Salome Schillack:

Hello, and welcome to The Shine Show. And this is Episode Number 76. And today we're going to talk about when is the right time to hire Facebook Ads help. And before we jump in, I just want to say that I feel incredibly, incredibly loved. Over the last few weeks, every time I've gone on social media, I have been greeted by messages from people inside of Amy Porterfield's community and people inside of Stu McLaren's Tribe community with just the most beautiful messages of how the training I offered in those two communities have helped you guys.

I want to say that if you posted in any one of those groups to express your gratitude for the training I offered in there, I want to just say a deep, deep, deep thank you from the bottom of my heart. I appreciate it. And if you've come over here to listen to the podcast as a result of that training, welcome. I am very glad that you're here. And whether you've been here for months and months and months, or if you're new, I want you to know that I appreciate you, and I appreciate you taking the time to listen to me every week. I know the podcasts that I listen to every week is like a little highlight of my week. It's a little ray of sunshine, and I sincerely hope that I can be that for you.

I also had an amazing review from keto smart, and I don't know if it's a he or she. Keto smart said, "Salome is so awesome at teaching Facebook ads, but she also has so much wisdom in the online world of business. Thank you so much for sharing your awesome talents." Thank you so very much, keto smart. I really, really appreciate your beautiful review. And you can go to iTunes and give us a five star rating and review the podcast, please, if you want to help us reach more people and get more listeners to hear the amazing content that I do my very best to bring to you every single week. So now let's jump into the episode and talk about when the right time is to hire Facebook Ads help.

Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi, I'm your host Salome Schillack. And I help online course creators launch, grow, and scale their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world. If you're ready to be inspired, to dream bigger, launch sooner, and grow your online business faster, then tune in because you are ready to shine. And this is The Shine Show.

I want to tell you a story about finding my crap free zone. My husband has always been, I fondly refer to him as my crap free zone. The first time I heard this expression, I thought that is so well-said. It's just this place where there's no judgment and you can just relax and be yourself and you're not going to be judged and you're not going to be bothered and you're not going to be poked and prodded emotionally, physically, psychologically, or on any other level. It's just this really safe space. And we moved to Brisbane, my family and I moved to Brisbane about almost 18 months ago, maybe coming up to two years. And for the longest time, we didn't really have friends because I have an online business. You know that. And I work from home and I'm not particularly involved in my kids' school stuff. I should maybe be a little bit more involved in it, but it's not really my jam.

My husband on the other hand is an extreme extrovert and needs a lot of friends around him and loves it. But he finds it a little bit harder to reach out and make friends with strangers. Whereas I can do that part. I can rip off the Band-Aid and introduce myself and get to know someone quickly. And then after that, I'm kind of like, "Okay, now what?" Whereas he's really good with the now what part?

So after about a year of me listening to him complain about the fact that he doesn't have any friends, I decided to take matters into my own hands. And I started identifying couples in the school that I've gotten to know just from school drop off and pick up and hearing their school things. And this is all pre-COVID long before COVID happened. And I identified a few couples and started inviting them over to see if my husband liked the guy and if they got along. And so eventually we made some friends and we met this one couple. Our kids are best friends. And we get along like a house on fire. And this weekend was my husband's 40th birthday celebrations. And so the two of us and the two of them, just the adults, we left the kids at home. We did a bit of a staycation. We were able to book into one of our local beautiful hotels and stay there. And I left the kids with a babysitter for a whole weekend. And we went on this staycation and we spent the whole weekend just chilling at the pool and it was awesome.

And the funny thing is afterwards, my friend said she was telling the girls that she works with what we did. And she's a dentist. And she works with 22 year olds, 23 year olds mostly in their dental practice. And she said, they kept saying to her, "So let me get this straight. You guys were just hanging out all weekend with another couple, but you didn't actually do anything for two days. You just lay there and ate and swam for two days with the same people." And they couldn't understand that we could just hang out for 48 hours straight with the same people and not get tired of each other or need some form of entertainment.

So I say to her, I said, "Well, it's because we're each other's crap free zone." And she laughed because she immediately realized that to be true. And like I said, that's something my husband and I have said about each other for a long time that we just don't give each other a hard time ever, and therefore it is so easy to just get along. And it's pretty special when you find one person in your life that can be your crap free zone. We have now been very lucky that we found this couple friends that we can just enjoy each other's company in the same way.

Now, the reason I'm telling you this story is because when you hire an ads manager for the first time, I want you to feel that way about your ads manager. I want you to breathe a sigh of relief and just lean into the awesomeness that can be when you and an ads manager find each other, and you are a perfect match for each other, and you bring out the best in each other, and you can double your business, triple your business, grow your business with this partner by your side.

So let's talk about what to look for and how to know you're ready to hire someone else to take over this important part of your business and how to create that relationship, where you just go, "This person just gets me. They're on my team and they just work with me to create some business awesomeness."

And the first thing I want to touch on is when not to hire an ads manager or an agency. I had a call booked with a lead the other day. So when you come to my business and you're interested in working with my team in the agency, you fill out a form and there's some basic questions I ask you in that form, basic things that the way you answer those things tell me a little bit about your business, and I know can kind of most of the time tell if you have some foundational things ready in your business for us to do good work together. There's certain things that are clear red flags. And then there are certain things that I kind of look at it and I go, "Yeah, I like this person's personality. I don't know about the funnel enough, but let's hop on a call and see what's going to happen."

So I ended up on a call with this person and I should have flagged as a red flag for me the first moment when he complained about the time difference between us. And I had to explain to him, well, I am in Australia and he was in the US on Eastern time zone, which is quite hard to navigate. I can talk to people on the Eastern side of the country mostly after 7:00 PM at night for them. And I am at the point where I don't get up at four o'clock in the morning anymore to talk to people who are in different time zones because I did that for many, many years. And I still do that for my mentors. If my mentor shows up to teach me something, and that means I have to wake up at 4:00 AM, I gladly do that. But if someone wants to do business with me, they have to do business with me in a time where my brain is fresh and I have mascara on.

So anyway, this guy says he found us on Google, which was interesting. I was like, "Yay. Finally, someone found me on Google. That is so great." And I looked at his website and he looked amazing, very professional. It looked like he's making money. And from what he was saying, I could see that he has a successful business, but he said he has no email lists and he's never launched his webinars. And he wanted to hire us to help him launch his webinars. So I was curious because whilst having never launched anything is a bit of a red flag for me, I could see that this guy knew what he was doing. He has done this before. He's done it somewhere else. So I was curious about that.

So I sent him a message and said, "Let's jump on a call." And he was clearly a seasoned entrepreneur and had done a lot of media. So he knew how to put together amazing content because his content just blew me away. His only interest in the conversation we were having from the first minute he started talking was about our average conversion rates for our clients. And he kept asking me, "Tell me what your average conversion rate for sales. What is the return on investment for your clients on average?" And of course that depends greatly on the clients, the niches that they're in, and the funnels that they run and their own ability to convert. So I will never hang my hat on conversion rates because it's not my hat to hang. And if you see ads managers who are claiming that they're making their customers millions of dollars, just know that is a red flag because an ads manager does not make you money. And ads manager brings you traffic and your own funnels make yourself money. We are just good at making even more. We are good at amplifying what's already working.

So I tried to explain to this guy that there is no way I will ever make him a promise of revenue I can create for him from our ads simply because he has never run his webinar. And because he's never run his webinar, I have no data that tells me whether the webinar will convert or not. So I would be a ridiculous fool if I told him that based on my average conversion rate with our average clients, I can make him that amount of money. The guy was not happy. What is the Zoom equivalent of hanging up the phone in someone's ear, like dropping the phone in someone's ear? That's what he did when I persisted in saying I am not going to make him a promise of that.

He was literally looking for an agency to tell him how much money they can make him. And here's the sad bit. He's probably not going to look very far. He's not going to look very far to find either an ads manager or an agency who will compare his apples to someone else's pears and make him all the promises he wants to hear because those are the things that ads managers often hang their hats on. But here is the thing. Traffic is never a source of revenue. Traffic ads. Ads is traffic. Ads bring traffic or people to your funnel, your webinar, your challenge, your video series. And that conversion event, that webinar or challenge or video series, that's the thing that converts them.

Now, can we amplify the effect of that conversion event with ads? Yes, we can. Will ads save a webinar that doesn't convert? Never. Ads will not save a challenge or a video series or any funnel that is not fundamentally and basically converting. Now you can get the ads part horribly wrong. Yes you can. And you can not get the right people or the right traffic or get traffic or not get traffic at all. But that is rarely the whole story. So be careful when someone say, "My ads manager didn't make me money, or my ads manager was the reason why my webinar didn't convert." That's a giant red flag for me.

I tell you about this guy because he was just looking to outsource his ads. He was looking to outsource the responsibility of the conversion. This guy as a client will not be a crap free zone. And somewhere out there right now is an ads manager signing this guy up, probably right now. That guy or girl is in for a few months of torture. It is just not worth it. No Facebook ads manager can ever fix a funnel that is not converting. The best time to hire someone to run ads for you is when you know that your funnel is already converting because you've run your own warm traffic and possibly some cold traffic through it. And you have proven that it converts. Don't hire an ads manager until you know your funnel converts.

So what do you do if you don't know how to run ads and you want to increase your traffic? Well, it's always best to learn the basics of something as important as ads yourself. You want to know enough that you can look at your ads manager and evaluate the decisions inside the ads manager inside Facebook, that this person is making on your behalf with your hard-earned money. It'll take a bit longer to learn it yourself. I know. I speak to people every day who tells me, "I don't want to learn this."

But you are going to save yourself thousands and thousands of dollars just by knowing what really works in your niche and in your business. And don't just think about the money that is going to go into that you're going to miss if you hire an ads manager and they don't get it right. It's also about that journey that you're going to go on with this person and the negative energy that will be attached to how it all comes to light. There's just a yuckiness that I want to spare you. I want to save you from it. I want to protect you from it. And I'm just going let's just never unleash that yuckiness on your life.

So when is the right time to hire someone? I recently got an email from one of our existing clients, someone who is just lovely and I adore her. She said, "I am so excited to share the news that we did another six-figure launch. I doubled my business since I started working with your team. Thank you so much for all your amazing help with this launch. #blessed, #grateful." When I get these emails, they make me cry some days because you see this email is not just about a six-figure launch. This is not just about doubling the results in our business in a year. It's not just about the money.

What is not captured in this email is what happens as a result of this and what this means for the client in terms of things like how she can support her child that is at college at the moment, how she can pay for a wedding of one of her children. You don't hear about how this is the most money that she's made since she got made redundant from her lifelong career. You don't hear about all her students that are now learning a new skill that will help them make money, especially those that have been hard hit by COVID and needs to generate income in a new way fast. So this is not just about making money and hanging our hats on six-figure launches. This is about life change and about lifting people up and about being part of the rising tide that lifts all the boats.

So what did she have in place before we started working together? And what should you have in place to create your own magical relationship with a team or a freelancer that will help you scale and double your business? You need to know that your offer converts. You should have launched enough times with or without ads that you've seen evidence that people want what you offer. And then when you're looking for the right team, here are some other things to consider.

First thing I want you to consider is, do they share my values in my team? We value clear and regular communication. And that is a two-way street. We keep our clients informed and we manage projects in a way that gives them confidence and certainty. And we love working with clients who give us confidence and certainty in return. Clients who don't meet deadlines regularly and who often wants things last minute all the time doesn't gel very well with us and usually finds our type A personalities a little bit rigid. And that is okay by us. That is perfectly fine for us because we know who our people are and we know who we like to work with. And we know when we work with that type of person, we bring out the best in each other.

The second thing you need to ask yourself is, do they understand my marketing funnels? When I started out moonlighting or freelancing as a Facebook ads manager, when I still was working full time, I used to run ads for anyone who will let me run their ads between 8:00 PM and midnight, sometimes 8:00 PM and 2:00 AM. So I signed up bookkeepers and real estate agents and financial services providers and a jewelry brand and coaches and a few online course creators. Anyone who said, "Yes, will you please spend my money on Facebook?" I said, "Okay, I will." And I failed so hard at helping those local businesses that I had to actually refund the financial services guy his money. The other ones, they appreciated my effort and my lack of results. They had grace for the lack of results, but the financial services provider was like, "No, you delivered exactly nothing to me."

So I got him no leads and no wonder because neither him nor I knew anything about how to market financial services. I thought, I mean, how hard can list building be in that niche? But turns out there's quite the trick to getting people to opt in to book an appointment with you if you're a financial service provider, not a trick I ever want to learn or master. But ask me about webinars and three-part video series and challenge funnels, and you see my eyes light up like a Christmas tree. My team has been trained to do one thing, and we do that one thing really well. And that is to scale online course businesses and memberships. We don't take e-commerce clients. We don't work with local businesses. If you sell a widget, we do not sell it for you. If you build Facebook groups to sell widgets to, we don't. If you have an MLM business, we don't. Even as far as down as coaches, we don't run many coaching funnels.

I was told I won't be able to build a sustainable agency without also running e-commerce ads because all the agency people say the money's in e-commerce, which it is to an extent because those e-commerce companies are gigantic and they spend millions in ads. So if you're able to charge 10% of ad spend on a hundred thousand dollar a month account, of course you're going to make more money. But I decided to stick to my online course creators and ha-ha, who's laughing now. So find someone who knows your business model and the funnels you run inside and out.

So let's recap what we've covered. Don't hire an ads manager if you don't have firsthand knowledge of how to run your own ads and you haven't yet launched enough times that you know your funnels are going to convert. Do hire when you want a partner who specializes in helping others and has evidence that they have worked with other clients in your niche or with similar funnels before. Do hire someone that you trust and that you feel you have a good match in how you communicate, how you treat people, and what your values are.

And I'll give you a hint. You can usually tell a lot about how someone treats people by speaking to that person's assistant. So I hope when you talk to my team, you will come to the conclusion that I treat people with kindness and respect. And know that anyone who speaks to your assistant, if there's any level of burnout going on, that's a red flag for me. I want you to know that when you're ready to hire an agency or an ads manager, that will be that person for you that will help you make absolute magic in your business. That person like my husband is to me and that my husband and I found in our friends where you can create a shorthand with them, and they know you, and they know your business, and you know them and their business, and you always feel safe, and you can just hang out and talk for days and days and days and grow your relationship, and as you grow your business together as a team.

if you've ever been on the fence about hiring a team to help you grow and scale your online courses business or your membership business, and you want to talk to me about working with us, then go ahead and go to shineandsucceed.com/apply-here. The link will be in the show notes. That's shineandsucceed.com/apply-here. And we can set up a call to talk about your goals and to see if we can become partners to grow your business. Have a wonderful week, my friends, and I'll see you again next week. Bye.

Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that Subscribe button so you never miss a thing.