Podcast Transcript 035: Scaling eCommerce with YouTube Ads: Christian Hoppe’s Proven Approach

Christian H: The real secret is really the structure. and we always say the more you invest into the research, the better, the script will be. And then if you have the right structure, the better the performance will be later on.

Michel: Hi everyone and welcome to Growth Leap. I'm your host, Michel Gagnon. We talked to pretty awesome business builders who are designing disruptive and meaningful companies.

Michel G: Hi everybody. Today we receive Christian Hoppe, co founder of Forward Agency. He helps e commerce brands drive revenue and growth with performance based YouTube ads. He has 15 years of digital marketing and advertising experience, working as a fractional CMO and for various agencies, including Amazon. Christian knows how to run effective ads, but he's also passionate about sustainability.

Welcome to the show.

[00:00:55] Christian's Journey into Digital Marketing

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Michel G: Christian, you have a wealth of experience in e commerce and have helped many brands grow over the past couple of years. Can you share with us how you first got started in the industry and what inspired you to start your own agency?

Christian H: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It's funny because I started as a freelancer. I worked in agencies. Then I worked on a client side to help the DTC brand. built the whole D2C basically from scratch, helped them to grow 200 million in three years. And then I started my own agency. So I've been on all sides, working in agencies, working on a client side with agencies, then started my own agency.

But how I get started was actually after school, I just didn't know what should I study. And if I should study, I couldn't see myself invest three, five more years. And so with zero experience and no clients, nothing, I just started freelancing. which was, I don't know if I would do it again, probably yes.

Now looking back, but it was, it was a tough time. but it was also good because I just learned everything, doing it myself. And, yeah, after some time it just helped, it just happened that, after I left, Waterdrop, the brand where I built the D2C, I just, I just, We had a couple of other businesses inquires and said, Hey, can you help us also to leverage YouTube ads?

And, yeah, so we started working with them and that's basically how the agency was born.

Michel G:

[00:02:11] The Power of YouTube Ads for E-commerce

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Michel G: You have,a lot of experience in, in digital advertising, and now you're really focused on YouTube ads and,in the industry, Norm is that, video used to be branding, right? A lot of people say video is, is for branding campaigns, but that's not your approach, you heavily focus on YouTube ads to drive growth for clients for direct response marketing.

So tell us about your, approach and how, I don't know if you've discovered that or if you've experimented, but how did you get to that point where you use YouTube ads really to drive performance?

Christian H: Yeah, it was 2000, 2021 and a lot of businesses still are dependent on Facebook ads, meta ads and that water drop we. We're just looking for another channel and some one channel that has scaling potential that has, is large enough, basically we needed to grow faster. We needed to diversify. and so we looked around and tick tock was still very early and Pinterest, Snapchat is not really significant.

So. So we looked at YouTube and we said, okay, actually it's the second largest search engine, right? And it's also owned by Google. So you can say it's the largest search engines, first and second largest search engine. And so it has a lot of potential, it has a lot of active viewers and we want to see how can we make it work.

And as you said, most brands just see it as a, awareness channel. and that's also how we started. We worked with five different Google specialists, video specialists, and we invested or Honestly, burned 100, 000 euros, or 100, 000 pretty quickly. And we had 30 percent brand lift, but no incremental revenue.

So we said, okay, where's the revenue? And, then we started experimenting and investing into basically courses to really understand how, how to do that. YouTube works. YouTube works very well for B2B, for high ticket sales, all these ads on YouTube where someone wants to sell you some course or some unique method, how you can become a millionaire in three weeks, basically.

But the reason why this works is because the economics for high tickets, items work, right? If you sell a 10, 000 course, you can make a lot of money on, on this because the economics work. It's very, very hard to make YouTube work, on first. order profitability when you have a 50, 50 or 100 AOV, it took us a year, but we really invested in how should the creative look like and how should the media buying site look like to make it work.

And, it worked really well. In the end we were able to, drive several hundred thousand, dollar ad spend at profitable OS and, yeah, this is a short summary, but it was a lot of work going in there.

Michel G: Let's, let's drill down on this while, while we're on it. so you talked at B2B high tickets, companies, YouTube is, is one of the great avenues, to explore for, for advertising. You've kind of cracked the code for, e commerce or, smaller items or, D2C type of brands.

what's the secret? What. You know, I

mean, I mean, we, we, we, we don't have a lot of time, but,what, why, what works and what have you learned, over the past few

years,

[00:05:15] Secrets to Successful YouTube Ad Campaigns

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Christian H: So I've heard a lot of brands that said, Hey, we tried YouTube ads and it didn't work. And then they don't try again. And we were in the same position. So very happy to share the secrets basically. So it comes down to two things. the first one is the creative and it's very different. A lot of brands just take either the TV commercial or take maybe a Facebook ad meta ad and run it on YouTube and see if it works.

And. YouTube is a very different platform. It works very differently than other platforms. and that's why you also need to adjust the strategy for the creative. what is very counterintuitive on YouTube is that we don't strive for making people watch the ads. and, and what I mean by that is we don't want a high view through rate.

We want actually people to actively skip the ads that are not our ideal target audience. That's a bit counterintuitive if you think about it. But the reason why is that I strongly believe that the creative does the targeting. So, you still have a lot of targeting opportunities on YouTube, but what we aim for is that the creative, differentiates between, okay, this is a viewer that is actually our ideal audience.

And this is not a viewer that is our ideal audience. So we want, to make everyone skip who we don't think is the ideal audience. For example, if I go in with a, with a hook and say, Hey, do you have struggle sleeping at night? I could be selling them, right? A pillow, a mattress. I could be selling them supplements.

I could be selling them an app. so many different things. So some people might not be open for supplements. They're just looking for maybe a more comfortable mattress or something else. Right? So you have to be very clear. And also, for example, if you're selling higher price items, you want tomake that very clear already in the beginning so that those people that say, Hey, this is interesting, but I'm not willing to pay the price for it.

This KIP. And that helps the algorithm then optimize also for more, more for those people that actually are the ideal customer audience. so we have some clients that, for example, the,SAS business in that case, but Yeah, I would say like an image processing or editing, SAS and, and their audiences very specifically, print on demand designers, businesses.

So very different than, than the broad audience. So we have another, D2C client that sells convenience food and their target audience are sporty people because of the high protein in the, products. So you, you gotta be very clear and actually make the creative target the users.

So this is the one part. And the second secret is really the media buying part. There's a lot of hype now about performance marks, about all this black box campaigns. Google wants of course to earn more money. and so they put just everything together in one. campaign and, and think, okay, we don't tell you exactly what is, what is really driving the growth.

And unfortunately, YouTube is still very manual. So that's a bit of, experience needed, but, yeah, also here we, we kind of cracked the code.

Michel G: are you using performance max or,

Christian H: We also using performance max, but, we see it more like an extension, right? So it is, it has its benefits when you go to new markets, for example, and you just want to test it. and it also has the potential to, So we want to tap into everything else, but we also want to kind of build a structure first, where we understand, okay, what comes in, what goes out, what is really driving revenue and where you more or less wasting money.

And then on top, build the performance max to capture everything else, instead of just saying, we, we trust Google and here's a black box. We don't know. the results overall okay, but then that doesn't give you the flexibility to really optimize.

[00:08:42] Creative Strategies for YouTube Ads

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Michel G: I want to talk about the creative, and how you approach that because also, in the past brands looked at video as,an awareness. And a lot of companies did not touch video because of its complexity, right? You, you need to, if you want to put out something that, that is professional that you like, how do you work with brands and where your clients on the, on the creative side, since you, you kind of know what works, but how does it work?

Do you actually create some of the creatives

Christian H: Yeah, that's a good question. So the interesting part, maybe one assumption in the beginning that high quality creatives don't necessarily perform better than low quality creative surprise, even on YouTube. So we had productions with the same script, basically that Costs 2, 500 and we had the same production 50, 000 and the 2, 500 performed better than the 50, 000.

That's because the 50, 000 was more like a TV commercial in terms of quality, same script. but it was just too polished. It was too perfect. And, our assumption or our reasoning is that as a viewer, you immediately understand, Hey, this is an ad, this is not organic content. So it is important to make it fit into the platform.

yeah. So this is one aspect, but the real secret is really the structure. and we always say the more you invest into the research, the better, the script will be. And then if you have the right structure, the better the performance will be later on. and how we do that is really, scraping reviews, understanding what customers love about, your service, your product, and also understanding what competitors, for example, what they don't do or what are the objections when it comes to your competitors products.

So you can really put all this into, into the creative. and then it can be either UGC production, sometimes even stock footage, AI voiceover works, especially for. quick testing, or, higher end production. If, if it's a brand that says, okay, we tested the channel, it works, let's put more quality in it.

Then you can, hire an actor, get a professional shooting done for, for bigger investments.

Michel G: Yeah, there's a lot of talks these days about how ugly ads are outperforming beautiful ads. That's great,

Christian H: Unfortunately.

Michel G: unfortunately. yeah, but it also fits with the, the platform, right? There's a lot of, unpolished, videos on, on YouTube as well. Budget is, also an interesting topic. you hear pretty much, everything, along the whole spectrum.

[00:11:13] Budgeting and Testing for YouTube Ads

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Michel G: Some people are saying, invest like a dollar a day and you'll have a pretty convincing data about if your ad is working or not, others are saying, to actually run ads and, and really learn and find the right path, you need to invest, a lot more, what kind of budget, do you need on, on YouTube to start seeing results?

Christian H: Yeah. So to be honest, although we focus on YouTube ads, we never really, recommend businesses to start with YouTube ads because as you said, there is a certain budget required to really have a reasonable test. So what we've seen sometimes with businesses that started with YouTube ads, although they haven't test it, anything else is that maybe they don't have market fit yet or, or maybe their page doesn't convert yet.

And then to invest into paid advertising or specifically YouTube ads where you have to invest into producing some formal creative. is, is much bigger step than just going on, on Facebook on Meta and test some static creatives quickly and do some angle testing and understand, okay, this message works better than this one in general.

So we always encourage businesses to do that first. I think YouTube is, is not necessarily for, for at least an e commerce space for businesses that do maybe one, 2 million or less. It starts to be very interesting for businesses to do 5 million or more a year. In that range, you are actually missing out because your competitors are there, right?

We talked about YouTube being the second largest search engine. You can bid on your competitors, also on YouTube perspective. So on that stage, it starts to become interesting. the minimum budget that usually for normal. E-commerce brand that we normally recommend to get started is, is around 10,000.

a month is kind of the lower end to invest in, in terms of media spend, to, to really see how it works and, and what creative works. And with this, you can test around 10 different messages, maybe 15 different messages and understand, okay, this, this creative works better than. yeah, but you can invest a lot more than the beautiful part on the other side is that there is a very low ad fatigue.

So that means we've spent several million on one single creative and it's still the best performing, which is not so common on other platforms where you have to change creatives very often.

Michel G: But why is that? You still have a frequency capping on,

Christian H: yeah, that's a good question. I think that the algorithm from on Meta, for example, works interesting, in interesting ways. So if you have a, let's say an audience of 1 million people, Meta would not necessarily show your ad to 1 million people, but would first show it to 5 percent or 10 percent of the audience.

And then just increase the frequency. I guess it's also a bit of the quality of the, of the ad, right? On Meta you have 80 percent sound off. the, they consume very little of the creative, they skip very fast. on YouTube it's different. You have 95 percent sound on, so it's, it's quite the opposite. And we work with long form creatives, so it's up to three minutes.

So that also means like you. Pre qualify the audience much more and if you think about it, that's, you can put your landing page into a creative and the beautiful part of it is that if you're interested as a, as a viewer, you've watched the first seconds and say, okay, actually, this is a problem that I have.

I've been looking for a solution, so let me just continue watching. You don't have to click away, right? You can. consume all that is usually on a landing page in the video without changing the platform, without being interrupted. If at any point you say, well, it's not for me, skip. But until then, you get way more, education in, in the video.

And we also see that on onsite metrics. So we see much higher pages per session, average session duration than on meta, 50, 100 percent higher usually. So that's, that also speaks for the quality. And I guess that's why, The ad fatigue is also, lower on, on YouTube.

Michel G: If you design, you write a script and you, you, you work on an ad creative for YouTube ads and that creative is performing well, can you recycle that and assume that it's going to perform as well on, Instagram, TikTok or others?

Christian H: Most likely not because it's long form. So it's, it's again, very different platform. we work with creatives that are usually. Around two and a half to three minutes. That's the golden range. If it's longer than three minutes, you pay higher, CPMs on, on YouTube. but you, that's really just the length that is needed to get everything into the creative that you want to get into the creative.

So that is again, different on, on meter. You have also sound off. So it's much, much more difficult to get the same message across.

Michel G: And how do you write like, I converting script or, you talked to earlier about, doing some research, but if we try to get more concrete a little bit, how does, how does that look like?

Christian H: Yeah. So you want to go directly in the beginning, like on other platforms with a hook that starts with either problem or desire. what we learned here is that positive works much better than negative in 90 percent of the cases. So instead of really speaking about what people don't want, speak about what people want.

So kind of a desire focus or a positively framed solution. then you want to really tell consumers or the viewers directly how you're solving the problem. As with this example, if you struggle sleeping at night, you want to be very concrete. What is the solution that you offer so that the viewer can decide, okay, this is something I want to learn more about.

then we. Enter something like a call, early call to action, which is not a major call to action, but it's something either you can do that by saying, Hey, if you're already ready to learn more click here, but more, a better way maybe is just showing a screen recording of the website while you continue talking.

So please do that. People understand, hey, I can actually buy this, this product, this service on the website and they get familiar with the checkout process. then we go into this educate part and here you can really add a lot, first of all, building trust, of course, reviews what others say.

So it can be that you have a short supercut of testimonials, three testimonials from real customers ideally, or other ways to, to build trust. and then really going into everything that you usually put on a landing page, right? And all the objections that you have, Hey, why should this be? You have to know that this mattress be better than anything else, or anything that you really want to, want to tackle until you come down to the end, where you have to call to action and you can have a stacked call to action.

So it's not only one call to action, it's basically as long as the viewer continues watching, you can have another sense of urgency and our scarcity. Another reason until people actually click. So that's in a very rough overview into the structure.

Michel G: And what are the typical mistakes that you see either clients or, other companies do

Christian H: Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, first of all, a lot burn soil because they, they try YouTube ads in the wrong way. We've been there as well. So I really understand that. And then they don't try again. I also understand that because they say, Hey, we, we spent money, didn't work. Why should we spend money again?

And that's usually because they don't invest or they don't know about the ideal structure of the creative. They don't invest in the research, or they get the media buying rights. We had clients where we started working with them basically from scratch. We made YouTube in three months, the largest channel.

So really from not doing anything there, then they said, okay, let's let us do this in house and we always support that. And they changed everything. So basically the creatives were the same, but they started changing things on their structure. and everything tanked and so on. Two months later, they called us and say, Hey, can you help us again?

And we started working again. It took us again, two months to reverse everything. So there's really, again, the creative part, plus also to, to understand how you build the structures. you don't want to put everything in one campaign and, this can work really well for some time and then it crashes, so you want to build out a structure that is more horizontal, how we call it.

So, to have again, more control, flexibility, still give flexibility to the algorithm, but also. Understand what works and, and what doesn't work to, to optimize manually,

Michel G: So basically when people start working with you, because I've been in, the advertising world for a while as well. And,they all want results. Results like yesterday, when, when people start working with you, like with forward agency, like what's the, what's the process, like how do you onboard them, what kind of expectations they can have?

Christian H: Yeah, good question. So we start with the research and the script. That's, that's the most important part. We also invest really a lot in, into this part. and from then, it depends on the creative process, right? So it can be very quick. and easy production, maybe taking existing material, taking voiceover, doing a creative or it can be a professional production.

Usually we started with a simple creative just to test the concept. and from going live, it's around three to four weeks where you can see results. So we have some early metrics, that where we see, okay, is it going in the right direction? But then within a month, usually you already see results. Of course you can iterate and.

and go from there. But it's, it is very, very quick. It's not a channel where you can go from zero to a hundred thousand a day. also to be transparent, it's something where you add 30%, 50 percent more a week or a week. but it's also very stable then. yeah. So this is in terms of expectations.

Michel G: from what I understand, you are, an agency that has what you call a transparent,fee structure. how does that work? Like how, again, if we decide to work with you to tomorrow, what should I expect in terms of, fees and the amount I need to invest monthly?

Christian H: Yeah. So we went away from a percentage of revenue and percentage of ad spend. I think it has, first of all, a conflict of interest because then as agency we just try to push the client to spend more. we did that in the beginning 'cause that's how many agencies work, and of course it's very profitable for them.

But we just say, okay, our service is this. we,charge basically, a flat fee per, for our work for media buying and, a separate fee for the creatives. And that's also because, the creative batch,you can run very long with one, one creative batch. and that's separated and then it depends on the amount of markets and languages and stuff like this.

but, yeah, I think it's, it's a very, fair model. we do have some agreements also with clients. If you say, Hey, we checked the accounts and, In the meantime, we have so much experience that we say, Hey, we give you a guarantee. If we don't achieve that, we don't charge you. So you don't pay us because we know that in 90 plus percent of the cases we, we understand, okay, this is a product that works on YouTube, with, with this landing page, with this current numbers, we can make it work as well.

Michel G: And how much of the work do you also do in terms of the funnel, the entire funnel? So there's the, the creatives that the optimization, but you also get involved on the landing pages. And

Christian H: yes, we do. So. So, we get started with the landing pages that there are because the biggest impact, the biggest uplift you have with creative testing. But once you have creatives where you know, okay, these creatives work better, then it's all about the funnel, as you said. So, we create,I would say customized checkouts, for e commerce companies, it's, it's very, straightforward.

but there are also higher ticket, companies or SAS businesses where the funnel might look, different. The reason is, you have way more impressions than you have clicks. So iterating the creatives first is, is much, creates a much bigger impact. and then when you have the right clicks on a landing page, you can optimize the landing page.

Michel G: I want to shift gear a little bit, because you, you really know your stuff, but I was listening to other interviews that you've given and you seem to be a, I have to be careful with how I'm described you, but a very Zen.

[00:22:40] Building a Sustainable and Flexible Agency

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Michel G: advertising, uh, a guru or,expert. and I'd like to tell you to tell me a little bit about,how you see things in life, how you've decided to, create your own agency, how it fits with your, I don't know.

I don't know if you've, it's life design or lifestyle design or. Or if you've got to a point where you say, well, maybe the,the more traditional agencies are not necessarily the right fit for me. Like, what's your

life

philosophy?

Christian H: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for the question. It's a very interesting question. I never want to start an agency to be honest. it's not something when I was working in agencies, I was like, wow, this is really stressful. And, it is honestly, so it's not, it's not an easy thing or enjoyable thing, even if it made me happy.

It might look like this on the outside, but I think you develop a very thick skin because you have to go through a lot. but yeah, it just happened. Right. And, I think we've seen that there's a lot of potential and, what I didn't enjoy when I was working in agencies is that you cannot choose the clients.

So I had to kind of work with the businesses that were given to me. And I thought, because you also touched on sustainability, there are definitely red lines or. Businesses where I want to work with and others I would not like to work with so much. And to have this flexibility to really say, and I have to say we have really nice clients, amazing clients that really enjoy working with and where everything, okay, they're amazing businesses.

They really doing a lot of good things and where it also really makes. yeah, it gives, gives you a feeling of, of sense of purpose to, to help them to be successful. So it sounds a bit cliche, but we really, with my co founder, we often talk and think, think like, Hey, we really want to make it work for this business.

We really want to help them, be successful because we just enjoy the founders. We enjoy the team. We enjoy the products. We enjoy what they're doing. And it's just a real great pleasure to work with. And I think that's important because if you don't enjoy that and think, okay, actually, I don't really stand behind what they're doing, then it's very tough.

And it also creates this, this conflict of interest.

Michel G: And have you changed anything in how you run operations like versus, maybe when you were younger in agencies,

Christian H: Oh yes. So yeah, we were, I mean, in the last, I've been in the startup space basically on client side and, there's of course a lot of politics involved in businesses naturally when they grow. And there were a lot of things. It was often about FaceTime, not really results, although it was portrayed differently.

And I think that's normal, right? It's not for any specific company. I think that happens also. I've seen it a couple of times where when businesses grow, things change. so we, we are not a large agency in that sense. We will try to focus on. driving results. We're completely remote. We give maximum flexibility to our team members.

They can work whenever they want, basically. So there's no fixed hours. We don't, think, how much someone works, but it's in the end, it's about the result. And we try also to pass on the success of the agency to, to the team. And, yeah, that that's very, very good. And we have a lot of,the stories that we create, it's, it's very, rewarding as well.

And I'm very grateful for that. If you hear how much impact that actually has on, on other people's life and how does this changed working with us as well. So it's kind of this win win situation where we help brands become more successful and at the same time create something where it's also has a positive impact on our team and the people we work with.

Michel G: have you started looking into the sustainability of advert, digital advertising itself? Is this, there's a lot of talks, there's scope three, in that, there's been investing in measuring actually the footprint of the entire supply chain.

Christian H: Yeah.

Michel G: More and more clients also are asking for for some sort of data.

What's your take on that?

Christian H: my my honest take is that, every consumption is, is bad. It's not sustainable. And, you have to be so honest that whatever, you, whatever you consume, it, it has an impact. if you think about Patagonia, they advertise, don't buy this jacket because, it's not sustainable. In the end, you need to think, do you really need this?

I think for us, it was clear we don't want to support anything like dropshipping or anything like this and just really try to work with businesses. but the honest truth is advertising is controversial, whatever you do. I mean, like you try to promote consumption. So that's, that's really a thing that is.

has its downsides. and I want to be just very honest here. You can always try to minimize it, but, the fact is that in the end consumption is not sustainable. no matter, no matter in what form.

Michel G: I agree, but I also think that, advertising is, useful so that people who have businesses, can promote what they sell, right? So then, then you get to the next level, which is, do you really need a second yacht?

Christian H: Yeah.

Michel G: need the first one in the first place, right? So then there's questions about, consumptions.

but you know, you were mentioning, B to B businesses where, some are obviously selling,how you can become rich in three weeks, which might not fit in the right category either, but, there's a lot of businesses where, they, to be successful like you do with your clients, they need to be seen.

Christian H: Right. So, no, I agree with you. It's a, it's complicated. It's a complicated topic. I mean, what you can think of is that if you help someone who would, because there are people, right. People need to consume to, to live basically, and to also have a decent life and enjoy the life. I think that's also important. and, and you can also think of if someone wanted to consume something, then you at least help them go in the right direction and consume something that is more sustainable than maybe an alternative.

So that's kind of how I try to see it, if that makes sense.

Michel G: I'm trying to get someone, who specializes in, or, who's, very well versed in degrowth,to get, on the podcast, I, I find it quite fascinating as well, but, we'll, we'll leave that for, for another day. You have mentioned that you try to give as much flexibility as possible for your team. Uh, you are fully remote. Where are people, based in general?

Christian H: Well, I would say pretty much everywhere we have, team members around the globe, which is quite fascinating because it involves a lot of different, cultures and, backgrounds and that's, very, very interesting. and yeah, it's, it's crazy to see how they also grow together and, and how they work together.

I, I'm personally Austrian from, from center of Europe. My co founder is from.and I've been also been traveling a lot and, and checking out which are the best places to be. and yeah, so we have, we have people, I would say in many places.

[00:29:23] Christian's Personal Journey and Philosophy

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Michel G: You went from working in agencies being a fractional CMO to actually starting your own business. Can you tell us a little bit about that journey and how, things have been going for you as a, business owner?

Christian H: Yeah. Also that this was not planned. It, it also happened, kind of, And I, I worked at WaterUp, I came to them when there was no online team, nothing as, as to help them build the whole D2C space. And, back then there were, it was a super small office, almost nobody was the first employee in, in for D2C for online.

And we built the whole team. Basically I built four, four teams with different people. And after two and a half years, it was, it became a very different company natural because it grew a lot. Revenue wise, team wise, structure wise, and then I just realized, okay, it's, it's the time for me to, to change because.

there, there is a certain time and, and period. And, yeah, it was a great time. And then I didn't really know how I would proceed. I had other offers to again, join other companies. And then I just, when I announced that I leave, then certain things happened and fell into place. And I always like to quote.

Steve Jobs, where, where he said, you can only connect the dots backwards. Sometimes you just have to trust the process. And it's crazy now when I think back how things fell into place and ended up where I want, where I never thought I will be. And I never planned to do that, but that's just how things happened.

And, yeah, it's, it's been a very interesting journey. I have to say it's, you, you develop a very thick skin. It's not always easy. but after some time you, you get used to it.

Michel G: Where'd you find your clients

Christian H: It, it happened that when I announced basically that I leave Waterdrop and we started this agency with my, my co founder together that a lot of, there were a lot of businesses that came to us. So it was basically through my network, how we got started and then recommendations and yeah, again, a lot of organic growth actually.

Michel G: and what's been the toughest part of launching forward agency or, you talked about developing a, a thick skin.

Christian H: Yeah. Of course. I mean, not everything goes well. Right. And I have a very high quality standards and expectations also towards myself and you cannot control everything. So sometimes things happen,where you rely on, external people and, or whatever, and, and things don't go as, as I wanted it to be.

I realized later that my expectations are still sometimes much higher than the client's expectations. So. But I also want to do the best I can for the businesses. And even if the client is happy, but I'm not happy, then, the expectation is, is to improve here and yeah, it's just, a living organism basically.

And you have to, improve, but also accept that. Not everything is always perfect and there are ups and downs and it's a rollercoaster. But as long as the overall trend is upwards, then everything is good. Just to enjoy the journey, which is something, a quote that I never really understood, but it's, it's really all about, that.

Michel G: And how do you structure the actual services? Because, scaling a service or an agency service business is complicated, especially if your offering is relatively broad. Is there anything particular? In a forward agency where you say like, this is how we work. And this makes our work and the quality of our work, a lot better.

Christian H: Yeah, we, we, we focus on what we're really good at. I mean, I've been working in D2C, I've been, I've done everything myself, from, when I, when I started Waterdrop, I, Basically crop images for a product, detail pages. myself and set everything up and wrote, copy and etc. So I've done all the e commerce, the operational e commerce part, until we built the e commerce team.

I've worked in CRM. I built all the CRM, the analytics, etc. and the same for paid. I come from a performance agency. I've, I've set up the basic structures for everything I've hired people. I've, we've started working together. so I've seen pretty much everything, but, we still focus on one core aspect where we think, okay, this is where we are really the best.

And that's what we've seen is really worth it. Of course, you tap into other services here and there, but for us, it's YouTube ads and Google ads, paid search shopping, where we see, okay, this is something where we drive the best, results for clients. And that's what we focus on. And, yeah, that's, that's something where I know from, from the feedback from the results that we drive, that this is the, the core and this is what we're going to do.

Michel G: And what's your, your plan for forward agency in the next, I don't know, six, 12 months, but also. in general, I was talking to somebody else earlier and,she was basically saying that, her business is her retirement plan. And, what about you? Like, what does forward agency mean for you in your, in your life right now and also in the future?

[00:34:20] Future Plans and Final Advice

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Christian H: Good question. so one part is we want to really get more, businesses successful, even the ones that we don't work with. So we are launching forward thinking, which is. in parallel to Ford agency, kind of a platform where we're going to share a lot of content in terms of podcasts, in terms of newsletters, blogs, et cetera.

We just share everything that we do, for free and, and people can access it. because there is a lot of businesses where we say openly, Hey, look, it doesn't make sense for us to work together, but still, why not share what we, what we learned. and on the other side, I also believe that the best way is to become a product of your product.

So, we also investing and, building our own eCommerce businesses, in, in segments where we think there's a lot of potential and also show how it can be done. So these are two pillars. I have to say it's still stressful and, and all it takes a lot of time to run an agency. So all of this takes extra efforts and the core focus will still be working with our core clients.

We don't have, any,plans to hyperscale and, and, and blow up the agency with a lot of teams because we know that the quality cannot stay there. So, that's a certain set of clients where we know, okay, we can deliver.

Michel G: what's the most fun for you because it's different to run a business than to actually, do specific service in an agency or, in a corporate world. What's the most fun for you?

Christian H: The most fun is really when this small moment when you, when you can celebrate the wins and okay, this is so great. This, all the efforts is worth it. I loved the movie, The Pursuit of Happiness, I don't know if you've seen it, but basically in the end it is where he shares, this, this is the moment when all the efforts that you put into it, pays off.

I think this is always rewarding and, I really enjoyed his moments yeah,

Michel G: Yeah, I agree because sometimes the, the efforts that come in can take a while, right?

Before you actually see the results. Yeah, I totally

agree. Do you have any, last, advice for audience,any, either for people who would like to start their business or for, people who are contemplating YouTube ads, anything?

Christian H: Yeah, good question. I want to come back to, what, what I said before is like, you can connect the dots only backwards. really trust in, in the process. If there's something that you want to do, do it. And,as soon as you take the decision and you say, okay, this is where I want to be, this is where I want to go.

It's interesting how things fall into place. And if you're open for it and allow this, this energy to flow and things to happen, then this will come true. I've seen it a lot of times.

Michel G: Thank you so much, Christian, and we will be keeping an eye out for forward thinking in your podcast.

Christian H: Thank you so much for having me.

Simon: Thanks again for listening, I hope you enjoyed the show. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast. And as usual you can find the show notes at stunandawecom

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