How This Millenial Founder Built The #1 Fastest Growing Digital Agency In Australia From His Bedroom With $50
Sabri Suby is the founder and Head of Growth at King Kong, Australia’s #1 fastest growing full-service digital marketing agency and the 28th fastest growing company in the country ranked by The Australian Financial Review.
Launched in 2014 Sabri founded King Kong from his bedroom with no more than $50 and a computer his girlfriend has bought him. King Kong has carved out a niche guaranteeing true ROI — real business results — or they don’t get paid. Suby strongly believes that vanity metrics like impressions, clicks, likes, shares, and follows don’t mean anything unless they convert into sales.
He has consulted and advised businesses in 42 countries in over 167 different industries, teaching over 250,000 people through his seminars, content and trainings. To date generating him and his clients in excess of $400 million dollars in sales. Offering marketing services, including SEO, CRO, PPC, Facebook Advertising, web design Facebook Advertising, web design and marketing automation.
I started the agency three and a half years ago from my bedroom without any funding, venture capital or safety net. All I had was a computer, a headset and $50. Not only was I entering a highly-competitive industry but there were already thousands of digital marketing agencies in the market. To grow King Kong, my team and I have used the same direct-response marketing principles that we offer clients — and our record growth is proof that these principles work.
So, I would say that being ranked 28th on the AFR Fast Starters List — which makes us the fastest growing digital agency in Australia — is a testament to our ability to grow a business. Equally, our success is attributable to our company culture. Being a service-based business, our people and our expertise ARE our product. To deliver our clients the best results possible, we’ve invested a lot into not only cultivating the right culture within our team but nurturing team members and helping them grow. It’s funny, there are numerous business coaches and agencies coaching people on how to grow their companies but they aren’t practising what they preach in their own.
I’ve known for a long time that there’s no other full-service digital marketing agency growing at the pace that King Kong is, so it’s wonderful to have that validated. Despite all the milestones we’re beginning to hit and the successes we’re starting to see, I believe we’re still at the very beginning of our journey. That said, being recognised as a Fast Starter certainly fuels our desire to execute our vision of becoming the number one digital marketing agency in Australia, if not the world.
What exactly did you do with $50 to get here?
I loaded my VoIP phone account with $50 and started cold-calling businesses. I called businesses that were running Google Ads but didn’t appear in Google organic listing. I was making 150+ cold-calls per day. After a few days I have my first client. I did this for the first 12 months, until I had enough money to start advertising. I became incredibly good at it.
However, I realised that no matter how good I got, there were only so many hours in a day. Only so many calls I could make. I was limited by the clock.It was at this stage that I transitioned from one-to-one selling, to one-to-many.I applied my master salesmanship skills into print, into audio, into video and into other assets I could leverage to ‘multiply’ those salesmanship skills.And instead of making 150+ calls per day, I wrote ads that could call on 150,000 people per day! It was a quantum shift and a completely different dynamic, an incredibly powerful one where there was no limit to the impact of a sales message. It was this skill, that took me from my bedroom with $0 to now consistently bringing in over $1,000,000 in new revenue each month.
The ability to write a sales message that brings in new customers on a profitable basis, consistently and predicably, is the rarest skill on earth. And, if you can do it, I mean really do it, you can virtually write your own ticket.
1) How can an entrepreneur repeat what you do with that $50 in their own way?
In today’s day and age, having a lack of capital to start a business is no longer a valid excuse. The internet has brought about so much opportunity, that previous generation of entrepreneurs simply didn’t have.
With $0 today you can identity a niche that you want to enter or a business that you want to start. Research their pains, fears, hopes and dreams online for free. You can do this through sites like Reddit, Facebook Group, forums, YouTube comments, Amazon Reviews, blogs etc.
All you need to do is find out where your ideal customers are congregating online and then go there. An easy place to start is Facebook Groups. There are an endless amount Facebook Groups around virtually every topic or niche. These groups have thousands of people in them, posting hundreds of questions a day with people asking for help. All you have to do is reach out to these people and help them solve their problems and get paid in exchange. Here is a video on Foundr Magazine where I go into this in great detail:
2) When it came to expanding and shifting to make this a multi-million dollar company, what did You specifically change that make the difference and how exactly
I had to transition from one-to-one selling, to one-to-many. I applied my master salesmanship skills into print, into audio, into video and into other digital assets I could leverage to ‘multiply’ those salesmanship skills i.e. Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Radio advertising etc.
You can make great money selling one-to-one. But, there’s a limit. As we know, there are only so many hours in a day, only so many calls you can make, only so many doors you can knock. And, if you limit yourself to one-on-one selling, you’ll never really make BIG MONEY.
To truly make big money, you’ve got to use a ‘Automated Selling System’ to get your sales message in front of huge numbers of people all at the same time. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. I look at my sales message as my ‘soldier’ and I look at Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Radio and YouTube ads, etc. as the ‘delivery vehicles’ I use to deploy that soldier and deliver my sales message automatically without me have to exert more effort the more times I deliver it.
The reality is that the technology of delivering that sales pitch will be forever changing. Newspapers, direct mail, TV, the Internet, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat… The list will go on into perpetuity.
The way you deliver your sales message may change abruptly and radically. Yet what you put into that message will always be based on the classic tools of world-class salesmanship and human psychology. You can always hire people to deliver the work, set up the technology, do your company accounts and tax returns…
But the guys who know how to craft a killer sales pitch that forces people to whip out their wallet and throw money at you will always be rare… incredibly valued… outrageously well-paid… and sit in the driver’s seat of their abundant future. Good advertising is simply a sales pitch. Or better put, salesmanship multiplied.
Your advertisement and sales message should act like an army of tiny salesmen soldiers. And they should go forth, regardless of the delivery medium, and deliver a concert pitch. I then went from a ‘one-man army’ to a battalion of razor-sharp marketers to help me fulfil the work. We’re now a team of 51 and we’re looking to double that in the next 18 months.
3) What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received?
Be the hardest worker in the room
4) What makes you fastest growing that others aren’t doing?
I believe the amount of revenue a company does is directly proportionate to size of the problem, and its complexity, that your business solves. This is basically the amount of value you provide to your marketplace. We solve the #1 problem that businesses face; “How do I get more customers”. Not only do we solve this, but we actually guarantee results or we don’t get paid.
We a ruthlessly committed to being the very best in the world at customer acquisition and solving this fundamental issue at scale. We’re now at a point where we’ve worked with clients in over 167 different niches and have generated upwards of $400 million in sales.
We solve the hard problems and unlike other digital agencies don’t hide behind vanity metrics like click-through-rates, impressions, shares or even traffic. We’re all about how much money did we put in, and how much did we get out.
5) If you had to go back and start again from your beginnings what piece of advice would you give yourself?
“Push harder, go faster.”
Hindsight is 20/20. But I would tell myself to trust my intuition even more than I did. There certain choices I made where I ignored by gut, and they came back to bite me on the ass.
6) What’s your principles that make you successful
If I had to boil it down to one. I would say an unrivalled work ethic and hunger to master my craft. Instilled in me from watching my single parent mum slave away, raise two children and wear the responsibilities of two parents, all with a smile on her face. I have coined this quality the “single parent mother work ethic”.
I don’t care how talented you are, how fortunate your upbringing was, or even if you had a better education or opportunities than me. You simply can’t outwork me. Ever. And it’s this principle that continues to serve me. When I started King Kong in 2014 from my bedroom — with no money, no venture capital and no safety net — I was entering a market with incredibly established players who had deep pockets and huge head start. However, over the last four years, I’ve made a lot of these competitors wave the white flag and surrender. I’ve sent a lot of these companies either out of business or I’ve forced their hand to sell as they simply can’t keep up with the fire-breathing marketing machine that is King Kong.
And it’s this principle that still serves me today. I start my days at 4am hungry for success, always willing to put the work in to make my dreams a reality. Your work ethic is really the only thing you can control in life. And if you strengthen it, stretch it to its limit and forge an unrivalled work ethic that burns inside of you, you will win.
Having a single parent mother work ethic means being relentless. It means demanding more of yourself than anyone else could ever demand of you, knowing that every time you stop, you can still do more. Put. In. The. Work. Every. Day. Do something you don’t want to do first thing every morning. Challenge yourself to be uncomfortable, push past the mediocre, the laziness and fear. Forge your work ethic, exercise it like a muscle. Strengthen it. Build it. Be relentless in your approach towards success.
No marketing hack, sales funnel, or software can make you successful if you’re not going to do the work. Don’t wait for someone to make it happen for you. It’s on you.
1) What’s your backstory?
I grew up in a small regional beach town in northern New South Wales, Australia called Byron Bay. It has a population of 9,000. My older sister and I were raised by a single parent mother. I watched my mother hold down three jobs and work tirelessly to give us a great life.
She would wake up before the sun and go to work before we left for school, and she would often get home after we did. She would then head straight to the kitchen to cook us a healthy dinner. As exhausted as she was, she did all this with a smile and the affection and warmth only a loving mother can provide. There were times that were rough and we had no money. Yet she always found a way to pull through.
Watching my mother work so hard to provide a great upbringing for me and my sister taught me the most valuable lesson I’ve ever learned. And that is — nothing in life comes without hard work. Nothing is given to you. You don’t get what you ‘deserve’. You get what you push, shove, scratch and work your ass off for. My mother taught me firsthand that having a strong work ethic is the number one determining factor for success.
At 16, I got my first full-time job in sales. I’ll never forget it. The job ad in the local paper said, “Earn Up to $1800 per week. No experience required.” I was sold. It was a group interview of 30 and I got the job along with two other candidates. We joined a team of 13 others, all crammed into an office, converted from an old shipping container. We were tasked with making 100 cold-calls an hour — calling so fast we could hardly put the phone back on the hook. Feverishly, we worked our way through call sheets of businesses. I still remember the sound of production in that shipping container — it was deafening.
We were calling businesses to buy back their empty ink cartridges and then selling them back refilled. I was making 600 cold-calls a day, being abused, hung-up on and yelled at. People were screaming at me, “Fuck off little kid”, “Go fucking die!” It was a cold hard slap in the face. Here I was at the front lines of capitalism, and I was getting bruised up, bloody from the rejection and failing miserably.
After two weeks, my production was well below the other rookies. It seemed I was the runt of the litter. I had my review with the owner who liked me and said even though I was preforming terribly, he wanted to give me another seven days to see if I could turn things around.
After I stepped out of that meeting and went home for the day, I thought long and hard about what I was doing and why I wasn’t being successful. I said to myself, “Fuck it,” and it was as if it flicked a switch inside of me. Whether it was the owner seeing some promise and taking a chance on me, or me being backed into a corner knowing it was all on the line, I don’t know — maybe it was a combination of both — but something fundamentally changed that day.
I started looking at sales as a game. I would run through walls to get to a “yes” from a prospect. Objections would bounce off me like bullets to Batman. Overnight I literally became the company’s top producer. I couldn’t be stopped.
This success led me to seek out and study the greatest orators and communicators of all time. I started to examine human psychology and the art of persuasion. I applied what I was learning, refining my pitch, seeing what worked and what didn’t. If I changed my tone and cadence here or there, how would it affect my success rate?
I became unstoppable. I was 17 and making close to $2,000 per week. It was this early success that got me thinking about travelling the world to seek more opportunities than my small home town could provide.
After high school, while most of my friends were moving to Sydney or Melbourne for university, I decided it wasn’t for me. So, I packed my bags and moved to London to start on my adventures.
I would continue to work in sales, selling everything you can imagine, from telecommunications, satellite TV, mobile payment devices and even legal will writing over the phone.
I worked at companies with sales floors jam-packed with 2,000 people, and other companies with small more involved sales teams. From multi-billion-dollar corporations to start-ups and everything in between.
I was the top sales person at every company I ever worked at, for every month that I worked there. A fresh-faced kid from Byron Bay, not only holding his own in one of the world’s financial epicentres, but beating the pants off everyone.
How?
Well, I would like to say I was born with it. Some innate and natural talent. “He’s a natural salesman,” people would say. That isn’t the case. The answer is — an unrivalled work ethic and hunger to master my craft — learned from watching my mum slave away, raise two children and wear the responsibilities of two parents, all with a smile on her face.
I coined this quality the “single parent mother work ethic”.
“I don’t care how talented you are, how fortunate your upbringing was, or even if you had a better education or opportunities than me. You simply can’t outwork me. Ever.”
And it’s this principle that continues to serve me. When I started King Kong in 2014 from my bedroom — with no money, no venture capital and no safety net — I was entering a market with incredibly established players who had deep pockets and huge head start.
However, over the last four years, I’ve made a lot of these competitors wave the white flag and surrender. I’ve sent a lot of these companies either out of business or I’ve forced their hand to sell as they simply can’t keep up with the fire-breathing marketing machine that is King Kong.
And it’s this principle that still serves me today. I start my days at 4am hungry for success, always willing to put the work in to make my dreams a reality.Today my company is ranked as the #1 fastest growing digital agency in Australia and the 28th fastest growing company in the country, across all industries.
2) What inspired you to build a business?
At first it was financial. I didn’t grow up with money, and it’s always been something I’ve wanted to have a lot of, so I didn’t to worry about it. Money is ultimately freedom, and I wanted a lot of that.
Then over the years, I found that it’s the thrill of the ‘climb’ and building things that really drive me. Building teams, marketing machines and businesses. Starting from the bottom with all odds stacked against me and being scrappy, pushing, shoving and hustling to make it happen.
3) What’s the meaning of King Kong?
Business is a jungle. Survival of the fittest. And King Kong is the king of the jungle. The apex predator.
I also wanted to pick an outrageous name that people stand out. No one has ever forgot that the company looking after their digital marketing is called “King Kong”.
4) Do you have stories of trying to connect to specific people that have made it, while you were trying to make it or were you always just focused on building things without anyone’s help?
I was head down, focussed on mastering my craft. I’ve never been given a break by anyone. Nothing has been given to me, I’ve had to work my ass off to earn it. All the people I was studying, like; Robert Collier, David Ogilvy and Gary Halbert, Thomas Hall were no longer living.
4) What’s your ambitions as an entrepreneur? How does that feed into what you do today?
My ambitions are to build the number one platform in the world for growing businesses. Through both my agency King Kong, and through courses, books and masterminds.
The number one thing that drives me is living up to my potential. We only have one life. And my biggest regret would be to get to the end of it and knowing deep down inside that I could have done more.
5) Did you find any hacks along the way? If so, what are they?
Setting an alarm clock to go to bed and get 8 hours of sleep. Waking up before the sun and getting a work out in. Also investing in the best mattress and shoes (if you’re not in one, you’re in the other).
6) Did you ever seek funding? Why and how?
No, the business is completely bootstrapped and funded off cash flow. I started my business with $50 and old computer my girlfriend had bought me and invested every last piece of ‘sweat equity’ I had.
7) How did you scale your team size?
At King Kong we’ve attracted a team of absolute A-Players over the past four years — 51A-players in fact. We were a start-up that I bootstrapped from a rented bedroom, in a new and evolving industry plagued by cowboys, and a national skills shortage.
If your team is going to spend 40+ hours a week working for you, you’d better make it a good time. There’s a myth that business success comes from putting your customers first. That might work when you’re a startup, but if you want your business to grow, your team is the most important thing to get right.
Hire good talent, treat them well and give them a reason to be happy when they step into the workplace and they will look after your clients for you. On a small scale, we focus on success regularly. Every Monday each division has a team meeting where they review the past week, noting where we’re going, how we’re tracking, and what we can do better as well as highlighting recent success. That way we’re not only transparent about what’s going on in the business, we can attribute our progress to respective team members.
For major wins, we make sure the whole office knows it. We have a massive Chinese gong in our office and when a new client comes on board, we hit it. We also have a cowbell we ring when a client gets a new lead or a first sale, or their new campaign goes live and their first lead comes through; we celebrate our clients’ wins, because they’re ours too. If you’re busy at your work and a gong or a bell goes off and there’s a standing ovation in the office, you’re going to stop for a moment to celebrate that win. It brings people together.
A lot of people think a fun workplace is about beanbags and breakfast, but if you zoom out you’ll realise that your team spends 40+ hours a week together at work — that’s more time than I spend with my wife and daughter — so they’re going to smash it if they enjoy coming in.
Last year when we reached our goal I took everyone — from the heads of department to the admin team — to Bali for a week. I won’t lie: it cost a lot of money. It wasn’t just the travel expenses, but everyone’s salary and the lost revenue of no one being around for a week. And recently we all went glamping — and did it big!
But I want to say you can’t afford not to invest in your people like this. Not only does it rally your staff and serve as team motivation, it means people want to stick around and help you succeed so you kill it with great retention rates. In our business, our product is our people. And I heavily invest in it.
8) How have you grown in need/usage of office space?
I started the business from my bedroom. After 12 months we got out first office and outgrew it in 18 months, we had to break the lease and secure a new office. Our new office is a two storey HQ that oozes our culture and jungle theme (pics below).
Again we’ve outgrown our new office just 2 years into a 4-year lease and are bursting at the seems to secure a new home. This is the gift and the course of scaling fast.
9) What’s the biggest problem you face in managing a team and growing a company?
Our growth is throttled because there simply isn’t enough talented people we can hire to keep up with our growth trajectory. There is huge skill shortage for sharp digital marketers in our industry. We’ve found that even if you do hire a self-proclaimed “expert”, they’re really not great. So we’ve built a King Kong Academy that allows us to train any off the street to be a marketing weapon in 6–12 months. This is unlocking further growth for us and is allowing us to now scale quicker.
10) What do you suggest to early stage founders trying to build a giant organization?
FOCUS. In the age of endless distraction and instant gratification that social media brings with it. Founders are trying to be everywhere at once and do a million and one things. My suggestion is to submerge and cut yourself off from all the ‘noise’ and distractions for the first 3 years of your business.
While most business owners are hyper-scatted and have entrepreneurial ADD, they’re listening to 15 podcasts, blogging, doing social media, Facebook lives, uploading videos on YouTube and public speaking. They’re not focusing on the main thing. Which is solving your customer’s problems. And being better than anyone in your market at doing this. That’s what we get paid for.
My suggestion is to bury yourself in the craft and truly become and master, and then and only then, pull your head up for air and you’ll be amazed at how far you’ve come.
