Maksym Babych runs SPDLoad.com, a company that helps startups launch and build software applications. We talk about the BrillMedia.co entrepreneurial journey. By the way, Max has incredible LinkedIn reach. When we hosted about our episode on Linkedin it got massive reach!
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maksymbabych/
Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to the LA Business Podcast, a forum for business owners and senior executives to share the experiences about the elements that drive their success. Your host is Robert Brill, CEO of Brillmedia.co, an Inc 500 company delivering the power of hyperlocal advertising. Robert writes for Forbes Inc and Ad trade publications.
Our goal is to bring you the stories about successes and failures of people who are making big things happen in marketing, entrepreneurship and management.
Robert Brill: [00:00:44] Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the LA Business Podcast. This time we’re doing something just a little bit different. A few weeks ago I had a really great interview with Maksym Babich. He’s in Ukraine. He has a company called SPD load, and the website is SPDload.com. Sailor, Padlock, Dalmatians, SPD, load.com.
Maxim, recorded the podcast, which you can also see on YouTube. And we talk about how Brill Media came to be in our entrepreneurial journey. I had a really great time talking to Maxim. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Talk to you guys soon.
Maksym Babish: [00:01:23] So hi everyone. Today I have a guest from America. He is CEO of Brill Media. Robert nice to meet you.
Robert Brill: [00:01:34] Nice to meet you Maks.
Maksym Babish: [00:01:35] Yeah, I really appreciate for the time to jump on this call and you decided to share with our audience, is other potentials with regards to your business, how to be most successful, and how to do business and stuff like that.
Robert Brill: [00:01:51] Happy to be here and, interested to connect with you and your audience.
Maksym Babish: [00:01:56] Yeah thanks, thanks. So, my first question, really, you were studying, business administration. Was it your dream? It became this your own business?
Robert Brill: [00:02:12] Yeah, I, you know, I was just talking about this with my wife, over the weekend. Um. I did. I, I, I’ve been wanting to be an entrepreneur for a long time.
I just, didn’t know what to do. And I remember having a conversation with a colleague in college when we were graduating from school and he was, he was telling me all these big ideas he had about going into to be, his focus was being his own boss. And I was like, okay, well, for what? What do you do? And I didn’t know what to do.
So when I was, I don’t know, I was 23, 22 when I graduated from college, I didn’t know what I was going to do in that process. So I went to work. I graduated, I got a bachelor’s degree in business administration, and then I went to work at, ad agencies and I spent 12 years working at ad agencies until I saw this really golden opportunity to start my own business and understand the ins and outs and the nuances of running an advertising business, and I had the opportunity to learn from some of the best and brightest minds in the advertising business. I learned about business models and I learned about how to communicate with clients.
There’s a lot that I didn’t know, but I knew just enough to kind of, let me feel like I was not going to be a massive failure. But it was still an incredibly scary moment to start my business when I did it in 2013.
Maksym Babish: [00:03:40] Got it. And, could you tell me a little bit more about, what is the main idea of your business.
Robert Brill: [00:03:49] Yeah. The thesis for our business is advertised like a fortune 500 brand. Without spending a fortune. We make it so that our brands don’t have those minimum spend requirements. We absorb those large spends, and the goal here is for Brands that are spending between $25,000 a month and a hundred thousand dollars a month in advertising. You two can have access to those massive tools without having to sign an agreement where you guarantee that you have to spend millions of dollars with a single tool. The goal for our business is every dollar you spend that an advertiser spends with us it needs to be tied back to a sale, a lead that’s been generated for traffic.
Someone saw our ad and walked into our clients like restaurant or, or location. You know, we specialize in hyperlocal advertising, and so the idea is, anything you might imagine is available in digital marketing. We make available without the ridiculous, the high costs that are normally associated with these really vibe tools.
Maksym Babish: [00:05:00] Okay. Your current views investment, about your stock and company. And a final question. Do you buy things like cars or do you try to reinvest money back into your own company?
Robert Brill: [00:05:21] Yeah, so a little bit of both. I mean, I’m not a particularly fancy guy. Like, you know, I’m not into cars. I’m not into expensive watches. I mean, really as a, as an individual, you know, I come from humble beginnings. My mother still lives in the apartment that we grew up in. She never bought a home. She emigrated from Romania. My father, they met here. So, I’m the first generation, child born in the United States from two people who emigrated to America for a better life.
So, my responsibility growing up was, don’t mess this up. Like don’t do things that cause like there’s no fallback. Like I don’t, I’m not gonna inherit any money. Like when my father passed away, it’s sort of a joke and it’s sort of just a thing. Like it’s almost like a little bit of a badge of honor.
Like I inherited pies. Like there’s no money there, so there’s no backup for me. A lot of people in this country, they have backup. They have parents or grandparents who own property who might give them money when they pass on. I have none of that. So there was no other option either make it, you know, as 50 cent likes to say, get rich or die trying, whatever.
And I’m not rich, but we’re still working on it. So when I, had my business, it was like, I’m much more, my financial profile is actually very risk averse, so I feel comfortable having money in the bank. So. I, spent the money to grow the business. And I spent the money to have money in the bank.
And at some point, my wife and I were fortunate enough to be able to buy a very modest home in the San Fernando Valley here in Los Angeles.
Maksym Babish: [00:07:23] I found that your company, has as a revenue of around $4 million, in past year. What is your aim of for next year in 2020?
Robert Brill: [00:07:34] Yeah, So this year we spent a lot of time refining our process, right?
So we grew super-fast last year. This year we said, okay, with that growth, what are the things that need to happen so that every person within the organization knows what they need to do to operate a campaign. And so we’re a much different and much more organized organization today and in October, 2019 than we were in January 2019.
What it looks like for 2020 is propelling that growth further through sales, right? So, a much more aggressive stance on marketing, on advertising for our company and using various social media and sales tactics to increase our profile and generate new opportunities. And that’s what we’re focusing on. And so they look, who knows what those numbers will be. We’re looking to increase anywhere from a 20 to 50%. it might be more than that. it will really know it’s going to be a big year this coming year.
Maksym Babish: [00:08:46] And, would you recommend it some, books. What you would like to recommend for young entrepreneurs?
Robert Brill: [00:08:53] Absolutely. So, I have to do a little bit of searching, you know, I listened to audio books. So a lot of this stuff I consume as audio. There are three people who, I’m very interested in, James Altucher. He interviews, through podcasts, Executive. I think that’s interesting because you get a diverse point of view on, knowledge and success at the very highest level.
So from a podcasting perspective, James Altucher. I listened to a couple books by Grant Cardone. The one that really spoke to me and, and just my personality is, Be Obsessed or be Average and Be Obsessed or be Average, was really this idea that like, if you’re going to do something. Like do it in a way that you’ll have no regrets when you’re older.
There is no work life balance. There’s going all in. If you know you’re interested in something, do it all the way and being obsessed about it and being obsessed about the result, of being obsessed about the business and being obsessed about harnessing the passion that a person has for the thing that you’re doing, right?
There’s also a variety of books, sell or Be Sold, The 10 X Jewel and various Gary Vaynerchuk books, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.
Maksym Babish: [00:10:17] Maybe you also could say, they must work towards, what they shouldn’t do?
Robert Brill: [00:10:27] Yeah. I mean, I think there’s so much, I mean, some of the things that I’ve learned along the way, I’m thinking about myself when I was in 2013 to 2015, I had to learn the hard way and it costs me money and time to figure out what, what business I really wanted to do.
And so sometimes I tell people really focus on one thing, but then other times I’m thinking, you can’t focus on the one thing until you know that’s the one thing you should be doing. I was just at a conference yesterday and, I heard a really interesting speech from Gene Simmons, the lead singer of Kiss and you know, he was like, just try everything.
Gene Simmons, really fascinating fellow. He immigrated from, he was born in Israel, has his mother is a Hungarian immigrant. his mother, at 14, I think wasn’t a Nazi concentration camp. So very different life and, sees opportunities. And, when he was growing up, he worked out, like, I think the Puerto Rican consulate, he worked at a bank as a bag boy, out of Bodega in New York.
And then he, he tried, I T call this this music thing, and obviously we know that’s the thing that he built his name on. But you’re never going to know the thing you’re good at until you try a variety of things. And in that vein, when I was, you know, because I mean to, to fund, I went to school at Cal State Northridge.
I don’t know how much it cost, but it was relatively inexpensive. We had some, I had some financial aid and my grandma, whatever was left over, my grandma actually paid for to my mom and my mom paid for school. And so my grandmother affected the finance, my ability to go to college.
And. And because of that, I have to work, right. I still have to work or to have some money in my pocket. So I have, so like probably like five or six jobs during college, maybe more doing a variety of things. And I actually learned a lot. I actually got it. I had a job working for a startup advertising company where I learned what advertising is and it’s quite possible that I would never be an advertising today had, I not had that one.
Like I made $10 an hour making phone calls, internship. But I learned, so much there that I often think it’s a shame when kids come out of college and haven’t had any jobs because you get to learn what you like and where you don’t. Like, I got a job for, an entrepreneur who, um was a value added reseller for manufacturing, and the company was called like Manufacturing Business Systems.
I think his name was Herbert Mulatto. Really nice guy. I didn’t love the bit, I didn’t love the business. I didn’t know, but I learned, I learned things about it and I was like, okay, between advertising, which sounds really interesting. And this other thing, which. It wasn’t really that interested in I had formulated some point of view about which way I wanted to go.
So as an entrepreneur, you want to know which way you want to go and if you’re not sure, test a variety of different things and see which one are you most passionate about because the thing that’s going to get you through the hard time is your love and your obsession for the thing that you’re doing.
So if you’re doing it just for the money and that’s cool, but the minute you hit a hard time, like, like it’s just not going to be interesting to you, you’re not going to have the willpower for move forward with it. But it has to be something you know and love and you really won’t know that I have variety of things.
You know what you don’t like and you know what you do. Like in a lot of ways it’s like, David, you’ve got to figure out like. Who you are. That’s one point of advice for young entrepreneurs.
Maksym Babish: [00:14:23] Yeah got it.
Robert Brill: [00:14:26] Well, thank you Maks. I appreciate it. It was, it was really great talking to you and I hope we can keep in touch.
Maksym Babish: [00:14:32] Yeah. Thanks Robert,
Robert Brill: [00:14:33] Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the LA Business Podcast. If you like it, please share it with a friend. Listen on Apple and Google. Subscribe, comment, share. We are building a community of business leaders who are taking the learnings from this podcast and doing great things with their businesses, scaling their businesses, growing in Los Angeles, in the United States, and all over the world.
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Have a fantastic day.
