it themselves and they just
abandoned the initiative.
They go, yeah, we drove like 70 leads,
but we didn't close a single deal.
So this is just pointless.
(21:08):
Like this is, it's a vanity metric.
And I mean, sure, if you're driving random
non ICP leads, sure, that's not effective.
But if you are driving ICP leads, there
is a way to actually turn those into
real customers or clients.
But there, again, there's this whole sort of
typically a missing middle step.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me.
(21:28):
I never really thought of it that way,
but it is a really smart way to
look at it.
What are some of the biggest mistakes you're
seeing people out there that are making right
now, especially on the digital advertising side where
they're trying to scale their business, they're just
not succeeding?
Because what I'm seeing, John, is that COVID,
a lot of businesses blew up.
I mean, really grew.
Then they drop.
(21:49):
It's like when they experienced this COVID drop
where they saw the substantial drop in revenue,
kind of back to where they were before
COVID or close to.
So what are you seeing some of the
mistakes that people are making out there in
the digital marketing landscape that they should correct
to be able to get back to scaling?
So I think the industry largely has gotten
(22:10):
too obsessed with the math and the quantitative
elements, which sounds weird because obviously that's important.
I'm not saying it's not important, but they
haven't focused enough on the qualitative or the
creative side of things.
And this applies to small companies too, right?
Like the ad creative really matters.
(22:30):
In fact, I would argue a way to
think about ads is it's just a distribution
mechanism for creative, right?
So if you think about like organic creative,
whether that's like LinkedIn content or a banner
ad or whatever, right?
Like just the content itself, the message, the
pictures, the videos that go along with it.
The only difference between organic content and paid
(22:53):
is just that you're paying to drive it
to people versus an algorithm is deciding to
serve it to people because it thinks it's
relevant in most cases, at least in a
digital environment, right?
So like there's this thinking that, well, if
you pay, people should pay attention because you're
paying for them to pay attention, but you're
not.
All you're paying is to get them to
see it for a split second and decide,
(23:16):
do I stop long enough to read this
or watch this 15 second video or not
look away when the video plays that I'm
forced to watch?
And therefore the creative is really important.
Here's a way to think about it.
If the creative is not good enough to
go viral organically, you shouldn't be running spend
against it, in my opinion.
I think that if you think about it
(23:36):
in that way, it will significantly raise your
own bar for creative.
And my guess is when most companies aren't
seeing a good return from advertising, that's the
reason because we are obviously in this world
where attention is harder and harder and harder
to attract and to nail down, but people
still do have attention that they focus on
(23:59):
specific things, right?
But you're not gonna, yeah, you're not gonna
trick them into paying attention.
It needs to genuinely resonate with them.
And again, easy to criticize, hard to do,
right?
Like creative is hard, but I think that
tends to be the bottleneck.
Any advice from what you've seen of what
is kind of viral worthy content right now?
(24:20):
Ooh, I mean, that's a billion dollar question,
right?
And there's people that are far more qualified.
I'm not a creative guy.
I have the black t-shirt.
I've been in the agency world, but I'm
not, I've worked with really brilliant creatives.
I'm not a creative guy.
There are people that, people in companies that
do extremely well just monetizing creativity in this
way.
I think for me, it's, if you're doing
(24:41):
it in a sort of scrappy way, I
think it's trying to be really empathetic and
put yourself in the shoes of your ideal
customer or client, and just saying like, I
were them and I saw this, would this
be interesting to me?
Would it be interesting?
Would it be educational?
Would it be funny?
Would it be entertaining?
If it's not like one of those things,
then it's not good enough, right?
(25:03):
Would you stop and spend the requisite amount
of time to consume that content, whether you
were paid, it was paid to be shown
to you or not?
And I, again, I think that's at least
kind of the starting point and framework I
would use.
And then from there, I mean, there's, you
can find people on Upwork that can do
creative work for 30 bucks an hour.
(25:25):
You can go hire WPP and pay them
$7 million a year, right?
So there's like a massive, massive range of
the way to actually resource this.
You can do it externally, you can do
it internally.
And there's every flavor of kind of resource
you could think of out there in terms
of the creative industry is pretty big.
(25:45):
But at a minimum, I would view it
as at least kind of half of the
equation where I think most people, when they
run ads, because they're used to like Google
AdWords, there is no creative really, right?
I mean, maybe a little bit, but once
they get into other sort of advertising domains,
they just don't take it seriously enough.
So I think even that mindset is like
a good shift for a lot of people.
(26:07):
So I'm interested, five companies in a year,
that's a huge feat.
Along this journey, what's probably one of the
most important lessons that you think you've learned
in doing what you're doing right now?
I feel like all the lessons I've learned
are like obvious, but for me, the right
people is one of, if not the most
(26:27):
important variable of success here.
The vision I think is important, the domain
is important, the sort of financing model, the
operating model, those are all important, but ultimately
like you can get all that right and
you can get the people wrong and you're
still gonna fail.
And you can get the people right and
you can be kind of half baked on
the other stuff and still probably find a
path, right?
(26:47):
So like people are incredibly important.
I think that's been a big lesson.
Establishing product market fit, like really being realistic
about, we either have it or we don't.
I shouldn't say we don't.
We either have it or we don't have
it yet.
I think it's also critical.
It applies to every business, not just SaaS
or tech companies.
I think that's super important.
(27:08):
You might love the idea.
There may be a ton of demand, but
you need to make sure it really thrills
clients.
And until it does, you just gotta keep
working on it, keep working on it, keep
working on it.
Again, probably obvious, right?
But like, it's funny.
All this stuff is, I'm like seeing the
movie over and over again now.
Cause like I did it once and I
did it over 10 years.
(27:28):
It was one company.
Like most people run one company, which is
kind of the normal way of doing this.
And now I'm doing it like rapid succession.
So it's interesting to actually see like, there's
a little bit more pattern recognition now, which
is kind of fun in a way, I
guess.
So yeah.
Don, great stuff today.
Where can everybody go to learn more and
to maybe talk to you and your team
(27:49):
about being able to scale their business?
Yeah, for sure.
So you can, we have a very simple
website that kind of links to the companies
in the portfolio, vantafive.com, or you can
just find me on LinkedIn.
That's probably the best place to find me.
Search my name, there's only one of me.
And yeah, I try to be pretty active
and build in public and kind of at
least share some of what we're working on
(28:11):
there, so.
I love it.
Thanks, John, for joining us today.
Yeah, thanks Ty, appreciate it.
All right, so listen, if you're watching this,
make sure you go to vantafive.com, that's
V-A-N-T-A-F-I-V
-E.com.
It's a real simple site.
If you go to vantafive.com, you can
already get to two companies that John has
launched.
You can access them, get all their information
(28:32):
and access their resources to be able to
help you start growing and scaling.
You can even kind of see the other
three he's working on and the stage that
they currently are as he's actually getting ready
to launch those as well.
So it's really cool.
You got to check it out.
You've never seen a site like this before.
Go to vantafive.com.
And also make sure that you find John
on LinkedIn.
You want to follow his content.
(28:52):
I mean, let's be honest, you've probably never
in your professional career had a chance to
watch somebody behind the scenes, what they're doing
to launch five different companies at the same
time.
And that's something you uniquely can get just
by watching John.
So make sure you find him on LinkedIn.
His last name is spelled G-H-I
-O-R-S-O.
So it's John G-H-I-O-R
(29:13):
-S-O.
Let me say it over there.
G-H-I-O-R-S-O.
So make sure you go find him on
LinkedIn as well.
And then follow his journey.
So I think there's a lot of things
you'll learn to be able to scale your
business, to be able to watch somebody else
scaling five of those businesses.
So make sure you find John on LinkedIn
and also make sure that you visit vantafive
.com.
Thanks for tuning in.
Take care.
Have a great day.
(29:41):
You've been listening to the Business Credit and
Financing Show with your host, Ty Crandall.
Watch for our next episode to get even
more insight on financing and growing your business.
And don't forget to check us out online
at creditsweep.com for even.
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