Tom Breeze is the Founder and CEO of Viewability, a leading YouTube advertising agency that partners with companies to get reliable, profitable customers at scale. He is an expert on how to get more exposure, more views, and new clients through YouTube. Tom is also the author of Viewability and the creator of Bidurk, an X-ray tool that helps businesses create top-performing YouTube content that customers love.
In this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, John Corcoran interviews Tom Breeze, the Founder and CEO of Viewability, about strategies for getting more clients from YouTube. They also discuss Tom’s journey into working with Google ads, the benefits of operating a performance-based business model, and how to maximize YouTube ads.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [01:43] What Tom Breeze learned from running various businesses growing up
- [07:27] How Tom started helping top executives with public speaking
- [10:39] The Google ads strategies Tom leveraged to grow his business
- [17:53] Tom explains how he got into YouTube advertising and providing video production services to his clients
- [24:19] The benefits of a performance-based business model
- [29:48] Top strategies for maximizing YouTube ads
- [35:07] Should you create YouTube content consistently?
- [36:58] How Tom’s YouTube x-ray tool works
Resources Mentioned In This Episode
- Viewability
- Tom Breeze on LinkedIn
- Viewability: Harness the Power of YouTube Ads and Be There for Your Customer – When It Really Counts by Tom Breeze
- Bidurk
Sponsor: Rise25
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Cofounders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as being the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90x, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, Rx Bars, YPO, EO, Lending Tree, Freshdesk, and many more.
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Rise25 Cofounders, Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran, have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.
Episode Transcript
John Corcoran 0:00
All right, today we are talking about how to get more clients from YouTube, how to get more exposure, how to grow your brand. My guest today is Tom Breeze. He’s the Founder of Viewability. He’s an expert on how to get more exposure, more views, more clients through YouTube. I’ll tell you more about him in a second. So stay tuned.
Chad Franzen 0:19
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now, let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran 0:36
Alright, welcome everyone. John Corcoran here, I’m the host of this show. You know, you’ve listened to these episodes before, but if you haven’t, go check out some of our past archives. We’ve got interviews with smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from companies like Netflix and Kinkos, YPO, EO, Activision Blizzard, we’ve got all kinds of great episodes in the archives, check them out. And of course, this episode’s brought to you by Rise25, where we help b2b businesses get clients, referrals, and strategic partnerships with done for you podcasts and content marketing. And you can go learn more about what we do at Rise25.com.
And I’m excited today to talk to my guest. His name is Tom Breeze. He’s the Founder and CEO of Viewability. He’s also got a software company all around how to get more exposure, and more views, and more brand recognition through YouTube, which is the number two platform out there for searches, it gets incredible amount of traffic every day. And so if you aren’t taking advantage of it, then you definitely want to watch this whole video and get some of the cutting edge strategies on how to do it here. And, Tom, I’m excited to have you here. Today, we’re gonna jump into the YouTube topic. But first, before we get into that, now you started, like many entrepreneurs do with a little or website called eBay. And the funny part about that is you ended up buying a kind of heavy item and shipping it through eBay. That was gym equipment, which is some of the heaviest equipment out there. So you discover quickly that drop shipping items through eBay, lead to some really high mailing costs. Tell us a little bit about that experience.
Tom Breeze 2:07
Yeah, I was, I suppose I was trying to break it into the world of entrepreneurial kind of success, I suppose. And it was when I first got started, I must be about 15 or something. And I was it was like the birth of the Internet really, more than anything else. I was like, Wow, there’s so many cool things happening is like, the first moment where people start to realize the power of the internet and eBay users were going there and uploading stuff. And I was like, hang on a second. If I’m to buy this gym equipment from eBay, and then sell it to these customers, or vice versus buy wholesale and sell it on eBay. There’s a deal to be made here. And there’s some margin in between this, and I like this looks great. And the shipping. Yeah, not too much of a problem like, but then of course, then I worked out the like, okay, cool. If I have to ship this gym equipment, it’s gonna get really expensive. And so it wasn’t necessarily the most accessible venture in the world. But that’s kind of where I got started. And, and then I’ll go on to do different things like
John Corcoran 3:10
did you did something called car boot sales, which is not really something we have in the United States here. But it’s kind of like a yard sale, you take a car, loaded up with all your junk from your house, and your friends family stuff. And then you come to somewhere where everyone opens up their trunk and they sell stuff.
Tom Breeze 3:25
It’ll literally be in a field in a country in a countryside somewhere. But it will be a field that we advertised for about six weeks as a car boot sale happening here on this date. Okay, and you can buy your ticket to have your car there. But loads of people pick up bargains because there’s so many like antiques in the UK. Like there’s so many random things like 300 years old, yeah, silver spoon or something. Yeah, used by some royalty. And if you know what you’re looking for, you can pick up some amazing when so they were actually quite well attended. And if you’ve got a car full of junk, it’s great because you can just sell all the crap that you were going to throw away anyway for like small amounts of cash. But I would go there and be like, right, okay, cool. Let’s see what I can flog. My parents would have to agree to like, what I can go sell. And then what’s the profits and I started doing it a lot more with different people that I knew family members and this type of stuff. And they couldn’t be bothered to drive the car and go and sell their stuff. And I could that was quite fun for me. Your parents
John Corcoran 4:24
walking around the house going what happened to the end table that was over here. What happened with the TV, where’s the couch,
Tom Breeze 4:30
and I’m walking around with a wad of cash in my pocket. The
John Corcoran 4:36
learning about entrepreneurship it’s about
Tom Breeze 4:39
minimalism guy right. So the Yeah, that was gonna like, buy my journey. And that was I started to kind of make a little bit of pocket money and then then I started a poker online that not necessarily recommend that to everybody, but in the early days, you could learn as well like poker online pretty quick, and there will be terrible players playing for money online. And so it was just you could rake it in if you were just like, if you played like a robot. And the easiest way to do that is to have like five tables live at any one time. So you don’t get emotionally invested into any hand in particular, you’d end up really knowing how to gamble with your cards effectively, especially online, because it’s just, yeah, there’s no human interaction,
John Corcoran 5:27
you had to have a lot of money to start with that. Did you have a lot of you? Was there a lot of money coming in and out? Like, how much money did you have on the line at any one time?
Tom Breeze 5:38
Oh, these would be $5 $10 tables to start with. So it wouldn’t be huge, I might start with a little bit. And what I worked out is that if I did it myself, I’d be erratic. So I ended up sharing an account with my dad. And so we both gamble from the same account. But then you could have like some tables. Yeah. And you’d be like, wait a second, you made a silly mistake over here like, you can, if I went all in for no good reason or something, then I knew that I was gonna have my dad saying to me, what are you doing wasting all this money. And so we ended up having a bit more of accountability to each other inside of one account together
John Corcoran 6:16
some good lessons. There’s some good lessons in that, right, the having that extra accountability can be really valuable.
Tom Breeze 6:23
Totally. And also, it was fun as well, you sat there with each other and played and we’d have to make these decisions together. And like a need both of brisket. Sometimes you’re both player too conservative sometimes and then have like, different disagreements on how to play the next hand and that sort of thing. So yeah, it was like we’d spend hours just in front of the computer screen, but we made pretty good money and had a lot of fun doing it.
John Corcoran 6:46
So you actually ended up finding a lot of your university through these poker winnings?
Tom Breeze 6:52
Yeah, totally. Yeah, we pay for a few Christmases, and we’re paying for most of my tuition through university through poker. And, but bear in mind, like I think, in the UK, at that time, it was about 3000 pounds, which is about four and a half $1,000 per year for your tuition. So it wasn’t like a huge cost. Very different story these days, and also an own state. So you guys pay a fortune for your education. So it’s a slightly different kettle of fish or thing. But yeah, the it’s a very much a kind of it wasn’t easy. It was still making a lot of money. You know, I’m having a lot of fun doing it. So yeah, yeah.
John Corcoran 7:28
Now, after you, you graduate, you were interested in being a sports psychologist, you discovered though that that would require you to travel, go live in smaller markets, things like that. Kind of the same situation in the states, if you want to work in something like sports, you end up living in some smaller town or having to be flexible in terms of where you’re living, would you didn’t want to leave London, that kind of led you into helping people with performance, anxiety and public speaking. And I’m imagining you as like some 23 year old, giving a CEO of a company public speaking advice, which is kind of an interesting dynamic. What was that? Like for you?
Tom Breeze 8:10
It was, yeah, it was funny. I was like, I’ve got a far more gray hair now than I once did. But I even remember being like, Oh, I wish I had a few more gray hairs, then it would make me look a bit more legit for this job. But the Yes, I was about 2425 When I first started that business, and it quite quickly got me into a one to one room with some really quite influential people are not like necessarily famous people. But definitely people that are making big decisions on on behalf of corporate companies, or giving a pitch or closing lots of high, high end deals. And the the number of people that come to see me broke, really big meeting will be kind of really interesting. But you got to bear in mind, they knew their stuff really well. But they knew that they weren’t going to have to deliver it very well. They knew that like okay, cool, I know how to talk about this, they may even be able to present the structure of a great presentation. But they would stand in front of people and their voice would go shaky, they would feel really fearful. And loads of people call in sick and let their team take up the slack for that day. Loads of that sort of activity. So it’s quite chronic anxiety that people would feel. And my job was basically to get them in the room make them feel comfortable and present. And so I used to do like four hour sessions with them. And I was trained up in hypnotherapy, timeline therapy, NLP. And using a set of combination of techniques. It’s pretty much the same thing for everybody. But everyone kind of has the same worries when it comes to presenting just packaged up as different things are all kind of and so you can you can unpick that quite quickly give them enough confidence to be able to be like, okay, cool. I think I can do this. And it’s a very self fulfilling prophecy when you go and present it and you get through the first two minutes. And then you’re like, oh, okay, that actually worked out quite well. And then you get questions and you can handle them. And then you can see people in the audience nodding and things. It’s a, my job is done by getting in the room most of the time, because I’ve been like, rah, just stick to the script, and they’ll be okay. And most people do. It’s all about, like, 95% of people would get to that point where they wouldn’t call in sick, they will go to the thing, and it will be a roaring success, as we know, it would be but they, so they always attributed all that success back to me. And I’m like, Great, I’ll take it. But really, there was other room. And I feel a bit more confident. And you felt like the waiting for it, so to speak. So yeah.
John Corcoran 10:38
Yeah, with, with this background, I was kind of thinking that your trajectory, your path would be from public speaking to then, you know, creating videos, because it’s more efficient. But you actually ended up running Google ads to grow that business, which led you into helping, you know, kind of focusing on Google ads, which then led you to SEO and led you into YouTube advertising as well. Tell me a little bit about what the early days of Google Ads was like for you and why you ended up going away from it eventually?
Tom Breeze 11:13
Oh, yeah. Okay, cool. So I was kind of connecting the dots really more than anything else. So I had this business, and I wasn’t getting clients. And it was really early on in the business formation. And I was like, How do I get clients? And I called around family and said, Well, how do you do it? And luckily, I come from an entrepreneurial family. My dad runs an accountancy firm. And my brother runs a recruitment firm. And it’s like, how do you guys get business? How do you do it? But they would have a recurring model. So like, they would have to close one business, then that client, if you do a good job will be a client for life, and