Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Tired of being stuck in the trenches while watching others build empires? Welcome to the 50/50 Accelerator Podcast, where we're flipping the script on the traditional trade business model. I'm your host, Josh Patrick, and like you, I've spent countless nights wondering if there's a better way.
We bring you real conversations with business owners who've transformed their companies from time-sucking struggles into well-oiled machines. They'll share their exact blueprints—from finding reliable teams to creating systems that actually work. There is no theory, just battle-tested strategies that have helped them double their free time and cash flow.
Think of it as your weekly meetup with mentors who've cracked the code.
00:00 - Josh Patrick (Host)
Since 1974, I've read a book a week searching for what it takes to achieve business success. After thousands of books, hundreds of client success stories and decades of hard-won business wisdom, here's what I know for sure Working yourself to death isn't a badge of honor. It's a failure of strategy. So thanks for joining us today. I'm Josh Patrick, and this is the 50-50 Accelerator, where we explore how real business owners are cutting their hours by 50% while growing their profits by 50%. No consultant BS here, no theoretical frameworks, just proven strategies from people who have actually done it. Because here's the truth If you're still working 65 or more hours a week, putting out fires and missing family dinners, it is what it is, but that's not how it has to stay. So let's get started.
01:03
Hey, how are you today? This is Josh Patrick and you're at the 50-50 Accelerator podcast, and my guest today is Ramsey Sweis, and I probably massacred his last name. He owns a company called Aqaba, which is a marketing company, international marketing company, with 17 people. He has clients all over the world. I think he's based in Michigan. Am I correct in that, Randy Ramsey?
01:27 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
I'm based in Michigan
01:28 - Josh Patrick (Host)
In Michigan, so he has some local clients, some international clients, but he also has 17 people that work with him. So I'm kind of curious, Ramsey, what was the biggest challenge you had, or a challenge that's going to be the biggest one, a significant challenge that you had when you were going from one to 17 people?
01:51 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
Early on in my career at Aqua Digital, I think the greatest challenge was finding talent that suited our requirements and that challenge was driven by the lack of training, both institutional and freelance. So for folks to get a sharpened skill set to modern day standard it required modern day training. So I experienced this firsthand, teaching at Oakland University, advanced internet, marketing and undergrad studies, and the books that they provided were very for example, it was in pounds, so it was in British currency, british English, and it was very graded. So if that sheds light as to what skill sets we had to deal with back in the day, it was in line, not up to par.
02:54
So once we were able to overcome this, as technology advanced and advancements in education and the advent of mobile, in advancements in education and the advent of mobile, so the mobilization really pushed education and tech in a direction that has led us to where we are today, I believe. So in the advent of this educational tech boom we were able to draw talent from outside of the US, within Michigan, in the US, as a local, national and international, and we targeted we felt were the best suited talents and skill sets for our requirements and our vision and our scaling for growth. So as we wrapped that talent around, we were able to scale our company and partner with the right folks and bring us to where we are today with 17 plus, with very specific skill sets that are suited for our book of business.
03:58 - Josh Patrick (Host)
So how did you figure out in the beginning what were the skill sets you needed and how did you go about recruiting for that?
04:08 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
Great question. I'd say the number one attributing factor to that was failing failing multiple times, but I consider that failure to be failing forward right. So it was a step in the right direction and we were able to identify certain characteristics of folks that were a better fit for us. This ongoing education. We invested in folks that we felt were prime candidates for where we were headed, not only with our existing book of business, but as we grew our customer base, the skill requirements changed. So as that evolved, so did our hiring opportunities. So, being that we're small and only one level of management, we're able to turn things around quickly, hiring turnover and addressing jobs on a per case basis. And of that 17, not all are full-time, some are part-time, some are on a per project basis that require a certain skill set. So that specific skill set is not something we would keep retained on a salary type basis, right, it's on a per project basis. So those folks, we really appreciate their support and their willingness to elevate our company when called upon.
05:36 - Josh Patrick (Host)
Cool. So when you were looking at this skill set, was this skill set technical skill set, or is the skill set environmental skill set or a combination of both?
05:53 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
Definitely technical is heavily weighted in our organization. But there's also a creative and not just design creative, but just a creative element to whatever we're honing in on. For example, we may need an OTT streaming video commercial, we may need a carousel ad, we may need a technical specifications document or an infographic. So a graphic artist that has a technical background is best suited for an infographic. That graphic artist, that technical artist is not best equipped to support the requirements of a streaming video. So I'd say it's a hybrid approach.
06:56 - Josh Patrick (Host)
Yeah, it seems to me that when we hire we look for technical skills as a screening factor, but not a hiring factor.
07:00 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
Yeah
07:00 - Josh Patrick (Host)
And what I mean by that is that if you need a certain type of video editor, obviously you can't hire anybody that doesn't have that particular skill set as a video editor.
07:20
So I'm just using that as a first level of analysis to see if that person should be in my company from a technical side of point. But once I have the technical pool and hopefully I have more than one person that fits the bill technically for me, and then where you are I'm assuming it's hundreds if not thousands of people would fit the technical bill for what you need, and then it would become for me, would become what we call the fit factor, which are are do they fit in with the values that the company has? Because what I'm always concerned about and this happens more often with sales folks than it does with frontline workers is it's possible to get a brilliant jerk?
08:01 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
Yeah
08:02 - Josh Patrick (Host)
And you know what a brilliant jerk is just by what I just said is that it's somebody who's brilliant at a particular craft or skill, but they're impossible to work with. Have you ever had one of those in your company?
08:22 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
Yes and we make swift decisions to move on and align ourselves with the right folks, and I think one of the most important characteristics of what we prefer to hire in terms of additions to our team is understanding business. So everything that we do since we're a data-driven agency, Josh is a business analysis. There's use case study, there's research, there's strategy and planning. You may be a very gifted, a very super talented graphic artist, but you're only really geared towards delivering concepts that are inspired by someone else. So the originality of this is lacking, and this is where a trained eye will pick up on this early on, rather than have this person struggle. So collaboration requirements the onboarding of a project and then cross-examining this with the team. You have a business analyst approach and, in theory and practice your analysis, your strategy, your planning, the implementation, your attention to timeliness, budget and reasoning, is really a challenge across 17 folks right? So if they're all in the same mindset within the same mindset Josh then those challenges are really dampened and the creativeness and the business insight tends to flow really well. Really, take great pride and consider that a strength in our organization and across our talent pool.
10:23 - Josh Patrick (Host)
Cool. How do you guys go about getting new business?
10:33 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
Diligence, patience, creativity, positioning and, in terms of a campaign, we perform an extensive amount of research and targeting through email outreach. Our local rankings are very polished. Our national rankings are pretty good. Our international and certain skill sets are very good purposefully and we tend to have a really nice presence in the GCC and Middle East region
11:14 - Josh Patrick (Host)
What is GCC?
11:17 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
So it's the far Eastern region of the Middle East, and when you wrap your SEO and your paid efforts and your data collection, you're able to zoom in Like, for example I'll give you an example of a micro campaign that we recently launched we're leveraging first-party data and this first-party data is retrieved. We're able to identify who visited our website, duration of time spent, not as Google Analytics. Ga-4 is a third-party data and it's veiled. It collects first-party data, but it doesn't share that data. What we're able to do is derive with the plan to automatically reach out to this person or interact with them and in hopes of getting longevity in that relationship or that micro moment and pushing them further down the funnel.
12:13
The stickiness of your website calls to action. Areas of interest are in line with your target audience. If you're seeing a high bounce rate with just a couple of seconds as a visit, then you've got some issues. If this trend continues to grow on a specific page, we zoom in on that page and optimize it and there's a round of CRO that takes place. All of this is part of our strategy, as opposed to just driving traffic to our website or engaging with the user off page and interacting and looking for some sort of metric that we can measure, that's all fine, but if they're bouncing, then what's the purpose of driving that traffic to your site?
12:55 - Josh Patrick (Host)
Yeah, it's true. So do you have a salesperson?
12:58 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
We have two
13:00 - Josh Patrick (Host)
Okay, and I assume they use that data to put together sales processes.
13:08 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
We do. We have a CRM, we have automations in place that systematically trigger when fired and as these systems are firing, they're reacting to certain attributes that are triggered within that interaction, whether it's receiving an email, whether it's clicking on something on our website, downloading, filling out and submitting a web form, booking a calendar, consultation through our online calendar. All of this has rules. So if everything is simpatico, everything is working in the background the way it should, then that requires traffic to really get the fulfillment in place and your return on investment. So now your ad campaign or your outbound efforts are all at the front facing, as these mechanisms are in place. So it's an ecosystem that is unique to our business and our goals and it's constantly growing.
14:13 - Josh Patrick (Host)
Where in the process do your salespeople pick up the phone and make an outbound call?
14:24 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
We qualify and quantify those interactions through first-party data, the metrics that we're able to pull and, for example, our approach to an event that's booked through our calendar and you performed this with me. We had a series of emails that were parsed and they were spaced within days to hours to moments before our podcast as reminders submitted an event that's booked in the calendar. Another is whatever that attribute is within our first party data. Then you have an email cadence, a sequence of events that take place, and that content and that frequency and the schedule varies from a calendar invite or a booked consultation.
15:28 - Josh Patrick (Host)
So what is a first party? What was the term you use? First party, something or other?
15:31 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
First, party data.
15:31 - Josh Patrick (Host)
Yeah, what is first party data?
15:34 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
So that's a collection. We have a pixel on our website. It collects data anyone that visits our website good, bad or indifferent and then it cross-references that data from other data sources, such as Zoom info, linkedin and others of the sorts. And when it cross-references that data, we're able to extract email phone numbers, their business, their title, their role, the size of their company it all varies depending on the requirements for our clients so that data is then fed to a CRM and that CRM is then instructed to send out a sequence of email so that cadence is personalized based on the area of interest, what page they land, on, duration of time, whatever those key factors are to trigger that email cadence.
16:30 - Josh Patrick (Host)
Cool, we're going to switch gears a bit like a lot, because I do this all the time. What's the problem that your company sells for your clients?
16:53 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
I think the number one problem or inefficiency is strategy and planning. I attribute that to just being a business owner. And as a business owner, it's the shoemaker's kids. Right, we're busy cobbling shoes for the entire village, but our kids are running around shoeless because we're just so busy.
17:05
So it's always that thing.
17:07 - Josh Patrick (Host)
What's the problem that you solve for your customers?
17:11 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
It's the strategy and planning.
17:15 - Josh Patrick (Host)
Okay. Is that because they don't have strategy or planning, or I get, I'm. I asked this question to everybody, by the way, and I rarely get an answer that I can say, yeah, that's a problem, because strategy and planning is a thing. I'm not sure it's a problem. Lack of strategy could be a problem, lack of planning could be a problem, but what specifically about strategy and planning is a problem that you solve. Let's dive into that.
17:48 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
So the question was what problems do I solve for my clients? And we say strategy planning. So we'll dive into strategy first. If we receive an RFP, usually the RFP is somewhat boilerplate. The requirements are not personalized, data is maybe purposefully or maybe not set aside and it causes us to reply in a very vague or incomplete fashion, so the strategy is never really clearly defined.
18:26
Now, if we're engaged with a client part of our onboarding process we go through a planning and strategy sessions and or sessions, and those sessions comprised of worksheets, scientific worksheets, things that are unique to our internal process, our organization, and we're able to gather this data, collect it and then view, from our perspective, recommendations, things that we can do to assist this client and address those pain points. The planning part is okay. So what's the budget? What does the data currently say? If they have analytics, they have a CRM, they have a POS system, they have e-commerce, we're able to extract this data and review this data in such a manner that it says, okay, if we're growing at this rate, how do we get to this rate? How do we increase our top line sales by 20%? That requires a budget, requires a strategy planning, implementation and then how we track this data.
19:31 - Josh Patrick (Host)
So that's usually in our interactions. So I'll ask you a different one, because you just described what you do for your clients, not the problem yourself. What's the result that your clients want?
19:50 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
To grow and scale
19:50 - Josh Patrick (Host)
To grow and scale what?
19:52 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
Grow, and scale their business measurability accountability.
19:56 - Josh Patrick (Host)
Okay, so everybody that brings you in. They are unhappy with the growth their business is getting and they expect your company to help them. Am I correct?
20:08 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
Not necessarily unhappy. They've reached a position within their business that is, they're only capable of being so efficient and effective with the tools, the skillset and the resources they have. So that's typically what happens. We're more of a mid-market partner. That's where we really excel, and those are common struggles that we see our clients have.
20:36 - Josh Patrick (Host)
Okay, so lack of sales is a common struggle. Is it lack of awareness or lack of sales, or both?
20:46 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
It all depends. If it's awareness, it's an awareness campaign, and the KPI, the key performance indicator that they're using to measure success, is by likes and follows, or downloads or visits to a website, duration of time then that's the metric and the driver behind our campaign. If the metric they're using to measure for success is sales, then we dive in and say, okay, so volume, here's where we're at. How do we get from this point to this point? And then what's the average ticket? And then how do you measure that success? And that's where our plan would come in and say, okay, if we were to architect the campaign. It's based on top line sales. It's based on, maybe, cross-selling.
21:29 - Josh Patrick (Host)
So what I'm getting from this conversation and I think that the folks listening should get from this conversation is a 17-person business is a pretty complicated thing and there are a lot of things that you had to learn along the way to have your success. And now that you've been doing this for 20 or 30 years and I can see this because it happens to a lot of people is you become what we call unconsciously competent at running your business, in the fact that you know what you're doing and you know what you get, but you're not quite sure how you do it anymore, because you've been doing it for quite a while. Would that be a correct statement? You're doing and you know what you get, but you're not quite sure how you do it anymore, because you've been doing it for quite a while. Would that be a correct statement?
22:11 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
Absolutely.
22:13 - Josh Patrick (Host)
Cool. So, Ramsey, thanks so much for your time today. It's been really fun talking with you. Unfortunately, we're out of time and I'm going to bet some folks who are listening might want to find you. How would they go about doing that?
22:27 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
Feel free to DM me on LinkedIn or visit our website, aqaba.digital.
22:36 - Josh Patrick (Host)
Cool, and Ramsey is Ramsey R-A-M-S-E-Y Sweis. I hope I said that right. S-w-e-i-s. And this is Josh Patrick. You're at the 50-50 Accelerator Podcast. Thanks a lot for stopping by. I hope to see you back here really soon.
22:58 - Ramsay Sweis (Host)
Thank you, Josh
23:01 - Josh Patrick (Host)
Look, I spent enough mornings thinking and writing about what it takes for business success. Here's an important final thought the old ways work for a reason, but the best legacy isn't just about what you build. It's about building something that outlasts you without burning you out in the process. If you found value in today's podcast, do me a favor. Take 30 seconds to rate and review the show and yes, honest reviews. I'd rather have the hard truth than empty praise. Your feedback helps other business owners find these conversations. Hey, I'm Josh Patrick and this has been the 50-50 Accelerator. If you're ready to work less and profit more, make sure you subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and remember you've built something incredible. Now let's make sure you're actually around to enjoy it. See you next time.