How Moshe Czapnik built a LinkedIn consulting business and a coworking space at age 21
Moshe Czapnik is a LinkedIn consultant and is the founder of a coworking space in New Jersey. We talked about how he dropped out of college without a degree, took 2 dead-end jobs, and ended up mastering LinkedIn marketing at the age of 21. He’s since helped a number of small businesses with their LinkedIn strategy and has founded a coworking space with 80 members. It was interesting to talk about the coworking business model and what WeWork’s failure and COVID made Moshe realize about his own business practices. We also dived deep into building your own LinkedIn content strategy and leveraging its networking effect to upgrade your business; and in a lot of ways, the strategies Moshe talked about could be applied on any social media platform. Make sure to take notes and revisit parts that are worth replicating in your business :)
Full interview Transcript edited for readability.
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Question: Moshe for those of us who don't know you, tell us who you are.
Moshe: Abhishek, thank you so much for doing this. I really look forward to this and I hope that some of my own experiences and stories and ideas will be of value to other people when they contextualize it to their own lives and their own experiences. We're all different and we all bring something beautiful that nobody else of the other 6 billion 999 million etc people in the world can bring. We are all special. My name is Moshe Czapnik. It’s a tricky name and I actually spell it really crazy just to keep people on their toes. It’s an Eastern European name which is where my father's father is from. Originally he is from Poland. They emigrated to the US after World War 2 and my father was raised in New York and shortly after he got married he moved out to Los Angeles with my mother and they had a beautiful family of eight children and I am the youngest of 8 awesome kids. I'm 24 years old. My beard throws most people off but I'm 24 years old, three years out of school, I'm running two businesses and doing things that I dreamed of doing my entire life and actually making those dreams a reality. My main focus and where I make my most money is personal branding and LinkedIn Marketing. That's the concept of taking people that are really good at something - professionals, business owners, salespeople, people that already have market validation, are good at what they do and then they come to me and I help them leverage the power of social media and specifically LinkedIn to augment their existing reputation with the power of the LinkedIn community. Anyone I interact with, anyone I transact with, anyone who gives me money, my goal for them is that they came to me over here and they need to leave me at a higher level. And that's just me at my core, coming up with creative ideas, sometimes things that are hard for other people. I'm willing to work hard and smart to accomplish building these services that are effective in taking people from whatever level of success that they have already attained on their own and taking them a couple more steps up higher. So that's who I am and the side business that I have, I'm actually transitioning from one iteration to another; I was a co-founder of a management company for the last year. And we managed a co-working space in central New Jersey where I live right now. And we took that one location from eight members to 80 members and I'm spending my time over there and using the experiences that I've gleaned from last year, when I walked into the business I didn't know anything about co-working spaces and I just fumbled my way through it. I had an idea of what I wanted to accomplish but basically kept trying, kept trying, kept trying, screwing up, trying, and eventually, the market reacted and appreciated what we were doing. And now I'm in the process of taking that to the next level, which is a lot of fun. I'm young so I still have a lot to learn but one of the things that I really am busy with right now, like a real driving force that's coursing through my veins today is this idea that there are easy ways to make money. Think of it from the perspective of, if you're good at selling, you can find arbitrage somewhere. There's always something that somebody has too much of and another person doesn't have enough of and you can just go broker the sale of those two things from one person to another and you're going to get a cut off the top. It's relatively easy. But when I look for what I want to accomplish as a 24-year-old, what do I want when I'm 34? When I’m 44? I want to be building large organizations that are able to impact a large swath of the population and I realized that a lot of times, you know, in the last two and a half years of being a business owner, I've chosen to go down routes that were easy. So “Oh cool, you need something? I got something to fill your need.” And I realized that I really need to flip that on its head and what I've now been focusing on is, what is the path of greatest resistance that has the greatest potential impact on the world? And that's really what I've been focusing on. I think the co-working space is a great example of that because it's a hot item, everyone wants in, and WeWork is struggling now and they're the legend but they're struggling. They made a lot of mistakes and other people are watching them and saying “Wait, there's clearly a demand for a coworking space model. Let me get in on it.” And last year I was doing something just like everyone else was. Everyone else in the industry, they find space that's available, maybe work out a good deal with the landlord and just try to flip it and try to sublease little spots of it. And I realized that that's just too easy. And I was looking at the market and I don't know the exact numbers but the top two performers in the market are Regus and WeWork. Regus has been there forever. WeWork had a tremendous amount of VC funding to really expand at a rapid rate. And then if you look at everyone else, the vast majority of the players in the industry hover around one to ten locations. And I'm thinking to myself, “Why is that?” We have an industry that on the one hand, you have WeWork and Regus that are involved with billions of dollars worth of real estate. And then we have everyone else basically dealing with a million dollars worth of real estate, 3 million dollars worth of real estate and I'm thinking to myself, “What am I missing? What is the market missing? What are we all missing?” And I think that when it comes to the scalability of a business when you look at companies that are doing something on a large scale, there is something about them that is sticky. There's something unique to what they were doing that gives them the ability to scale on top of that. So WeWork made it cool to go to co-working spaces. So I understand why they're capable of being the leader and I'm looking at the other guys in the industry and I'm just not seeing anything exciting. So I'm back to the drawing table and I came up with a business model that I believe is the path of greatest resistance. I'm not ready to share it with the world yet because I'm in the process of putting some things together on the back end, putting some financing, strategic joint ventures together on the back end to make sure that we have a good chance of making this work. But the guiding principle is, what is the path of greatest resistance? The one that everyone else in the industry is going to look at me and say, ”What? That's what you're doing? You're crazy.” That's what I want. I want everyone else, I want all of my competition to think to themselves “Oh my gosh, this Czapnik dude is out of his mind.” And then I'm able to go and say, “Yes, I made it work. I helped a lot of people in the process. I'm empowering people. The marketplace proved me right and that's how I have a scalable business.” So that's just some of the ideas that I'm thinking about right now.
Question: I want to take a step back and talk about your childhood a little bit. You have started 2 businesses at this young age. Was it your upbringing or certain incidents that took place in your childhood that led to this path of entrepreneurship?
Moshe: It's an interesting question. A lot of people in my position, a lot of really hungry people, people that are doing things that others perceive as daring or brave; a lot of us come from a lot of pain, a significant source of pain as children, whether it was the single parent or there was just no money and super, super motivated to create wealth so that our family, our future families don't have to do it. Everyone has a different story. Surprisingly enough, I actually had a good upbringing. I’m the youngest of eight. We were four boys, four girls, nice and equal there. My dad is a rabbi in Los Angeles where I was born and raised. And the cool thing is, I do have a little bit of hunger built into me from when I was a kid and that's because I had awesome leaders to look up to. My parents are tremendous individuals. Everyone that knows them thinks the world of them, myself included. My siblings are really successful in their own ways and success doesn't mean how much money they have. I'm the youngest of the family, I'm probably going to make more than all of my siblings either by the end of this year or by the next year. I can say that with confidence. But their success is just being good versions of themselves and I saw that from a young age. And yeah, I didn't do well in school. Gary Vee talks about not doing well in school. I resonate a lot with that story and I just said “I need to do something big. I need to do something massive.” And one of the interesting things I encountered growing up and then entering the workforce and meeting and dealing and working with other professionals from different areas, being raised in different types of communities, different types of households, I realized something that was very powerful that my parents instilled in me when I was a little kid, this idea of respecting others. My dad's synagogue is a very unique blend of different types of people, with varying degrees of knowledge of what it means to be Jewish. Some are really religious, some are less so. And we all come together in this synagogue and in my parent’s house and from a very young age I was raised with this idea that everyone around the table looks different, but we all have amazing gifts to the world and we all have a purpose here. And yeah, I was influenced by growing up on the west coast of the US. We have that culture as well of a liberal-minded and relaxed way of life and letting other people live the way they want to. But I realized, now that I'm living in New Jersey, that this place is severely and heavily influenced by New York and Manhattan and Wall Street. And yeah it's 2020 but there are still certain components of that dog-eat-dog world that Wall Street is so famous for. And I think it's just so off. I always compare Amazon to Alibaba. I think Amazon has got to go. They are way too greedy. Alibaba is the same kind of business, really successful as well and they have the exact opposite philosophy. Jeff Bezos wants to control the platform and he's working on controlling the distribution and all the shipping. He wants to put FedEx and UPS out of business and also gets involved in the manufacturing components. Alibaba goes the opposite approach. Alibaba says, “No. I just want to facilitate as much commerce in the most efficient way possible.” And as someone who's raised in that kind of household, I really resonate with that. We were all beautiful. We're all different, we're all unique, we all have our own needs. I don't need to have world dominance through business. I want to have world facilitation through business. I want to use the tools of creating wealth and creating successful businesses that actually provide more value to the people that are consuming its goods and products and services than myself and I want to be able to help as many people that way. There's a great story that I like to share. I heard this from a close confidant of Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks. As a religious Jew, this kind of touches on something that I'm really passionate about. Both of my father's parents were survivors of the Holocaust and were both the sole survivors of their families. They didn't have any brothers or sisters that survived. So growing up, the Holocaust and the rebirth of American Jews after the war was a big influence in our lives. Howard Schultz talks about how he and a group of Fortune 100 CEOs did a trip to Israel and they met with one of the big rabbis in Jerusalem at the time. He's no longer alive. But he sat with some of the biggest CEOs in the world and he asked them, “What is the lesson of the Holocaust?” And obviously they felt uncomfortable. Nobody wanted to touch on such a touchy topic and someone said, “Oh never forget.” And the rabbi said, “No, that's not the lesson of the Holocaust. Bad things have happened in human history in the past. They probably will happen again in the future. The lesson is that when there were four people stuck on one bunk bed in sub-zero degree weather in the Eastern European winter and the Nazis gave these people, in the concentration camps, one blanket for the night and they had to share amongst four people, you know how they stayed alive and stayed warm? Each person shared the blanket with the other. And when you have that mentality of sharing the blanket with the other person, everyone gets taken care of.” If you just think, “Oh, I'm going to keep it for myself.” Well then the next person is going to keep it for himself and the next person is going to keep it for himself and no one's going to get warm. But if you keep on ensuring that the other person is taken care of, then everyone gets taken care of. And in business that's really a driving philosophy. We don't need to do it the way Wall Street did it in the 50s and 60s and 70s. The fact that all of those things are gone for the most part and a lot of sleazy business practices have been banned and outlawed, that kind of proves that that's not the right way to go. Today, having a more responsible approach to business and using business like it's a tool to help people and provide real value to others is the real play. People want different things from their businesses. For me, it's a legacy business. I want a business that's so good at providing value to its consumers that as the world continues to evolve, and the world will always continue to evolve, it’s there at the forefront helping and continuing to help. And if we take someone from here and then after a year, they're at a higher level, we shouldn't just stop, we should say,” Okay. What else? Can we push you a little bit higher? Awesome. Let's do it a little bit more.” And just keep on pushing, keep on helping others achieve more and grow.
Question: Do you think Amazon will face the consequences of their business practices?
Moshe: Absolutely. Here in the US, and we're talking about probably 70 years ago, I could be off on this, there was a businessman by the name of John D Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil. And he really was the first modern businessman who had a monopoly and used that to hurt others - the consumer, the competition; and he really inspired all of the anti-monopoly regulation that we currently have in the US, that I believe is replicated in many ways across the world. The issue is that those laws are very antiquated. They're going to need to be updated for the 21st century. I think Amazon may very well be the impetus that requires that update, just like John D Rockefeller forced the government to say “Okay, no more monopolies.” I think Amazon is going to force the government to say “Okay, no more 21st century monopolies.” Had they stayed out of manufacturing, had they stayed out of distribution, they probably would be okay. But because they have this desire to be everywhere, controlling all aspects of the world, I think they're going to run into some issues. So long term, I know people like betting on stocks, I would never use Amazon as a long-term bet. I think at some point, I don't know when it is, but maybe in the next decade, those different divisions of Amazon are going to have to be split apart and broken down. That's just a core belief that I have. The way I view a business negotiation is - truth stands on its own, it's just covered by falsehood. We all have biases and things that make us perceive the world differently than it really is and we really need to just strip all of those layers back and use our self-awareness to understand like “No, this is really what it should be.” And I think Jeff Bezos has accomplished some of the most amazing things of any CEO or entrepreneur in modern history. There's no question. You got to give credit where credit's due. But what's he doing now? What's his next 20-year game plan? I don't know. I don't really like it as much as I liked his first 20 years of being in business.
Question: You talked about your own coworking space business. What do you think went wrong with WeWork?
Moshe: Greed. Good old-fashioned greed. The co-working space is a very tough industry to crack. Think about it from this perspective, why it's Regus successful? Regus is successful in large part because they own the real estate that they rent out. In every business, you have different players in the industry that stack up on top of each other, and everyone needs to be making a profit. So you have the raw goods and then you have someone that sells the raw goods to the manufacturer, who takes the raw goods and turns it into a finished product who sells it to the distributor. In real estate, you have the same thing. The first step is somebody who owns a piece of real estate and you want to buy that from him. So perhaps you have some money on your own and then you come to the bank and the bank gives you some more money and then you get the property and then somebody else comes and rents the property from you. So what happens when you have WeWork? WeWork comes to the landlord, pays retail price for the co-working space, and then offers it to the world at a little bit more than their cost. But the margins are very tight. And I think that's the real challenge when you're doing the co-working space. You're creating a co-working space and you're renting the space and unless you're able to come up with a creative deal with the landlord, you really don't have a lot of margins and I think that was the issue that WeWork had. Since they had so much interest from the world and had so much capital, they never cared to come up with that creative financial model. And if you never cared to come up with a creative financial model, and your margins are small, it just becomes very difficult to actually create a business that works. In Silicon Valley, they've forgotten principles that business relies on. So they don't care so much about building businesses that work. They just want businesses that grow. I think there's a little bit of a disconnect between the CFO and the CEO and I think that's just the main struggle that they had. And because Regus buys their real estate and then subleases it to the public, they have WeWork’s profit margin together with the landlord's profit margin. And now that's a profit margin that we can build a business on. So Regus did grow slower than WeWork, they've been around for 56 years because it costs a lot of money to buy real estate and you need a lot of capital and you need to keep on refinancing and getting more loans from the bank, so you are forced to do it slowly. But ultimately the business model is more sustainable over the long term. See, the interesting thing about business is, when you have a good business model, and your business is being productive and effective in the marketplace, you can withstand the storms. But when you have a bad business model, the slightest storm can kick off this massive chain reaction that just ultimately leads to your demise. Back to my social media and personal branding side of things that I play in, I interact with a lot of high-level CEOs of really successful companies and the one thing I've noticed is that businesses that were doing well before COVID, and I mean they had good processes and systems, had a good client base, good services, were actually making an impact on their clients' lives, those companies are doing just as good as before if not better. Whereas the companies that were struggling because they were missing something, whether it was lead generation or business processes, those are tanking right now. So it's kind of like they taught us in school when we were kids, you can do two plus two equals four in your head but if you don't learn the rules, when you start dealing with bigger numbers, you start seeing the cracks and then you're not effective anymore and business is kind of the same thing; when you scale up you have to have really good business practices.
Question: How did COVID impact your coworking space business?
Moshe: We saw this coming right away. We knew that the whole community was going to shut down. Everyone was going to go home. So we made a conscious decision that we were going to be as flexible as possible as no one had any clue how long this was going to last. And say I wouldn't be flexible. It's a month to month contract anyways with all of my members. So if I'm not flexible with them I may earn more the first month or the first two months, but I'm going to lose all of those members and I'm going to have to rework to get all of them back into the space. So instead, off the bat, for anyone that requested, we just waved the rental fee. I think it was something like 50% of our members. We just waved the entire rent, “Sure you're not ready to come back to the office. You're still staying at home, you know, you can come back in at any point. It's your office just like it's ours. But if you still are struggling, we're happy to continue giving you free months.” And we did that for a good four months. We just waved rent for over 50% of our members and people really appreciated it and I found out we were right when I started seeing all of those headlines and articles of WeWork being not nice to their members and not helping them get out of contract and I feel like this is back to where the dog-eat-dog world meets the upbringing that I was fortunate enough to have. We're here to do good and even if it hurts us sometimes, that's exactly when you need to do good.
Question: I would like to take a step back and talk to you about your college years.
Moshe: I went to Jewish college, College of Talmudic Law. I actually never fully graduated. I made it almost to the end but I never actually got a degree. That was in Chicago, Illinois. Great City. Loved that. Made some awesome relationships. I really grew a lot in self-awareness, learning about myself and what I wanted to accomplish in the world. Those were key years. You know, it's interesting, I have a hard time sitting. This interview is about the longest I've sat today and school kind of requires you to sit for long periods of time. I think I just don't learn the same way that most people do. I learn from practice, from doing. I have to figure it out myself. I have to make my own mistakes. And school gave me a lot of lessons in life but ultimately, I knew I couldn't last there very long and I just made the plunge to hit the workforce before I went too crazy. It's the kind of thing like when you're in a situation that’s maybe not ideal for you but there are benefits to being there. It's a very fine line that you have to walk to make sure that you don't stay too long and you don't leave too early. And yeah, I was surrounded by good people. My rabbis from school were really helpful in determining when was a good time for me to go and ultimately I made the switch and took two dead-end jobs one after another. Those were my best to worst years of my life. Lasted about one year. And what I liked about it was it taught me what I was really good at and what I was really bad at. I learned that I was bad at data entry. I learned that I have a hard time with bosses. That was a lot of fun. I was the kind of guy who always had creative ideas. I always had unique Ideas, big ideas and they scared a lot of people. And I used to have this interaction, this back and forth on a regular basis, once I left school where I would share an idea with someone whether it was a supervisor, a boss, or a co-worker and they would say, “No way, that's not possible. Don't do that. That's crazy.” And I always used to respond, “Well, that's unfortunate. I guess you're going to be like everyone else that argues with me.” So once I would say that they would be like, “Wait. What am I missing? Maybe this Czapnik guy is actually good at something.” They'd be like, “Well what happened the other times?” And I always used to answer, “Unfortunately, we will never know because they just didn't give me the chance.” And after saying that enough times, I'm thinking to myself, “Why am I still doing this? Why am I still relying on other people's visions and having to conform to that? How will I ever know whether my ideas are good or not?” So I made that choice to, you know, let's talk about the social media side for a little bit because this played an integral role and I think that this is something that could be valuable to anyone that is currently working for another person and loving it but they're worried about the future. I don't say entrepreneurship is for everyone. We all have different things that we want to accomplish. So let's say you're not the person that needs to be their own boss, you enjoy working for the right boss, someone that helps you grow, but you're worried that you might plateau. How do you prevent yourself from plateauing? So about six months after I had left school, I started a marketing internship in a boutique marketing and branding firm and I realized I don't know where I'm going to end up. I don't know what I'm going to be doing. I don't know if at the end of this internship I'm going to get a good job. And I started posting every day on LinkedIn. And I didn't pretend to be an entrepreneur or CEO of anything. Everyone's a CEO, everyone and their brother’s a CEO these days. I wrote on my LinkedIn profile, “I am a marketing intern.” And I would just share what was going on, stories that were happening on a day-to-day basis, ideas that I had, and my experiences. And over the next couple of months, I had built up this nice following of professionals that appreciated my fresh perspective on the business world. I was literally six months out of school and I was learning a ton and I was just sharing my process with everyone and at the end of the six-month marketing internship, my boss at the time didn't make me a job offer that really resonated with me. I'm like, “Okay LinkedIn. Let's do this. Does anybody know of a job for me? I'm looking for an XYZ type of marketing job. I want to go in-house, leverage what I've learned on the agency side and now go in-house, and get some more focus.” I had like a whole dream job that I cooked up and nobody offered me a job from that post. But what I did get was 4 strangers who I had never talked to in my life, reach out to me on LinkedIn. They said, “Hey, can you help us with our LinkedIn marketing?” And I'm like, “Cool. I'm 21 years old and these business owners want my help. I don't know anything about what I did. I just know that I did something.” So that was two and a half years ago. It began the process of reverse engineering what I did for myself and trying to replicate it for others, which is a constant evolution. I'm constantly improving my business, constantly improving the service. I make a joke, like every three to six months my clients know I call them up and say, “Hey I've been testing out such and such. I had this idea I've been implementing and it's blown my mind. We were doing it all wrong the last little bit. We need to change it now and improve.” Every three to six months without fail, sometime in that time period, I'm gonna flip my business on its head and Gary Vee used to say something that really resonated with me, “If you're not going to put yourself out of business, somebody else will.” When I started I was just basically a glorified copywriter, writing posts for people on LinkedIn and then I became more of a social media manager where I included more services and now I’m becoming more of a personal branding consultant and it's constantly evolving. Who knows what's next?
Question: A lot of people build their own personal brand on LinkedIn or maybe they build a page on TikTok or Instagram. And you took that skill of building your own leverage on LinkedIn and built it as a service for other businesses. Talk to us about that transition. How are you able to go back, look at what you were doing, peel all the layers and then build it as a service for other businesses?
Moshe: I challenge every single person reading this to just answer this one question to yourself - Does everyone’s social media content look more or less the same? How many unique creators are there on social media? Very few. For the vast majority of us, we look at the people that are really successful in something, we look at the biggest influencers and say, “Oh, that's working for them. I should do the same.” And we end up echoing the top hundred creators and that doesn't work for the very simple reason that there are seven billion of us on this planet and we are all different. And to just follow along what Gary Vee does and assume it's going to work for us is a mistake because what works for Gary Vee works for him because it's him and what works for you works for you because it's you. It's not going to be the same strategy and that's really my main motivation at this point in my business. How do I figure out how to make you the best version of yourself and to position your professional uniqueness as well as your personal uniqueness? Think about it like this- As a business owner, I created my businesses as extensions of myself. These are manifestations of me and I've chosen to do things in my professional career based on who I am at my core. So that's a real focus during the personal branding sessions I do which cost $2,000. It's a one time fee. It's nice and expensive but the value is unparalleled because if you're going to look like everyone else on social media, you will not grow a community around yourself. You will not grow a personal brand. If you don't grow a personal brand you can’t take your existing business to the next level. So it's become really important to do a deep psychological dive. It's all based on the psychology of who you are as an individual and how that manifests in your professional life. And then once we understand those two pieces, then we can think about what narrative we need to build on social. What should people think about you? And we don't need everyone in the world to know about you. We only need the people that appreciate you to know about you. In branding, there's basically first position branding, which is Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Apple, those first names that you think of when you hear of an industry, and then there's everyone else. And everyone else can try to take the first position in the marketplace by out-spending the biggest names in the industry or you can say, “Let the biggest name be the biggest name. I have used my self-awareness to understand that this 20% of the segment of the population really benefits from my services. And the way I've structured my business becomes a unique emotional benefit to my clients that they can't get anywhere else. Let me just focus on that 20%.” And that's what we focus on the personal branding side.
Question: Could you give us an example of a business that was stuck at some place and you went in and were able to elevate that business to the next level?
Moshe: Awesome. Let's talk about this. I'll give you two examples. One example was a fellow by the name of Joseph Kahn. Joseph Kahn is the CEO of a Realty advisory firm based in New Jersey called the YK group. The YK group does everything that a real estate investor needs help with, whether it's reviewing potential real estate deals to see whether they're good deals or to help facilitate that deal, make sure it’s successful or whether it requires some sort of construction and getting necessary municipal permits, then managing the asset, just a lot of the different pieces that real estate investors deal with. And I remember when he first called me and this is going back about almost two years, he's like, “Listen, I offer a lot of different services. I don't know how to advertise it because they're just too broad. So if I'm going to take an advertisement out in the local paper, I don't think I'm going to be able to articulate what I'm doing. Why don't we try the personal branding approach where I can share the stories of how I'm helping my clients and see if maybe people appreciate that? And I can share the knowledge that I've accumulated over my years in the industry and become a resource for people.” And we did that and within four or five months, he had seen such an uptick in his business that one of his services that was at the time doing $2,000 a month, had increased to $10,000 a month. And that was just one vertical of the services that he was offering. I've continued to work with him and his team as they've doubled their business literally year-over-year and the only form of marketing that they've ever done in the last almost two years is the personal branding and LinkedIn marketing with me. So that's one example where what he was doing was so important to the industry but also so broad and all-encompassing that it was really difficult for him to advertise. And just sharing content, stories, expertise, opinions, and values created that community and that network that really supported him and helped him grow his business. That was one example. The other example is someone by the name Jebbey, who also works kind of in the real estate field. He services plumbers. And he had come to me after being active on LinkedIn, posting every single day for four months. And in the four months that he was posting, he had generated three or four leads and none of them ever closed. He never made a penny from being active every single day and he came to me and I said, “I think you're copying other people. I don't think you're showing people what makes you unique.” And we did the personal branding session and we gave him a custom roadmap for content creation and he really ran with it on his own and one month later I reached out to him and he said, “Moshe, my engagement rates doubled. I've had five leads in the last month. It was more than the leads of the four months prior and I closed my first deal from LinkedIn.” And that really showed me that if you're pretending to be someone that you're not on social media and you're hoping to get business from that, it's not going to work because what happens is you're going to attract a different type of person that is really not a good fit for you and they're going to see your content and they're gonna be like, “Oh wow, this guy is my kind of guy.” And they're going to need your services. They're going to pick up the phone. They're going to call you and within 30 seconds of that first conversation with you, they're going to realize that you're a totally different person. And what attracted them to you is no longer existent and at that point, there's no way you're closing the sale. So that inconsistency on the personal branding side from what happens in social media to what happens in real life, that's a real liability that a lot of people suffer from.
Question: Suppose I have a small business and I haven't used LinkedIn before, what advice would you give to somebody like that who is coming to LinkedIn for the first time and has no experience with content creation? What is the roadmap that you would give to that person in terms of how to create content and what to post?
Moshe: I tell this to everyone that works with me. In the process of becoming a client, one of the things I make very clear to them is what we do is not rocket science. It's not brain surgery. You can figure it out on your own. What I tell people to keep in mind is, share your passion, your ideas, and your experiences. Those three things are really what makes you unique and how those passions, ideas, and experiences are infused into your business, and what benefits your clients are receiving from that. So kind of set that expectation of what they can expect from working with you and don't spend too much time on the platform. Be very, very careful that you're actually using LinkedIn as a tool for business development and not wasting time. Be intentional about that. Be mindful of that.
Question: Could you give us a couple of examples of people or brands you follow that are doing extremely well on LinkedIn in terms of content?
Moshe: I'm going to share the funkier ones. First of all, all my clients are awesome. So yeah, follow my client’s accounts. But seriously, here are some people that are just doing things differently, and I really respect and appreciate that. So one fellow and I'm not talking about massive influencers, one fellow is Travis Chambers. He actually made it to Forbes 30 under 30. But he's a really cool guy, Travis Chambers. I think his company’s name is Chamber Media. So he's a cool guy to look out for. Then there's this CEO of DUDEwipes, Sean Riley, a really awesome guy who's totally crazy with his content. He was actually on Shark Tank. So he's a cool guy to follow. Everyone has good things about them, but I like those that keep it business-related. Patrick Bet-David is awesome. Ryan Serhant is awesome. These are business leaders that are really good. On my Instagram account, besides a couple of family and friends, I basically only follow - Ryan Serhant, Patrick Bet-David, and David Meltzer. David Meltzer is awesome on all platforms and is a really good guy, shares a lot of values that I have and these are some of the people that I really respect. I’ll tell you one of the interesting things about Ryan Serhant. When I first got into social media marketing I used to look up to Gary Vee a lot and I tried to model my service based off of the way he was operating and I realized it's really an issue because Gary Vee doesn't put in a lot of intention into the content that he puts together. He has teams of people following him around, documenting everything. And everything that goes out is something that's true to his core. But there's not a lot of strategy that goes into why this piece or why that piece. It’s just - this is true to his core and it works well for him because his audience is so big and he's sharing ideas that a lot of people can get behind, that are valuable to the vast majority of the world. So it works to help his persona which helps him in business. So by him being a celebrity entrepreneur, it gets him through the door of some of the biggest companies in the world. But I really started appreciating Ryan Serhant and his entire team and the executive producer of Ryan Serhant Vlogs. These guys are smart. They are strategic about what they're trying to do. And if you look at their content, who are they trying to attract? They're trying to attract other realtors. How are they attracting them? They're providing motivation, inspiration, tools, techniques, and strategies. If your local realtor, and I don't care what town you live in, thinks of Ryan Serhant as God when it comes to selling real estate, you're going to think of Ryan Serhant as God too. And I think that's a really smart strategy. And once I realized that, I actually started implementing that with a lot more of my clients. Who needs to think of you as being really good in order to position yourself in a really unique way? And I started doing it for myself. I started reaching out to other marketers. I was realizing that having marketers from all different backgrounds reach out to me and say, “Oh, I know that you're really good at LinkedIn. Can you help me with this client? I haven't been able to get engagement for him or we're arguing about what the best approach for LinkedIn is? What do you think?” I realized that I'm helping all these people for free. I should capitalize on that. And that's why I go by LinkedIn Rabbi on social media. #LinkedInRabbi is the easiest way to find me on LinkedIn. The reason why I go by LinkedIn Rabbi is because if I'm your marketing professional when it comes to LinkedIn, I could be your marketing Rabbi too. It's that positioning that I want in the marketplace. So I'm constantly improving my game and I'm not worried. I will put myself out of business faster than anyone else can, that I guarantee you. But meanwhile, I'm going to continue to help as many people as possible because when they view me as the LinkedIn Rabbi, then the people who trust them for their marketing advice will definitely trust me.
Question: Who are your mentors?
Moshe: Matthew McConaughey said it best - I want to be Matthew McConaughey in 10 years from now. So my mentor is kind of myself. Obviously, I learn from everyone, I’m the kind of person that’ll meet a little kid on the street and we'll be talking and I'm going to learn something from him. And I don't know where, I don't know what, I don't know how, but I try to learn from everyone because we all have unique backgrounds, unique ideas, unique experiences and there is always something to learn from somebody. So I kind of view the world as my mentor and I kind of make sure that I'm always working towards growth.
Question: I was talking to Jamie McDonald the other day and he's the kind of person who reads a lot and goes through a lot of interviews to take business lessons and motivate himself. On the other hand, you have people like Gary Vee who don't consume so much content, but they study people and that's how they learn. Which kind of person are you?
Moshe: In a weird way, I'm like a third breed. So I do read a little bit, not as much as I would like to. As a child, I loved reading. Fortunately or unfortunately, I'm busy enough doing things that make me really productive and fulfilled and happy so I don't spend that much time reading. But there are some awesome business books. I love the Memoir style. I don't like business textbooks. I like Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog, Howard Schultz’s Onward, Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness. Awesome books. So I do enjoy that. I do enjoy learning from the people around me, but mostly I enjoy learning from my own experience, my own mistakes. I was just talking to a CEO during COVID and we're talking about how we were all doing crazy things during COVID to grow and use this opportunity productively and people always say entrepreneurs are risk-takers. To be honest with you, I actually consider myself more risk-averse than the average employee. The average employee is hedging all of his bets on this one person called his boss and you are totally reliant on that boss. I've spread out my risk amongst many clients and even if I lose one, I can pick up another one somewhere else. So we were talking about this idea of being able to make mistakes. You don't have to be willing to take risks to make mistakes. You're going to make mistakes regardless. We all mess up. The question is, what are you doing with those mistakes? And I told the CEO, “I know if my business goes to 0, I can either start a new one or I can go get a job.” I get job offers all the time. And I usually use those job offers to pitch to my services. Because if they tell me what they need, what their pain points are, and they're hoping that I can solve it as an employee for them, I can, as an outside vendor, may be able to help too. So I know I can find a job. I know I can work. I can maybe start a new business. But it's a matter of keep on moving, keep improving because opportunities exist. You just need to be productive.
Question: Talk to us a bit about the biggest challenge that you're facing right now.
Moshe: The biggest challenge without fail is video. I need to have video in-house at a good cost that I can pass on to my clients with a nice margin while still keeping it affordable for them. And my partner and I have met close to 20 video production companies and videographers in the last six months and every single one in my opinion is missing the market. The market wants social media appropriate video production. That means high-quality creative and high volume. I don't care how fancy it is. I don't need it to be filmed on a $60,000 camera. I need it to be filmed on my cell phone. I need to capture the essence of who I am and I need you to be able to do it fast. And that's the number one challenge. I reached out to some of the big videographers, but I'm still waiting to hear back from some of them. I need someone in-house that can help me use the personal branding that I've done with my clients, use my client base, and just create a video package. I need the vlogging that I can pass on to my clients for $2000-3,000 a month. And for $2000-3,000 a month, you should be able to get a weekly vlog and you should get once a month, a creative commercial. And I don't need it to be filmed fancy. I don't need to be edited fancy. I need it to be decent or a little bit more than decent and I need the actual messaging to be really strong and powerful and impactful. This is something that the market is dying for and thankfully we have YouTube and we have all these bloggers and superstars that are motivating a new breed of videographers. But anyone who's like over 30 that's in the video space, they're busy like, “Oh, I'm going to go to Hollywood and produce these really cool movies.” And I'm like, “I apologize to do this to you but .001% of the population makes it to Hollywood. For everyone else, there's a lot of opportunities.” So if you're so stuck up on the quality of your video editing and that's why you need to charge me so much money to do a video shoot that takes you a half a day to do or you're the kind of guy that comes down with a whole crew, you know, the person that's holding the coffee and the person that's holding the audio and the lighting and it's like, “Dude, we need to create content that's compelling, that people want to watch. It doesn't need to be art. It needs to be compelling and needs to talk to people and needs to make people move.” Charge me a fraction of what you're charging and then I'll make you rich. So it's kind of that idea of, you know, sometimes you ask for too much from the marketplace and you don't get very far. So sometimes you need to be a little bit more humble, take less and use that less to grow more.
Question: And the second part of the question is, what’s your biggest breakthrough in the past 90 days?
Moshe: I have a weird outlook on money. I believe that money is one of human beings' top three assets, right up there with family and health. And when I'm in a business relationship with someone where I need to take money from someone, I need to make sure that I'm giving back much more value than I'm taking. This is something that David Meltzer talks a lot about and this is something that is true to my core, Anytime I want to raise my prices, I’m like, “Wait, I don't know how much value I’m actually giving for this Increase. Am I giving ten times the amount of value that I'm receiving? Then I can do it.” And I really just made the jump where I took my LinkedIn management services from $500 a month to $1000 dollars a month. And the reason why I did it was not that my ego said, “Oh, I'm worth more.” Not at all. Instead what happened was I realized that I had all these add-on services and very few of my clients were taking them because I wasn't really pushing them. And then I had a few clients that asked me for those add-on services. And there's one add-on service in particular that helps them engage with potential clients. You know who your potential clients are, if you can find them on social media and comment on their posts and be a part of their community, they appreciate that and that opens up the door for a potential conversation about doing business together. Some of my clients started using that service and their accounts blew up. Financially, they started doing a lot better and I realized that I was selling half the service, half the solution and I made a really tough but good decision of raising my price from $500 to $1000 and including that service to the base content creation service. And I was scared to do it, but I knew it was the right thing to do, and ultimately I've been blown away by the results. My customer retention rate continues to improve every time I improve the business. And as I pivot and change, I see those numbers just pick up, boom, more people staying, and that's really how I know that I was doing it well. I had one client that without this service, no way would have stayed with me more than a month because for the first week I was still doing it the old way and then I forced him to upgrade and the next three weeks difference made such a strong impact on the engagement rate of his own content that at first, I thought I was gonna lose him because he was not getting any engagement and then that thing just really sparked a whole wave of engagement. And thankfully he's still a client. So you’ve got to be careful about the money thing, make sure that you're providing more value to people than you're receiving from them and constantly improve your services.
Question: What is the best place to contact you?
Moshe: The best place to find me is on either Instagram or LinkedIn. LinkedIn is where my main magic goes down. The easy way to find me is #LinkedInRabbi. There is only one LinkedIn Rabbi in the whole world and that's me. Am I actually a Rabbi? No. But I look the part. So I became a Rabbi.
Books - Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog, Howard Schultz’s Onward, Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness.
Moshe’s inspiration - Travis Chambers, Ryan Serhant, Sean Riley, Gary Vee, Patrick Bet-David, and David Meltzer
Contact Moshe - He prefers LinkedIn or email your questions to stealmymarketing@gmail.com and I’ll forward them to Moshe.
Listen to the entire interview here - Spotify Anchor Apple Podcasts