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Stuck on Repeat? The $1–5M Black Hole Is Causing Your “Feast or Famine”
19 Plays7 days ago
In this episode, Ken Freire sits down with Tom Hart, founder of Hart Ops, to unpack why so many 7-figure agencies get stuck in the “financial black hole”—and what it actually takes to make profit possible. Tom shares his contrarian takes on experience, hiring, training, and why “automation basics” matter more than AI for most smaller agencies.
Resources Mentioned
• Hart Ops (website) — https://hartops.com/
• Tom Hart (LinkedIn) — https://www.linkedin.com/in/hartops
• The Bureau (formerly Bureau of Digital) — https://thebureau.community/
• Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits! (Greg Crabtree) — https://gregcrabtree.net/books/simple-numbers-straight-talk-big-profits/
Timestamps
• 00:01 — Tom Hart’s background + what Hart Ops does for $1M–$5M agencies
• 01:54 — From English degree to web design to running a wedding business, then agency ops
• 03:11 — Turning an agency around: cutting salary cap, 13 months straight profit
• 06:46 — How Tom wins clients: referrals + The Bureau/EOS community + a 4-week program (40-page operating doc)
• 09:48 — The “simple numbers” Tom looks at: revenue vs margin, target 20% profit, and people cost red flags
• 12:10 — AI vs automations: why most smaller agencies should master basics first
• 17:13 — Common agency traps: overpaying talent while underbilling clients; align hourly costs with billing
• 19:41 — Training + coaching as retention strategy: grow people beyond their role
• 22:10 — Contrarian view: experience is overrated; hire hungry younger pros; document processes to remove the founder bottleneck
• 25:15 — Values + vision reset: “corporate therapy,” reclaiming the original mission, and EOS vision clarity
• 29:02 — Advice for the stuck founder: perspective from an outside operator who can tell the truth
• 32:23 — Fast Five: short-form podcasts + LinkedIn, marketing focus, industry shifts, and legacy book (maybe workplace poetry)
• 37:26 — Where to reach Tom: Hart Ops on web + LinkedIn
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Tom Hart
00:00:00
Ken Freire
Welcome back to another episode of the Solo Skilled Podcast, a podcast of the AI-driven marketer. I am your host, Ken Freire, and today I have with me Tom Hart. He is the founder of Hart Ops.
00:00:13
Ken Freire
Tom Mann, super excited to have you on the pod.
00:00:16
Tom Hart
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Hart Ops and Fiscal Strategies
00:00:17
Ken Freire
Yeah, Tom, so want to get into your story. We were talking a little bit. I've been looking at some of your stuff and it's exciting. You have some contrarian views, which is always great for a good podcast. But tell us all what you do in regards to your business.
00:00:32
Tom Hart
Yeah, absolutely. So I work with marketing agencies between one and five million dollars in revenue. I work with them to both look at the fiscal perspective as it stands and also to work with them to analyze the people that they have in the room. And between the qualitative and quantitative aspects of their business, I help them come up with an operating system which makes profit possible.
00:01:01
Tom Hart
So... One to five million is well within what's considered the black hole financially. And basically all that means is that it's very difficult for businesses in that range to kind of escape a certain threshold to grow more comfortably and more easily easily.
Tom's Career Path and Experiences
00:01:22
Tom Hart
So, yeah, work with them to kind of study the way that their business is operating today so that we can form a better way of operating in future that makes profit possible.
00:01:33
Ken Freire
Tom, you're about to become every marketing agency's best friend because a lot of marketing agencies I know, they're like really great on like the creative and the strategy. But when comes to finances and ops, that's their Achilles heel.
00:01:46
Ken Freire
So how did you get involved in that world?
00:01:50
Tom Hart
So yeah, I come from, I bounced around a lot. I'm from the UK, so I bounced around a lot of different jobs. I studied English at university because I thought it would be, poetry was a good way to meet girls.
00:02:05
Tom Hart
So yeah, I didn't want to be an English teacher and that was the path that I was on. And I worked in kitchens and then the group of friends that I met at university were all graphic design students. And I thought their homework was more interesting than mine. So basically I kind of got in with them. And after I finished my English degree, I taught myself web design. This was ancient history.
00:02:31
Tom Hart
and got my first web design job and really went from there. And then eventually I met my wife. We started a business together. We worked in the wedding industry for a decade, and that was a crash course in how to operate a business of that kind. And pandemic came and went. And in that period, I started working with an agency remotely who were based in New York and really went from kind of a technical project manager
00:03:04
Tom Hart
slash owner to like really being an operations person and understanding, okay, yeah, of validated the concept of what me and my wife were doing in our kind of tiny business in a real business. And so that just happened to be an agency, which was very familiar to me. and yeah we went we kind of took them from a very dark place and uh we did 13 months of straight profit we hired
Personal Life and Business Philosophy
00:03:30
Tom Hart
we cut our salary cap by 40 percent and good things happened and it was a very strange period in the history the company and it it didn't work out in the end but Yeah, we did lot profit and elevated some really interesting young professionals to kind of validate them in the marketplace. So it's a very kind of, that's a very abbreviated description of how I ended up there, but pretty much it was like taking this kind of contrarian novel perspective of why can't we find people who are really hungry for the work?
00:04:04
Tom Hart
And why can't we take ourselves from a marketing perspective more seriously, increase our rates that we were charging? And that kind of culminated in the House for President campaign website that we did towards, well, obviously over the campaign period. That was kind of the crescendo of my work there. And then I came out of there with a kind of validated concept that I could not only operate a business like that, but really change their fortunes for the better. So we went from struggling to do two months of profit consecutively to doing 13 months straight profit.
00:04:39
Ken Freire
So after that, you went from that business and you said, hey, I think I could do this. And you went out on your own.
00:04:47
Tom Hart
Yeah, exactly.
00:04:47
Ken Freire
Is that correct? Nice. OK, so before we step into too much of the business stuff, I got a personal question I got to ask you. You say you met your wife. Did you meet her, one, in university? And two, did you do poetry to catch her?
00:05:04
Tom Hart
You looking for tips, Ken?
00:05:06
Ken Freire
I always, man, I'm married 13 years, but I'm sure, or wow, almost 15 years. You know, I'm just trying to keep the romance alive all the time.
00:05:13
Tom Hart
Yeah. So we actually probably shouldn't tell you this, but we met on Yahoo Chat in 2002, 2003, like really early days and just kept in touch.
00:05:23
Ken Freire
love it.
00:05:27
Tom Hart
Like we were of pen pals for the best part of a decade. And she was actually working. She's a painter and she was working in New York at the time for for a painter. She was a studio painter. And so we got back in touch and I said, okay, well, you know, we've always talked about meeting up. Do you want to, I'll fly to JFK and I'll meet you there. And, and she, she showed up. So yeah, that that's the origin story.
00:05:57
Tom Hart
Yes. The poetry probably did help if I'm honest.
00:06:01
Ken Freire
You know, what's funny is back in the day, right? That like Yahoo chat, was like thinking, I'm like, oh, is he gonna say AOL chats? Those used to be the rave. I have a friend of mine who did it via Craigslist.
00:06:13
Tom Hart
Oh,
00:06:13
Ken Freire
So he met his, like they met and they hit it off and they're married.
00:06:16
Ken Freire
They have six kids now. So he's a really good friend of mine. Okay. So I was just curious because you said you got married and all that stuff.
Business Growth Strategies
00:06:24
Ken Freire
With that now, you started your business.
00:06:27
Ken Freire
You've kind of honed in on the marketing side of things, specifically from the financial and ops side. What's been your biggest strategy in growing your business?
00:06:39
Tom Hart
grown my business or my clients businesses?
00:06:43
Ken Freire
Oh, that's two good questions. We'll start first with your business, like you getting clients, and then we'll talk about how you help your clients.
00:06:51
Tom Hart
From my perspective, I'm still in the weeds. I'm very early, so I'm less than a year into this, but I won a couple of very good, big projects for me last year, which were one was a referral from a client from the previous agency that I ran. And the second one was from just a part of networking group that I'm part of. So there's an organization called the Bureau of Digital, and they just renamed to the Bureau. It's an organization of mostly agency owners and principals. And I am big into EOS and the book Simple Numbers. So for me, there's two parts of my work. There's the fiscal stuff and then there's all the people stuff. And so naturally, I borrow, beg, steal and borrow frameworks as much as I can in order to make sense of that, but also to talk other people's language because I'm
00:07:44
Tom Hart
the second client that I found was in an EOS group. So I'm showing up and contributing back to a community that I know a lot about. So I inherited EOS at the agency that I run. And to me, it's like learning another language. And then once you have that vernacular, you can show up and contribute back to that community. So I met the second client in that group and they came to me and said,
00:08:10
Tom Hart
I really like the way that you're talking about this operating system and how you think about it. And I would like to explore this opportunity together to kind of rethink as we go into the new year, how we operate, what we stand what we should tolerate and what changes we should make into 2026.
00:08:27
Tom Hart
We did that and went through four-week program, which is my sole offering at the moment, and came out with 40-page document, which was specific to them and how I see them operating between simple numbers from a financial perspective and EOS from an operational perspective.
00:08:47
Tom Hart
That's how I operate and market my own business in terms of my clients and what I'm recommending to them in terms of what goes into that 40 page document. It's again, a lot of EOS and a lot of simple numbers, but then I kind of, again, beg, steal and borrow principles and philosophy from lots of different writers. Mostly I'm a big reader so I'm more than happy to steal good ideas to contribute to my kind of operational framework that I try and imbue in each and every offering that I deliver to my clients.
00:09:22
Ken Freire
OK, so I'm very familiar with EOS. I've implemented it multiple times. Simple Numbers is new to me, so was like, ooh, I got a new book to read. What are the numbers that you typically use to evaluate how well business is doing?
Financial Insights and Margins
00:09:42
Ken Freire
Oh, perfect.
00:09:44
Tom Hart
So, yeah, mean, the first questions that I'm going into, you know, if I was on a sales call someone, first thing I would try and treat it like a conversation. It's both, am I a good fit for this client, but also, is this going to be fun?
00:09:57
Tom Hart
Because it's a very involved process and we get to know each other well and quickly. But just purely from a numbers perspective, I'm going to be looking for obviously revenue of the company because I think my best fit is those emerging agencies or agencies that have scaled back over the pandemic in order to kind of make sense of things. But then margin to me is more crucial than revenue because it's very important from my perspective to understand where the client is honestly in their journey because some clients have gone above a certain big sounding number and then come back down, but their margins have always been too thin. And to me, that says that they have an introspection challenge and are they going to be a good fit for me because I work best in an environment where I can do my work quickly, but effectively. And part of that
00:10:49
Tom Hart
effectiveness is an open and honest conversation about why they can't meet a certain threshold. So yeah, I would love to hear that a client is doing between one and $5 million in revenue because that's a good fit for me. would love to hear that their...
00:11:04
Tom Hart
really taking it seriously, trying to get to 20% profit. But then also secondary to that is like how much they're spending on people. So biggest expense by far in those agencies is going to be people. And you would be surprised how often clients or prospective clients would come to me and say that they think spending 65, 75% of their revenue on their people is okay.
00:11:27
Tom Hart
It's not, and that's a big flag that we need to talk about in order to correct where we're going so that we can make profit possible.
00:11:35
Ken Freire
Yeah. Do you see conversations you're having now? Are people wanting to supplement people for like AI with it? Is that or is it still heavily people?
00:11:47
Tom Hart
Honestly, one of the reasons why I like working between one and $5 million in revenue is because people are still working out the basics. And so before we get to AI, I would love to just talk about automations in terms of the client conversation that I'm having. There are so many automations that they can be making use of before they even think about AI.
00:12:10
Tom Hart
ai is typically a kind of aphrodisiac for good or bad so you know typically when you throw it into the mix it's going make things better or worse and the kind of aptitude for ai among those smaller clients is going to be pretty low their level of ambition is going to be like how can we make sense of the people that we have because by and large they're not great management they are loyal to a fault and they have communication problems that they need to overcome before they can even think about how to communicate with machines surprisingly a lot of agencies that use machines every single day
00:12:53
Tom Hart
struggle to kind of make sense of AI and automations that make their lives a lot easier. And most of their headaches, yes, they come from people. And yeah, they're more likely to raise with me the issue of how do I tell people that they're not getting more money? Or how do I let someone go who I've tried to let go in the past and it's never worked out?
00:13:14
Tom Hart
Or how do I find new talent? How do we make sense of interns? Do we pay interns? Those the sorts of questions that are more in their mind than AI. tends to be larger agencies who are kind of outside of the black hole are more able to kind of use AI and understand it fully in order make the most of the gains that it offers.
00:13:41
Ken Freire
Yeah, so it sounds like AI is helping a lot of the agencies past 5 million because now they're able to play. They've got the foundation set. The other ones are still working on the foundation. I love how you said that people still haven't even figured out automations. And I think in today's world, we're conflating AI and automations too much. And you're like, no, no, no.
00:14:01
Ken Freire
AI is something different. Let's just get the basics down.
00:14:04
Tom Hart
Yeah, so simple numbers would ordinarily dictate that you know, $1 to $5 million used to be kind of the range of the black hole. And due to inflation and just a lot of the kind of crazy changes that we've seen over the last 5, 10 years, that's more like $7.5 million now. So that ceiling is kind of escaping those smaller companies. And so they need to do more revenue in order to escape the gravity of that black
Challenges for Mid-Sized Agencies
00:14:30
Tom Hart
hole. But yes, absolutely. I don't see... Automations pretty much kind of...
00:14:36
Tom Hart
the forgotten child of technology, like the fact that we can save ourselves time and avoid repetition basically just been overlooked. And if that would have come first and there would have been a period where that was the kind of dominant word used in LinkedIn posts every single day, all day, then I think we'd be a lot better off because I think that that would help those smaller organizations make sense of it because Honestly, I have to explain to people all the time that you can schedule messages in Slack or you can create filters in your Gmail that make your life easier so that you don't have to trawl through 500 emails first thing every day.
00:15:14
Tom Hart
Those sorts of basics are going to save you real time. And obviously, the smaller you get, every single minute that you spend becomes increasingly more important. And yeah, agencies that are between, you know, 10 and 50 million, they're going a lot more contingency and a lot more ability to waste time because it's easier to hide that.
00:15:34
Tom Hart
They're going to have big staple clients that pay their bills. And those guerrilla clients are going to kind of hide the kind of wasted overages that we're talking about that make play possible because most of the time my clients between that one and five million dollar bracket they're worried about utilization because every single minute for every single person counts that much more
00:15:58
Ken Freire
Have you found that as in that one to five million, are there common trends or common issues that they all struggle with? Like so far, I know you mentioned like automation, people problems, like how to manage them properly. Are there any other common trends that you see? Like you guys got to fix this and it'll really level up your game.
00:16:20
Tom Hart
Yeah, the classic two, well, I mean, money in and money out is a real problem. So the classic problem is trying to find people with the most amount of experience who are essentially overpaid. So for instance, maybe, I don't know, you're a marketing agency in, I don't Akron.
00:16:39
Tom Hart
and you're paying New York salaries because the people that you hire are remote, but they used to work in an agency in New York. So you're kind of the gravity of their salary means that you overpay them.
00:16:51
Tom Hart
But then there's a weird dissonance between that and then being underconfident with the amounts that we actually bill to our clients. That's very strange, but pretty consistent. So we're overpaying our people, but under billing our clients and the confidence never survives that translation. So the confidence that we have in our people, we're very proud of those people and we depend on them and we think highly of them.
00:17:18
Tom Hart
But then that doesn't translate to the dollar amount that we're charging on the outside. One of the easiest things that anyone listening to this could do is to actually relate the amount that they pay per hour per person to the amount that they're billing per hour per client project. That would be really good way to kind of, one, come to terms with whether you're operating in reality or just perception of what you think your time is worth. But also kind of getting real with the amount that you're paying your people, because typically what happens is, you know, people's salary over time is linear.
00:17:51
Tom Hart
You know, if you lived to 200 years old, you would expect to be paid more than if you got to 100. So that never stops increasing that line. It's linear
Employee Investment and Growth
00:18:01
Tom Hart
all the way. So, yeah, I think to me, it's money in and money out is kind of the big standalone truth that I see pretty commonly.
00:18:11
Ken Freire
You know, Tom, I work with a lot of like solopreneurs, expert led business owners. And I love how you just talked about that shift of money in, money out, because for a lot of them, they're doing the same issue where they're like, I'm confident in my skills, but I don't charge enough because I don't know if people would ever buy.
00:18:30
Ken Freire
But if they do that thing, like just hourly, how much are you charging and how much are you billing themselves? They'd see like, oh, my gosh, this is never the math is never going to work. And that's why they don't ever grow.
00:18:41
Tom Hart
Yeah, it's a hard truth to face that agencies typically are their own worst clients. They always put themselves last. They undervalue their value in the marketplace, and they underinvest in training and coaching their people, which is pretty strange when you think about their priorities, which retention.
00:19:04
Tom Hart
They don't want to be known as the type of businesses that burn people out or are toxic. But there's a commonality between places that aren't fun to work at and places which are just kind of borderline negligent on training and coaching their people.
00:19:20
Tom Hart
If your ideal is to keep people for as long as possible, paradoxically, it's my view that you should try and prepare your people as much as possible to accelerate their career beyond And my experience so far, my preferred playbook is that if you prioritize your people's career over their current role, they won't want to leave because they'll be aware that their friends work at other agencies and aren't having zero fun whatsoever and not learning.
00:19:48
Tom Hart
And you're both being trusted and are learning very quickly about how to be a good professional. So paradoxically, they won't want to leave. So the other side, aside from just money in, money out, is just how we train and coach our people. That's a commonality that I think people fall well short of in the agencies I typically work for.
00:20:09
Ken Freire
Yeah, man, I don't want people to miss that because what could end up happening, even for expert-led business owners, is they're the experts, but so many times they forget to train their virtual assistants or train their people.
00:20:22
Ken Freire
And I love how you said that, train them to expand out of their career. or expand to grow their career, not just their current role. Because I've known so many bosses when they did that for me, I feel so much more loyal to them. I'm like, yeah, bro, like I'll stay for you. What do need me to do? And then when there's a new position that comes in, they're going to look to me because they're like, well, I've already trained you.
00:20:43
Ken Freire
You already got the skill sets, go for it. It's a win-win situation. Tom, for you, as you are processing through this, what's an unpopular, you've talked about a lot of things in contrarian reviews, but what's maybe another unpopular opinion you have in regards to helping clients?
00:21:02
Tom Hart
uh honestly i think experience is overrated i talk a lot about mistakes because for me i have always learned the most in environments where i i can make mistakes quickly I think in my 20s, I made a lot of mistakes and none of them were so consequential that they harmed me long term.
00:21:23
Tom Hart
In your 30s, you start managing people or maybe you set up your own business you kind of operate at higher level because you build pattern matching. And then when you get into your 40s, you realize that energy is very much finite and...
00:21:39
Tom Hart
your pattern matching ability should be greater because you learned a bunch from the mistakes that you made earlier in your career. So I'm always encouraging people to hire basically to kind of hire younger professionals and try and treat those level one or two professionals as your biggest assets. Like if you can delegate down and alleviate yourself as the principal of your firm, then that's mostly, I don't see that in the brackets that I'm working with. And it gives you a big distinct advantage over other companies and competitors because one, if you can actually explain what you do and document it, then no one basically in that bracket can do that. And it gives you actual advantage that
00:22:27
Tom Hart
By the way, also makes you more primed for an acquisition, like people wanting to exit these firms and sell them. If you have documented processes and procedures, that makes you far more attractive because it alleviates you as the principle and the bottleneck from it. But two, it means that maybe the principal can take a month long vacation and go anywhere in the world that they want without an internet connection or a phone line.
00:22:52
Tom Hart
That to me is its own form of growth. And I don't see enough people talking about the difference between purely just growing top line revenue versus the ability to kind of switch their phone off and not think about work.
00:23:05
Tom Hart
value comes in different forms and not all value is money. And to me, I think that that's something that I don't see people talking about enough. And after the pandemic and COVID and all of the political and social disruption that we're going through at the moment, one of the highest forms of value for me is the ability to go to the gym for an hour and not look at my phone.
00:23:30
Ken Freire
Yeah, I mean, you're right on that. A lot of people forget about their values because they're chasing the dollar. And just to be able to stop and say, what do I really value? Like for me, when I started my business, I have at the time of this recording, I just had my fifth child, right?
00:23:47
Ken Freire
So I value the autonomy and the freedom to be able to like, hey, I'm going to stop for a little bit and go hang out my kids because we homeschool them. Or hey, I'm like, even right before hanging out with you, Tom, I went and ran errands for my wife.
00:24:00
Ken Freire
because I have that freedom to be able to do that. That's what I value right now. Do you, Tom, see, as you're talking to these agencies, like a big wake-up call that they're saying, hey, we really need to reconsider our values?
Vision and Values for Success
00:24:12
Ken Freire
Or are they just kind of like, same-o, same-o, and then this is a deeper root problem that you end up addressing? Like they got a surface problem, they come to you, and then you're like, hey, here's a deeper problem you're actually struggling with.
00:24:24
Tom Hart
Well, first of all, I appreciate that you're hiring young. Sounds like you've got a team of five and they're going to do good things for you.
00:24:31
Tom Hart
Values. Values. It's difficult because what I do requires quite a high degree of honesty and an emotional preparedness by usually the owner and the principal in terms of coming to terms with who they are and what their values are.
00:24:40
Ken Freire
Yeah.
00:24:49
Tom Hart
Usually I think that my clients are typically around the decade mark. So they've been operating for about 10 years and they're frustrated that the cyclical nature of their business is is becoming too familiar and probably their values have become lost in the noise and the friction of any given Tuesday.
00:25:12
Tom Hart
So I think that my approach, one half being EOS and one half being simple numbers is once we come to terms with the reality of the numbers, then we can come to terms with the reality of the people that we've got involved.
00:25:27
Tom Hart
And yeah, I think that part of that is a soul searching for values. And most of the time it's a reclamation of the values that they started with. Maybe if they were a designer and they then just became an owner and the CEO and they did new business and they represented the look and feel of their design work.
00:25:47
Tom Hart
maybe their values don't disseminate fully all of the way down to the people doing the work anymore. Maybe there's an obsession over quality or the kind of look and feel of the house style that they want to pursue and persist with.
00:26:01
Tom Hart
But maybe a couple of those five core values that they set up a decade ago maybe have fallen by the wayside. think the most important thing is in the parlance of EOS is the vision.
00:26:14
Tom Hart
And I think it's far more important for the people doing the work to understand the vision so that we can build those blocks that pave the road to wherever we want to go in the future.
00:26:26
Tom Hart
Explaining the vision and having everyone understand that is far and away more important than some core values that get mentioned but aren't understood.
00:26:31
Ken Freire
Thank
00:26:36
Tom Hart
But yes, I think that part of my work gives the usually the owner, an opportunity to kind of slow down and have an honest conversation with someone who's got the outside perspective. They need to be fully honest about the situation because the people that we tend to start businesses with or promote within the business, we deal with those on a day-to-day basis.
00:26:58
Tom Hart
It's very difficult for us to have an aside with them where we have a higher degree of conversation, which is fully honest and transparent. So there is a corporate therapy element to what I do. And I think that can be hugely beneficial to these people who are 10, 12, 15 years in.
00:27:14
Ken Freire
Yeah, you know, I love how you were talking about it because if they slow down long enough, they can either realize that they are running their business or their business is running them. Right. And that's what you're doing with the simple numbers, with the EOS, with the values and stuff like that. You know, Tom, before we wrap up, I typically do a fast five. There's five questions I want you to quickly answer. But I want you to think about the person who's listening to this and they're thinking,
00:27:41
Ken Freire
man, I am in that cyclical phase right now and I'm tired. I'm exhausted. keep trying new ideas. I've read Alex Harmozy's book 10 times. I paid into the 6K thing. I got all the offers.
00:27:56
Ken Freire
I hit every webinar that I see, but I'm still stuck. Talk to that individual and what is it that they maybe most need right now?
00:28:06
Tom Hart
Perspective. I think we all talk about positioning a lot and we think a lot about positioning and how niching down is something that we want, but we're fearful about the consequences of that.
00:28:19
Tom Hart
We don't want to be unattractive to the average buyer. Ideally, we want to be more specific to the right buyer so that the fit is right.
00:28:27
Tom Hart
I think that person needs to be considerate of the truth of their situation. And I think that almost always comes in the form of perspective. Most of the time, they just need someone on the outside who they can have an open and honest conversation with about the way that they're feeling because...
00:28:45
Tom Hart
Usually clients are at a crossroads. There are easier ways to go about earning the same amount or more money than they currently earn. Perhaps it's been a couple of years, maybe five, since they've taken a profit distribution.
00:28:58
Tom Hart
it's easier to talk with someone on the outside about words as big as profit than it is to confide in someone that they work with. Most of the time what happens is they go and talk to their peers who own their own agency or they're in networking groups where there are other business owners in there.
00:29:12
Ken Freire
Bye.
00:29:18
Tom Hart
Those places can be a bit swampy. in terms of the degree of honesty, because let's face it, part of that is marketing as well. Like you don't wanna appear weak unprofitable to your peers who are going around bragging about how much profit they're doing or revenue.
00:29:34
Tom Hart
So mostly I think it's the ability to talk with someone who understands their language, but can also give them some shortcuts to reset their true north, like try and find the right direction to go in. Because the way I think about it is probabilistically, there's no one single right way to operate this kind of business.
00:29:55
Tom Hart
And I'm more than happy to be flexible to show them the way that I would go make the best possible bet. But mostly that's because I have, you know, 20 years of painful mistakes that I've learned from that inform the way that I think about this type of business. So I enjoy giving them that perspective.
00:30:16
Ken Freire
yeah tom and that that's great insight and especially as i even was listening to you like what perspective do i need right now you know like even always thinking my to myself like i'm stuck in my lane i need an outside perspective to help and that's where you come in for these agencies and for anyone listening to this you may be like I'm stuck in my business and you need to reach out to someone. It might be a networking, it might be Tom, it might be me, it might be anyone, but reach out to someone with some experience, some skill sets, because without that, all of a sudden, you're just going to keep doing the same thing over and over and over again.
00:30:51
Ken Freire
And it's going to suck. Tom, man, I've really appreciated this conversation. have been doing a expert led business trend report segment where I'm just asking the same five questions to everybody. You could just answer very quickly, like 20 seconds just to get a pulse. And then when I've collected all of them, I'm going to make a report and send it out to people.
Innovation and Industry Shifts
00:31:12
Ken Freire
Hopefully they like it. But just of what's working, what's not working for people.
00:31:16
Ken Freire
So question number one for you is what's something in your business you're experimenting with right now?
00:31:23
Tom Hart
Oh, experimenting.
00:31:27
Tom Hart
I'm thinking about writing a book. but mostly the podcast that I'm producing at the moment, which is one of two marketing approaches that I'm taking. And one half is thought leadership on LinkedIn, essentially. And the other half is short form podcasts, which talk directly to the young professionals so that I can kind of reach both sides of the same coin. So short form podcasts.
00:31:53
Ken Freire
I love it, man. Hey, if you decide to do the podcast or the book, my business partner and I, we just went, we did this experiment where went from podcast to book. And it was a lot of fun.
00:32:04
Ken Freire
actually have my copy right here. But man, I can show we could talk offline and I can kind of walk you through all the all this stuff and like hand you the blueprint if you ever decide to that.
00:32:10
Tom Hart
Awesome. Sure.
00:32:13
Ken Freire
Okay, question number two, which part of your business feels the most influx these days? Or you're like, I really need to put more energy towards this area.
00:32:23
Tom Hart
More energy. Mostly my marketing efforts, like trying to reach the right people. I'm kind of old fashioned in that I spend too much time probably trying to perfect content rather than experiment with just reaching the largest number of people possible in order to create a funnel.
00:32:36
Ken Freire
Yeah.
00:32:42
Tom Hart
So probably just trying to kind of add the logistical layer to marketing.
00:32:50
Ken Freire
Sweet. Love man. All right. Question number three. What's a goal you're building toward this year that you're already really excited about?
00:32:57
Tom Hart
I'm really excited about trying to draw a straight line between lots of the people that I know who are looking for work and some of the agencies that I work with in order to kind of speed date through Rolodex in my head to try and find people opportunities.
00:33:18
Ken Freire
Great. All right. Question number four, where do you see the industry shifting and how are you preparing for it? Specifically, maybe like the marketing agency industry.
00:33:31
Tom Hart
I think that The bad news is that a lot of businesses are not going to survive this period. And I think that the ones that do will require caliber of onboarding, recruitment, onboarding, training, coaching, and a level of communication that mostly I do not see.
00:33:49
Ken Freire
you
00:33:52
Tom Hart
So I'm really trying to help people with that short form podcast understand what good looks like in terms of professionalism. while I try and work with companies in order to kind of prime both ends of that telephone line. So how I'm preparing for it is putting out as much content as I can, which mass distributes this messaging about professionalism and what good looks like while actually trying to feed that back to past clients in order to give them ongoing value and to show them my appreciation for working with me so that I can kind of build and maintain those relationships over time.
00:34:36
Ken Freire
Sweet man. Last question. What's the legacy you want to leave behind?
Legacy and Future Aspirations
00:34:42
Tom Hart
A big, giant, fat book by Tom Hart. Maybe a nice way to think about my career is I started off by reading literature and trying to be a poet and then going full circle with leaving a really good one-off, one-hit wonder book that maybe someone will pick up and read in 100 years' time. Maybe that might be a nice legacy.
00:35:10
Ken Freire
I got to now ask, I'm breaking my own rules, but are you hoping this book would be like a nonfiction business book, a poetry book, novel? kind of book?
00:35:20
Tom Hart
I think poetry probably has a longer shelf life, so maybe I'll be high-minded and say a book of poetry, but maybe it's about the workplace.
00:35:29
Ken Freire
All right. I love it, man. Tom, for those who are listening to this and they're like, I really like Tom. I like his perspective. What's the best way to reach out to you?
00:35:38
Tom Hart
You can reach me on my website. You can reach me on LinkedIn. Both of those are just heart ops. I'm available to talk.
00:35:48
Tom Hart
I don't think that traditional sales work.
00:35:51
Ken Freire
Thank
00:35:52
Tom Hart
So I really just appreciate having conversations with people. And if they're a good fit, we can keep talking. And if not, then I'd be happy to pass you on to someone who's a better fit than me.
00:36:02
Tom Hart
But yeah, just reach out all the traditional methods.
00:36:06
Ken Freire
Sweet. And that's Tom Hart, H-A-R-T, OPS, O-P-S. So if you go to Hart, H-A-R-T, O-P-S, dot com, that's where they can reach out to you. Tom, thank you so much for being on the podcast, man. Really appreciate it.
00:36:21
Tom Hart
Thank you, Ken. It was lot of fun.