Behind every successful exit is a messy middle — and John Doherty doesn’t skip that part. From almost going bankrupt to coaching agency owners on building sellable businesses, he shares the uncomfortable truths most founders avoid. This episode is packed with hard-earned lessons on pricing, positioning, and building a business that actually works for your life.
https://page2pod.com - Today’s episode dives deep into the real side of entrepreneurship with John Doherty — founder of Credo and EditorNinja, both successfully sold — and now full-time coach to agency owners through JFD Coaching.
But this isn’t just a highlight reel of exits.
John shares the uncomfortable middle: the cash crunch that nearly wiped out EditorNinja, how AI rapidly shifted content economics, and the 3.5-week sprint from “I might shut this down” to signing an LOI.
We explore what’s actually happening to agencies in the age of AI, why commodity positioning is killing margins, and how to build a business that’s both profitable to run and attractive to sell.
From pricing strategy to hiring philosophy to value-based retainers, this episode is packed with tactical advice and founder-level perspective.
🔥 In This Episode
• How EditorNinja nearly went bankrupt before being sold
• The 3.5-week path from shutdown mode to signed LOI
• Why AI broke traditional content acquisition models
• The biggest mistake agencies make at $20K–$40K/month
• How to improve gross margins fast (without cutting quality)
• Why your first hire should be an admin—not a specialist
• The shift from “done-for-you” execution to strategic partnership
• How to anchor pricing to value instead of cost
• The $15M acquisition offer John turned down
• Why the best businesses to sell are the best businesses to run
This episode is a masterclass in building resilient agencies in a rapidly shifting market.
If you’re an agency owner navigating AI disruption, pricing pressure, or growth plateaus, this conversation will change how you think about your business.
👉 Subscribe to the Page 2 Podcast for more honest conversations about agency growth, entrepreneurship, and digital marketing strategy.
💬 Comment below: Are you repositioning your agency because of AI? Or are you still competing on price and execution? We’d love to hear where you’re at.
🎯 Resources and Links
• JFD Coaching (John’s Coaching Business) - https://www.johnfdoherty.com
• John Doherty on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnfdoherty/
• John Doherty on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/johnfdoherty/
• Credo - https://getcredo.com/
• EditorNinja - https://editorninja.com/
Jon Clark (00:00)
Today's guest is John Doherty, a longtime entrepreneur in the agency world who's built and sold two businesses, first Credo, then EditorNinja, and now coaches agency owners full-time through JFD Coaching. And the interesting part isn't the exits, it's the uncomfortable stuff in the middle, the cash crunch that almost wiped out, the moment he seriously considered shutting it down, and the three and a half week sprint from maybe I should sell to a signed LOI. We unpack the part of entrepreneurship people usually skip,
the exact moment the math stops working. John walks us through how AI changed the content market fast enough to break customer acquisition payback times and what he's seeing across the agency landscape now. The firms most at risk aren't defined by what they deliver, but by how they position it. If your value prop is executing as a commodity, faster, cheaper, interchangeable, you're going to feel the squeeze. We get into practical stuff too, tightening scopes, raising prices, fixing gross margins,
when to hire, starting with an admin, not another specialist, and why the best businesses to sell are often the best businesses to run. I've personally stolen two of John's lines from past advice. Let me know where I missed the mark and sending the SOW already signed. If you learned something new today, take a second to subscribe to the Page 2 Podcast, leave us a rating or review, and tell us what resonated. We'd love to hear from you. All right, let's get into it.
Jon Clark (01:24)
Welcome to episode 108 of the Page 2 Podcast. I'm your host, Jon Clark, and I'm joined as always by my partner at Moving Traffic Media, Joe DeVita. Today we're joined by someone I've been learning from, well, I guess for years, long before I ever reached out to book this conversation. Last week we had Will Critchlow on the show, founder of Distilled. Today we get to talk to someone who helped build that legacy from the inside. John Doherty cut his teeth at Distilled's New York office,
Joe (01:32)
Hello.
Jon Clark (01:50)
spent the last decade building and selling two companies, which I'm really excited to dig into. First Credo, a lead generation platform that sent over 250 million in leads to digital before he sold it to private equity in 2022. And EditorNinja, where his team edited over 15 million words in three years before selling to Proofed just this past December.
And now he's channeling all of those learnings into JFD Coaching, helping agency owners build businesses that actually work for their lives. John, very excited to welcome you to the show.
John Doherty (02:19)
Thanks for having me. Lucky 108, right? That's very cool. Yeah. And I love, got a lot of love for Will Critchlow. Loved working with him. Loved my time at Distilled. Actually got to reconnect with him last year at SEOWeek, a bunch of my old Distilled coworkers. So was kind of a, big family reunion. So good to know that I'm following after him.
Jon Clark (02:23)
That's right, that's right.
Joe (02:23)
you
was preparing for this interview and I listened to, I think I listened to all of the episodes you ever did with the John Doherty teaches you entrepreneurship. So I've heard your voice a lot in the last week, but I was, I lived in Colorado for a while too. And I liked how you like, sometimes you just did short episodes. Like I'm driving to the resort right now.
John Doherty (02:44)
yeah.
Joe (02:55)
Like I got it. And then you park and you're like, all right, episode's over. I'm going skiing. So I was really hoping you would join us today from a car with a mountain behind you. But it's not the case.
John Doherty (02:59)
Hope that helps. See you later.
Jon Clark (02:59)
Yeah
John Doherty (03:04)
I mean could go hop in my car and go for a drive if you guys want to but the audio's not going be quite as good.
Joe (03:07)
You
Jon Clark (03:09)
Right.
We'll live vicariously through your, through your skiing. Actually, so I looked, I took screenshots of this. So I looked it up. was back in February of were giving, I think it was a webinar on how agencies can improve their sales. And there are two things that I still use from that conversation. The first was when you send sort of the initial proposal.
John Doherty (03:11)
Yeah, yeah,
Jon Clark (03:31)
⁓ I always use the line, 'let me know where I've missed the mark based on our conversation'. So it sort of allows to right size anything that I may have misheard or anything like that, which I thought was incredible advice. And then the other one was always send the SOW with your signature. And I think at the time, Proposify had said there was something like a 17 % increase in getting that signature back. And so those are the two things that I always try to include anytime I'm sending out a proposal.
John Doherty (03:36)
Mm.
Something like that.
Jon Clark (03:58)
But let's dive into EditorNinja real quick. You sold that, I think it was December 1st, roughly about five months ago. And I think this is something that founders don't often talk about publicly, which was, when was the time you first considered selling? Because it seemed like, in my research, a lot of the trajectory was positive. Certainly there was some
John Doherty (03:57)
Very cool.
Jon Clark (04:15)
influence of AI, I'm sure, which we'll dig into, but how long was the gap between when you first thought about selling and then actually going through that process?
John Doherty (04:23)
Yeah. So that one was different from my first one. And to be honest with you, the EditorNinja one was, it was fast. Because I, really liked that business. I really liked running that business. It was very like one of my mentors talks about you have head businesses, you have heart businesses and you have soul businesses. And Credo was very much a head business for me. Like I got laid off. I had that going. I picked up some SEO consulting, which SEO consulting is also a head business for me. Good at it. Can make money doing it.
Jon Clark (04:32)
Mm-hmm.
John Doherty (04:48)
How Credo going was like, I can make people money, I can do this, right? And so I built that. It was very much a head business. EditorNinja is much more a heart business because I mean, Jon, we, you probably first came across me at Distilled when I was writing on the Distilled blog and Moz and all that. Like I love writing and I love getting better stuff out onto the internet, right? Good stuff on the internet that adds value to people's lives and adds value to people's businesses. And I knew the value of editing and it was like, man, I can help people. Like we can help people with this. I'm not an editor, but
It's like, I can hire the people, I know how to build the business, and so I really, I really loved it. And the, I mean, the, the, the real, like the fully transparent story here is last July EditorNinja hit a big cash crunch. Like we basically went bankrupt. If I'm being completely honest, we basically went bankrupt and probably not many people would admit that, but like, I'm an open, transparent person. And like, I was overspending on acquisition, like ads were working really well. I was kind of burnt out on like creating content and all of that. ⁓
Like myself, writing, had some like other, you know, kind of content going out, you know, experiment with some webinars, Jon. And, but around April of 2025, the economics in the market changed. AI tools got a lot better. We also had a lot of people in the content space got laid off. So there was an influx of available talent. And so a lot of the places that a lot of the companies that would have hired us,
Jon Clark (05:59)
Mm.
John Doherty (06:05)
were laying off their content teams and then hiring their editors and content people back as contractors. Those previously would have come to us, right? So I think we actually had a lot of under the radar, not seen competition coming to the market. AI was great for the business, to be honest, where they just overall just like content volumes. But long story short, once I actually went and did the analysis of like what just happened, like I didn't catch it quick enough. And basically,
our payback time from like, or our close time, and then time to earning our money back for like paying to acquire the lead and then like, you know, get the client went from six weeks to over four months. Very hard to run a profitable business based off of that, right? So the economics stopped working, we trimmed down the team, I got it back to profitable all of that. And I basically had to make the I want to keep building this or do I want to do something else? I've had coaching on my heart in my soul for a long time.
Jon Clark (06:37)
well.
John Doherty (06:54)
I've done it, dabbled in it over the years. And I have a mentor, the same one, the head, heart, head, heart, soul guy. I was at a, he's, he lives in Ireland on the west coast of Ireland. I was at a retreat there at last June. And then I was really like, kind of starting to think through some of this stuff, but like, what do I want to, what do want to do? What am I being called towards? And then two weeks later had this big cash crunch. And I was just like, I finally just said like, you know what?
I think I want to coach, like I've been building dump few businesses for 10 years, I got a team of 20. I don't really love like doing that. I don't really like, yes, I could step into that. Like, you know, leadership kind of doing that level of stuff. And I just didn't want to. I was like, I want to coach. I love working with other entrepreneurs, like, and I love helping agency owners build the business that they want to build, right? Even if it's the business that I didn't want to build, I can help them build the business that they want to build. Cause I built it. So that's, that's long story short. So I basically started thinking about it,
It was probably mid guess mid July is when I kind of started coaching and then it was really working. And so about mid August, mid to end of August, I was like, okay, I think I need to do something. I think I want to get rid of this business by the end of the year. So I was actually just going to shut it down. I was just going to shut it down, walk away. And the opportunity came up just like happenstance got connected with someone over there. They're head sales guy and a coach
Jon Clark (07:58)
wow. Okay.
John Doherty (08:06)
recommended that I just reach out to some people because I just told him I was going to shut it down. He's like, I was going to see. So I reached out to that sales guy and I was like, Hey, if you guys are about businesses, he's like, yeah, let me introduce you to our founders. So we had the deal put together. We got the, the deal, the initial papers signed the LOI to like, you know, to sell it three and a half weeks later. It was fast. was fast. It was fast. Yeah.
Jon Clark (08:23)
Mm-hmm.
Wow, that moves fast. Yeah.
So that's incredible. I don't think I've heard or even read or heard you mention that it was almost bankrupt before.
John Doherty (08:35)
I haven't talked about it much. Yeah.
I haven't talked about it much. I'm starting to cause it's like, it's, mean, it's real. It's like a real part of the journey. I made some mistakes, I learned from the mistakes. Like I saved the business and I mean, same thing happened with Credo in 2019. We almost went bankrupt and I saved it and the business like took off and we ended up selling that, you know, so like these things happen. Everyone kind of runs into that. I talked to a lot of agency owners that are right there, as well that like, they're really struggling. And so like, I've navigated it like multiple times,
and so, you know, it's just, it's part of my story. So why not share it.
Joe (09:04)
You'll be a better coach for it, I imagine. If you can help somebody avoid a problem that, you know.
John Doherty (09:07)
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, I was just talking to someone today, a potential coaching client they're running a business. They're around 30, I don't know, 20, they kind of bounce between like 26 and 40 K a month, which is very common for like, for small agencies. It's kind of like businesses grows and grow in ones in three. Getting the first hundreds, one step, then you get to 300, you got to change things. You can get to a million, you got to change things. And so they're, they're right there.
And we're, we're hopping on a longer strategy call, which is kind of how I do it, like initial, like discovery call and then a longer strategy call to build out what we'll work on together before I even ask them to commit. And for them just to go in eyes wide open, and they didn't even say anything about this, but I was like, we need to look at your profitability because you're at 30, 32 K a month and you have 20 part-time people. That's what EditorNinja was. And I know how hard profitability was, and that's why you're struggling to be able to invest in marketing. So like, we're going to look at that, right? So like I've built a business show to your point, like
I've been through it, I can see, I've worked with over 500 agencies across Credo, EditorNinja, and then also my coaching. So like, I've seen a lot of agencies, I've seen some do it well, and I've seen some do it poorly, and so yeah, that's what makes me a good coach. And I'm not afraid to tell people when like they're wrong or when they're missing things, right? And if anything, that's actually a lot of the value that I bring.
Jon Clark (10:14)
Yeah, I think as a coach, that's probably the hardest thing, but honestly, the most important thing, right? Like that, you know, unfiltered feedback. You can deliver it gently, but you know, certainly getting that, getting that hard truth. EditorNinja was operating, I think around like 70 % margins you mentioned one time. I'm guessing you haven't come across the agency that's even near that, in terms of gross. Yeah. Okay.
John Doherty (10:22)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, gross, gross margins I have, um,
net margins, definitely not. Um, But gross margins I have, and I actually like to get my, my clients to 60, 70, 80 % gross margins. A lot of them are at like 25%, but that's because when you're around 30,000, so I normally get people in there between 20 and 40,000 and they're kind of bouncing between those. At that point, three things are going wrong. You are undercharging. You haven't raised prices in a while, so you're undercharging.
Jon Clark (10:41)
Yeah
Okay.
John Doherty (11:03)
You are over-delivering for clients because there aren't clear statements of work and so you can never push back and say that, you know, Hey, this is outside of the scope or like raise prices, charge for more, right? Cause it's just, we just do things for you and they ask you say, yes, very common. And then the last one is overcompensating, so either overcompensating the team or overcompensating yourself.
Those are the three. And if we solve those, profit explodes, like gross profit and net profit explode.
Jon Clark (11:25)
What do you think about team How have you, or guess maybe what do you think about from a revenue perspective to new hires? Is there
like a common threshold that once that agency hits it, or even a business, I guess, hits it, it makes sense to hire that next person? Because you talked about overcompensating. I think overgrowing is another potential pitfall.
John Doherty (11:42)
Yeah.
Yep.
Yep. It very much depends on the role. So the first hire I get people to make is actually an admin, like an executive assistant schedule sales calls for you, send followups, proposals, make sure that you're getting stuff in on time. They manage your calendar. They manage your email. They do all of that. I mean, that's $20 an hour work. And, but when you're like, you know, when you, you're a solo person and you're doing 30 K a month, like you're effective hourly or somewhere in the 150 to 200, you know, $200 an hour range.
Jon Clark (11:52)
Interesting. Okay.
John Doherty (12:11)
You can hire someone for literally like that costs a 10th of your time to do those tasks. You don't need to be the person doing the task needs to be done, but you are not, but they are not, but they do not have to be done by you. So I get them to hire that one first that hires a back that gets back a bunch of your time. We had one assistant at EditorNinja that we brought in for 40 hours a month, and between myself and my head of ops, she probably saved us hundred hours a month between the two of us. Best $1,600 a month I've ever spent to be doing it was like
Jon Clark (12:33)
That's significant.
John Doherty (12:37)
unbelievable. So like you just
do that and all of a sudden you're able to sign on more clients. You're making more money, right? And like you pay $1,000, $2,000. If you can sign another 10 K, like that's a phenomenal return on your money. As it comes to delivery, it changes a little bit, but basically like I push people like to the point where it's like pretty painful, like they're working a ton, right? And then we don't hire full-time people. We hire people to kind of take, like take pieces, right? So we're kind of hiring like fractional help, like consistent fractional help.
And there's ways to structure that. So you always have their like availability, it's kind of what we did at editor in Egypt. That also allows you to scale up and down. So you're not bringing on like, you know, an eight, $8,000 a month person, right? Usually when someone's hired a certain agency, started a service business like this, right? They are really good at what they do. And then the big mistake they make is to hire someone to do the thing that they are best at, and then they're left doing the stuff that they hate. That was me. I did that at Credo and then it didn't work.
And I was talking to one of my first business coaches, name's Chris. And he goes, he goes, ⁓ was, he's like, you need to hire someone to do like, you know, all this admin stuff. And I was like, I was like, Chris, but like, why, like, I don't want to hire someone for that. That work sucks. Why would, why would I hire someone to do like work that sucks? And he looks at me he goes, John, are you so f****g egotistical that you think everybody's built the way that you are? There are people who love doing this stuff and that just completely changed like my whole, like my whole approach, to it. So
yeah, so don't hire someone to replace you. Like you keep owning the stuff. As the owner of the agency, you should be making sure work delivery is staying high. Eventually you hire someone to replace you in that. But you get all the stuff off of your plate that you hate doing, like invoicing, accounts receivable, like that sort of stuff. Making sure your accountant has the documents for your taxes, like all that sort of stuff. Has to be done, doesn't have to be done by you. And then you basically slowly hire things that like, you know, keyword research, for example, like...
I shouldn't be doing cured, I don't do SEO anymore, but like, you know, an agency owner shouldn't be doing cured research. Someone on their team should be doing cured research, right? Cause that's $25 an hour work and you're worth 200 plus. So you started hiring that and then eventually, you know, you just, just kind of keep replacing yourself as, as the business grows. very much Dan Martel's buy back your time. You know, sort of principles I've Dan mentored me for a number of years. So a lot of my thinking comes from him, but, yeah, but so, so, but, but when it comes to hiring a person, they should be
contributing minimum four X what they cost you to the business. So if you're paying someone five K you should be able to bill minimum 20 K. They should be able to like deliver minimum 20 K worth of work. Ideally it's more like 30 to 40. So when I was at Distilled, I was making, I don't know, I mean, I'm thinking about at the end there, I was making about 90 a year or something like that. It's like 2013.
Jon Clark (14:55)
Hmm.
Got it, got it.
John Doherty (15:07)
So they were paying me six and a half a month, something like that. And I was managing about 35 to 40 K a month worth of clients. So it was about right.
Jon Clark (15:16)
Got it.
Joe (15:17)
A lot of people know you from, you cut your teeth in SEO. You graduated college and you started working in SEO. Most, not most, I don't know how many, but a lot of people know you because of your SEO chops. You don't do SEO anymore, it's very clear. But this, you ever think maybe I'll get back into it? It seems like it's, I know it's changing a lot,
It's changing so fast. Like this is an exciting time to jump back into it, I would guess, but you're not, not even flirting with the idea.
John Doherty (15:46)
No,
no, I'm the, I'm the specialist that became the, like the business person. And honestly, that's who I love working with that. Like they're very good at what they do, but like, it's kind of their like zone of competence to zone of excellence. It's not their zone of genius. So my genius is building businesses. Like I'm really good at building businesses. I'm really good at coaching. Like I'm great at coaching. I was good at SEO, right? But like, you know, you look at some of the, like the, people that I came up with, like,
Michael King, Ross Hudgens, you know, Patty Mugen, Phil Nottingham, Will, Tom, you know, Tom Critchlow, all those guys, like all of them are way better at SEO than I ever was. And then I ever wanted to get to, like I love, I love the business side and like, I love kind of, I I'm very good at pattern. I have ADHD, so I'm very good at pattern recognition. And so I can see where stuff comes together and I can put together the pieces. And so like, for me, SEO was like, it was like, uh, it was, was a small sliver of like the whole puzzle.
So think about like a puzzle within a puzzle, like, yeah, you can solve that puzzle. But then there are so many other pieces to building a business that that just didn't solve, right? Offers, paid traffic, pricing, so many different things that I was like, I want to learn that stuff because then I can put together the whole thing and build something sizeably bigger. And I got bored of talking about backlinks.
Jon Clark (16:55)
Yeah,
John Doherty (16:58)
AI is more interesting, but
Jon Clark (16:59)
don't blame me on that one.
John Doherty (17:00)
I got bored of talking about backlinks over and over and over and the same stuff. I was like, I just, can't, I can't, I'm sorry.
Jon Clark (17:05)
Well, maybe a different way to ask the question, are you using AI in your coaching business at all? Like it's such a interesting space generally, maybe not for SEO specifically, but are you finding ways to sort of plug that in and learn about it as you go?
John Doherty (17:19)
Yeah, for sure. I mean, one thing that I'm doing right now is so, my coaching is all one-on-one at this point. And so I record every call and one of the things I do is I give them homework, right? It's like, okay, next time I need you to, like, I need you to take, you know, a couple of hours over the next week. So we do call it basically have like a standing time every week. And I say like, these are the two or three things that I need you to like really think about and come prepared for, for us to talk about, to dig in deeper, right? Cause we're solving their biggest, highest leverage issues to help them unlock the growth that they haven't been able to unlock for themselves.
⁓ And so I record them using Google Meet, get the transcription from Gemini. I plug that into ChatGPT and I basically have a standing prompt that's like pull out the main themes and then also give us the main takeaways and then also their homework, anything that I need to do for them as well. Because I'll say like, yeah, I'll send you that like, you know, ⁓ service, you know, master service agreement, you know, the template, and then I'll just forget about it. And so like I do that I look at them like, okay, cool, I actually need to send that to them. So then I'll send them the recap and I'll make sure I do that in that same thing.
so I'm doing that. And then actually just this morning, one of my clients is, he, he loves, he runs a specialist marketing agency focused on a specific medical niche, but he loves using AI. So he and I were actually messaging this morning. I'm like, Hey man, how do I automate this? Like I have never make it work with Zapier and OpenAI. And he's like, do this with Claude and blah, blah, blah. And I also asked him like, what else could I add in to make it more valuable to you, right? So he's thinking about that, but, yeah, so I'm using it for stuff like that. And honestly, that's the kind of thing that like, I was about to hire an assistant again,
to like, to do that kind of thing. Cause I've got eight to 10 of those to do a week and that's grow, that's only growing. So I'm like, you know, and I have to like really find time for it. And so I was going to hire an assistant for it. I'm like, but what if they could just take the transcript and do it automatically, pop it in as a draft and I can just go in and review it, right? Like it's saving me five to 10 minutes per, but when you have 12, like that's an hour a week, four hours a month, 48 hours a year, basically a week of work a year more than that.
Jon Clark (18:59)
Right.
John Doherty (19:06)
So I am using with some of that stuff. I haven't gone to like, there's some like SaaS tools out there for like productizing your coaching into like an AI, like that sort of stuff. I haven't done that. But yeah, and I use it as a thought partner, right? If there's like a particularly like sticky situation and like, I just need to kind of like uncover some stuff and I always make AI give me, you know, like, show me where you got this from, I just don't, I don't want it just like making stuff up, but like, I do use it as a thought partner for a bunch of stuff or like yesterday, a new client sent me a bunch of sales calls
Jon Clark (19:27)
Mhm.
John Doherty (19:34)
that they had done, the new client we kicked off this morning. And I was like, I'm trying to figure out why like they're not closing the clients that they, that they should be. There's a few parts to it, but I got them to send me some sales calls. I transcribed those, popped it into ChatGPT and was like, this is what this is. Like, and then just like went through and asked questions and it actually helped me pretty quickly identify what the, what the main issues were as opposed to me listening to like two hour long sales calls, you know?
They made it, just made it the analysis a lot faster. And we got to the heart of the issue a lot faster. So I love using it for stuff like that, like stuff that humans can't do.
Joe (20:03)
The agencies that you've worked with I'm sure are like all over the place with the services they offer and the clients that they work with. There's two basically two ways to bill a client, it's a retainer or like a time and material. think, my experience probably Jon's too is that the time and material agreements are a lot harder to manage,
I guess like, of all the different services that you've helped people figure out, what are the toughest ones to make work as an agency?
John Doherty (20:30)
Hourly quit any time, pay month to month. That's the worst. It's horrible. It's so, so hard to make work. Yeah.
Joe (20:35)
But what kind of work? What kind of work?
Jon Clark (20:37)
It's impossible to plan, right?
Joe (20:39)
Like, what is the service? What are the services that are hardest to make work?
John Doherty (20:43)
historically, honestly, content has been a big one. It's been super low margin with AI. That is very much changing. Like it's becoming a lot higher margin. Some more like, I don't know. I talked to a lot of P agency owners that they're just like, they think their issue is that they're in a commoditized and competitive space, which is true. And it makes it harder, but the issue isn't that they're in a commoditizing competitive space is that they are playing in that space.
Meaning it's not that you need to change the space that they're in, they need to change the way that they're billing and the value that they're bringing. So what I often see Joe is cost of materials retainers. So it's like, it's going to cost us X, but they also don't make that expectation, they also don't set that expectation. That means like X hours or whatever, you know, because they're afraid of like, I don't know, afraid of talking about running a real business, or something like that. But, ⁓
that's the most common one that I see, but if you can move to a value based retainer, so that means niching down. So if you're serving anyone and everyone that comes to you, but you're really good at e-commerce. If you can niche into e-commerce offer the services that you're offering, get numbers on like the average growth that people see, right? Then you can build to the value. You can charge to the value. And of course you have to like be able to deliver. So it has to, the thing is like value based pricing has to work,
the economics of it have to work within the time and materials So if you're going to price it according to that, say, say it was going to cost you $2,000 a month to deliver, right? Again, your cost to deliver it and you're going to charge someone four, realistically should be charging someone six to eight. If that's what your costs are, but you're going to charge someone four, you can charge, but you can make someone an additional million dollars over the next And you could, you could show them case studies. Obviously results are not guaranteed and blah, blah, blah, but like someone at your stage, they make this.
You should be looking to charge about 10 % of that. So you should be charging about 8K. It's much easier to charge 8K when you point to the million as opposed to my cost. You know, so it works. It works with the time plus, but you're usually able to charge two to three times more because you're anchoring them to the value and not to your cost. Does that make sense?
Joe (22:40)
So you have ⁓ some source of truth that the client agrees to, and say we're gonna use that system as our source of truth, and when you hit this number, my fee's gonna change.
John Doherty (22:49)
No, you just say like, I like, know that when you know, an e-commerce company making $2 million a year comes to us and we do all the things that we do for whatever channel it is for you. We know that on average they grow by a million dollars in the next year. So what is, what is making an extra million dollars in the next year worth to you? Is it worth a hundred K? And they're like, yes. Okay, cool. So it's not performance based. It's value based and the value that you know, that you can get for people. It's not a guarantee. They might end up at 900.
Joe (23:15)
Okay.
John Doherty (23:17)
They might end up at 1.5 depending on the space, right? But like that's the average and that's kind of what you can anchor them to. So for me with agencies, like I'm not cheap, multiple five figures a year for my one-on-one coaching. If people stick with me for the, you know, for the full year, but if they implement my system, they're basically guaranteed to double in the next year. So if they're making 30 K a month right now and they can get to 60 and they make an additional, you know, 300 K.
Should they pay me 10 % of that? Seems worth it.
Jon Clark (23:42)
I think one of the things you talked about, I think both at Credo and EditorNinja was basically starting a new customer at the lowest tier, right? So you sort of learn about them, they learn about you in the process. Is that something that you apply to your coaching as well? Or is it, I know what my time's worth, I'm giving you X amount of time and that's the price.
John Doherty (23:50)
Yeah.
Yeah. So the reason why I did that at Credo specifically was because, and I did it differently at EditorNinja, but I'll talk about it in a second. The reason why I did it at Credo originally was because, number of things. One was I wasn't confident in selling higher ticket. It was really easy to sell people in at the smaller one. So I would sell them in there. I also, I also learned over time. So I just had to develop, I had to get better at sales. had to develop more confidence with selling right price to the value.
Jon Clark (24:20)
true.
John Doherty (24:27)
But also with that one, I wanted to make sure that we were going to be able to deliver value for them. Cause I had people come in they're like, I want 15 leads a month and they would sign on. They'd pay us whatever 5, 6 K a month, but they weren't able to close. As in they'd be mad at us, the leads are crap. No, you told me you wanted e-commerce companies doing two mill plus a year that are XYZ, right? We got you those you're bad at sales. So I'm saying, when it say that, and I would coach them on sales stuff, right. And I like just blew up some agencies in a very good way. They closed a lot more.
But basically like, because we were kind of limited in like how many clients we could serve and how, like how well we could generate leads, right? Like economic, like with the economics working, I wanted to make sure that, and part of that model, the end model became, we got a percentage of sales that they made. So it wasn't just the retainer. also got a percentage of sales that they made. So I wanted to make sure that they were going to be able to be successful and they were going to be able to close. So we'd sign them in there. We had a certain number that we could do at the bottom, just like total, like, you know, leads that we were able to generate. So we'd get them in there. And then if they were good
then we would basically move them up. With EditorNinja, and also with that one, I didn't have like, so I just had that one level that I was willing to sell people into. I learned a different way of putting together packages, basically like the one you want them on, something that's like 20 % cheaper that they could take, but it's not gonna be like, it's not all the things that they would necessarily want, but it's a bit cheaper. And then one that's like three to five times bigger. So was basically like,
three to five X, the middle one, which is where you want most people to be. So let's say 2000, 4,000, 16,000, right? I didn't have that set up for Credo. I had that set up for EditorNinja. And so I was able to sell people kind of into the middle one. that was based off of like, do you need just proofreading or do you copy editing and proofreading, or do you need like developmental, right. And then also based off of volume. We had kind of a number of different ways that we did it. But I would propose them three different, like three different pricings.
Jon Clark (25:52)
Mm-hmm.
John Doherty (26:14)
So with coaching, I do that same thing. I've got a big offer, 175 K a year meant for agencies that are, you know, three, five mil plus. And then I have two, you know, two smaller ones. I'm not gonna say the exact pricing cause it's probably going to change, but they're sizably they're, they're smaller. And so, but I anchor people to the one 75. That's what I say first. And then the one that I say for weekly one-on-one calls for 12 weeks was why it signed people into looks much more reasonable. And then I have one that's a little bit
smaller but calls less frequently on the back end. So, but yeah, I didn't have that pricing rubric, but I have implemented that pricing rubric for my own coaching now.
Jon Clark (26:48)
Got it. Got it. One thing that I was really curious about is you've gone through this process of selling to companies, different types of buyers, which I think is also like really important from an experience perspective. But I imagine in most ways to exits our value adds to conversations. But have you ever experienced a situation where that would close a door or like maybe make people view you
John Doherty (27:05)
Yeah.
Jon Clark (27:09)
differently that limits an opportunity or something like that? Is there downsides to it?
John Doherty (27:15)
Yeah, I would say that the only downside has been I'm much more selective about like opportunities that I pursue moving forward. So like, and I kind of believe that everything I do is going to work out. ⁓ So, but also part of it, like with, you know, with EditorNinja part of
Jon Clark (27:29)
Mm-hmm.
John Doherty (27:33)
and the reason why I didn't move into coaching right after Credo was because I basically wanted to prove to myself that I did wasn't a fluke. And so once I sold EditorNinja literally guys, like we signed the deal, I don't know, It like November, say November 19th or something like that. The next day I doubled my coaching prices and I started closing more clients because I had that confidence that I could do it. I mean, it was about 80 % or something like that, but like basically doubled them. And I had been not closing a bunch of clients before that. And then I doubled my prices and I basically started closing almost everyone.
So everyone that I wanted to close. So like, I think with the first exit, a lot of people think like, was this a fluke? Did I actually like do it? Could I do it again? and then a lot of people like connect through next one doesn't, doesn't work, right. I got lucky in that, not lucky, but I already had EditorNinja working and it was growing. Obviously didn't go to like five, 10 mill a year, but like it did, it did well enough over a number of years, you know?
So I think, I think that's a, I think that's a downside to it. One thing with coaching actually, that it's not really a downside, but it's an objection that I sometimes have to overcome. People will be like, but I don't want to sell. I'm like totally fine, but the best businesses to sell are the best businesses to run. So we're to build a business that's great to run. And if you change your tune a couple of years down the road, cause I also said for a long time, I'm not going to sell, right? I had one, one that they, you know you guys wanted to ask about that. I turned down that like, I really regret with Credo is like, we can get into that, but like,
Jon Clark (28:35)
Mm-hmm.
Right.
John Doherty (28:48)
your tune may change down the road as your life, like as your life changes and as your goals change. So like, let's build a business that you could sell and it's going to be a business that you love to run. And then if you go to sell it, you're actually going be able to get it.
Joe (28:58)
You sold Credo to a private equity firm, So I'm a lot and try to get a question out of this, because I'm curious about, we have a lot of clients owned by private equity.
I think is a value of working under a private equity is they bring in experts all the time. So there's like always this flux of people that come into meetings and give advice and help with some new campaign or some new project. I think that's a pretty cool part of working within private equity. And like, wouldn't that present a lot of coaching opportunities for you to like partner with some private equity? And then you're working with like whole different kinds of businesses outside of agency. Ever thought about that?
John Doherty (29:40)
Yes, short answer. So here in Colorado, Techstars is based actually up in Boulder. And so I've given some talks there and that sort of thing. But yeah, there's part of me that I would love to be a mentor, like a YC mentor, a Techstars mentor, or something like that. As far as actually coaching is concerned, I mean, yeah, probably someday I'll expand beyond just agencies, but like,
agencies are what I really know, like in and out. So like, that's where I'm, that's where I'm focused. I'll be like, kind of punching up the, you know, revenue bands, like that sort of stuff. I'm sure. But you know, right now I'm really just like, I mean, dude, I'm six weeks into coaching full time. Like, you know, I'm like, I'm really just like trying to nail, just nail this, nail my process, like all of those things. So, but yeah, it is like, there are definitely those, those networks and I could see myself getting involved with those in the future for sure.
Jon Clark (30:13)
Heh.
Let's dig into that offer that you got. Rand Fishkin has that famous offer from HubSpot that he passed on. And you mentioned about a big offer that you got early on. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
John Doherty (30:30)
Yeah.
Yeah. So it wasn't the offer itself though, in retrospect, the offer was very good for where we were. It was what happened afterwards. So, and I've talked about this publicly. It's like on my Instagram, it's like how I lost $15 million or something like that. It really is how I didn't make $15 million, didn't actually lose it. Summer of 2018, I was talking with basically trying to partner up with them. You know, cause I was like, well, they have
clients, like basically trying to get like lead flow from them, but then also like agencies as we needed it. And they told me that they were actually looking at building out like a directory of agencies to like drive leads to. And so Credo was doing about 250, 300K a year at that point. Just me, a couple of people helping me out. And they basically made me an offer that would have been that amount of cash upfront.
It was that amount of cash upfront. They wanted me to stay for two years for that same amount in annual salary. And then they were going to give me a million and a half in pre IPO SEMrush stock.
They IPO three years later, I would have made $15 million from selling them a $250,000 a year business plus my salary. So probably more like 16.
My ego got in the way, I was like, I'm not looking to sell. Like, I mean, I've been laid off like three years before. And so was like, I don't know. I don't really want to go back inside a company and all of that. So there were a bunch of like things to it, but yeah, I didn't take it. And then a year or so later, I was talking to, my coach at the time, Chris, and he goes, he was telling me about a different, acquisition, a friend of ours that sold a business, that Chris is the company Chris was that was looking at acquiring one of their competitors offered a lot more for it more than the company was worth.
And Chris goes, John, when a company wants to overpay for your business or when a, when a competitor wants to overpay for someone else's business, let them. And I was like, that would have been good to know a year ago. So you live in your learn. I've done fine, but like it was a, that's, I don't regret much, but like that was a missed opportunity. That's for sure.
Jon Clark (32:15)
All right.
So you mentioned that, you know, some agency founders come to you and say, well, I'm not looking to sell. If they were to get an offer like this, you would advise them basically how your coach did, right? Like if they are willing to overpay, then, you know, maybe that's a sign it's worth the effort.
John Doherty (32:38)
I would point out the real numbers because so the way agency valuations work is usually it's a multiple under a million. It's a multiple in EBITDA. So profit grows profit, especially when it's private equity, cause then they can like cut costs and just make it more profitable. Over a million million, million and a half, it becomes a multiple on revenue, and then there's kind of a adjustment, like a dial you could say based off of like how much you're growing. So we were growing, we had doubled in the previous year and we were going to double that year and
our profit was probably 60%, 70%. So was say 150 in like in EBITDA. That business was worth about a half a million dollars. They were offering me two that became worth 15, right? So like, I wouldn't tell them to take it. It's their choice. My job as a coach is not to tell them what to do. My job is to present the options and help them make the right choice, help them make the choice that is right for them.
Jon Clark (33:15)
Hmm. Mm-hmm.
John Doherty (33:27)
So, you know, I would just be like, look, realistically, your business is worth half a million dollars and you're still super involved. So if you don't go with it, it's probably more like 200 K is probably more like one X.
This is 10 X that plus you're being guaranteed like that, like I wasn't making that like it was 250 K of your business. I was not making 250 K. They were offering to give me that as a salary plus that amount upfront, plus the upside of the the stock, right? So like in retrospect, I definitely should have taken it. And so if someone, if a client of mine came to me saying like, Hey, I have this on the table, I would be like, I would tell them this story. And I would be like, you should heavily consider it because that's life changing money.
Jon Clark (33:39)
I'm
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Are you still involved in EditorNinja at all? Is there any sort of requirement for you to, I don't know, help with training or for a clean handover?
John Doherty (34:15)
I'm, I still, I still
do some stuff with them. Yeah. I would like some like handover stuff anytime there's like, know, an issue with like a, you know, a client that moved over, you know, then I'll, you know, they'll ask me some questions. I refer leads to them. I mean, part of the great thing about selling to your biggest competitor or to your competitor, like I wouldn't have sold to them if I didn't think that they would take great care of our clients. And they, and I did believe that, and I more than seen that since then,
so I'll refer even like my own coaching clients now, like I have a couple of coaching clients that are like trying to spin up their content program and they're like, how do we make this work? And I'm like, and I help them and I'm like, look, you a managing editor internally. You need to use AI or a service that's using AI or like, if it's a super regulated space, you know, human writers, but then like, don't staff up editing and such internally. Like it just doesn't make sense in the current, like, you know, economy. So, you know, and I just refer them to proof.
So yeah, I am still a little bit involved. I get some commissions and that sort of thing. but I mean, I, you know, I'm, I'm such a like open, transparent person that like, if I didn't believe in it, if I didn't believe they're doing good work, I wouldn't send people that way. And honestly, I wouldn't have sold it. would have, I would rather have shut it down than to sell it to someone that I didn't believe was going to take care of our clients. Like I had a bigger offer, bigger upfront cash offer from a private equity firm for EditorNinja. And I didn't do it because I didn't believe that they were going to take care of our clients or the team,
Jon Clark (35:29)
Interesting.
John Doherty (35:29)
and proof tests,
so.
Joe (35:30)
Content, providing content as a service for an agency has gone through a really rapid change because of AI in the last less than two years. Are there other, I imagine you're talking to a lot of agency owners fearful of what is gonna get disrupted next. Do you have line of sight into where most of those worries are like a specific service or?
John Doherty (35:38)
Yeah.
It's not a specific service. It's a specific type of agency. So anyone that is offering, we do it for you, we do it better or cheaper than you are currently doing it. They're in trouble. They're in huge show. I'm actually talking about this at SEO Week. I have a whole like framework which that has, that hasn't been announced, but I think it's being announced on Thursday. So I'm actually talking about like, what is the future of marketing teams and marketing agencies in a world of AI?
Jon Clark (36:08)
Nice.
John Doherty (36:16)
And basically you have to, you have to operate on a higher, like more strategic level, more as like a business partner. Anyone that's been operating off of like, we can hire people cheaper, we can deliver it cheaper than, you know, other people can like that sort of thing. Those are stalling out to like declining and they're kind of dead in the water. So you have to move up to the strategy level, you have to charge for strategy, and basically you have to do, you have to let humans do human things. And so, you know, like.
AI isn't prompting itself to like put together a strategy, a paid media strategy for a, you know, 200 K a month, like B2B SaaS, right? A human knows the questions to ask AI can help them put that together a lot faster. But let humans do the human things and let AI do the AI, do the things that AI is best at. And so yeah, that's, that's more what I'm seeing. It's more the type of, more the, the level of service that a, that an agency offers, not a, not a specific line, right?
But I do imagine it's going to happen. I mean, we're, we're seeing it too. And like, I mean, paid media, you know, analysis like that sort of stuff, it's coming in everywhere. I think content has been especially, cause those have been able to be a bit more like profitable content was always kind of a like breakeven, like you had to offer it sort of thing, even if it delivered big results. I mean, the SEO space is so bad at selling their value. So may, like
It depends, I don't know. It's like that sort of stuff. And as a mentor of mine, I lived in Europe for a few years. A mentor of mine said, he would say, we can't say everything, but we also, but we also can't say nothing. Like we can say something. We can give some sort of signal, even if it's talking averages and like what I've seen across and that kind of thing, but just saying like, it depends. That's not helping you out, you know, but the SEO space has been so bad about that, yeah, like content has always just kind of been a like,
you have to offer it, but like kudos, I mean, to the siege media is and domination, digital and all those that have like made a good business out of it. But for most SEO agencies or like content agencies, they've just kind of like, they just kind of survived, because like, you just needed to build a team to like, be able to get it done. And most in-house teams weren't doing it. And now with AI and house teams can do a lot of it. And so you have to offer more value other than that. Does that answer your question, Joe?
Jon Clark (38:12)
You
Yeah, the cookie cutter.
Joe (38:15)
I was hoping you'd say something like the data scientist is in trouble or the video editor is in trouble, but you made even better points. So I'll just let.
John Doherty (38:22)
Yeah. I mean, video,
they are all in trouble if they don't punch up to the next level. Like anyone, anyone that's just like banking on we do it for you. We like, we do it for you, but don't really bring anything additional value. They're, they're gone. They're gone, unfortunately.
Jon Clark (38:27)
You
I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about AI content.
You you had, you did a study or basically an analysis of content that was coming into EditorNinja. And I think one of the things that was really smart about what you did was you were one of the first, I believe companies that were like, yes, we'll take AI-generated content and edite it for which, in the early days of ChatGPT was absolutely necessary, still is. But I might get this percentage wrong. I think it was like 80 % of the submitted content moved into like
John Doherty (38:46)
Yeah.
Jon Clark (39:05)
clearly AI generated? Yeah. How, or I guess, were there common patterns or workflows that you guys started to apply to that type of content? Like, we always see this, and so we have to have a common, I don't know, plan or implementation because we're always seeing, I don't know, the em dash is always the common one, right?
John Doherty (39:07)
Something like that.
Jon Clark (39:26)
Are there were there other things like that that you started to build sort of a process around whenever you could identify that it was AI generated content to make it more human like?
John Doherty (39:35)
Yeah.
Totally, totally. Yeah. And AI was so funny because I sold Credo in September of 2022. I basically took that next quarter off. Cause I was super burned out, didn't even realize it, and I started working on EditorNinja full-time about middle of January, started January and ChatGPT launched in November of 2022, right in the middle there. And so I went to a Mastermind in Costa Rica in January of 23,
and I told people what I was doing and literally it was like 80, 80 other entrepreneurs or something like that. Literally every single conversation they're like, after I told them what I did, they go, how does it, excuse me, how does AI affect that? Literally every person. So at the start of the week, I was like, I have no idea. And by the end of the week, I had a pretty good hypothesis that like, people are kind of like going to mess around with it for about six gonna see a lot of bad content come out, we're gonna see the tools get are going to realize they need humans in the loop and then tools are going to get better. And then what humans do is going to have to change.
I basically just nailed it. Like I nailed the timing. I nailed the how it was going to go. And then, when I started working on it full time in January of 23, about 80, 90 % was human written by the time I sold it about 75, 80 % was AI generated. So it completely flipped in the two, almost three years that I was running it. And I was, yeah, we were one of the first, I don't know if we were the first, but probably first three bit three services saying that we work with AI-generated content. That's something I did well. I
published that page in January of 2023. But what we saw, I mean, basically it came down to like, so say you had a hundred bucks to produce a blog article, right? I know that's super, super cheap. Let's just keep the numbers. Let's just say a thousand dollars, right? let's add a 600 ish of that would go to writing,
50 ish, 100 ish, if you're lucky would go to editing. And then the rest was like content management and profit, low profit, right?
Jon Clark (41:09)
you
John Doherty (41:13)
When that 600 goes to the cost of a few tokens, five bucks.
The thing is you're not going to get $600 quality for $5. So what we saw was to say it was like 60 % writer, 10 % editor, 30%, whatever else. Basically we started seeing people sliding that writing budget to editing, but editing became kind of a hybrid, cause we were like, it was more like, it was more like developmental editing. You guys know what I mean when I say developmental editing. So it's like a super in depth. So I come from the book publishing industry. Actually, that was my first like entrepreneurial foray,
Jon Clark (41:32)
Hmm.
Okay.
John Doherty (41:45)
Um,
with that author writes, developmental editor comes in and developmentally edits it, just tears it apart, sends it back to the author, author fixes it, comes back, might get another round of that, or it goes into like copy editing, proofreading, final formatting, etcetera.
AI, with AI content, is basically that developmental editing, except you don't have anyone to send it back to. So the editor has to fix it. And then we would also put it through another editor, doing the copy editing and proofreading, but it means you have to have much tighter style guides. We would actually have clients towards the end that would give us like, we don't do any of these things. So we'd make sure that was like in the style guide, no em dashes like that sort of stuff. But then they're also like, they're like our prompts, even though we tried to work on them, they'll always have like a,
you know, some sort of like AI giveaway, right? In other words, like, it's this, not that, like that kind of thing. So they would actually tell us we don't want that. And so, so the editors would actually edit to that as well and edit out like that, that sort of stuff too. So, and then in ideal worlds, this didn't always happen, but we would they would get, like a clean version of the content after it went through, like those layers and the client approved it. And so some of them would actually take that clean version and feed it back into the LLM
to be like, I'm giving you this prompt, but this is the kind of output that we're looking for. So it would actually use the human edited version to improve the output from the LLM.
Jon Clark (42:56)
That's smart. Yeah. I'm hearing a lot more about submitting a prompt, getting a response, and then asking the model itself to improve the original prompt. You sort of like that improvement over time. Yeah, that's...
John Doherty (43:05)
Yeah.
Yep. Yep. Yep.
And you have to have those examples to give to it. So yeah, we would, we would have people use us, use us for that.
Jon Clark (43:14)
So in that editing model, did you have a series of editors? So like it would go through, I don't know, let's call it a junior editor and then maybe a senior editor and then finally the final editor. Is that the way that you were sort of tiering and bringing it into sort of a human structure?
John Doherty (43:20)
Yep.
Yeah.
Yeah. So we had layers. I had a full-time head of operations and then we had what we call our lead editors, and so they were basically like kind of account managers, but they were responsible with their editors themselves and they were responsible for, like the final product going back to the client. And then we would always have a team of editors assigned to each, to each client. So if it was AI and it needed like that developmental editing, it'd be like, all right, here's our like in-depth, like, you know, AI editor,
Jon Clark (43:51)
Mm-hmm.
John Doherty (43:55)
and then we would have a copy editor and proofreader. So every piece of content went through, like that went through two layers. It was just like straight, copy editing and proofreading. They would have like, the lead editor would assign it to the person, because there's always like an assigned two people at least, plus the lead editor to every account. So the lead editor, Robbie, was our main lead editor, would assign it to say Beth. And Beth was their primary editor. If Beth was sick or Beth was on vacation, they had a backup, a secondary editor that could step in,
Jon Clark (44:17)
Okay.
John Doherty (44:22)
so they would do their thing, editing it to the style guide, and then they would submit it back to QA, which was the lead that lead editor would finalize it, clean it up, you know, remove a copy, accept all the suggestions, leave all the comments, make sure it was in keeping with what the client wanted and then send it back to the client. So we had multiple like layers, like that for every document that came back. And that was one of our big, like, you know, one the things that made us stand out from, you know, any, like the, the, much lower cost, like competitors that we had
proofed does what we did to a couple, like a couple, even layers more, like we basically built the same business. They were just further along than I was when I sold it to them. Like there was a point where they were like, why didn't you do this? I was like, honestly, man, I just hadn't gotten to it yet. Like that was, that was next on my list. Like there were a number of those things. It was really funny, but like the way they structured it, that was part of what made me feel very comfortable, like sending the excelling to them. Cause I knew that like, I mean, they basically operated the way that we did. So it was going to be a very easy transition.
Jon Clark (44:56)
You
It was on the roadmap.
Right, right.
While we're on the topic of LLMs, I was curious if you are thinking through like the, the ranking or like the reporting challenges of LLMs ⁓ as it relates to, you know, I'm sure you're getting agencies coming You're evaluating maybe their reporting or how they're justifying fees, right? Are you
talking about or thinking through some of those challenges just in terms of how you get reporting out of some of these LLMs and citation tracking and all these things that are so heavily talked about in the industry today.
John Doherty (45:45)
Yeah, a little bit. I try to stay out of any industry drama. Like I just, I just don't, I just don't care. I got so tired of it. I was so deep in it for so many years. I was just like, this isn't doing anything for us. Like, it's not making me a better person. It's not making me a happier person. I just like, I'm a very Zen like woo-woo person these days. Like if it's like, I can't be in a negative brain space. So I just like, and a lot of those just turn into it and there's no answers either. It's just a bunch of like endless debate.
Jon Clark (45:50)
Good for you.
Yeah.
You
John Doherty (46:10)
But to that point, I mean, I have friends that run like prompt tracking, you know, sasses and like that sort of stuff. I think it's useful. At the same time, it was funny, I was talking to... I don't remember. I think it was Michael King and I was like, I am so glad that like the stuff that we have always pushed building a brand, you know, building like high quality content and getting press covers, like all that stuff that literally I've been talking about for 12 years now,
Jon Clark (46:22)
Mm-hmm.
John Doherty (46:34)
like that's what I did when I was in houses Zillow, right? We didn't even mention like that part of my life, like, you know, producing big content like that, building a real brand. Like I'm great at building brands online and like you do that stuff. And yeah, there's some other like technical things that I like you know about, but don't really understand, but know that they're important like for LLMs and you know, mark down and all that stuff.
Jon Clark (46:38)
Right.
John Doherty (46:53)
I know enough to be like dangerous about it and to point clients in the right direction. But basically it's like, build a brand, you do good marketing, right? And like, LLMs are doing a much better job at rewarding that stuff than Google has ever done. Google's talked about it for 20 years, they've never done a great job with it. You can obviously game the LLMs. Like I'm not saying that you can't, but they recognize brand and like being the, you know, being cited all over the internet and all that sort of stuff in ways that we've always wanted Google to, but they never have. So I more focused on like
what are the big things that we can do? How do you become like the go-to person in your space? Like getting on the list of places, like, you know, all of that, all of that matters. I'd much rather focus on that and all the other, like all the other stuff comes. Like I was joking with someone recently, like, cause Credo had like, we had our clients and we worked directly. We also had a directory, right? That we would rank and then people would inquire and we would match them up with the right people. I joked with someone. was like, I kind of still wish I had a directory
Jon Clark (47:38)
Mm-hmm.
John Doherty (47:44)
because everyone, every professional services business once needs to be in directories now. I kind of wish I had a directory and I could just sell paid listings. It'd be really easy. But yeah, that's, that's my take on it. I will say I have seen a lot of like for my own coaching, half of my leads come through LinkedIn and half of my leads originated on ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude. They're on LinkedIn, they come and they schedule a call directly. If they come through an LLM, like I get recommended, right? It's like this way he's good at like
Jon Clark (47:48)
Yeah, that's true, actually.
Interesting.
John Doherty (48:09)
LLMs are actually, I mean, I keep an eye on it. Like they're pretty accurate to what I do and who I work with. They'll come to my coaching page on my site. They'll see some, some Instagram, like reels embedded there. They'll go to Instagram. They'll binge a bunch of like stuff there. And then they'll reach out to me there. They'll come back and schedule a call. Those are my two conversion funnels right there, and it's that way for a lot of agencies now, a lot of Google, previous Google originating leads are now originating on LLMs.
Jon Clark (48:24)
Fascinating.
Fascinating. Cyrus Shepard created the Zippy list. Maybe he took your agency directory idea and applied it. ⁓
John Doherty (48:41)
He's
had that for a long time. He's had it for a long time. But yeah,
Jon Clark (48:44)
The other thing that, that reminded me of like early MozCon days was will Reynold's ⁓ presentation on like doing real company stuff. ⁓ Yeah, yeah. Which, you know, in today's world is like, I mean, comes full circle, right?
John Doherty (48:53)
RCS, yep, yep, yep.
Yeah. One is always what has moved the needle, but people didn't have to do it because they could game, especially in the SEO space, but any big company, they didn't get there off of hacks. Like they got there off of doing like real, real company stuff and, you know, actually building a business and building a product that people wanted or service that people wanted.
It's just, yeah, that's, I think the, digital marketing space has been a bit different, but now it's like coming around and, you know, I feel a little bit vindicated to be totally honest with you. Like, let's just, let's build a great brand. Let's become the go-to person, right? You can't sell anything to anyone. Like you got to sell what you're best at to a specific, kind of, you know, kind of client, which also makes your marketing so much more effective. It makes your delivery so much simpler. You can price a lot more because you actually have the, like the value that you bring, like all of those things. It makes everything easier. And people are finally coming around
Jon Clark (49:26)
Ha
John Doherty (49:45)
because LLMs are in part because LLMs are actually rewarding that.
Jon Clark (49:49)
let's jump to some rapid fire. I know we're bumping up against time here. Is there anything that you've never said publicly? Maybe this isn't a rapid fire, but is there anything that you've never said publicly that founders should know?
John Doherty (49:51)
Yeah.
Gosh, I've said most things publicly. I have no idea what I've said publicly, but I think the thing that I would want founders to think about and to know is
It doesn't have to be soul crushing to build a business. And if your business is soul crushing, it means there is something wrong. Either it is not aligned to who you are and what you actually want to be doing, or you have the wrong strategy and you're going about it in the wrong way. It is hard work, but it should not destroy you as a person. You shouldn't have to give up your hobbies. You shouldn't have to give up the things that you love. You shouldn't have to give up your health. If you're doing that, you're doing it wrong.
And if you're feeling that you re you need to pay attention to that because I was like, I was operating at when I sold Credo, I was probably operating at about 20 % capacity. That's all I had. It took me until about middle of last year to get back to about 90%. I think I'm, I think I'm a hundred percent now, but it took me a really long time because I got in so deep. So I, it's just, it's more of a word of caution than anything.
Jon Clark (50:57)
This is one of those things you don't really understand until you're actually in it and doing that, right? And then you sort of have like someone like you or a friend or something says something and you sort of take a step back and you're like, wow, yeah, need to delegate better or take on less say no more often. ⁓ Yeah, that's a great one. That's a great one.
John Doherty (51:10)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Joe (51:15)
Couple of softballs
for Jhon. ⁓ Favorite toy on a powder day?
John Doherty (51:17)
Yeah.
Oh my gosh, my DPS whalers 112 underfoot. They're super fun.
Joe (51:24)
Okay, and favorite
Jon Clark (51:25)
Hahaha.
Joe (51:27)
resort on a powder day.
John Doherty (51:29)
my gosh. Crusted Butte, Crested Butte, Colorado. I love Crested Butte. Yeah. Super steep. I'm actually heading there in a couple of weeks for a guy ski trip. I mean, that's in the US like if I worldwide, I haven't been to Japan, but Chamonix, France, just like the Chamonix Valley, there's five different resorts. It's just like frigging unbelievable.
Joe (51:30)
Yeah, it's steep.
You have one kid or two? Is there a work-life balance you try never to break?
John Doherty (51:48)
I've two kids.
Never is a strong word. I would say, so I am, I am a very present dad. I do half the pickup and drop off for school. I do half the cooking, or sometimes more, cause I actually really love to cook. You know, I do a lot of the, a lot of the cleaning and all that. Like I'm, I'm a very, like, I'm very present, like parent, and partner, and that's really important to me. At the same time I don't work weekends,
weekends are for family weekends are for hobbies. They're for skiing where we have a place up in the mountains near Breckenridge. And so like we spent, we spent a hundred days a year up there and that's just like, I go there for two days and I feel like I've been on vacation for a week. And so that's very like necessary for me, just functioning well, I think also one thing for me, like as a parent is I don't want my kids to grow up and not want to be an entrepreneur because they saw me being unhappy doing it.
I want them to see my work bringing me alive and me working hard and also seeing like the benefits of it, right? Like that it was worth it. You know, I can drive a nice car. I can have a nice house, two houses, right? My wife works too, she works in tech, but like, I want to see them, like, I want them to see the benefits of it and see that like, you can build something that you love to do and like, kind of do it on your own terms.
Jon Clark (52:35)
God, that's a good one.
That's really great. I can't imagine a better spot to end than that one. Well, John, this has been really, really a lot of fun. I'm glad that we got to connect. Let our listeners know where they can find you and maybe sign up for a coaching session.
Joe (52:59)
was just thinking the same thing.
John Doherty (53:00)
Yeah.
Mic drop.
Yeah. So, social media, Instagram, Doherty JF — D-O-H-E-R-T-Y-J-F. My email is that at gmail.com. So feel free to send me an email, and LinkedIn, ⁓ as well, just search John Doherty. It's like slash in slash John F Doherty, I think. And then, yeah, so my website is johnfdoherty.com and johnfdoherty.com/coaching. So if you're, you know, this is resonated and
you know, you're running an agency or somewhere I like solopreneur up to about 30 K or like small agency kind of somewhere between 20 and 40, you're stuck, you're looking to grow, you know, you're tired of being you need an outside person's perspective that has done it and sees across a lot of agencies, I'd love to chat. My spots are limited, I'm actually getting close to capacity, which is awesome, and quick. But, I do have, you know, a few, a few slots open, but you know, some good interest in it. So.
but I can always put people on the wait list and let them know when I have a spot open up.
Jon Clark (54:01)
Always a good problem to have. All Well, we'll wrap up. If you enjoyed the show, please remember to subscribe, rate and review. We'll see you next week. Bye bye.
John Doherty (54:03)
Absolutely.