Behdad Jamshidi Podcast Transcript
Behdad Jamshidi joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of The Digital Executive podcast.
Do you work in emerging tech, working on something innovative? Maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.coruzant.com/brand.
Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Behdad Jamshidi. Behdad Jamshidi started CJAM, the Marketing Connector.
After realizing that most companies don’t know how to evaluate the value of a marketing agency or assess their own needs. Since every business is different, not only in their needs, but where they are at in the growth process, it isn’t one size fits all. In the past seven years Behdad or B has met with and assessed thousand and 71 plus marketing agencies embedded them down to a lean 100 preferred partners across all marketing niches.
After pairing hundreds of businesses with the right partners, he’s found his skillset lies in the matchmaking process.
Well, good afternoon, Behdad. Welcome to the show.
Behdad Jamshidi: Thanks for having me, Brian.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. Hailing out of Vancouver, British Columbia. It’s been a while since I did a podcast in Vancouver.
I’m in Kansas City, so I really appreciate you making the time traverse in the time zones here. And so Behdad, let’s jump right into your first question. You built CJAM. After realizing that many companies don’t know how to evaluate the value of a marketing agency or even assess their own needs, what was the key moment or insight when you said, this gap is so big, I’m gonna build a business to fix it.
And how did your background in engineering, consulting and strategy help you see that?
Behdad Jamshidi: Yeah, this is a great question. I mean, when I first got into this space I was working as an engineer, a sales engineer, working with mid-size businesses, doing a lot of consulting, mapping things out and helping guide business.
And when I got into the marketing space, it just super random. I, I’m just very curious human, so I like to learn stuff. So I started building out websites, Google ads. SEO very quickly realized I hated doing a DR websites on the weekend. It just wasn’t fun. So I started looking for different marketing agencies to work with.
And as I. Started putting businesses and marketing agencies in the same meeting. I noticed that they didn’t speak the same language. Agencies didn’t understand business and business people didn’t really understand marketing. And so I started thinking, okay, what if I was able to bridge this gap and bring people together?
And where this really highlighted it for me was when I was working with a customer and they needed to build out a website, and I went and found them a marketing agency that could help ’em build websites. They had an amazing designer. The work was really, really well done. And after the website was done and they were really happy with, they needed to do Google ads and SEO.
And very quickly I realized, oh, this agency says they’re good at Google Ads and SEO, but they’re not good at it at all. They’re just really good at building websites. And so I started looking for other agencies to see if I could, match ’em with another, my, my customer with another agency. And then quickly started realizing other agencies also were only good at one to three things in a business.
When it came to marketing and as I kind of went down the road, I thought, okay, well maybe I just haven’t talked to enough partners. As I’ve talked to over 1,081 different marketing agencies and experts now and have come to realize there is no one size fits all marketing agency. It really comes down to like what the business needs, what’s their sizes, and which channels make the most sense.
And then marketing agencies are typically good at one to three things. Only 11% of them are good at one to three things and the rest are good at nothing. And so that’s kinda how I figured out there’s this massive gap. There needs to be someone in the middle figuring out what, who needs to talk to, who at what time to allow the businesses to grow.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Really appreciate that. And I like the backstory how you got into this, right? Of course. You were very curious, very creative. You started building websites and, but along the way you found a solution to a problem, bridging the gap to match all those web marketing aspects, from the websites to the SEO to the advertising, all that stuff.
There’s, there is certainly, and I’ve seen over the years and I was in this space as well, a lot of gaps there and I just really appreciate that. So bead, you’ve spoken about businesses hiring B player agencies and moving slowly while an A player agency can accelerate growth exponentially. What are the top warning signs of businesses already working with a B player agency and what questions should they ask themselves to realize it?
Behdad Jamshidi: Yeah, so when you’re working with a B level agency, I mean, they’re just doing good enough work or just good work. And we all know in today’s business age, like just doing good doesn’t get you average results anymore. It just gets you no results. And so when you’re working with an agency and you notice ’em like stagnating, right?
Most agencies have a range of businesses that they can work with, right? So some, some agencies are really good at working with businesses from 500 create a 3 million. Some are good at from 3 million to 10. Some are good from 10 million to 30 million, but there’s a stage where the agencies like their expertise starts.
Fizzling out and you start realizing, oh, they’re not coming up with new ideas, they’re not changing anything. They seem to be hiding numbers, not really giving me an accurate estimate of like, what’s happening. So if you feel at any point that you’re working with an agency where you don’t really understand your numbers, how things are working, are they working on the right things, like you should really follow that gut instinct and start diving into looking at other agency partners to see if there’s something better out there.
And so as your business grows, you are going to need to be shifting. And the other thing is. The difference between a B player agency and a player agency is huge. I mean, every business owner knows when you have a B player employee in your company. The difference between an A player and a B player is not linear.
It’s exponential. And so when you’re working with their agencies, the right agencies, they’re able to move things forward exponentially better than a B player ever would. And it puts you ahead a lot further. And just like an, a quick example is like if you’re running let’s say Facebook ads and you’re hiring a Facebook ads agency and you have the B player that just says, well, we just run the ads, we don’t do any strategy, we don’t help you with the video content or the creative, or any of that kind of stuff, that’s a pretty telltale sign that they don’t really care about all aspects of Facebook because if you’re just doing the media buying and not the other pieces of it, you’re not an expert at it.
Whereas there’s other agencies that have all aspects under where they go. We do the media buying, but we also help you with the strategy of the video. We even have video editors in-house to take your raw content or they might even have a production house in-house so that they can move very quickly, especially when you’re dealing with large budgets.
You need agencies that can produce a lot of assets, test a lot, and move quickly to really maximize your spend.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Really help. Helps me, it helps the audience here. What you just unpacked and you’re right, I see it today. A good agency might get the job done, but in today’s market it’s just not cutting it.
And you need to start looking for those great agencies. Of course, you said start asking those tough questions so you can get to the bottom of it. And what I liked. Really what I heard is the difference between an A and a B player really is exponential as far as quality and growth, and I think that’s important.
So thank you. And bead. You’ve met and assessed over a thousand agencies to arrive at a lean network of high quality partners. What are the critical criteria you use? Give us some examples of agencies that passed and some of the traits of agencies that failed your filter. How can business owners use your checklist?
Behdad Jamshidi: Yeah, absolutely. I mean I have like over 40 different checkpoints that I go through, at least with agencies, but some of the biggest ones that you can tell in the first 30 minutes of a call would be one how long they’ve been running their agency for. If an agency’s been around for less than five years.
Like systems, processes, people, it’s just not set. It takes time for agencies to build to a certain point where they can actually be more mature. And that’s around the five year mark. Understanding the story of how the agency was built, right? Like, so how did the founder even get into building the agency?
Were they the executioner of another agency? You know, they maybe ran the paid ads department or whatever it was or were they someone that ran another agency before sold it and are running a new one. These are all just key signals into like what level of agency you’re working with and what kind of partner you’re working with.
Then when you’re working to find out what kind of customers they’re working with, a lot of agencies will show you a ton of different logos. At the end of the day, I always ask. Where were these logos captured? Are they actually based on people you’ve worked with as an agency or who you worked with as a freelancer?
And a lot of times you start finding out, oh, these big logos that they worked with, that’s when the founder was working with another agency underneath them as an employee and are just highlighting it as a customer they’ve worked with. And so don’t get tricked by some of these things. And a couple other red flags just very quickly is.
Whenever an agency tells you that they’re growing really fast, that’s a red flag. Because agencies are businesses built on people and people don’t scale. And so typically you want to hear like an agency’s growing 15 to 20% a year. Obviously when an agency starts out, they could be scaling really, really fast, but they’re gonna break really soon.
And then your business suffers for it. And whenever you hear an agency says that they can do everything under the sun in their full service and you’re not playing in the enterprise space. That’s a massive red flag. There’s very, very, very little agencies that can do everything under the sun for mid-size companies.
And if they do it’s way more expensive than most mid-market companies can afford.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. That’s very helpful. I believe you mentioned you had 40 checkpoints in your checklist as you vet these agencies and highlighting a few I think it was pretty cool here, how long has the agency been in business and you said that five year mark is, gosh, a minimum.
And what’s the story of the business? What’s the story of the founder, how to get there? Did. Switch hands. Did it sell? Did it buy? And you course another one. The agency claims are growing fast or maybe they claim they can provide all the services under the sun. I think those are something to look out for, especially as folks in my audience, a lot of entrepreneurs.
Looking to hire an agency. This is a helpful start and bead. Looking ahead, how do you anticipate the agency business relationship will evolve with AI distributed teams, maybe niche specialization? What should business leaders be doing now to future proof how they pick and work with marketing partners?
Behdad Jamshidi: That’s a great question. I think like, let’s tackle about the simpler ones like the, the workplace and where people are working, diver, like all over the place. That’s already happened, so I don’t think that’s a big shift at all on, on that front. But when it comes to things like ai things are shifting quite a bit.
And so what I think is gonna happen with a lot of different marketing agencies is that execution is becoming easier and easier. To do. And it’s gonna require less effort there. And so you’re gonna be needing to look to make sure that your marketing strategy and what you’re doing on the strategy front is really sound because execution’s gonna become way easier.
So whenever you’re looking to work with a marketing team, make sure that they have some sort of strategic resource in-house. Instead of just like hiring them just for execution, unless you have the strategic resources in-house and all you need is execution work. And I think that for agencies to stay on top of the game and for, big companies to stay on top of the game is that when you can hire those specialists, the people that really understand what they’re doing at a really high level, say like a copywriter or someone who does brand just throwing it into, AI and getting an average result out, like we talked about, is just, just only not gonna get you just.
Good results, it’s not gonna get you any results. You need to find those specialists that really understand and have mastered the craft and then they can use AI to then get the output that they’re looking for. So if you take for example an average copywriter and you get them to use chat GPT, you’re gonna get average results.
But if you use an expert copywriter and they use chat G gt ’cause they know what expert and great looks like. You’re gonna get great results. And so just being aware of finding the people that really know what they’re doing at a high level already and then they’re using AI to augment or, or produce more is typically what I’d be looking for as a business.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And I really like that there, again, having experts, they might be leveraging ai, but with an expert, they’re gonna understand. That aspect of the business very well, and that’ll just accelerate what they can produce, which is really cool. I do a lot of work in ai, so I, I can appreciate that.
And AI is definitely a big shift right now in the industry, across the board but you did highlight that. One thing, you did highlight, your strategy needs to be vetted and sound and execution is the key, is what I heard, that long-term stability and growth, and that’s what you should be looking for, so I appreciate that. And Behdad it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Behdad Jamshidi: Great. Thanks for having me.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Behdad Jamshidi Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
