Inside Bluleadz -Eric Baum on Building the World's Most-Reviewed HubSpot Agency

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This is the Beyond the Story podcast, a show that goes way beyond the story. And now, Sebastian Rusk Eric, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Sebastian. Happy Glad that you are here. I almost said Brett, welcome to the show, because you remind me of I hear that quite a bit, man. My wife gets frustrated because like, A, you're not super rich and B, you're not as good looking as he is. So That's amazing. Well, dude, you and I connected through the great Dan Martell's elite mastermind group, which, you know, as you can, as we were talking about before we got here, It's been instrumental in our growth, both personally and professionally as well too. And obviously meeting other great human beings that brought us to this interview today. So man, it's great to finally meet you and Yeah, likewise. Can't say enough good things about Dan Martell and the elite business program that he's got. It's helped us a lot over the last six months that we've been part of the program and continues to help me think Yep. It sure does. He, he has a very unique way of getting inside So, um, on this show, I like to talk about people's stories, like to back up to the beginning of the story, wherever the beginning is for you, where you started doing or got into business and what really brought you Yeah, that's a long discussion right so I've owned six different companies in the last 30 years. So anything from sewer contracting company to a bar in downtown Richmond, Virginia to manufacturing company to plumbing franchises. And now to Blue Leads, which is a HubSpot onboarding and implementation agency. And I've had this for the last 15 years.

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So I have had an awful lot of ups and downs and learning curves, catastrophes along the way. But, you know, the last 15 years at least has been an Love it. So what got you? So what exactly does your company do?

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Yeah, so simply put, you know, when a company wants to get on the HubSpot CRM platform, so HubSpot's, you know, Salesforce's biggest competitor in the CRM space, right? And so when they want to get on the HubSpot platform and they don't have the internal bandwidth to to do it and get it set up themselves, that's where we step in. We do a lot of co-selling with HubSpot direct sales reps, and we set the companies up on HubSpot platform, and we really step in to help them transform the way they market, sell, and service their customers, leveraging HubSpot, but also now, Yeah, absolutely. So what type of businesses are utilizing HubSpot? I know I dabbled in HubSpot for a little while with their CRM, and then I was engulfed in other solutions out there as a marketer by default. So I haven't really absorbed it.

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I do a gigantic conference every year called Inbound that I never get picked to speak at, but that's another conversation for another day. I'm not upset, I promise, I promise. But what exactly, what type of companies do you work with and what kind of solutions are Yeah, I mean, it runs the gamut, right? So we've worked with companies, small plumbing companies, all the way up to $5 billion enterprises. These days, we primarily focus on B2B companies, but honestly, any company that's getting set up on the HubSpot platform is in our wheelhouse. So it's crazy because you'll see a mom and pop shop doing a million dollars in revenue that signs up on HubSpot starter and it helps them to grow their business. And then you see these large enterprise companies that come in and they're spending, you know, they might be doing three, four, five, $10 billion in revenue, and they're migrating off of an ERP and off of Salesforce onto the HubSpot platform. And that project may take six, 12 months to execute on. So it really is a wide variety of customers. And we work with customers in all kinds of different industries. But primarily, we're focused on SaaS companies, fintechs, health care, professional services, manufacturing, of course, because that's near and dear to my heart, having owned one in the past, which is a whole different story. And if you need some fodder on Hey, what not to do in business and who not to go into business with. That's Yeah. So like, you know, I've always wanted to own my own business straight out of school. And so I own a couple of companies. And then I landed in a Tampa market. I was a financial planner and happened into one of my old business partners from the first company I owned, PSI. And he had just started a manufacturing company in the sewer lining space.

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And he became a client as a as my financial planner.

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And next thing you know, six months later, I buy out his partner and I go back, I go into business with him again, and things went great. So we went from, you know, a million to $5 million in revenue in the first four years in business. We ended up buying and starting two franchises in the meantime. So now we had three businesses together, right? This is 2006, world's going great. I just had a baby, had been married for a year and a half, two years, bought a house in a country club neighborhood, two new SUVs, like I'm living the life, right? Quarter million dollars a year in salary. And we had been in negotiations for a year with a VC company to buy the manufacturing company out, right? We're two weeks away from closing. And the VC company said, hey, Eric, we want you to step in and be the CEO. We want your partner to step out of the CEO role and just do sales and marketing. And he got wind of that, and my world imploded. He fired me because he owned the majority of that company, fired me. Now I'm in a six-month legal battle with my partner over these three companies because of my actions and his hurt feelings. It was a nightmare, man, an absolute nightmare. You go from sitting on top of the world and having a ton of equity in companies, and a great income coming in to like, everything is completely frozen. Had no idea that could even be a possibility. And it really put a strain on my, my marriage and my, you know, mental health. Right. Cause I'm like the guy that gets up every single morning. It's just like, okay, today's a brand new day. We're going to crush it. Right. Yesterday was yesterday, but it was a tough six months going Yeah, I bet. I bet what, so, And when it comes to the agency that you guys do, you mentioned a little bit about of AI and what you guys are doing there. Are you solely focused on just helping people with their CRM needs or are you working with marketing Yeah, so we started off as a digital marketing agency, you know, 15 years ago and we found HubSpot and actually this was about 16, 17 years ago. We rebranded 15 years ago as Blue Leads when we found HubSpot, became one of HubSpot's very first partner, partners back then, strategic partners, what they call solutions partners now.

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And so we kind of fell into the inbound marketing world, kind of drank that Kool-Aid, along the way, changed the way we operated over the years, and really switched completely about four or five years ago to away from doing inbound marketing and digital marketing per se, to just doing the technical setup of HubSpot. Now, that being said, we still have clients that we do content for, still have clients that we're doing SEO and marketing services for, Yeah. So what would you say your favorite part of the Man, helping the companies grow, right? So there's so many times you would be amazed at like even midsize companies, companies doing say 50 million, a hundred million dollars in revenue that don't have a defined marketing process, lead generation machine built, don't have a defined sales process built, don't have a truly, effective way to cross sell and upsell back into their existing customer base.

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So having the opportunity to go into a company when they're thinking, hey, we're going to hire this blue leads to get us set up on the HubSpot CRM. And we go in and we say, not only are we going to do that, but we're going to look at your entire company and provide ways for you to actually become more efficient, more profitable, and help grow revenue. We're not going to charge extra for that, but that's just part of our process. Then of course, they hire us to do additional services surrounding those recommendations. Now with the invention of AI, that just adds another component for us to be able to layer in a level of efficiency and profitability that's been unheard And so speaking of AI, well, that seems to be what we're all talking about these days.

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What are some of the solutions you guys are working on for your Yeah, so we take a look at AI in basically a three-tiered approach, right? So HubSpot is infused with AI throughout the entire platform. So most companies need help on how to leverage and getting trained up on how to utilize the HubSpot AI features that they're already paying for, right? So we help companies in that respect. The second tier is, hey, companies don't know how to leverage these LLMs, the Google Gemini's, the chat GPT's perplexities.

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How do they actually create AI policies at their company? How do they create good use cases inside their company for the marketing sales or service, and even in the HR and finance departments as well? We help companies set all of that up for them, as well as even getting into building custom agents for particular use cases. I'll give you an example of one, that we use quite a bit, and that's like building out proposals in our sales process. We've got a custom agent that can listen to all of the Fathom calls or Zoom call recordings, right? take all that information match it up with the exact service offerings that we have in our service product catalog and then build that proposal for our sales team based on those conversations in the sales process with prospects so it cuts down you know forty thirty forty percent of the sales person's time just by having to go back in their notes even though a i transcribes all that and says, hey, what do I need to do to build this out? So an AI agent does all of that for them. So it allows salespeople to spend more time communicating with the customer and actually walking them through helping them as opposed to Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's all kinds of really cool things that we, I mean, we've built a migration tool from one CRM to HubSpot that cut our integration engineers time by 40%. So yeah, so that, and that's just internally, right? So we do all kinds of things. We're currently working with a CEO right now to build a really detailed custom email agent that acts as their personal assistant and can take actions on their behalf based on the email coming into either Google or Microsoft Exchange. It's really, really cool Yeah, it really is. And I mean, it's, it's only still feels like the Yeah, we are. It's scary, man. I can't keep up fast enough and we're in this industry. So I can't imagine most companies they're like, dude, I don't even know where to start. Right. What do I do first? And What are the biggest things companies overlook when not Probably they look at, anytime you hire an agency or an outside consultant, let's say, you tend to look at them through just one lens and be like, okay, this is what I hired them to do. In our case, it's setting up the HubSpot platform, right? But they don't think about all of the other things that we have to offer.

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And we would look at that, we kind of layer in every interaction with our customer through the lens of, How can we help them to transform the way they market, sell, and service, right?

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Not just set up their HubSpot. So I think that's the biggest part when companies come to us is like, hey, we need HubSpot set up in three weeks for the marketing department. We need to do X, Y, Z. Great. No problem. We'll execute on that. But then let's have a conversation with a CEO and the VP of sales and figure out, OK, what's your mark when you're marketing set up and really crushing it? What's the handoff look like? Is your sales process built to be able to handle that? Are you leveraging the technology available to you to become more efficient and more profitable and be able to cycle faster in your sales process? So I think that's the biggest thing that companies overlook when working with us initially, at Yeah, absolutely. So we're in the middle, literally in the middle of 2025 time we're recording this episode. What are you the most excited about, um, for the rest of the year and I think for us, it's how do we cycle faster? What I'm most excited about is AI, like everybody else in the world, but only because we can leverage that to become more efficient and profitable and help our customers grow faster. I think layering that into every piece of software that we interact with, is going to be a complete game changer. We see that. Everybody's talking about AI. I'm not the only person that's out there shouting from the rooftops like, hey, you need to infuse this in the way you do business. But for us, it is absolutely critical because HubSpot's built on an AI infused system right now. Their platform has AI infused in everything they do. When we bring that level of technology to a company, and train them on how to utilize it, they're like, man, we're creating efficiencies. 20%, 30% we're saving in time for these various departments. That's a complete game changer for agencies. I think most companies now, when they look at, hey, I want to grow to $100 million and have 500 team members, now they're thinking, I can grow to $100 million and have 250 team members, or maybe even 100 team members become that much Yeah, absolutely. Well, I love what you're up to, man. It's clearly a solution within the world of the business world that brands and businesses need to stay organized, stay on top of things. And more importantly, talk to people that are already Man, it's been great to chat with you and better understand what you guys are doing. And of course, meet you and connect with you as well. I appreciate you taking some time out of your day to hang out with me for a few minutes. Any I think from my perspective is embrace change. If you're an owner of a company or an executive company, you need to spend time on your own. and learning some of these technologies, not the nitty gritty stuff, but really get out there and see what's possible. And that will enable you to affect the change inside your organization and be more profitable, especially like in today's world where most companies are like, hey, we're pausing on things. Our revenue is down this year, or we don't know what the rest of the half of this year is going to be like. dig into that and say, how can I become more efficient? And it's upon us as business owners to take that and Absolutely. Great final thoughts. Hey, thanks again, Eric. I appreciate your time, brother. Keep rocking and rolling. All right. Thanks, Sebastian. See you, buddy. You got it. Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story podcast. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. We sure do appreciate it. Signing off from the podcast, launchlab.com studios.