Blueprint to Scaling an SEO Agency with Jason Hennessey

In This Episode

• [02:09] – Stephan welcomes back Jason Hennessey as they discuss his success in digital marketing and proven strategies to scale a business.
• [16:51] – Jason reveals digital PR strategies and successful media coverage.
• [19:48] – Jason explains how he incorporates AI into his workflows to reduce cost and increase output.
• [25:26] – Jason elaborates on the importance of EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) in SEO.
• [36:20] – Jason shares how he discovered creating a “Vivid Vision”.
• [38:37] – Stephan and Jason talk about the “free book strategy” for generating leads and revenue.
• [41:05] – Jason gives advice on hiring an executive assistant and a coach for accountability.

Jump to Links and Resources

Jason, it’s so good to have you back on the show.

Thank you, Stephan. I appreciate it so much. And it’s funny to be here because it’s full circle. When I first got into SEO, way back in 2001, you were one of the first people I learned from. I remember seeing you speak at one of the original PubCons. So it’s full circle. It’s great to be here, my friend.

It’s great to have you. I remember some fond memories of hanging out with you at Semrush events, which were summer jam events where they wined and dined us at junkets. Really. They were.

They did.

That was fun.

Yeah. We built a great friendship over the years. So, yeah, I’m honored to be here. 

Yeah, we also had some fun with them. You’re the one who had most of the fun, I think, doing these picture selfie battles and things and using my book in the process. Do you want to share what you were doing with the CMO of Ahrefs? That’s crazy.

Yeah, that just kind of all started. I think it was before the pandemic. I think Tim Soulo from Ahrefs posted a photo saying, “Hey, let’s see your home workspaces.” So, he posted a photo of himself. And so, I thought it’d be funny to just post a photo of myself but have his image as my screensaver on my website. And then he took it one step further and posted a photo of him with me that had him as my screensaver of his image on his screensaver. Right. And then it just continued to get progressively better and better.

So much so that, yes, there was a photo of me where I made a bedspread. Right. So it was like a recursive photo battle. Right. And so my bedspread was. I had a picture of him, and then I was holding a book. I think I actually had your book.

Yes. You had my book curled up in your bed with that bedspread on with Tim’s photo, which had Tim’s photo with the photo of you inside of that photo and then a photo of him inside of that photo.

That’s crazy. And it just got so much further. The last thing he did was put up a big air balloon in the middle of Singapore.

At a hot air balloon. Yeah, like, not a little toy, not a real one.

A hot air balloon with Ahref’s conference on the front and a photo of me in the background. If you want to follow this, there is a website called seoselfieiebattle.com, where you can follow the whole history and see some of these photos. Yes.

That’s crazy. Did you get ROI out of that?

I don’t know if there’s a true ROI, but it has definitely helped because it is comical, and a lot of people know about it. And so, it has helped build up a bigger personal brand presence internationally. I’m being asked to speak at international conferences where I have never really engaged that much. So it’s funny: my wife just came with me on a 35-day trip to Asia because I spoke at the Ahrefs conference in Singapore, and then I spoke again in Thailand. So it was really interesting because my wife was walking around me, and people were coming up to me asking for photos. Right? With me. And I think that has, you know, she’s like, “Who are you? You’re not like some celebrity or anything?” I’m like, “No.”

But I think it really comes down to the publicity we’ve gotten from these SEO selfie battles. 

That’s funny.

Yeah.

And I’m sure you had no idea where that was heading when you started this thing.

Yeah, I just took a life of his own. Yeah. And we’ll continue to one-up each other until one of us has it at the Sphere in Vegas, maybe, I’d imagine. I’m not sure where this goes, but we’ll see.

I think whoever wins will have the image at the International Space Station. I don’t know if that’ll be you or Tim, but that’s the challenge I’m putting out there.

I don’t know how you’d top that one, but yeah, that’s the winner, I would say for sure.

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Yeah. So, how did you monetize the speaking gig at the Ahrefs conference and the SEO conference you spoke at in Chiang Mai, Thailand? I’m assuming you’re not going to get law firms from attending that event. It’s not like it’s a law firm SEO conference in Las Vegas or something. So, what spurred you to do that? And then what’s the ROI, or how are you justifying an ROI for those events?

Yeah, that’s a good question. You know, and I didn’t necessarily look at it from an ROI perspective. I think it was a great opportunity for me to go and travel to Asia. We went to Singapore, Bali, Tokyo, and three different areas of Thailand. And so my wife and daughter came with me, and it was just amazing. We created a lot of memories together. And hey, I had the opportunity to go to speak on these stages, and as far as getting customers there, I think, you know, I knew going into that wasn’t really my audience. That’s the reason why I never really spoke at many SEO conferences.

Right. I’ve never spoken at Pubcon or any of those stages just because I was in such a niche. I was focused on working with law firms. But there comes a point in your journey where sometimes you just need to inspire others. So that was really my ROI. I was kind of giving back and sharing some of my lessons in scaling an agency and many of my mistakes. And so that was really my topic.

I wasn’t up there teaching SEO. I mostly talked about my entrepreneurial journey and building an SEO agency. That resonated very well with the audience, who knew I wasn’t there to sell them anything. You know, I even said such a thing. But when you’re there, you meet some great people, potential partners, potential link vendors, and all kinds of other things you meet along the way. So, I think that the ROI was really the relationships that I made while I was there.

Yep. And you’re an open book. You share a lot of your secret sauce and finances at events like that where you’re speaking and also publicly on your Facebook and social media. I think that’s very generous and trusting, or maybe too trusting. But what’s the impetus for doing that?

I really don’t have anything to hide. I built my business with $1, not having much, and I just kind of reinvested the dollar, and I made it three and reinvested the three and made it 10 and just kind of continued to grow it. So, like I said, I’m just trying to inspire other people. People are sitting there who might be at a stage where they want to give up, or there might be people at a stage where they’re trying to go from 1 million to 3 million or 3 million to 5 million. So I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and I’ve seen some success. 

So, if I can just be more of an open book so that people resonate with my story and I inspire somebody to just kind of get to their next level or just push through whatever obstacle they’re dealing with right now because we all know that there are many obstacles when you’re growing a business, especially when your business is predicated upon a third party algorithm that you don’t really have much control over. That is why I am basically more of an open book like that.

So, what are some examples of things that you share around financials, growth and mistakes, and what should you focus on scaling and what should you focus on?

Yeah. When I was in Chiang Mai recently, I shared our revenue. I shared the revenue from 2015 to 2024 and the revenue leading up until 2024. So, over the past 10 years, you have seen our growth. There was a year when we took a dip. I told the story of what happened there. A couple of big clients accounted for a large percentage of our revenue. And that was a mistake. That was a lesson that I learned. 

Trading your time to make money, then finding a way to start trading your money to buy back time.

And so now we’re very careful about not landing that one big client that’s $200,000 a month, and if you lose that client, you have to lay off people. The other thing that I talked about was trading your time to make money, which everybody has to do early on, but then finding a way to start trading your money to buy back more of your time.

I also learned about the art of delegation and some of the things that I learned there. So, I did that by kind of bringing in a great leadership team and then bringing in mid-level managers and a strong workforce. And so when you’re doing that, your margins can go from 30, 40% all the way down to 7%.

Because you’re investing all this investment into your business’s infrastructure and future. And so there was a good period, probably five years, where our margins were 7%, 8%, 9%. And that’s scary when you’re building a business like that. But we set up the infrastructure, and so here we are now. And so now our margins are back at like 23%. But I’ve bought back a lot of my time now.

Right. I can take a 35-day trip to Asia, and my company will still grow without me.

When you say it’s growing to what degree? I know you’ve said that you like an eight-figure agency publicly, but how specific do you get with your numbers?

Very specific. Right.

How specific will you get? Right now, I’m just going to cut to the chase. What secrets will you share in this episode? Right now?

We’ll end 2024 with a top line of about $18 million. Our run rate, meaning how much we’re billing today, is just north of 20 million. Our profit margin is about 23%. So, we’ll end the year with a 4.8 million EBITDA at the end of 2024.

That’s great. Are you looking to get acquired, merge, bring on investors, or do anything similar? What are you looking to do as a next step?

It’s always good to have those options. Right? So, any business, right? You know, that you kind of build. In fact, I just posted something on LinkedIn over the weekend, right? I just said that the first five years of business are not where you get rich, right? That’s where you make your mistakes, learn, and set up the infrastructure, and then that’s really it. It’ll be nice just to have those options, right?

So, if we look at acquiring or acquiring other businesses, right? It’s just good to have that margin profit, That’s really what makes a business successful at the end of the day, right? Nobody wants to be a part of a business that is not profitable forever. That’s a decision that you really have to make, right? Do you focus on growth or profit? And you have to find that delicate balance. And I think, you know, most people who are in the SEO space are not necessarily business people, right? You know, I think you kind of have to wear an SEO hat for years and years and years.

At some point, you have to take off that SEO hat and put on a CEO hat, right? And that’s really challenging. A big part of my conversation or my talk in Chiang Mai, too, was getting people to realize that, “Hey, listen, most of you in this room are like SEOs, diehard SEOs. But in order to grow and scale a business, you kind of have to start thinking and acting like a CEO.”

Right. Not just a CEO but an owner. An owner of a business that is not just an income stream or a lifestyle but an asset that needs to be produced and will grow over time. A lot of people are; they’re deluded into thinking they have a business, but they’re just self-employed. So if they disappear, then the business will disappear, too.

Most SEOs are not business people, but you must start thinking and acting like a CEO to grow and scale a business.

That’s right. That’s a lifestyle business, right? And there’s nothing wrong with a lifestyle business, right? You know, you just have to accept it for what it is, right? But you are the business, right? And that’s fine. I mean, when you have a lifestyle business like that, in some cases, your margins could be 40% or 50%, right? Maybe you don’t want to have staff; maybe you don’t want to have people management problems of growing a business perfectly fine. It’s just a different course, right?

Being self-employed doesn’t give you the multiplier effect that having a business has. So if somebody says I’m a business owner and they don’t have an exit strategy, I would push back and say, “Well, actually, you’re self-employed.”

Yeah, that is very true. Yeah. Because if somebody’s looking to buy you later on, like if you are the business, right? There’s not much really to buy, right? So, yeah.

Another thing I think you talked about at Chiang Mai was that the product is the SEO and not the business itself. So if you’re thinking that you’re selling well, you think you’re an SEO business, then you have really limited your growth potential. However, if you’re a business that happens to sell SEO, then you could just as easily swap out SEO and swap in AI. And now you’re much more future-proof. Do you want to share more thoughts about that?

Yeah. So I think everybody has a business, right? It just so happens that our product is SEO, right? And things evolve. At one point, a client asked us, “Hey, do you do organic social?” And the easy answer was, “Yes, we do organic social,” right? And we’re like, “Okay, we’ll sell it and then we’ll figure it out later,” right? And so we went down that route only to realize that maybe we shouldn’t be selling this organic social stuff. Maybe they should be doing that in-house. 

We learned that lesson because I want to say it was March 17th; it was St. Patrick’s Day. This was when the world shut down because of COVID-19, so we published. We pre-scheduled their content calendar for this client. We hope everybody has a Happy Leprechaun Day or something. You know, and it went live while the whole world was shutting down, right? And so the client called me up and said, “Are you tone deaf? Why would you publish this when the whole world’s shutting down?” Like, this is embarrassing.

I’m like, “Oh my God, it’s not worth it.” You know, we weren’t making much money. We were just trying to help the client, right? Sometimes, you kind of learn these lessons the hard way, right? And that was one of the lessons that we learned the hard way. Only to realize, “Hey, we’re never going to be world-class at organic social media, so why sell it?”

What else have you killed off in terms of product lines?

Well, we’ve added certain things. We’ve added a digital PR. That’s like, there’s a big buzzword with that now, right? It’s been a thing forever, but, you know, I think people kind of coined it as digital PR. That’s where we’re leveraging data with journalism, putting together compelling stories, and reaching out to different media to get them to cover the story. 

If you don’t have an exit strategy, you’re not a business owner – you’re self-employed.

In fact, we recently just got one of our clients. It was like the morning I was in Vegas at the time, and I got a message from a client saying, “Hey, did you guys do this?” And I’m like, “What?” He also sent me a link to Jimmy Kimmel talking in his opening monologue, in which he references our client.

And it was because we did this digital PR campaign about the states in which people are smoking weed, right? So, I think D.C. was one of the top states. And so Jimmy Kimmel, of course, was talking about politics, and he says, “Well, the reason why they’re making bad decisions is because everybody’s smoking weed in D.C., right?” And so he references our study and goes, and how could you not believe this? Right? Because it’s put together and researched by a personal injury law firm. Right. You know what I mean? And so, like, he was kind of making light of it. But it was really funny that the data and research we did made it to his opening monologue on his show. Right.

So, we’re doing a lot of digital PR now, too. Yeah.

How does that differ from just link building?

In terms of link building, I think, like, “Okay, if you want to rank for a keyword, you go in, you reverse engineer the link strategies of whoever’s top ranking above you, and then you just start chipping away.” It’s like,” Okay, they got a link here; let us get that link there. They got a link there; let us get that link there.” But the problem is that that’s not really creating a barrier.

So, I think these types of links that we’re building, where we’re leveraging data and insights and journalism, these are the links that your competitors really won’t be able to clone easily, just because it’s all, like, applicable to this particular story or data that we’ve kind of come up with. And in some cases, one digital PR campaign might be able to get 50 links.

Right. With the right outreach, whereas traditional link building—guest blog posts and, you know, all the other stuff—just moves at a little slower pace. Right. I guess it is for the same level of activity.

Yep. Are you using Pitchbox or some other tool to do the digital PR and link-building work that you’re doing for your clients?

Yeah. In fact, Michael. I was just with Michael at Pitchbox in Singapore. He’s another icon and industry OG. He’s been around forever. I’m not sure if we’re using Pitchbox. I have a whole digital PR team, and we’re really growing that department quickly. I’m not sure exactly which tool they’re using, to be honest, but they definitely have a whole system and process that they’re following.

How are you incorporating AI into your workflows to reduce costs and increase the output and impact of your work? I’m sure you have things in the cooker that will massively increase your margins, if not your revenues. So, I’m curious about what you’re working on.

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Yeah. So, there are a couple of different ways that we’re using AI. Obviously, it’s allowed us to be a lot more efficient with content strategies, writing and structuring content and writing and publishing more content with fewer people. I think it still requires human editing. Right. We’re not just taking content directly from ChatGPT and publishing it on people’s websites, but we can move 50% faster. 

Just with the help of different AI tools, that’s always good. Another thing that we’re doing is we’re being pretty innovative. One of the things that we did was we had a hackathon at our agency where we just gave our engineering team a full week to come up with innovations on how we can be more efficient or effective for our clients.

So through that process, somebody deployed AI translations, where we basically took a website and turned it into multiple languages. So it’s really interesting. So it’ll basically create an ES subfolder, and it’ll basically take all the content and then convert all the content to, let’s just say Spanish. All of the internal links get translated as well. It creates all the proper Hreflang tags.

So now, here you go. You have a website that didn’t have any Spanish content, and now, all of a sudden, you’ve got 2,000 pages that follow the perfect architecture. So we can drive massive amounts of traffic by doing this. And if you go and update the English page, it automatically updates the Spanish pages. So it kind of keeps it like in real-time. So that’s something that we created, and it became a product that we then offered to all of our clients. 

As a result of our work, many of our clients now have multilingual websites. So we’re doing a bunch of cool things with AI.

Are you concerned that Google might smack those websites with a penalty or an algorithmic adjustment? Because I think Google has publicly stated that they don’t like machine-generated content. It needs to be human, edited, reviewed, and all that. So, if it’s just an AI-generated translation, it will have inaccuracies. It’s just, you know, hallucinations and so forth are part and parcel of how an LLM works.

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So well, I think it’s translating the content that we wrote. So, it’s not translating AI content to AI content. So it’s translating human written content.

But the translation is AI-generated. So yeah, if the source document in English was human-written, that passes muster with Google, but is the translation not human-reviewed by a multilingual person who’s making sure there are no inaccuracies?

No. So, I did leave that part out. It’s hard to review every single page. But we do have multi-language bilingual people who are kind of spot-checking the content as well. And it is, don’t get me wrong, it is a risk, right? It’s like there’s risk and reward. 

So, this was just an experiment, and we haven’t rolled it out across all of our clients yet. We still have it in a beta. But it is interesting. I mean, it is working. You’ll see a client that had no call volume like Spanish, right? And all of a sudden, boom, the traffic spikes were, and now they’re having to hire people in their intake team to help answer some of these Spanish phone calls.

Quality problem. Yeah, you’re good with coming up with experiments, you know, hypotheses and then testing those out to see if they work. So, what are some other examples of experiments that you’ve run?

Right now, we are experimenting with 100% AI content on a motorcycle accident website just to see what we can do. And how is Google responding to certain strategies and tactics? What are some of the lessons that we can learn from it? We know very well that that site could just get punished—right, with an algorithmic penalty or filter.

To be clear, that’s your site, not a client’s.

100%.

Yeah.

Any site we will test like that is always my site. Yeah, these are throwaway domains, I guess, if you will. Right. And that’s actually how I started back in the day. I had a couple of rank and rent websites, right? I was just using these websites to test out different strategies, right? And then, at some point, the phone started ringing. My cell phone, right? People called me up, saying, “Hey, I was in a car accident.” I’m like, “How did you hear my number?” And you’re like, “Oh, I’m on this website.” I’m like, “Oh, wow.”

It’s like ranking, I guess. “Okay, hold on a second.” And so I’m like, “I got a problem here.” And so then I reached out to a couple of attorneys in that market saying, “Hey, I’ve got this website if you want to just kind of, like, lease it out.” And I was basically creating these virtual real estate plays, right? So, I had three of those websites back in the day. And so that’s when it was a lot easier to rank websites without all the EEAT signals and things like that. So. But yeah, that was because I was just using those websites as testing grounds. And eventually, they started ranking. And so I turned that into a revenue generation where I was making money from renting the testing websites out at some point. Right?

Yeah. By the way, for a listener who’s not deep into SEO, you just said EEAT signals. That’s EEAT: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Can you elaborate on some of those EEAT signals and how you can help future-proof a client’s website? So, that looks like it has EEAT.

Yeah. A mutual friend, Cyrus Shepard, creates a lot of content about this. I think he even went undercover as a Google quality rater. I want to try to understand what Google is looking for in terms of these EEAT signals. I think the best way to put it is if I were to describe myself as doing SEO for my agency. Part of the EEAT signals is, “Okay, Jason Hennessey is an SEO. He owns Hennessy Digital. Well, why should we trust Jason Hennessey? Is he a subject matter expert on SEO? Well, let’s look.” And then they look at all the different signals, right? I wrote two books on SEO, right? Those books are connected by either links or schema markup that you can add to help bridge that gap.

A lot of the content that I publish online, whether I’m writing content for Search Engine Journal or an article for Entrepreneur magazine or whatever, also helps to feed the EEAT signals. Being on a podcast like this, right? It’s a very credible podcast with 900 episodes. I would say that you know, Stephan has some of his own EEAT signals that get passed over to me by having me as a guest.

We developed a strategy to build content that would satisfy the intent of what people were searching for.

Just to be clear, it’s 900 episodes across both shows. This one has 450. So also, with Get Yourself Optimized, there’s another double of that. So, anyway, yes, it definitely adds credibility. I know you’re working on building up your SEO, and your agency’s SEO. For many years, you have been kind of ignoring that. And now you’ve spent a lot of time in the last few years with the books, personal websites, and other initiatives, such as the recursive selfie battle, you know, many things that help build your personal reputation and the agency’s reputation. Do you want to share a bit about what worked and what didn’t work there?

Yeah. So what didn’t work was ignoring it for so many years. It’s like the mechanic whose son’s car is broken down in the garage? Just because he’s so busy working on other people’s cars, right? So that was basically it. We were so focused on working on clients’ work that we ignored our own for many years. But having said that, when I say we ignored it, we really didn’t ignore it because we were doing real things that real businesses do. We made the Inc. 5000 for six years in a row. We were basically doing a lot of the stuff that businesses do naturally. And so that was helping build our website’s authority and some of these heat signals that we just talked about. But as far as developing a precise strategy, we were kind of ignoring that.

So about 18 months ago, we’re like, “Hey, we need to fix this.” And so what are our clients typing in to find us? One of the big keywords was a keyword like law firm SEO. And we didn’t really have a strategy for that. So, we developed a strategy to build content that would satisfy the intent of what people were searching for. Then, we started building a very specific link-building strategy to attract the right links to help promote that page and the whole website. 

We’ve made videos that kind of go on the pages to keep people on the page a little bit longer. So, we just started to apply a lot of the stuff we do for our clients to our website. Since then, we’ve seen a significant number of leads coming in, which means that we would have to spend less money on pay-per-click to attract that same audience.

It’s been a great journey developing and deploying a website for your own, I guess.

You rank the hennessey.com site for law firm SEO, but you’re not ranking it. I think you have lawfirmseo.com, right?

I own that. I redirected it to hennessey.com. I acquired it over the past six months and just redirected to that website.

Got it.

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Yeah.

Okay. Did that help?

Yeah, that definitely helped. Yeah. We took a former agency that owned lawfirmseo.com and redirected that to our internal law firm SEO page. Right. So, a lot of that link authority was passed over to the internal page, and we did see a nice spike as a result of that. But the other thing that I did, too, which was interesting, is when I wrote my first book, I was going to name the book Law Firm SEO because I wanted to use Amazon as kind of like a barnacle SEO strategy if you will. Right. If you search for law firm SEO, you should see Hennessey ranking, but then you should also see Amazon ranking.

And that was all a strategy. We also started building some really strong links to the Amazon page to push that page up. Right. So, that’s where you can leverage the book strategy as an SEO strategy if you’re writing books. Right.

And is the book still titled Law Firm SEO, or did you change that at some point?

No. That book is still titled Law Firm SEO, and my second book was titled Honest SEO. It’s just kind of a different audience. Law firm SEO is niche-specific, whereas honest SEO is applicable to most small businesses.

So why did you call it Honest SEO?

Good question. You and I both believe in the universe, kind of giving us signals; I guess we call it the juju or whatever it is we want to call it. I was thinking, like, I need to come up with a name, right? It has to be SEO, but there has to be a word to it, Right? I have a book that’s called Words That Sell. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that book. I think there are three different versions of it. And so I literally opened up the book, right? And I pointed to a word, and the word was honest. And so I’m like, “Okay, let the universe speak.”

The book’s name is going to be Honest SEO, which makes a lot of sense. You’d appreciate that story.

I do. So, how does that book compare to law firm SEO in terms of its ROI?

So, I would say the law firm’s SEOs really generate more indirect ROI. We actually mail out probably four or five hundred copies per month for free. So we have Facebook campaigns running where, you know, we said, “Hey, how would you like a free copy of Law Firm SEO? I’ll even pay for shipping and handling.” And so we send those out to law firms. And so that’s part of the strategy.

And then if we’re not working with somebody in, let’s just say, I don’t know, Oklahoma. We might find 400 personal injury lawyers in Oklahoma and just mail them out a copy. That’s why I say indirect ROI is because 400 people might get the book, and we might get 12 people that follow up and are interested in speaking with us, but then we might have 50 people that just post about it on social media or whatever. So, there’s a lot of other goodwill as a result of that strategy, whereas Honest SEO is really. We’re not really giving those books away.

That’s on Amazon. If somebody wants to learn a little bit about SEO, I might mail them a copy. But that’s just kind of a different strategy, I guess.

With law firm SEO, you hired Mike Rohde, a guest on my other podcast, Get Yourself Optimized, many years ago. I think it was 2016 or something like that. Mike Rohde is amazing. He wrote all these books about Sketchnoting, and I don’t know how I discovered that, but I just thought, “Wow, this is really cool, and I should have him on the podcast.” I reached out to him, and he said “yes” and that it was a great episode. But somehow, you hooked up with him and hired him to do the illustrations for Law Firm SEO. Did you use them again for Honest SEO?

We did. And it’s funny how we came about that. So, one of my favorite books is Rework, and it’s by the guys who created Basecamp, right?

Yeah. Jason Fried.

Yeah. So when I read that book, I’m like, “Oh, my God, I love the way this book is written” because it’s such short chapters. So me, like, somebody that has, like, ADHD, and I can’t concentrate much. Right. That’s how I kind of consume. And so, like, I read it, and then there’s an illustration so that you can stop and kind of understand it in a very creative manner. And so I’m like, “If and when I ever write my book, I want to have illustrations like this, and I want it to be short chapters.”

Right. And so that was kind of the basis of what I was going to use to write my book. So I went to my assistant at the time. I’m like, “Hey, I sent her a copy of Rework.” I said, “Here’s what I want to do. I basically want to get illustrations like this. So if you can maybe try to find somebody that can do illustrations like this, that would be great.” And so she was smart.

I didn’t even think of this. So she just went right to the back of the book and saw who did the illustrations for this book. And so she found his contact information, reached out, and set up a call. The next thing you know, he agreed to come in and do the illustrations for my book. Right. And so it’s funny how you can kind of manifest stuff like that. So that worked out well.

He also did the illustrations for Honest SEO. It’s very similar to how I found my business coach, Cameron Herold, who I think is a mutual friend of yours as well. I’m unsure if you’ve ever had him on the podcast, but he would be great.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

Yep.

In fact, I just interviewed him a few weeks ago.

You did? Okay. Awesome. Yeah, he’s one of my favorite people. And so I manifested him, too, I want to say, like, 10 years ago, I’d seen his Ted talk about raising kids to be entrepreneurs. So that really, again, resonated with me, and I said, “Wow, this is so awesome.” So, I bought his books and followed him on social media. And I’m like, when the time is right, this guy is going to be my business coach. Right.

Sure enough, once I hit 5 million in revenue and didn’t know how to get to 10 million, I was like, “The time is now. Let me just reach out and send an email.” So I put together a very clever email and reached out to him, and he’s been my coach now for probably six years. I’d say our business coach has really helped us grow to the next level by giving us shortcuts.

That’s awesome. Yeah. We talked about him in the previous episode, 2021. So I’m curious what’s happened for you and your business since 2021 that he had a part in or that an idea of his germinated into something really profound.

Operating without a vision is just operating.

Yeah. So, for one, I was operating without a vision. Right. So we were just kind of operating. He wrote a book called Vivid Vision, and he got me to see that in order. In fact, it’s funny because it’s 2021. So, that was the year that I created my three-year vision.

So, that comes to an end right now. And if you go to hennessey.com, I think if you go to about it, there’s a link that says where we’re going. So that was my three-year vision, and I wrote that in 2021. It was written as though it was already January 1st, 2024. Right. We missed the mark on a lot of that, but we also hit the mark on some of that. 

So that’s what it is when you create a vivid vision; you’re going to think big, right? And you’re going to be realistic. And so, like, I think our profit margin is right where I said it was going to be in 2024, way back when it was 2021. So he not only showed us why we should do that, he showed us how to do it. We get on calls with him. He holds us accountable. He was the reason why I wrote my books. He was the one who introduced me to the publisher to write the books.

When somebody was looking to acquire us, and we weren’t really for sale, he was like, “Why go through due diligence if you’re not for sale? It’s going to be a distraction.” He went, ” If you have a number, give them the number, and if it’s too much, let them go away.” Right. There are so few pieces of wisdom there that you might not have access to.

I’m looking at it right now on Hennessey.com: 32 million in revenue at the end of 2024, with 5 million in profit before taxes.

Yep, yep. And so we were a little bit more efficient.

You certainly are getting close to those profit numbers. But yeah, it’s like if you are focused on the revenue, then you’re just paying a lot of people and feeding a lot of families.

But you’re not taking care of yourself. And if your profit is high, and maybe the revenue numbers aren’t what you’d like them to be. Ideally, it’s still, I mean, it’s like this is what the business is for. It’s there to provide for you and your family, not for all these families across the country. 

That’s right. 

Good job. Thank you.

Yeah.

When you create a vivid vision, you think big and be realistic.

So what would be the biggest, I don’t know, whale or win that you got out of? Let’s say the free book strategy because that’s expensive, sending out hundreds of books for free, including shipping every month, and paying for Facebook ads and all that to get in front of all those attorneys and their law firms. I can’t imagine not turning an ROI. I mean, you wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t. So what would be a big account that came from giving books away?

Yeah. So this is, for the most part, a big part of our marketing strategy and a big part of our marketing budget. And so, like, we have two salespeople that work for our agency, and their goal between the both of them is to generate $60,000 in recurring revenue every month. That’s their business target. Some months, they bring in over 100,000. Some months, they bring in 35,000. Again, it’s between the two of them. 

But for the most part, they’re hitting that target. And in order for them to hit that target, we need to generate leads, not cold leads. A cold lead is when somebody does a search for law firm SEO, finds our website, reads our page, and then reaches out to us. That’s kind of like a cold lead.

A cold lead finds us. A warm lead reads our book first.

I would say more of a warm or hot lead is when we mail them a book. They read the book; they’re inside my head for three hours. And then they reach out to us because now they’re educated and empowered to make the best decision. And so from that, if we could generate 20 appointments in a month, right? As a result of the book strategy.

We can close, let’s just say, 4 or 5 of those with an average retainer size of about $12,000 per month, but some could be as high as $30,000 per month. That’s when it makes a lot of sense. The expense might be $20,000 to mail out books and run Facebook ads. But if we’re generating $60,000 per month in recurring revenue, it just kind of makes sense to do it.

Yeah, that’s super. And that is really innovative. And if you didn’t have such an incredible asset, that wouldn’t make sense. But because you do, you have that great book. Wow. Good for you. I know we’re running out of time, so if you want to share one last nugget of wisdom for our listener and then your contact details, the agency website, and your website, we’ll wrap things up.

Two things made all the difference: getting an executive assistant and a coach.

Yeah, I would say we talked about it. You know, I think one of the things I wish I would have done earlier on is just kind of getting two things. Getting an executive assistant and maybe a coach has made all the difference in my growth. It has allowed me to kind of free up a lot more of my time and have somebody to hold me accountable. And so that’s just been amazing.

I know that you work with many different mentors and coaches, so I think we’re on the same frequency there. So, as far as how to get in touch with me, Hennessey.com is my agency, and I’m on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and all the usual places. I think Jason Hennessey is mostly how you can find me.

Jasonhennessey.com is your personal site.

That’s right, yeah.

Awesome. Well, thank you, Jason. This was fun. It’s great to reconnect, and thank you for sharing so openly with my listener and all the cool stuff you’re working on and the lessons learned through the process and listener. Now it’s time to do something with this information. Go out there and light up somebody’s life, do a good deed, and reveal some light in the world. We’ll catch you in the next episode. Have a fantastic week. I’m your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Experiment with new strategies on my own sites to gauge their effectiveness. Safeguard my clients by testing the risks myself first.

Incorporate Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EEAT) into my SEO strategy. This framework helps build credibility and improve rankings.

Leverage AI for content creation and translation to enhance efficiency. Ensure I have human oversight to maintain accuracy and compliance with Google guidelines.

Learn from and share my past mistakes publicly. Transparency can build trust and inspire others facing similar challenges.

Avoid over-reliance on large clients to mitigate business risk. Diversifying my client base ensures greater stability and growth potential.

Pay attention to profit margins, not just revenue. Sustainable growth comes from maintaining healthy profit margins.

Use unique data and storytelling to create digital PR campaigns. This approach goes beyond traditional link building by garnering media attention and unique links.

Invest in an executive assistant and a business coach early. These roles provide needed accountability and relieve me of administrative burdens.

Write and promote books to establish authority in my niche. Strategic book marketing can significantly boost my SEO and client acquisition efforts.

Work with Jason Hennessey at hennessey.com to accelerate my business growth.

About Jason Hennessey

Jason Hennessey is an entrepreneur, internationally recognized SEO expert, author, speaker, podcast host, and business coach. Since 2001, Jason has been reverse-engineering the Google algorithm as a self-taught student and practitioner of SEO and search marketing. He is the Founder / CEO of Hennessey Digital. He’s the author of 2 books, Law Firm SEO and Honest SEO.