SPEAKER_02 0:00

This the sale price on a portfolio starts at 60x monthly recurring revenue. It starts there. You can get up to double that 120x. I know people who have sold payment portfolios for eight figures.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Welcome to the Agency Our Podcast. This is the podcast where we help web design SEO and digital agency owners grow. My name is Troy Dean. I'm your host. And this week on the podcast, we have our very first guest who is brave enough to come on for a live consult. I talked about this last week on the podcast. If you want to come on the show and pick my brain and ask me anything about growing your agency or your agency-related business, uh Josh technically has uh our our guest this week has a payments business and his clients are agencies, and so he's very much in my world, but he's strictly not an agency. Uh but if you want to come on the show, just go to the agencyhour.com slash apply and uh fill in the form. If we like the look of it and we have time in our schedule, then we will get you on the podcast. We'll reach out, send you an email, and you can book in a time uh in our calendar to come on the podcast. Uh so there's no feed this week, there's no deep dive. We are just hanging out with Josh Knox, Joshua B. Knox from Numeric, they are a payment processor company, they're a payment solution, uh, they are an alternative to Stripe, PayPal, and Square. Um, they have this amazing opportunity for agencies too. If your clients get paid by their customers, so if your clients are sending invoices and those customers are paying those invoices online, and you use numeric as a payment solution, you can make a percentage of the payment processing fees. I spoke about this last week on the podcast. High level are rolling out their own payment solution, LC payments, and they're gonna be paying up to 40% of their profit on the processing fees. Processing card processing fees is a trillions of dollars a year business, right? There is just, as Josh mentions, there is a war chest of cash in payments. And high level are going to be sharing 40% of theirs with you, and Josh is sharing up to 70% of their profit with you as an agency owner. So stick around and learn about this business and also uh learn the advice that I'm giving Josh to help him spread the word and get more clients. All right, without further ado, let's go meet Joshua B. Knox from Numeric. Uh, all right. So tell me, tell me what's going on. Tell me about your product, tell me how long it's been here, what problem you're trying to solve, who you serve, all that good stuff.

SPEAKER_02 2:40

Yeah, so I I essentially replace Stripe anywhere you want to take payments. So Stripe's really well known known for fast onboarding, like their API stuff. I've got all of the same stuff, but I don't kick you off and I cost significantly less. So people typically will come to me. I'm pretty well known in the high-level space. People will typically come to me if they've had Stripe trouble. Um hasn't had stripe trouble. Yeah. And it's happening more and more frequently. Like I literally posted something on Monday that was like, hey, if you're a business owner and you're using Stripe and you talk to me, I'm gonna tell you you're in trouble. Literally, within uh just a few hours of posting that, another post popped up in my feed. Hey, I just got booted from Stripe, who can help? And then the very next morning, the same thing. I just got booted from Stripe, you know, who can help me? So I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you.

SPEAKER_00 3:39

I'm gonna ask some questions because the there's this is not an easy problem to solve, right? There's a like there's a massive amount of compliance that you have to get through. And so what's the infrastructure behind what you're doing? Like how how how like Stripe is, you know, I've used Stripe for years, right? I'm I'm now also processing through WAP for a whole bunch of reasons, um primarily because Stripe are just ridiculously expensive. I sell in US dollars, we convert to Australian dollars, I get, you know, they they charge me a percentage in in conversion fees for the privilege, and anyway. So um but the Stripe is a a credit card processing uh facility, but also a merchant account. So back in the day, before Stripe existed, I had we were processing credit cards through PayPal. We needed a separate multi-currency merchant account with a local bank here in Australia, right? It was a nightmare to sell shit online. I'm talking like 2015. It was a nightmare to sell shit online and accept someone's credit card and have that money land in your bank account. It was a real pain in the ass. Then Stripe came along, they blew up, they made it really easy, right? Now there's problems, everyone knows the problems with you know, Stripe will just look at your business model and go, we don't like you, we're just kicking you off the platform, or they'll freeze money for 30 days. There's horror stories all over the place. How have you jumped through all of these hoops to get compliant and build this infrastructure?

SPEAKER_02 5:02

So let me let me add maybe a couple of um critical points there. Stripe doesn't actually give you a merchant account, they rent you theirs. They're literally subdividing their account for you to use. It would be like going into an apartment building in New York. You don't really I mean you're renting it, right? Right, got it. Um so how do we how do we deal with all the compliance? Um we're not that dissimilar from Stripe in that regard. So in payments, everybody has what's called a sponsor bank behind them. So if we start from the very top, you have the card brands, Visa Mask, Card Amocks, Discover. Below those guys, you have processors. These guys are doing literally trillions and trillions of dollars a year. They're the ones actually moving the money. Uh, then you have um sponsor banks. So Stripe has a sponsor bank, Adion is coming on pretty strong, they're pretty big in Europe and Asia. Um, and then just start trickling out. Look, all the other people. So the sponsor bank is the one that handles a tremendous amount of that compliance, and you're simply reselling their product. Got it. The sponsor bank, in in most cases, is not, they're not in the business of the technology to take the payment. They're not doing a gateway, they're not doing a software, they're not doing a device, a terminal in person, right? They're allowing the ecosystem to resell what they want to do, which is just move money. They're literally the X's and O's on the board of $10 goes here and $1,000 goes here. And so they handle uh the majority of that compliance. Now everybody saws to be PCI compliant. Uh Stripe wraps that into what they're doing. Uh, if you get into my world, there's a simple forms to fill out to be PCI compliant. Um, so a lot of that's handled. I will tell you, there is a I won't call it a third layer. Uh sorry, my dogs are trying to jump into my lap. I won't call it a third layer, but there's kind of a third layer where there's in payments, there's essentially a tech stack. So if you were to relate that to like a high level, they might have AWS as their servers, right? And Twilio as their back end for LC phone and all this kind of stuff. Payments are very, very similar in that regard. So we have we have a tech stack in our that supports the front end, literally us helping our clients take payment. They also handle compliance. Um, for us, they handle all of the PCS or PCID, CSS. Um, I got all the letters wrong, by the way. They handle all that stuff for us. They the the SOC 2 compliance, all of it. By virtue of us contracting with them for that part of our tech stack, we're now also compliant. So that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

Yeah, it does.

SPEAKER_02 8:07

It's it's like I geek out over it. Like I think it's the sexiest thing on the planet to talk about, but other people are like, I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 8:14

No, no, I get it. I get it. And I do want to make a case for this because uh I also want to understand what what your differentiator is, right? Because so just a bit of context, the reason that you're the reason we're hanging out is I put a post up recently saying, hey, I think it would be interesting to get on and and do a consult with like a you know, just like pick my brain if you've got any question or any challenge about your business, uh, whether it's in the agency space or coaching or consulting or online at all, um, you know, I'd like to just kind of get to know people and see if I can help, right? And I think it's good content for the podcast. And so you uh full transparency, you're the first person that's that booked in. I've got about six people booked in now. Oh god. Um and uh, you know, we're just gonna, you know, we're gonna publish this as content and hopefully it's helpful for people. So um I do want to know what your differentiator is, and also I want to talk about a high level of just brought out LC payments, right? I've also got uh launches Q1 of 2027. Also got a bunny on Tom Fennelli at Convisio, who's a large kind of WordPress hosting company. They've got Convisio Pay, and so they're kind of like their whole thing is like if you've got a website and you want to um take payments on a website, we are the tech infrastructure that allows you to do that, and they kind of kick back some of the um some of the the kickback from the processes to their clients. Because what a lot of people don't realize, and and high level are doing this, right? A lot of people don't realise is that if you process enough, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but if you process enough through a credit card processor, that they'll kick back some of the fees to you, right? And this is where Stripe makes a lot of their money, and a lot of these uh tech companies make a lot of their money from the kickbacks of the fees. High level are saying, well, if you do it through us, we're gonna share up to 40% of those kickbacks with our clients. So that would be just in high level. But I'm curious, and this is actually a problem I'm trying to solve right now, right? I want to build my own funnels with my own checkouts, and I want to use an API, I want to comp I want to have complete control over the checkout experience. I don't want to use a high-level checkout, but I want the payments to go. I don't want to hold people's credit cards and all that kind of shit, right? There's pin payments and brain tree here in Australia that we can use. Where do you fit into this ecosystem and what's your differentiator and who's the ideal client that would use and also what's your product called? It is it numic? Numeric. Numeric, how do you spell that?

SPEAKER_02 10:33

It's uh N-O-O-M-E-R-I-K. It's actually the phonetic spelling of the word numeric. Numeric. Which is numbers. We we deal in numbers. Numeric. Um love it.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

So the differentiator thanks for explaining that because I had no idea what your name meant, but now I know.

SPEAKER_02 10:51

I'll tell you the branding story later. Um so the the main differentiator between us and somebody like a Stripe is the infrastructure. It's the stuff that you don't see that you absolutely need to have as a business owner. So let's start from the same premise from the beginning, which is Stripe can cancel you just as fast by saying we're just not interested in your business model, right? Or you have one.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

But they do that, but sorry, but they do that for they do that to keep themselves compliant, right? Like in the same way that like an email market, like an email service provider would say we don't want you on our platform because you're a scout, you're a spammy affiliate marketer, you're just selling spam and and you're gonna hurt the deliverability of all of our IP, our pool of IP addresses, and you're gonna hurt all of our other clients, so we don't want you. Is that why Stripe do it?

SPEAKER_02 11:37

So it's not so much compliance as it is risk. Um in payments, so let's start with a quick payments one-on-one. In payments, think about this. Everybody spending money with you on a credit card is taking a loan to pay you. That's what's happening. So there is inherent risk with that payment, meaning there is an agreement between the card holder and their card issuer, right? Amex is saying, John Smith, you can spend up to $10,000 on this card, but you have to pay us back at X interest rate. John is now agreeing to make that payment. But if John loses his job and can't make that payment, or his income's down, or whatever happens, then Amex has now absorbed that risk. From the merchant side, the risk is doubled because if they say to you, Troy, you can take $20,000 a month in payments on credit cards, we'll give you that sort of ceiling to work with. And then as your business grows, we can grow it, blah, blah, blah. If $20,000 comes into you as a business and you withdraw that and you pay bills and your mortgage and your team and the whole deal, then Amex is now lent out $10 or $20 to all those people who now agree to pay Amex and they've essentially given you that loan, which has now doubled their risk. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 13:05

Yeah, sure. Because if the if all those people fall over or do or do chargebacks, I don't have the money anymore because I spent it on the mortgage and right.

SPEAKER_02 13:12

Exactly. Or if the worst case scenario happens and you get hit by a bus and you simply can't provide the product, they got a refund, right? So Stripe originally came on and made huge waves. They're still making waves. If any video that I've ever been on or podcast or whatever, I'm not a Stripe hater. I'm simply calling out for the world that we live in. They're no longer a good solution because of the cancellations. The reason is not compliance, it's risk. They're shifting to a lower risk model in terms of what they're willing to do. So Stripe, they're the ones taking on the majority of the risk because the money's actually moving through their accounts. They're reconciling. Money comes in, it deposits into their account, they reconcile it, deposit into your account. In my world, I don't do that. It moves straight from your customer to your bank. The only person in the middle is the issuing bank and the acquiring bank who agree to exchange the funds and move the money, right? Stripe, when they take on that risk, are simply saying to people, that's too much risk for us. That's not what we want to do anymore. So thank you very much. And you know, go find another solution. Um, so that that's one of the main differentiators. So inside of what we do uh is that infrastructure piece, the piece that you're not necessarily gonna see. So the sponsor bank, the in the US, these are banks you just don't necessarily walk into and deposit money into, they're just part of the banking system. They the way we built our infrastructure is we can bring you on and then level out over multiple banks. So if you so let me quantify that. If you come to me and you say, hey, I'm doing $10 or $20,000 a month, I'm probably still gonna put you with one bank, but I'm gonna put you with a bank that probably is not probably is definitely more comfortable with the level of risk that you bring based upon what you sell, how you sell it, and how much of it you sell. If you then say to me, uh, I've got, so I'll give you an example. I was just on a call today, um, medical product, they're gonna come out of the gate doing almost 400k a month. The risk there is pretty high for a new business, but I can mitigate that with the right bank. So, what I would do is I would go, we're gonna start with the one account, but we're gonna immediately get a second account. I want two lanes on that highway instead of one. Because if I run into trouble in the one lane, I need another lane to keep moving in. Ideally, the more they grow, I'm gonna add another layer of security with another account. In our technology, we can route that based upon that volume. So now I can scale much more securely with much more stability, uh, and it's still at a huge cost savings for folks. So that's one of the biggest differentiators of what we do. I would also say the third is it's it's more common these days, but not as common as you might think. Exactly what you described with how you want to have APIs and build out your checkout experience. We can do that. So you can take our APIs and build out a completely custom really uh a custom checkout. So yeah, you could that's interesting to your heart's content.

SPEAKER_00 16:38

Dude, I I'm seriously, like you I'm you could I be could become a customer, right? Because I'm like literally trying to solve this problem right now. Uh I'll I'll get into this a little more. Uh I'm on your website at the moment, I'm checking things out. What I'm curious about is how do you do like just walk me through, just like I'm a dumbass, right? Walk me through how do you do zero percent on on credit card?

SPEAKER_02 17:01

How do you yeah, you pass the cost on, but you do it the right way. So uh this just happened in Australia, actually, because I have quite a few Australian friends. You guys used to be able to surcharge and now you can't, right? Yeah, and it's been a big stink. In the US, we can still surcharge cash discount and do dual pricing. Now, those three things are passing on the cost, but but the mechanism in which you do it is different for all three. It looks semantically the same. I'm passing on the cost. But in cash discounting, it's typically better in person because I have one price displayed. It's the credit card price. You go to checkout, it's really popular in restaurants and convenience stores, and you present cash, and now I give you a discount. It's almost like a surprise coupon at checkout.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

Yep, 100%. Happened at the barbershop yesterday. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:57

In surcharging, it's the surprise. It's Ticketmaster. Hey, your tickets are $100. Whoops surprise are $200, right? Yeah. Everybody hates that. But it can still work. In dual pricing, we're literally giving you two prices at checkout. They're both displayed. One is a credit card price. Online, it's a debit card price. In person, you can do debit and cash. The way the law works here is there's a there's a various number of ways to do it, but digitally we do it with debit. When I present your customer with two checkout options, I know for a fact that 98% of the time, they'll choose the higher price in the credit card because they want their airline miles.

SPEAKER_01 18:37

Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Got it.

SPEAKER_02 18:39

So that's how you get down to 0%. It's zero for you. There's still a cost.

SPEAKER_00 18:44

What if I'm okay? So what if I'm charging like two grand a month for a coaching program and I like I'm happy just to eat the fees, right? Like that's what I do at the moment. I just eat the fees, right? What is that still the way that it works?

SPEAKER_02 19:00

Um, you you can do it that way. I'm always gonna argue in your behalf to pass it on because I know that it works and you don't lose sales from it. Got it. Okay. Yeah, I get it I this is how I generally approach um a sales call with somebody, if you will. Uh I'm giving you the information and then urging you to take my advice. I'm literally a profit coach. I'm telling my clients, this will work for you. And sometimes it can sound pretty arrogant. I'm always working on ways to not sound arrogant, but I'm I'm I'm probably saying to them what you're saying to people that come to you for advice. You came to me for advice, I'm telling you how to do it because I know that it will work. So if I know that it will work, and I don't care what the price point is, I have LAC surgeons, plastic surgeons, like dental clinics. It works everywhere if you do it the way I tell you to do it, which is uh well, I'll use you as an example. You're on a coaching call or a sales call for coaching, and they go, Yep, I love it. I'm in. And you go, Great, it's $2,080. Awesome. I'm ready to get started. Great. You want to give me a credit card for that? Can I pay you a debit card? Yeah, I'll give you a discount. Now it's $2,000.

SPEAKER_01 20:18

Got it.

SPEAKER_02 20:19

And doing in that simple switch is what makes it a winner every time. Because now they're not surprised if you now send an invoice instead of take it over the phone. So the payment form shows up, let's say in that example, they're like, I'm in, can you send me the link? I'll make payment, right? However, you run your business, if you tell them the credit card price first, then they're never surprised with what the price is. Make sense?

SPEAKER_00 20:48

Yeah, got it. All right. So uh quick question before we dive into like where you're stuck and what you need. Uh, how does the API thing work? Like if I want to set up my own, you know, I'm kind of flawed coding my own checkout experience and everything's looking beautiful and it's all in GitHub and Verse L. And, you know, now I'm like, all right, I just need someone to be able to put a credit card in this page and pay me money. You know, uh, I can't really do that with Stripe. I can use a Stripe checkout, which I don't want to do. Um, I'm not really sure if I can do it with WAP. How do I how does that work with you? Is it literally like you give me an endpoint that it posts to? What would kind of walk me through that?

SPEAKER_02 21:24

Yep, you would get an endpoint that it posts to the payment. So you can create your you can create your own look and feel for what you want to do, and you're essentially sending that transaction data to our API endpoint to process and then send back to you the status failed, successful, or failed. That's how it's working.

SPEAKER_00 21:42

Got it.

unknown 21:42

Got it.

SPEAKER_02 21:43

Yeah, we okay. We um we we right now are working with a uh a vertical SAS product. Um and I'll just for NDA stuff, I won't mention the category they're in, but they were using um they had stripes. Square, NMI, authorized.net, and like one or two other gateways tied into their software. And they have 800 users right now. And they're just like, this is a freaking nightmare. So we handed them the API. They kept their entire SaaS model the exact same, the one they've been running for 10 years, and plugged us into every location. They need to take a payment, it all still looks just like them. So it's you can do it that custom.

SPEAKER_00 22:30

Okay. So now you've also got um a partner program, an agency partner program. So talk me through how that works, and then we'll dive into where you're stuck and what you need.

SPEAKER_02 22:40

Yeah, what what you said with your friend that runs Convisio Pay, right? It's it's that model. So I've been I've been in high level for six or seven years now, and then payments, my payments specifically for six, um, talking to people, helping agency owners. Uh in the very beginning, I had a phone call with Sean, and we talked about payments. And he told me this is gonna work. I was talking about dual pricing. He's like, This would totally work for us. People will pay it. I know they'll pay it, but I need it to work for agencies. So that's what we built, quite honestly. So it's literally a reseller program. Now, LC payments is gonna pay up to 40%. We'll pay you up to 70%. There is, there's no other way for me to say it. There is a dumb sum of money in payments, it's ridiculous. Yeah, done. So I'll give you a really popular example, Shopify, known globally. I think the numbers, their financial report, I think this was from 2024, could have been from 2025, but they did write around 12 billion in uh revenue. Over eight of it was from payments, merchant services. So the software piece is only a quarter percent of it, right? Well, when you do this the right way, at the end of the day, uh I I started saying this, and this is kind of the advice piece. Maybe we'll we'll segue with this. No matter what you do in your business, no matter how good your funnel is, or your checkout page, or how good your sales team is, or how awesome your VA is, or your product, or your delivery, or onboarding, none of it matters if your payments are broken. Or if your payments are taking so much of your profit that it becomes ridiculous. So I've always led with as an agency, as a business that is helping other businesses, you should absolutely a thousand percent be offering payments as part of the tech stack that you're giving people.

SPEAKER_00 24:55

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 24:56

Because when you, Troy, can get paid, when your customers get paid, that's a win for everybody. Yeah. Your customers have somebody they can trust, a technology system they can trust, coaching they can trust, somebody they can talk to. You don't necessarily need to answer payments questions, you will, but you don't necessarily need to know the level of detail. But when somebody in your world, your client, sends out an invoice, and now you make money off of that same invoice, it's a beautiful thing. Yeah. So yeah, that's that's what it's about.

SPEAKER_00 25:30

So it's probably, you know, like the reality is I wouldn't I wouldn't go down the e-com path with this because Shopify's kind of got, you know, there's a lot of trust, unless you're dealing with industries that Shopify don't want, right? Like uh, you know, yeah, that's just an example, by the way. That's just an example of a lot of certain, certain, there's a bunch of there's a bunch of medical products here in Australia, you know, medical marijuana. This is a this is an adult show, kids, right? Medical marijuana here in Australia that Shopify don't want to touch, right? Um there's a bunch of dispensaries selling the stuff here in Australia that Shopify don't want to touch. So if you're you know, like so if if you're dealing with Shopify e-commerce stores on Shopify, you're probably, you know, there's probably not an in-road there because they're just gonna trust Shopify, right? Unless, unless numeric plugs into Shopify. Um But if you're dealing with if you're dealing with tradies or construction, right, or if you're dealing with the in e-commerce, e-commerce industries that Shopify don't want to touch, or you're dealing with coaches or consultants or professional services like accountants or lawyers or uh, you know, uh anyone or or you're dealing with someone who um or even like sporting clubs, right? Like you think about I think about my kids play sport and you go online and you buy their their uniforms and you make it and you buy for the you pay for the luncheon and like the their fundraising, right? Yeah. Um all of those, all of those organizations need a technical solution to accept payments, right? And most of them haven't got a clue what they're doing from a technical point of view, and they end up on fucking WooCommerce of all things, or they end up paying too much for a Shopify store that they don't really need because they don't there's no other option, right? And so if you uh if you can build a great checkout, um I I'm thinking in terms of like online purchasing, if you can build a great checkout experience and plug numeric in, then that solves that problem and you're making money when your customers get paid. And then if you've got if you serve a niche like tradies or you know dental or you know, whatever, um then you've got a channel there that you can plug them into payments, right? Yeah um, and so because if you don't, that like that money is just going to Stripe or you know someone else, right? And there's and and at and at scale, there's a lot of money there that you're leaving on the table. So um uh how do how are you nervous about LC payments with high level? No, not at all. No, that's good. No.

SPEAKER_02 27:57

Uh I'll I'll beat the pants off of them. Listen, they've they've got distribution and I love high level. Um it's built an awesome life for me, as it has for a lot of people. Yeah, um, it is a really, really fantastic tool. I do payments better, period. I have no, and I'm not like you guys are the devil. I'm like, I just do it better. I I this is all I do. I do payments. You guys do a thousand different things, and and payments is unbelievably lucrative. Um, if you want to just talk about the business side of it, it's also unbelievably complicated on the support side of it.

SPEAKER_01 28:41

Yep, I can imagine.

SPEAKER_02 28:43

And the the the the high-level interface is good to a point, it's still lacking in a lot of areas that people ask questions about constantly.

SPEAKER_01 28:55

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 28:56

Um so so no, I I'm not necessarily worried about it. I in fact, I hope that we can collaborate with them and make it the best product for everybody, uh, to be honest with you.

SPEAKER_00 29:06

So I'm I'm seeing a lot of agencies, I'm talking to a lot of agencies, and I'm also seeing a lot of conversations with agencies who are getting off whatever tech stack they're currently using, right? They're abandoning WordPress, they're getting they're moving away from high level, they're getting off Shopify, they're going, you know what, like fuck it. I'm spending all this money on other people's platforms. I can vibe code my own thing, I can build my own system. I've got agencies that have built their own CRMs. Now, look, whether this is a good idea or not remains to be seen, right? I'm I'm not convinced that agency owners should be spending their time building B2B SaaS, but if they're building internal tooling, right? If you like, if you serve, I've got an agency in the US who all she does is build funnels for life coaches, right? She's got hundreds of thousands of life coaches in this community that she serves. And all she does is build, but basically builds like a high-ticket sales funnel for life coaches. And it's all on WordPress, right? I'm like, she shouldn't be doing that on WordPress. She should build it once in clawed code and get a system set up that she can click a button and deploy this and change the change the design system for a new client that comes on, plug-in payments, right? She's done. Like, you don't, there's no plugins to update. There's no, you know, it's like you're not paying WP engines 350 bucks a month. It's, you know, like it's it's way more profitable to have your own stack. And she's in such a niche, she's got such a productized offer, it makes sense for her to do that. Jenny, if you're listening, I'm talking to you, Jenny. Um she knows who she is. Hey, just a quick little sidebar here. If at any point you're listening to this podcast or hanging out on our YouTube channel or consuming any of our content and you just know the timing is right to take your agency to the next level, then go to the agencyhour.com slash headless and apply to work with us inside Agency Mavericks. We only take on a handful of clients each month. And so if that page is up and the application form is open, then that means we've got an available slot. It's the agencyhour.com slash headless, and we'll get you plugged into a great team of agency mentors, a great community of agency owners. We'll help you grow your recurring revenue, get your team, your processes, and your AI dialed in, and turn your business into an agency that is not only highly profitable, but an agency that you just love running. We've been doing this for a long time. We've mentored over 4,500 agencies from every part of the planet over the last 15 or 16 years, and we'd love to help you take your agency to the next level. So go to the agencyow.com/slash headless. All right, let's get back to the podcast. All right. So you've got agencies who are um partnering. So what's the what's the challenge? Like, where are you stuck right now?

SPEAKER_02 31:47

Uh, message, getting the message out. Um, I I kind of alluded to that. Like, high levels got distribution, right? Um, you alluded to it in a way that you probably didn't realize when you said it, but Shopify, like people shouldn't, they they just have great marketing, but it's not necessarily the best tool for you to take payment through. Um, so I s I tend to struggle with just distribution of message. I've got a my audience on Facebook is my biggest audience. It's only like 3,600 people. Um, I can have I can catch a wave and and see you know some pretty good uptick. Um I'm in a course right now working on just content that drives more virality to it to broaden your audience, right? So there's the distribution of message is one thing, and then a human trait, which is I've got ADD and I get distracted by every freaking shiny object on the under the sun, right? So uh there's that is surprisingly, right? When you're consistent, you get consistent results. Absolutely. So yeah, so I big the biggest thing, honestly, I think is distribution of message, and the best way to probably systematize that, because I I have actually a really unique ability where I can write content every day. I I don't seem to, I seem to, I'll say it this way. I seem to be blessed with a constant stream of ideas on content that I can write. Some of our short form, some of them are long form, some of them are like skit based to try and film it and get it out for virality. Um but there's no real system for me to um just go, all right, from you know 8 to noon, this is my system for delivering that content, right? I can write in that time frame, I can film in that time frame, I could edit in that time frame if it's a recording and get it out. But then there's no way for me to track it other than me literally clicking through different dashboards and this and that, right? You posted something today on uh and I I copy and pasted it into my Claude. I was like, start working on this. So it was your like how to win in I think 2027, and it was like do research on Claude. I know a lot of the pain points because when somebody cuts off your cash flow by cutting off your payments, that's pretty painful. Um, like people literally freak out and they should. Like, how am I gonna get paid now? Um, and then they just start making dumb decisions because they're trying to solve you know a fing with a finger in the dike problem. Um so that I think that's it. I don't know that that's in a nutshell, but it's you know, distribution of message consistency of that distribution and then tracking that distribution.

SPEAKER_00 34:47

Yep. Okay, so I think first of all, uh thanks for being candid and vulnerable and you know, talking about your ADD. I think, you know, a lot of us are in a similar I mean I'm undiagnosed, right? Um, but I've definitely got traits. Like I've fucking chased dopamine all day, right? I'm like, give me the give me the thing, give me the thing, right? And and I think partially that's because we spend our lives sitting in front of computer screens and we've figured out that we can tap something on a computer. You know, it's an amazing thing, right, Josh, when you realize you can type some shit into your keyboard and and have money come into your bank account as a direct result of publishing something on the internet, right?

SPEAKER_01 35:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:29

And that's a pretty incredible. I remember the first time I figured that out, I was like, wow, this is power, right? This is like, I have the power to generate cash for me and my family by just sharing what I know on the internet, right? That's a really powerful skill to uncover. And you've got it, you present great on camera, you've you've clearly got a depth of knowledge in a particular domain that is enviable because you've done the hours, you've you've got the time on the wall, right? You prepared to put yourself online and publish content. So here's here's the m, and I'm just going to talk from my experience, you know, here's all the some of the mistakes that I've made over the years, and also I've you know coached a lot of people over the last 15 or 16 years. And he that this is generally the pattern that I see is that is that people typically will start on a journey, right? And so let's uh let's just talk about um, you know, let's just go, all right, if my if if we decided that doing short form videos, which by the way, I think is probably the number one thing that anyone can do to build their personal brand, and I actually think more than ever that your personal brand is the thing that is going to help grow your business. And and the and let me just unpack why. Part you know, the reason, first of all, AI has removed the barrier to entry. There is no barrier to entry. You and I are making this content right now, we're having a conversation, we're recording the conversation. I'm gonna share this footage with you because there's the first half of this conversation was you just basically flexing about how much you know about payments, right? That's useful content for you, right? I'm gonna take this content, I'm gonna give it to Claude, and Claude is gonna edit this video into a bunch of shorts, right? So the barrier, the the and that and they're gonna sound amazing, they're gonna look great, uh, they'll be exactly the way I want them to. And so the point I'm trying to make is that there is no barrier to entry anymore. You don't need a fancy studio. I've got fancy gear because I'm a fucking idiot, right? You don't need fancy studio, you don't need an editor, you don't need a strategist, you don't need a digital marketing coordinator to post it up on TikTok for you. Claude can do all of that. So AI has removed the barrier to entry. AI has also uh f littered the internet with shit, with with meaningless, valueless AI shit, right? And so there's a reason that I swear like a drunken sailor in most of my content. One, I'm Australian and we're a nation of convicts and it's just in my DNA. But two, I know that AI doesn't fucking swear. It's very difficult to get an AI avatar to drop the F-bomb and to be really opinionated and a bit gruff, which is why I do it. It's part of my personality, right? But also I do it to go, well, this is clearly not AI. I'm clearly a human being, right? And so if you want to if you want to attach yourself to a human being and you want to be part of a human experience, come this way because I'm a real human, I'm not AI, right? Right. So that's why I believe, and also 99.9% of people on the planet will not make video and put it online because they're too self-conscious. So it's a massive opportunity for those of us who are willing to make video and just share what we know on video, right? So that's step number one. Step number two is um is that I so so having said that, I think shorts on LinkedIn and Facebook and probably YouTube, uh probably the same short, one a day, right? Uh is probably the play. Now, if you if you if you said, okay, this is what I'm gonna do, right? The problem is you're gonna get, you're gonna do it for three weeks, and then you're gonna report back to me and you're gonna go, I've made no sales from putting so I did what you said, I sat in front of the camera, I, you know, I answered these questions, the frequently asked questions, which is what I the post I'll put up, you know, just get AI to crawl Quora and Reddit and all the forums and come up with, you know, a hundred questions that people are asking. Sit in front of a camera, answer those questions as if you are talking to me or someone else on a Zoom call, have Claude edit them into shorts. You've now got a short for YouTube, LinkedIn, and and you know, Instagram or Facebook or whatever, one a day, five days a week, do that for three weeks. And you're gonna come back to me and go, I did it and I've made no sales. And so you're gonna quit and you're gonna try something else, right? That's what I do, that's what I used to do, that's what everyone does. If you don't get it, it's like going to the gym, and after two weeks you go, well, I I fucking I'm I'm I weigh more, right? Well, probably because I'm eating more, because I'm working out, and I haven't really changed my diet, but I've gone to the gym, and because I'm a bloke, when I go to the gym, I just do biceps and chest, right? Because I'm a bloke. And I drink beer and eat pizza on the weekend and go, why am I fucking still getting fat, right? Because I'm 53, I have no metabolism, my testosterone level has disappeared. What the hell's going on? So after three weeks you stop going because it's too hard, right? So the point is that there is the the the game is, right, the the opportunity is if you just keep doing it, eventually you will win because 99.9% of people won't start, and of those people that start, 99% will quit very early on because they don't get an immediate result, right? So if if I were you, what I would do is I would and you said you hinted at it before, you said, you know, you're kind of trying to find new ways to not be arrogant, right? Fuck that, man. Like, be arrogant. You can be kind, you can be kind and arrogant, right? Like when when I first met my wife, you know, she said, Oh, she goes, there's a part of you that's like a little bit arrogant that that you know, I'm not sure about it. I said, you know, the good thing, the beautiful thing about being a little bit arrogant is that arrogant people don't give a fuck about what other people think of them. So if you think I'm a little bit arrogant, I don't that part of me doesn't care because that part of me is a little bit arrogant, right? I'm kind and I'm polite and I'm I'm not a I'm not a prick, but when I'm if I know that I'm right about something and I've got the data and the evidence and the war wounds to prove it, right? Yeah I'm not really gonna get into a debate with someone who's more inexperienced than me. I just don't care, right? It's like fine, you do you, dude. You go and make all the fucking mistakes and come back in three years' time and tell me I was right, because I know I'm right. And that's that's okay. If that if people think that's arrogant, I'm okay with that. So that what I would do is I would bring your experience, your knowledge, your deep, deep experience of payments. I would bring that to your content, right? And I would have a I would have some kind of uh checklist or some kind of lead magnet, right? I we're generating dozens of emails a day off YouTube, organic YouTube videos that I just put up, and I go deep into a thing, into a particular topic, and then I give away a lead magnet in the comments, right? And it's it's a it's a it's amazing what once you have once you can flex your knowledge about something and give away a cheat sheet to people, right? This is how we're doing most of our lead gen. And then the leads that come in, we're just sharing more content with them. So by the time they get on a call, they're like, Okay, Josh, you are clearly the payments guru, you're the payments dude. I've seen enough of your content to know that you're the guy, and I want to buy whatever it is you've got because I resonate with your personal brand and I resonate with your personality, and you clearly know what you're talking about because I've seen enough of your content to know, right?

SPEAKER_02 43:20

Yeah. Um so I've never like when I say arrogant, I've just never been that guy that sort of toots my own horn, right? We we say that in the US all you toot your own horn. And I've got I've come to the point where I'm like, I I agree with you. I I don't care what you think. In fact, the so I I posted on Monday. I'm trying to I'm trying to find it. I know exactly where to find it. I was looking in the wrong spot. Um, I'll tell you what I said um in the post. It was literally a text post in Facebook. Um, it's now been viewed 4100 times. Had 74 comments, right? All the numbers are here. This is exactly what I said. I was in the gym when I wrote it. I was sort of like pissed off.

SPEAKER_00 44:10

I think I saw this part.

SPEAKER_02 44:11

Anyway, I I am a payments expert. If I look at your business and see Stripe as your provider, then I will tell you you're in trouble. The same is true for PayPal and Score 2. Not because they are competitors, but because they've proven every week they will cancel you just as fast as they've approved you. If that reality is uncomfortable for you, then you have an ego problem in your business. You can get mad or you can just scroll past, but I know what you'll face in the same way your heart doctor knows you're headed for a heart attack. And that like took off for me. That that's probably one of the best performing posts I've had ever.

SPEAKER_00 44:48

Great. So I would take that post and I would turn it into a video.

unknown 44:52

Right?

SPEAKER_00 44:52

Okay. That's like a that's you just read that in like 20 seconds, right? So that's a 30-second. I would just get the phone, right? And you've got a little microphone on your on your thing, right? So make sure your audio is good. Get your phone, go for a walk outside, say that exact post. You could have that post up on Facebook and just read it, go to your camera, film it, right? Give it to Claude, tell Claude to edit it and publish it, right? That's so what I when I find something that works in one modality, I'll then use it in every other format. So a text post will become a video. If an organic piece of content goes gangbusters, I'll put money behind it and turn it into an ad. I always test it organically first before we put money into ads, right? Okay. So I think I think there's um the agency play, I think there's a whole play around how to get agencies to partner with you by just highlighting the opportunity that it's passive income, right? It is truly passive income for them and it's leveraged and it's scalable, right? Every time they onboard a new client, they're going to get paid when that client gets paid by their customers. Um, I think there's definitely webinars that you could do around that. That's a hot that's it's like a separate campaign because it's a separate channel, right? Yeah. Uh if and then or end users, um, the kind of content that you just said then, I would be going all in on that, super opinionated. When I say, and we have a tall poppy syndrome here in Australia too. People are like, what are you fucking doing putting content on the internet, you dickhead? You know, you're a wanker, right? That's the same kind of thing. It's like you toot your own horn. It's like, damn straight I'll toot my own horn, right? Because I know shit and I'm here to help people, it's my job. So I would go all in on that. I would die, I would be opinionated. You want to polarize people, you want people to watch your content and get pissed off. That's the point. Because the right people will then go, you're right, and I'm coming to you because you know I want you to help me.

SPEAKER_02 46:38

Yeah, I think that's I mean, that's how I feel like this went, right? It got out to um, it got out, it's more non-followers that saw it than than followers. That's at least the data that Meta has given me on this. Um, and so yeah, it's I I wrote it in in a mood where I was like, I'm so sick and tired of being like again, arrogant. I'm so sick and tired of people making a stupid decision because what I hear is, oh, it's easy, oh, I don't have time, oh this, oh that. I'm like, you can take the time now and switch, or you can wait till you get the email and go, how am I gonna get that 40 grand back that they just froze? Or they're not letting you like, and then all of a sudden your subscription payments are failing and your customers are like, why did my payment not blah, blah, blah? And then you got to try and get caught back up. That's a fun conversation to have. By the way, my payment system exploded on me. I know I was supposed to collect this from you three weeks ago, and then again in next week. So, can I just get two payments from you? Yeah, it's not a fun conversation. It's not so right. So it came from that. It came from the same thing that you probably feel for your clients. Like, I'm I'm telling you what to do. If you'll just do it, your life will be better. Right? Yeah, and I I I actually am leading in this webinar. I'm leading with, I don't even want you to rip out Stripe. I want you to leave them right where they're at, and I want you to put me in the backup position. And here's the cost to put me in the backup position. Yep. Because for $27 a month, you can have an account you can literally flip on and take payments on the second you get the email from Stripe. So I don't even need you to change your behavior today. I just need you to get this set up. So when Stripe comes to you and they say to you, uh, yeah, we're not really interested in you anymore. I call, I call Stripe the American Idol of Payments. Like everybody just gets to come audition, and if you win, you win. And if you don't, you don't. See ya. Thanks for your gift and parting parting prizes. So the concept is get this backup in place. You should have a redundancy in your business for the very function that lets you live your life.

SPEAKER_01 49:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 49:07

Um, once you have that redundancy, right? Then strategically I'll be like, hey, why not why don't you test this out? Why don't you run a few payments and see how it goes? And then if you run a few payments and see how it goes, you're like, oh, it's the exact freaking same thing. Money still shows up in my bank account. Then I go, all right, now you've run the test because I can see it. Now, now why don't you just put more cash in your pocket for every current sale you're making? And then the next right upsell is the agency, like, well, why don't you just start making money from all of your clients' invoices too?

SPEAKER_01 49:40

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 49:41

Right? Is that make so strategically that that's how I've thought through the whole process? But the post literally is like, use your brain when it comes to how you get paid because the tightness in your chest when you can't get paid is pretty severe.

SPEAKER_00 49:55

Yeah. And I think, you know, you you're kind of you're kind of arguing logic, and what you have to realize, and I say this, you know, respectfully, is that most people are just sleepwalking through their lives and they don't want to fucking solve a problem until it's a problem. And then when it's a problem, it's too late. It's like the heart attack, right? It's like, well, dude, you should have done something about this two years ago because now you're in hospital and you're having an open open heart surgery, right? It's pretty serious. Um, so I think you know, the classic, classic thing in marketing is that you've got to tell them what they want to hear in order to teach them what they need to know, right? Yeah. And for me, I would be leading, I would be leaning in on this is a stream of it's the most passive income you can make by setting up payments for your client. If you have clients that are doing good revenue and you plug them into your payments, your payment system, you get paid, you know, a percentage or whatever it is every time they get paid. This is the most passive income you're ever going to make, right? As an agency. And agencies love recurring revenue. Most of them haven't figured it out, right? And but that's the dream. It's like, well, I'm on holidays, but I'm still getting paid because my clients are still getting paid by their customers and they're using my payment system, right? Yep. Um, so I think the messaging is like, you know, if you if you lead with what they want to hear, because at the moment it's also it's kind of carrot and stick, right? You're kind of like approaching from the stick end going, if you don't, you know, it's like if you don't change behavior now, you're gonna have a heart attack. Everyone thinks it's not gonna happen to me because I'm invincible until they have the heart attack and they realize they're not invincible, right? Whereas if you, you know, it's like if you lead with, you know, um, like the the all all the great male supplement ads that you see online is like, well, your wife's gonna find you more attractive in the bedroom and you'll have more stamina, right? It's like that's what I want to hear. I'm gonna have more energy to hang out with my kids and I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna look like Brad Pitt and like I'm my clothes are gonna fit me better, right? That's what I want to hear. What I actually need is, you know, to lose a bit of weight, get fit, you know, get into better shape, get some vitamin D into me because I spend all day in a fucking studio looking at a computer screen, right? Whatever the thing is. But I don't, if you lead with what I need, I'm probably gonna tune out because there's no dopamine there. So you need to lead with what gives them the dopamine, which I think in your case is the recurring revenue. It's like passive recurring revenue. This is a stream of passive recurring revenue. This is like the most passive money you'll ever make in an agency, right? You literally turn it on and then you don't have to do anything, it just works. And if you scale it across your clients, you can build this into a stream of recurring revenue. So that's what I would be doing. I'd be super opinionated, short-form content, leading with what they want to hear, give them the dopamine hit, and then once they're in the ecosystem, then you can teach them what they need to know, right? Because the other thing is like, you know, the the um Theodore Roosevelt saying, right, nobody cares what nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.

SPEAKER_02 52:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:47

Right. And so if you can really lean into I'm here to help you make more passive recurring revenue in your agency, and you know, and if you've got case studies and you've got social proof, which I've seen on your website, you do, so then it's like, right, now what you need to know is this. And and then they'll they'll listen because they know that you care about them and they know that you're there to try and help them do more of the thing that they want, which is make more passive recurring revenue. That's and also the other the other thing that agencies I think forget is that if you've got if you're if you've got an agency that's built on Shopify or WooCommerce, right, versus an agency that's got recurring revenue and built on your own tech stack, that agency is way more valuable to someone who might want to buy it. If you've got your own tech stack, you're not reliant on WooCommerce or high level or ClickFunnels or Shopify, right? Yeah, those agencies are valuable, but the agencies that have their own technology, I think, are more valuable. And so this is something that I'm very curious about is like how do we build our own checkout experience and have you know your payments API in the back end doing all the heavy lifting and all the compliance and all that kind of stuff, and we just have a beautiful experience on the front end.

SPEAKER_02 53:55

Yeah, that the part that you hit on there is really important for people to know. You you can you build a payments portfolio the same way you build a stock portfolio, which becomes an asset. Correct. And in payments done correctly, this the sale price on a portfolio starts at 60x monthly recurring revenue. It starts there. You can get up to double that 120x. I know people who have sold payment portfolios for eight figures. So that's beyond, it's exactly what you said. It's it's the reason that medical practices, this is how it works in the US, for decades have always had payments wrapped in. It's a closed loop system. Nobody can get into it because the software company knew going into it, insurance payments and cash pay people and co-pays is where I'm gonna make a crap ton of money because I'm moving money for all these practices. Now you just go out and get 10,000 practices. I mean, easier said than done, but that's the model. The model is the software gets you in. There's a company here in Utah, their model was giving away the software. This is gonna blow your mind. So in payments, how you make money is uh basis point, right? It's fractions of a percent on the volume. Uh and there's multiple ways that you can do uh pricing. So I won't get into those details, but you're making a quarter percent, um a half percent, a tenth of a percent, right? On the processing volume side. You come to me, I process your volume, I'm making fractions of a percent, right? On the issuing side, where you become the person issuing the card, you're making three and four percent. So literally hundreds of uh multiples higher, right? There's a company here in Utah that the guys he built it and sold it in like I think it was two or three years. The software was free. Here is financial analysis software for your business, all the money that is moving through you. And oh, by the way, if you use our credit card, then you can really track all the spending in your business. And he sold it for I think uh I don't know, two or three billion dollars by giving away the software.

SPEAKER_01 56:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 56:26

So the the power in in moving money is just tremendous. I mean, it's really tremendous.

SPEAKER_00 56:33

Yeah. Unreal. Hey Josh, where do people reach out and get in touch with you if they want to learn more more about numeric?

SPEAKER_02 56:39

Yeah, they can go to numeric.com. We got a little chat widget on there, and then they'll collect their info and we can follow up with them, or if we see it live, we can, you know, uh call them back. But that's the first one.

SPEAKER_00 56:49

Numeric is n-doume.com, numeric.com. Uh Josh, thanks for hanging out uh on the agencyhour podcast, dude. I hope this was helpful. Super. Yeah, and uh let's keep in touch. And I'm hoping that I'm gonna see some short form video content from Josh over the next few weeks.

SPEAKER_02 57:05

Yeah, you'll see some. Awesome. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 57:08

Hey, I hope you enjoyed that format of the podcast. If you want to be on the show, just go to theagencyhour.com slash apply. And I stand by what I said to Josh, and it is my advice for everyone. The in the world of AI that we live in at the moment, the only thing that we have is our humanity, our personality. What is it that makes us unique, right? Lean into that and share what you know on the internet. You know, Josh put one text post on Facebook, it's had over 4,100 views, right? I mean, good luck going to a networking event and getting in front of 4,100 people, unless you're a speaker on the stage. And even then, it's got to be a pretty fucking big networking event to have 4,100 people there, right? Most BI breakfast, there's the 20 same people every week, right? So it's it's a leverage play. If you share what you know on video and put it on the internet or even on tech and put it on the internet, hundreds or thousands or millions of people can see what you know. And that is the number one way to bring people into your world and convert them into clients. If you're running ads, ads are faster. The leads typically aren't as good. But guess what? You still need content for ads. So forget about the idea of publishing content. Just share what you know and put it online. You will attract people and they will become clients. That is my absolute number one advice. Lean into the personal brand, you know, lean into your personality and what it is that makes you unique and just bring your personality online and share it with people. Don't be boring. Bring your opinions. We want to know who you are. We want to know what you think about things, we want to know what you've got to offer. Share it with the world, and the right people will find you and they will reach out and they'll become clients. All right, I hope you're enjoying the podcast as much as I am. I look forward to hanging out with you again next week. Remember, go to theagencyhour.com/slash apply. If you want to come on the show, subscribe, like, share it with all your friends, do all that kind of stuff. And I'll see you again next week on the agency hour. My name's Troy Dean. Let's get to work.