Jacob Baadsgaard, Disruptive Advertising – Developing a Team, Niche Specialization, and Moving Beyond Owner Based Selling
Jacob Baadsgaard is the Founder and CEO of Disruptive Advertising. Disruptive helps businesses grow to the next level by developing and executing a dynamic digital marketing strategy; They provide PPC, analytics, and more for their customers.
In just a short period of time, Jacob’s company has grown from two employees working in his basement to an eight-figure agency with more than 100 employees.
What’s in This Episode:
- Who is Jacob Baadsgaard?
- What is the idea-to-launch story of Disruptive Advertising?
- How should you expand your service offering as your company grows?
- Jacob shares tips on how to scale your service business beyond owner-based selling.
- The steps Jacob takes to nurture the team members he has in his growing company.
- The importance of being the change that you want to see when leading your team
- Jacob talks about the high-value activities he brings to Disruptive Advertising to make them better
- Jacob shares why work-life balance is important
Episode 17:
Prologue
Welcome to The Rankings Podcast, where we feature top founders, entrepreneurs and elite personal injury attorneys and share their inspiring stories. Now let’s get started with the show.
Chris Dreyer
Chris Dreyer here, CEO and Founder of Rankings.io, an SEO agency for personal injury law firms. You’re listening to the Chris Dreyer podcast where I invite top digital agency owners, elite SEO experts and innovative digital marketers to share their inspiring stories. Speaking of top digital agency owners, Jacob Baadsgaard is the Founder and CEO of Disruptive Advertising. Disruptive helps businesses grow to the next level by developing and executing a dynamic digital marketing strategy. They provide PPC, CRO analytics and more for their customers. In a short time, Jacob’s company has grown from two employees working in his basement to an eight-figure agency with more than 100 employees. Jacob, welcome to the show.
Jacob Baadsgaard
Thanks for having me, Chris.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, I’m really excited to have you on the show. So let’s kick things off. How did you get started with Disruptive Advertising? Where did the idea come from? how did how did you launch the business?
Jacob Baadsgaard
Yeah, you know, it’s, it’s always interesting going on a walk down memory lane, right? This, it almost feels like a different lifetime. But the first few years of my career, I actually worked at a company called Omniture. That was later bought by Adobe. And I actually did web analytics, implementation and consulting for the first few years of my career. And I actually worked with a lot of kind of like fortune 100 type companies to make sure that they could track how their dollars how effective their marketing dollars were online, and then tying that back into their actual customer database, helping them make good decisions so they could spend their marketing dollars where it was going to give them the best results. And I just remember there was a couple of moments that happened. One of them was, you know, I’m working with American Express and John Deere and Home Depot and a lot of just just just big brands. And I’m like, What if these guys don’t know how to do this, no one else knows how to do this, and what are like the normal size companies out there doing? So that was kind of my first and I actually thought my business would just become a freelance consultant for web analytics. And that was actually my first stab at it when I had a one year non compete. And the business that I started after that was over was actually a company called FoundROI, horrible name. And, and everyone kept asking me what’s FoundROI. And, and then I’d have to explain, oh, I hope you get good data so we can make smart marketing decisions with that. But what I found while working at Adobe, and then while getting my business launched is people like the idea of data, and like the buzzwords of big data and data driven decisions and all of those things, but The reality is most people don’t have the bandwidth or expertise to get the right data. And then they generally lack the bandwidth or expertise to act on that data in a meaningful way. And so what kept popping up was the easiest place for us to go and move the needle immediately was with PPC campaigns primarily with paid search with some paid social retargeting because we could track those so incredibly well, and adapt and adjust those campaigns on the fly day of based on that data. And so that’s where I started to see Oh, data is great, but where people or businesses are really getting the value is us actually executing on what the data is telling us. And the in the area that kind of just materialized was more on the on the paid side where it was a little easier to track and be in control of that. And that’s that’s kind of where it all started.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, from from a standpoint of being an ROI focused agency, those conversations Hey, we’ve next year your revenue, leave us a case study, or would you be willing to do a case study? Would you be willing to leave a testimonial or even to grow those accounts? You know, having that that data that data focused viewpoint, I imagine that that really helped in the in the growth strategies, too.
Jacob Baadsgaard
Yeah. You know, and we always love working with new companies, which is exciting and getting involved with some new businesses. It’s, it’s probably more fun to grow our existing customers. And we actually, in one year published like 100 growth case studies of businesses that we helped grow and that we could measure and demonstrate that impact for them. And so absolutely, that’s that’s the fun part about it. And I’m a little bit of a control freak. And that’s what I love about the paid side is I can control it and report on it and point and point to it and say, Look, this is this is what we did.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, that was gonna be my next question is you’ve got this very recognizable brand. You got a great marketing team. You know, it’s I see you everywhere. Obviously, you Go to your site. I’m getting retargeted I’m getting hit with your brand. So you’ve generated this this brand equity Have you considered now? you launch with PPC CRL and you’ve started to expand your service offering. Have you started to look kind of the dark side? And those those SEO those organic types of strategies? Are you still just laser focused on PPC and ads and crl? Oh,
Jacob Baadsgaard
yeah, there are. At our core, who we are as an agency, is we’re paid digital media. That’s what we that’s just who we are at our core. And so as we’ve expanded our service offering, it’s been to support who we are and what we’re best at, which is let’s get you good data and help you make great decisions with your media and spin online. And then service offerings that we have started to expand into is so paid search and paid social advertising and retargeting and display has been what we’ve been doing for a long time. The areas that we’ve expanded into is, Hey, no matter how good the traffic is that we’re pointing to you, to your website, if your website just really sucks at converting that traffic, we’re not going to get anywhere. And so we’ve actually built a creative team, a strategy and a dev team that can actually help our clients test and update their website to get instead of five out of 100, doing what we want them to do to 10 out of 100, for example, and really improving the site experience. The other area that we’ve actually launched and it turned into a good little business arm for us is actually nurturing and getting beyond the initial sale through email and text nurture, to say, hey, you bought this now or you abandoned in the shopping cart, or you filled out the lead form, but you never actually signed up. So we’ve actually introduced an email marketing component and SMS to that as well. But again, it helps us get more out of those, those dollars that we’re investing for. clients. And then we’ve been looking at expanding the ones that were most interested in extra probably Amazon, because that that probably aligns a little bit better with our core. Yep, that being said, SEO and organic is something that I am such a big advocate of. And I know that we will be exponentially more successful with any of the clients that we work with if they’re running a good content SEO program, because they just dovetail so nicely together. And that’s a big component of how I’ve grown disruptive as a brand and as a company as well. And so I just see it as a very complimentary part to what we do, but not something that we’re looking to build in yet. We just want to stay really focused on what we’re best at.
Chris Dreyer
I really applaud you there because it’s easy to get that shiny object syndrome. There’s always something new around the corner, whether it’s Tick Tock or Snapchat, you know when it comes to marketing, and I really applaud you on that. So you know back to kind of the the starting you know, starting found Found ROI, and then go into Disruptive Advertising. So what was kind of the turning point that kind of took it to the next level. And obviously, if you guys can hear the weed eater started outside, apologize for that. So it was it kind of like the, to take it to the next level and grow.
Jacob Baadsgaard
There was a couple of pivotal moments. The one that I would probably highlight was how to move beyond founder based selling. It’s one thing to grow a service based company, you know, if it’s a law firm, if that’s if that’s an agency, if that’s whatever, and the partners and the owners are generally pretty good at selling themselves and getting some business, but then quickly grow to the point where it’s like, and now there’s just no more hours in the day. And if I’m selling it and also doing some of the work on it, then it just gets challenging. So kind of two pivotal steps that I’ve had to make early on was building the competency in the team to actually do the work based on the strategy and proposals that we were sending out there and developing that skill set. And that allowed us to kind of go from a few people company to a 20 person company, because then I could still sell a lot, right? And but then, but then we kind of got to the point where it’s like, I can only sell so much, right? And what was what took quite a quite a bit of time and a few failed attempts was actually building a sales team that could sell without me and moving past that founder base selling and my first couple couple of attempts were someone that I could just hand it off to and that could take care of it, which didn’t work. When it finally worked was I just said hey, I’m just gonna work with someone for like a year I’ll even close their deals for him and pay him the commission. But I’m really committed to giving them great at this and setting them up for success. And so it felt kinda like slowing down but it actually sped things up and and now we have a Really great sales team that does all of that, and they prefer I don’t get involved at this point.
Chris Dreyer
That’s awesome. So is so to do, you know, breaking that down? Just a real quick question because I think it’s very valuable for the audience was, you know, was it a just an ad type model where you have that person worked the lead all the way through? did was it a an SDR type of setup where there was a qualifier? And then it goes to the A E. You know, what, what do you find works best for for volume for for when you’re getting a lot of leads like that. Unknown Speaker So
Jacob Baadsgaard
same way eat an elephant, like one bite at a time, right? So step one was, hey, there’s a lot of follow up and follow through that I’m not doing Can you just help me make sure that that’s happening for all of our prospects? Step two is Hey, that’s working pretty well. How do we get some more leads into the pipeline now and and get them involved with that or investing more in marketing, and then kind of just iterating through that. Okay, great. Now that you’re doing Great job of kind of helping move these through, but I’m still closing the deal. Let’s let you start closing the smaller ones also close the larger ones. Okay, cool. Now you’re good at the small ones. Let’s see how you’re on the medium ones. Okay, great. And then we’re talking the course of yours. Right. And that’s one of the challenges that I ran into and that I see a lot of owners and founders run into is, we’re always looking for that silver bullet. But the reality is, I just needed a couple of great salespeople and just take the time to invest in them. And to get there, and it’s not cheap, right? Because they need to make enough money to make it worth it for them. And I’m still doing some of their work for them and just kind of committed more to the long game there. And, and those were some of the steps that we took.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, that’s great. And obviously, you know, you’ve grown you took it to the next level. I think that’s huge, right? Even myself, I have one sales guy, right. So I haven’t figured out that puzzle. So I really applaud you there. You know, now you’ve got over 100 employees. And then it’s just this different level of management and having the right people in the right positions, right. You know, right, you know, right seats and the mentors. What steps are you taking to nurture your team? Now I saw on your Instagram, you have Disruptive Leadership and Personal Development Course I would love to just talk about nurturing your team.
Jacob Baadsgaard
Yeah, I think that there are lasting success in business, I think ties. It has to apply to life, and it has to apply to business. And so I’m a big believer that it has to be a win win win. The employee has to be winning, the client has to be winning and the company needs to be winning. And when all three of those are happening, that’s when the magic happens. And that’s and that’s where it can really align with that when it comes to our employees. There’s really three things that we’re trying to help them be successful with. One of those is We want to just help them develop really, really good marketable marketing skills, right? Like we want them to be the best at the things that we do and just help them get really good at those technical aspects of it. The other part are more of the soft skills, how to manage expectations, how to develop business acumen and marketing acumen to say, you say you want this, but what you really need, I think, is this, right and really develop those soft skills. And so we have training that’s done by myself, as well as a variety of people in the company to address those technical and soft skills to just get them great at what they do. One of the other things, one of our mantras is we’re here to win at life and in business together. And there’s a couple of just core life skills that we feel like translate really well into business success as well as just overall living a fulfilled and happy life. And so we actually teach courses that are optional at the company, but and people have to show up at 7am and actually have To pay money to participate in these, and if they graduate, they get their money back and a bonus. But one of those is a personal development course that’s really focused on developing habits in our personal lives. That are, if you’ve ever read The Miracle Morning, those are the habits that we house.
Chris Dreyer
Hal Elrod. Yep, yeah,
Jacob Baadsgaard
yeah. So waking up and bidding in things like visualization and meditation and reading and exercise, and, and all of these things that we actually practice for months together. We read books together, and we really focus on building great habits. And we base a lot of those habits on the principles found in Atomic Habits is the book that’s kind of more of the operating system
Chris Dreyer
to another. Yeah, I’ve read that one, too. It’s a great book.
Jacob Baadsgaard
Yeah. And then we also have a finance course where they come in and they learn the basics of how to put together a budget, how to live within their means, how to save how to how to do all of those things, and then they actually put together a budget and report back My CFO once a month on how they executed their budget for the month. And they do that for six months. And if they graduate, they get up to 1000 bucks for every year they’ve worked at Disruptive towards their financial goal. Wow. And so and then we’re doing a health one where we actually have a coach that comes in trains people on nutrition and exercise and form. And, you know, because when we’re physically and mentally and spiritually, and all those things in a good spot, man, we just perform better at work in life. And so those are the things that we’re really focused on as a company to just win at life and business together.
Chris Dreyer
That’s incredible, Jake. And then the first thing I can tell you is, I’ve got a vision board, literally an arm’s reach from our Miracle Morning. I’m definitely not putting it on the screen. But, you know, a few great books. They’re one of the things I’ve noticed too, just you know, so we’ve known each other we’ve been buddies for a while now. And one of the things I’ve noticed is when you have to teach something and kind of embody these ideals and now you’re passing on and you’re, you’re a leader for your team. It’s, I’m seeing you do, you did a marathon? I’m seeing, I’m seeing all these things that are occurring with you to, you know, how is that impacted you, you know, in in terms of teaching these other individuals and how has that impacted yourself?
Jacob Baadsgaard
Yeah, a lot of a lot of the things that we focus on in these courses and at work are directly come from the challenges that I’ve had to overcome in my life, and then trying to kind of pay it forward. So I’ve worked with all sorts of therapists as it relates to marriage counseling, addiction, recovery, self improvement, business coaching, and I’ve really had some, I’m just, I’m a big believer in that stuff. And I used to worry that needing that type of help meant something was wrong with me, or being open about those types of things. People might judge me and now I’m just realizing call, I wish I had started that stuff sooner because I had like a decade of hardship that I didn’t really need to have in my life when it when it came to those things. And so a lot of what’s built into these programs stems from that. And it also creates an incredible accountability source for me to take my performance to the next level. Because now I have 2030 people in the class that I have to show up and report on how I did in these areas. Right. And now that I’ve done that for three years, just a little bit by a little bit those things have compounded and, and physically I’m in the best shape of my life. Mentally I feel like I’m way more stable I think as entrepreneurs, I think we’re generally have a lot more highs and lows. And it’s really helped me to find some more stability and self worth and those things. So that’s that’s kind of what it’s done for me. It’s been a game changer.
Chris Dreyer
That’s amazing. And I can imagine to when you’re doing the finances, there’s a lot of vulnerability there. So you kind of bond with your team. And those even those EQ and empathy type skills kind of even come naturally probably even when you’re looking at your financials like probably crossover in some degree. So your, your high value activities have changed the, you know, the E myth where it’s the manager maker, the owner, and you’re taking off these hats at different stages of development for your company today, what are your high value activities that you really bring to Disruptive Advertising in your company?
Jacob Baadsgaard
Yeah, I think the number one thing that I can bring to disruptive Well actually, I’m going to backpedal just a little bit and then I’ll answer that question. Sometimes you just don’t know until you feel something. And so disruptive that had enough success. I mean, I grew up in a family of 10 kids we did not have money and and when you have these lofty goals, to save If I ever achieved this, I just financially call that just make my life easy and then to hit and far surpass, surpass those goals by a longshot and then to realize, Oh, this didn’t, the money thing didn’t really solve my problems. In fact, it made my life more complicated. And now I kind of have more things to worry about. And so those were some of the things that like, were interesting to feel along the way as we had certain levels of success with the company. And what I what I’ve realized, is that what I can bring that I feel like I uniquely too disruptive, is a vision for who people can become, that sometimes they don’t even have for themselves. And when I can, when I can come to the table and say here is how we’re going to win at life together, personally, professionally and financially. And we are in this fight together. And here is Not only who you’re capable of becoming, but who you already are. And we’re just going to start tapping into that together. And it’s going to be like, hella vulnerable and challenging and mega rewarding at the same time. And bringing that vision of what could be and and really helping people tap in and resonate with that. I feel like that’s really what what makes the difference at this point. And it’s, it really aligns with making it really meaningful for me, I’m not looking to build this to grow it and sell it and get away from it. It really aligns with I want to create an environment of growth for myself for those that I have a relationship with. And the company is is the avenue in which I can accomplish that goal. And and helping people see that they’re capable of becoming more than they maybe give themselves credit for. I feel like is really the difference maker that I can bring to disruptive and getting more and more comfortable with the fact of and some Sometimes that might mean that staying at disruptive forever isn’t what they need for their growth and development. And but I’m sure gonna try my hardest to make sure that it is. Right.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah. And that’s very powerful because people see, you know, what you’re committing to them and in terms of their growth and just having that impact on their culture and retention, and it just builds this this tremendous bond. So that’s, that’s just incredibly powerful. You know, Jake, we’ve been talking about a lot of things we’ve talked about focus, you know, staying with what you do best. We talked about, you know, developing your people, you know, marketing, we’ve talked about, you know, some great books and mentorship. One final question here. What questions or stories that we’ve not talked about that you feel would be important.
Jacob Baadsgaard
The story that probably had the biggest impact on me, personally and professionally, was actually going through marriage counseling. And it’s kind of funny because sometimes we don’t connect the On, on how those things tie together. But I think we’re all searching for meaning and and desperately looking for love and belonging and that we’re enough. And the one thing that I would share is that there is no level of professional success that will ever feel that cup and to be sitting in and what I realized is that I have used my professional success as a tool to minimize and diminish the value of my of my partner of my wife because of how I felt about myself. And then I used it as a tool to say, clearly, I’m not the problem because look how well the company is doing. Clearly our issues are because of you. And to have a marriage counselor, who is also the owner of his practice, because we tried a couple and I didn’t like it’s worth trying A couple that finally just helped me understand that I did not view and treat my wife as a partner and as an equal is probably what really set me on a very different course with what I’m doing with the company. And those are the things that and now she’s actually part of our financial review once a month with our CFO we go and have a business lunch together once a month, she’s very involved and understands what’s going on. And we are both part of the problem and we are both part of the solution. And I would just say that’s the one thing that I would highlight it’s worth digging in a little bit there and so often the areas that we’re having success in our lives are the things that come easy to us that we use as tools to justify not doing the things that are hard for us
Chris Dreyer
that’s amazing Jake every every time I talk to you I just have tons of takeaways admits take a step back and think man like I need this type of advice? You know, I’ve got my business coaches and things like that, but it’s different to have a different view on just your overall happiness and, and trajectory in life. So that’s that’s just incredibly powerful. Guys, we’ve been talking to Jacob Baadsgaard, founder and CEO of Disruptive Advertising. Jake, where can people go to learn more?
Jacob Baadsgaard
Yeah, you know, at the end of the day, companies hire us for two things. They lack bandwidth or expertise to get the most out of their Google and Facebook advertising budgets. And if you want to learn more about how we could potentially help you there, go to disruptiveadvertising.com and check us out, feel free to reach out we do free audits and are glad to do a consultation there. If you just want to connect Personally, I’m the most active on LinkedIn. And my last name has four A’s in it so it’s Jacob Baadsgaard, you’ll find me send a request I’d love to connect and, and always love learning from other people. So that’d be the best place to do that on a personal level.
Chris Dreyer
Thanks Jake.
Conclusion
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