#169: Lessons from Managing $500M in Media Spend and How to Apply them to Your Business with Babak Azad

On the show today I’m joined by Babak Azad, who is the former Senior Vice President of Media & Customer Acquisition at Beachbody. During his time there, Babak helped grow the company from $100 million to over a billion dollar in sales, while overseeing more than $500 million in media spend. Now he is the founder of Round Two Partners, which helps performance marketers scale their businesses.

I asked Babak to come on the show because he brings a very unique perspective from his days at Beachbody. You’ll be interested to hear how he had absolutely no direct response or performance marketing background prior to joining that company, but the lessons he has learned he now uses to help small business owners who are his clients.

In this episode we talk about how you can understand the value of a customer, the importance of scaling, why it’s really all about context and fundamentals when it comes to business (regardless of which platform you’re using), and so much more.

You may find that it takes a few minutes of us talking to get to the really good stuff in this interview, but I really like that we covered such a wide range of topics that can really applied to many types of different businesses.  As we talk about the show often, you’re going to hear that regardless of what level you’re at, you need to always be in a mode of testing and optimization.

On the Show Today You’ll Learn:

• The single biggest takeaway that Babak took from experience at Beachbody – and a significant mindset shift he had to make around advertising spend
  
  

• What you really need to know in order to succeed (especially if you’ve just launch or are bootstrapping things)!
  
  

• An area that he believes is missed opportunity that most companies aren’t taking advantage of
  
  

• What his two channels/two offers concept is all about and the importance of simplifying while scaling
  
  

• The reasons why it’s beneficial to go deep on the one channel that you’re seeing the most success in
  
  

• How to leverage our time so we’re spending it where it really matters, plus when to hire and how to know which tasks you should outsource!