Will Wang of Black Belt Consulting joins Jeremy Rivera to discuss his journey from corporate IT analyst to accidentally building a seven-figure marketing agency. In this candid conversation, Will shares the expensive lessons he learned about hiring (including a $500,000 mistake), how he's leveraging AI for market research while keeping humans in the loop, and why he's betting big on YouTube and Instagram while going bearish on LinkedIn for 2025.

This episode is packed with practical insights for agency owners, consultants, and entrepreneurs who are scaling their businesses and want to avoid the costly mistakes that come with rapid growth.

Listen to the full episode: Unscripted SEO Podcast

Will Wang

About Will: Will grew up in Sydney, Australia, worked in corporate IT making $130-150K/year before taking the leap into entrepreneurship. After two years of struggles and making every mistake possible, he built a seven-figure marketing agency which he sold 12 months ago. He's also a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt (earned 4 years ago) and now runs Black Belt Consulting, helping businesses scale from $25K to $250K per month with strategic marketing consulting.

On Making the Leap:

"If I don't do this now, then it's never going to get done. But how do you replace $130,000 per year salary? Right? Like that's pretty difficult."

On Building Accidentally:

"I accidentally built my previous business into a seven figure business without really meaning to. It was just like the growth happened."

On Making Mistakes:

"I made every single mistake to the point where I couldn't make any more mistakes. And then the business kind of took off."

On the Hiring Disaster:

"I've probably personally lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in terms of hiring the wrong people, setting them up for failure, setting them up in the wrong way."

"We weren't big enough for a GM. Like we just did not need a general manager. We just needed me to spend less time working in a few of the things on the business."

On Team Building:

"I like having a very small core team of highly competent people. People who you don't necessarily have to micromanage or have a look at what they're doing every single day of the week."

On AI Research:

"AI has made research just such an easy thing to do. Rather than taking days, if not weeks, it's now delivered in a matter of minutes."

"Nothing that we do that gets delivered to clients or that we tell clients to deliver for themselves—none of that is actually AI done. So the output is still very hands on human."

On AI Hallucination:

"There's just so much BS with AI. It hallucinates so much stuff all the time. So you've got to be very, very careful."

On Platform Strategy:

"YouTube is the big one for me. I'm investing a lot into that this year."

"LinkedIn just feels like it's so transactional and kind of day by day at the moment. So I'm a little bit bearish on LinkedIn, but more bullish on video content now."

"I don't like creating content once and then having it just disappear into the ether."

On Content Persistence:

"The fact that we can post a reel up and get long-term growth and every single day it grows—that's kind of surprising to me because it means that the content's sticking around."

On Service Business Marketing:

"As companies start ignoring direct mail or fight to do purely online, I find that the offline has really started to come around and perform a lot better."

On What's Missing:

"With AI coming through, the marketing execution stuff is actually so easy now. What people are missing is the strategic piece."

On His New Approach:

"If you're doing 25K a month and you want to get to 250K, hit me up."

Jeremy Rivera is the founder of SEO Arcade, host of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, and has 19+ years of SEO experience. He specializes in converting podcast interviews into comprehensive content marketing strategies and connecting SEO tactics to actual business outcomes.

Jeremy has worked in-house, at agencies (both good and bad), as a successful freelancer, and now runs SEO Arcade's whitelabel podcast-based content and link building service for agencies and businesses.

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Episode Length: ~47 minutes

Episode Format: Unscripted conversation

Best For: Agency owners, consultants, entrepreneurs scaling service businesses, marketers interested in AI integration and platform strategy

This episode of the Unscripted SEO Podcast brings you real conversations with real SEO professionals about their journeys, mistakes, and insights. No scripts, no PR-approved talking points—just honest discussion about what works (and what doesn't) in building marketing businesses.