The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast

Rachel Wilson Thibodeaux is Founder, Brand Strategist, and Professional Speaker at SWAG Strategy Solutions a boutique consultancy that helps clients design unique brands to "better position their offers" and market them at least twice as effectively as they were in the past. Clients include women entrepreneurs, as well as service providers and experts, people Rachel says want to make a big impact and income. Building blocks of what Rachel connotes as "brand curation" include: Asking clients, "What do you most want to be known for?" Identifying the audience, even down to the one person who will most resonate with the client's offering Establishing the most effective way to connect with that individual. Rachel majored in finance and marketing at the University of Houston and spent the first 16 years of her career in financial services. In 2013, she left her "good-paying, good-benefits" six-figure job to chase her entrepreneurial marketing dream. How does someone make that kind of transition? Rachel believes that it important to communicate to your community, the groups to which you belong, what you are doing businesswise, "even if you don't yet have a product or a service out there." She provides a number of questions that can help build the kind of engagement which can turn into future buy-in. She says that success requires disciplined consistency in doing the hum-drum activities; e.g., making a certain number of phone calls to connect with customers. In this interview, Rachel talks about when and how to reengage humor and the importance of sensitivity to what is going on in terms of the pandemic, social unrest, the fact that it is an election year, and concerns about the economy. When posting to social media, Rachel often posts questions she thinks will "bring a smile to someone's face," help them escape for a moment what they are going through, and increase "connection." The most important thing? Know and respect your audience. Rachel had an Ask Me Anything Live session at virtual HubSpot Inbound 2020 where she fielded audience questions about Brand Development, Positioning, and (especially) Social Media Marketing, as well as offering guidance on posting and engagement in the "new normal," connecting with people, managing COVID impacts, and online responses to the pandemic and the changes it has brought. She also addressed social listening, paying attention to the data available online, your audience feedback (comments, likes), and engagement to identify what works and what doesn't, create better campaigns, and communicate better. Rachel can be reached on LinkedIn at Rachel W. Thibodeaux, Instagram at @rachel.vswagstrategist, and on her company website at swagstrategy.com. She has a Facebook group – Brand, Sell profit – for entrepreneurs/brand-builders/experts. She offers a virtual program for strategic pivoting called "Pivot to Profit," with a free "sample portion" (one of the five parts) available at: bit.ly/pivot2profitnow. Check it out. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Rachel Wilson Thibodeaux, Founder, Brand Strategist and Professional Speaker at SWAG Strategy Solutions. She's based in Houston, Texas. Welcome to the podcast, Rachel. RACHEL: Thank you so much, Rob. ROB: Why don't you start off by telling us about yourself and about SWAG Strategy Solutions and what gets you going and keeps you going? RACHEL: Oh boy. That can be a dangerous question when you ask a speaker to talk about themselves. But I am in the Houston area. I'm originally from North Texas, from the Dallas/Fort Worth area. College brought me to Houston. I've been here almost ever since. Not quite. I did return home for a few years after college and then came back to Houston around 2008. Even saying that is a little scary because time has really flown by. But I spent about 16 years in corporate America, working mostly in financial services. I was a double finance and marketing major at the University of Houston, so I went in the finance route. Marketing, though, was always a passion of mine. I know "passion" sometimes is an overused word, but that word comes to mind. Throughout my corporate career, I was always still focusing on and doing things on the side that were entrepreneurial and also that allowed me to feed that hunger, if you will, in terms of the whole marketing and brand aspect. I kept getting this pull, this entrepreneur pull, when I was still working in corporate America, and more so the last 2 to 3 years. So in 2013, I left my good-paying, good-benefits-having job, as I've referred to it before, because that's how my mother referred to it as she was asking me, "Are you sure you're leaving that good-paying job?" "Yeah." [laughs] Since then it has been quite an adventure. My business, SWAG Strategy Solutions, which is a boutique consultancy, has certainly evolved over the last 7 years or so. Now we focus primarily on brand development, and as I like to say, helping clients curate a brand. I use that word more than "build" because I think with curating something, more of a design comes into place. We want to help you design a brand. We want it to be very unique. Sometimes when you build something, it's based on instructions. It's based on a model, almost like a model home. Other homes in the neighborhood tend to be modeled after that home. So; I'd like to think that I'm helping clients curate a brand as well as better position their offers and market better – at least twice as better. We work a lot with women entrepreneurs along with service providers, experts – folks really looking to make big impact and income. ROB: Doubling your effectiveness is certainly a big difference. When we are breaking down brands from the big picture into some of the pieces and parts, what are the components or building blocks of a brand you think about when you're starting to work with a client? RACHEL: First and foremost, I usually ask prospective clients as well as clients – and this is something I've shared when speaking, in blog posts; I think it's such an important question – "What do you most want to be known for?" I emphasize the word "most" because many of us are good at more than one thing. Many of us are multifaceted, multi-passionate, multi-something. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it can make things more difficult in terms of really creating a brand and niching down and honing in on what you can most be effective at. That is a key question. I think it's important to really get foundational, if you will, and look at how you're most wanting to effect or impact your audience. You also want to get clear on who that audience is because it really should not be "everyone" – although I know, especially with newer entrepreneurs, and sometimes not just new, we tend to think we can help the world. We want to change the world, and we sometimes think of that literally. "I want to help everyone." But it's important to really zero in on who is that audience, who is that group. It helps to even get it down to thinking of one person who's going to most resonate with what I have to offer, and how do I connect with that person? ROB: That focus, I'm sure having that external perspective from you is helpful in even getting to that understanding because sometimes we don't fully know ourselves. You mentioned a little bit into your origin story, and your last 2 or 3 years in corporate America, you had this longing on the entrepreneurial side. What pushed you over the edge? It sounds like you were thinking about it, but that means you were also thinking about not doing it, and at some point you overcome that tension and you make the leap. What was that process like for you? RACHEL: I had been doing entrepreneurial things almost throughout my career. Not quite throughout, but from different ventures I was involved in. For example, I did some consulting. I helped form a real estate investment group with three of my buddies. That happened when we were in our mid-twenties. We were kind of crazy kids, or somewhat kids, exploring real estate development. The last 2 or 3 years or so, things had started to change at the company where I was and even in my role as well. At the time, I was a relationship manager – which I enjoyed. Even at the time when I left, I still enjoyed it, although I didn't feel quite the same about it. The writing was just on the wall, as it often is in these situations. There had been changes in leadership; the direction of the company and our division in particular was really going in a different direction that I didn't really like. I often tell people, I was not fired, but it was one of those situations where I felt I didn't really have a choice because of some things that happened, what transpired to make me take that leap. Frankly, I had considered leaving a few months before that. I actually left my last job in August of 2013. I seriously considered leaving in May because of another situation. It wasn't the right time. I didn't feel it was the right time. I wasn't totally sure it was the right time when I left, and I tell you, Rob, my eyes were glazed over for about two weeks. I was in a state of "Huh . . . I really did that. I left." [laughs] I left my six-figure corporate job that at one time, certainly when I started and probably even during the first year or two, I figured I would be there long term. I wasn't convinced necessarily I'd retire there, but I figured I'd be there longer than I was. It just goes to show you how things can happen. There was certainly some fear. I say all the time, everything was certainly not perfect. It wasn't close to being perfect when I actually left. My husband has been in law enforcement most of his career. He had just gotten back into law enforcement at that time, had started a new job. His benefits had not even kicked in. We had savings, but it still wasn't an ideal time. But again, I felt it was time for me. ROB: Congratulations on that. Now if there's anything concerning in the business, you've just got one person to look at, and they're in the mirror, so that's a little bit different. We were originally looking at connecting around HubSpot's Inbound conference, which is a great conference. Happens every year. Normally, past couple of years, we record it live with speakers like yourself, so we always love connecting with HubSpot speakers. You had an Ask Me Anything Live session on brand development, positioning, and social media marketing. What kind of questions did you expect coming into that, and what were some of the themes of what you did hear from the audience? RACHEL: Going in, I figured I would get questions about brands, about branding, certainly about social media. I got more questions, though, about social media, which is kind of interesting since that was the last thing mentioned. But I think it just goes to show you social media continues to be a hot topic, especially among marketers, whether online or traditional marketers. There were several questions about social media. There were a couple of questions as well about how to navigate this "new normal" we're in, how to manage what's going on with COVID, things to do online in light of the pandemic and the changes that has brought about. So yeah, there were some questions along those lines too. ROB: How do you suggest people think about marketing in – I don't even know if there's a new normal. It seems like things just continue to change, and we keep adapting, and you wonder what you can say, what you should say, what you shouldn't say, and what to start doing and what to stop doing. How are you thinking about all this, and what do you have to tell the audience here? RACHEL: One thing certainly is I don't think it's a good idea to ignore everything happening. I've seen that with some brands and marketers. Not many. Frankly, I think most are addressing what's going on – and when I say what's going on, I mean it's more than one thing because we're dealing with a number of things in this very interesting year of 2020. You've got the pandemic, obviously. You have this social unrest going on. It's an election year. There's challenges and certainly concerns about the economy. So, there's a lot going on. I think any really great marketer – and this is part of being connected with and knowing your audience – you have to speak to that. It doesn't mean that you dwell on it all the time, but in your marketing, in your messaging, I think it makes sense to address these things. I have a big sense of humor, sometimes a quirky, sarcastic sense of humor, and I'm big on incorporating humor. I think sometimes it helps, certainly. If you can put a smile on someone's face or help them escape what they may be going through, even if it's for a few minutes, a day or so, that certainly helps. So, I think in terms of posting on social media, for example – and I'm also big on questions. I love posting questions. It could be, of course, related to business and related to brands, or it could be something, again, to put a smile on people's faces. I've asked the question before to parents, "Have you had any brown liquor before noon today? I'm just curious," because a number of parents I know are really going through it. I think that is really important, and connecting even more. Obviously, connection has become a big thing, or bigger, I would say, over the last few years. I think consumers are wanting to connect more. They're expecting more, or have been, even before this year, expecting more from brands. I think it's really important to engage. Social media is social. I think sometimes people forget about that. They think it's a one-way conversation when it's definitely not. ROB: Hmm, so you're saying that clear liquor before noon is okay? RACHEL: [laughs] Maybe. You might be able to get away with it, Rob. The brown, you've got to be careful. You've got to be careful about that brown liquor. ROB: Yeah. Even on a podcast. It's interesting – even where you went with that, the humor you used there, it's relatable and it acknowledges the moment without engaging in humor at someone's expense. It's kind of humor at our own expense. I was speaking a while back with someone who's involved in marketing at Buffalo Wild Wing, and they said with the pandemic, they basically cut – they engage in humor a lot, but they cut it all. They went transactional and they're killing it in ecommerce now. Their best day used to be the Super Bowl. Now every day is the Super Bowl for them for online ordering, which is fascinating. They really had to overdo and redo their ecommerce systems. But how do we figure out when it's okay to reengage humor, how to reengage humor, how to not do so in a tone-deaf way? RACHEL: I think what you said is key. You don't want to offend people – at least, I try not to offend people. Now, it's possible that could still happen, I suppose, but I don't try to offend people. Again, this is your audience, or typically you're speaking to your audience, so you want to respect your audience. You don't want to be offensive. Now, having said that, I think being bold is different from being offensive. What you believe in, what you stand on, I think there's nothing wrong with communicating that and standing your ground on what you believe. I think you let that be your guide. ROB: Definitely makes sense there. The Inbound crowd in particular can be a little bit more of a business-to-business marketing audience. Quite often, although you get a mix because it's a big, big conference. When it came to social media, what sorts of questions – where do people fall on the spectrum? Was this B2B marketing, "How do you even do this?" Were there questions about emerging channels or channel selection? What were people wondering along the lines of social media? RACHEL: I don't recall there being anything specifically about B2B. The questions had more to do with, to some degree, posting, engagement. That came up. I answered that question in terms of engagement because it was related to – I think that was all the same question, how to engage now, given the environment. I spoke to that in terms of engaging now, giving everything, going on, and connecting with people, and the humor and that kind of thing. There was also a question – and it threw me off a little because I have heard this term, but there's different versions of this term. A question came up about social listening. I have heard more so of social media listening, and then there's another version I'm not remembering right now that's similar to that, although there's a slight difference. So that question came up. Social listening is really about taking data, using the data available to you online. It's using feedback that you get from your audience, whether that's through comments, likes, you paying attention to the comments, the likes that you're getting, different parts of engagement, and using that. There's one thing, collecting that data, and then the other part is what you do with it. You certainly use that data certainly to your benefit. You can use that in helping you create better campaigns, communicate better, paying attention to when you are posting, what works and what doesn't. ROB: That all makes sense, especially within the context of the conference. I do hope that you will be back to share in person next year. I hope we can do that by September of next year, but I guess we will see. RACHEL: Yeah, that would be cool. ROB: Maybe we can meet after noon so that we can choose whichever color of liquor we prefer. [laughs] It's about creativity here. Rachel, when you reflect on your journey, it sounds like you have honed in on some focus areas for SWAG Strategy Solutions. What are some lessons you've learned since jumping off on your own and building and growing the business – lessons you might do differently if you were starting afresh today? RACHEL: Ooh. How much more time do we have, Rob? [laughs] ROB: [laughs] We have as much as you need. RACHEL: You absolutely learn a number of lessons. Or you should, I think, especially in 7 years or so. One lesson certainly that I've learned is how important it is to build or create an audience, a community if you will. I didn't realize how important that was when I first started. When I left my job, I was on social media, I was on a few platforms. At the time I was using LinkedIn somewhat a lot, Facebook – but Facebook completely socially – and Twitter. I am also somewhat – I like to think I'm recovering – somewhat of both an information and a political junkie. So, as you can imagine, I spend a lot of time on Twitter. But again, not as much for business purposes. When I started my business, I figured the skills I had before and that I had utilized in corporate America were transferable. And to a degree, they are. But it really makes a difference when you have a community. That can show up in different ways, whether it's an email list, whether it's a Facebook group, some other group. When you have people who really understand what you're doing in terms of business – and even if you don't yet have a product or a service out there, you're talking about it, you're getting them to buy in even before you put it out there – that turns into, often, your customers, your clients, and folks who can sing your praises and help you get more customers and clients. That is certainly one lesson. Also, consistency. Again, some things you think that you get. "Yeah, I know I need to be consistent." But I really didn't. Not the way running a business really requires, being really committed to doing certain things – and certain things that are not necessarily sexy, certain things that are not what you jump out of bed in the morning wanting to do, whether it's blogging, whether it's making phone calls and making a certain number of phone calls, whether it's an actual phone call or a text. However, you're reaching out to people, connecting with people, pitching, these are things that really make a difference in a business and help you move it forward. Those, as some people refer to them, revenue-generating activities – that is what you most need to be consistent about. That's something else that I have learned more since starting my business. ROB: That's very consistent. I can see why HubSpot brought you in. Last year they mentioned this flywheel concept. It was a little bit forced, but basically it's a similar thing. They talked about talking to people and building a community and serving them well, and then it turns into business. But then business turns into service. You still have to service those customers well. It turns into word of mouth, it turns into marketing. They had this flywheel effect. I think a challenge many people have here is with consistency. Some people are very, very natural community builders. You watch them, and the moment they decide they're going to have a new business, they're building the community before you even know what the business is, and maybe before they do. For someone who it's not as natural for, how do you think about getting to consistency, getting to the right audience, if maybe you don't know who that audience even needs to be? RACHEL: I am really big on feedback. If that's something that doesn't come quite naturally to you, and certainly if you're not quite sure of what audience or what group you should be connecting to, look around at your own network, even if that's very small. That may be coworkers. That may be subordinates. That may be even friends and family. It could be someone in a Facebook group that you're in. Start asking them questions along the lines of what you want to do, what you're thinking of doing, or if you do have something that you're working on or maybe even you've completed, ask them questions about that product or that idea. And really pay attention to what they say. Also ask them and the people closest to you, like friends and family, how they see you. What is it that they feel comfortable and they feel pretty confident coming to you for? I think those basic questions, that can also be profound, can be underrated. Sometimes I think we also underrate or discount our friends and family, but those are the people closest to us. It's not to say that that's necessarily your target audience, but it's a starting point just to get that feedback. For folks who are not natural, I would say, or it doesn't come as natural to them for building a community, you have to find the way that works for you. It may not work as well for one person to do a podcast or to create a blog. It may work a lot better for them to build an email list, to put something out there of value that they can offer free and folks jump on it because they do find a lot of value in it, and they just communicate through email. It all depends on you. It's not just about what you're comfortable doing. I do think you should enjoy what you're doing, and specifically in terms of building community. But realize it absolutely may require you – probably no "may" – it will require at some point for you to step out of your comfort zone. So, make sure that you're balancing comfort rather than hate. You don't want to do anything you hate, but at the same time, don't rule out certain things because you're not comfortable with it, you're a little fearful or it doesn't come naturally, as you say. That doesn't mean necessarily that you should not be doing that. ROB: That's such a great distinction between the things that you hate versus doing the things you're uncomfortable with. That's a great point. The people that know you well are going to be able to give you good feedback because people you don't know, so often, will tell you that your idea sounds nice because they don't have the relationship to tell you the truth. RACHEL: Yeah. ROB: This is really, really good stuff, Rachel. Tell us, when we want to go out and find and connect with Rachel Wilson Thibodeaux and when we want to see more about SWAG Strategy Solutions, where should we go to connect with you? RACHEL: I hang out a lot on LinkedIn and Instagram. Those are probably my two favorite platforms. I kind of have a love/hate relationship with Facebook, but that's another conversation. You can find me there too. But you can find me on LinkedIn under my name, Rachel W. Thibodeaux. You can find me on Instagram @rachel.vswagstrategist. On Facebook, I do have a group for entrepreneurs, for brand builders, experts if you will – those looking to curate a brand and to do that better and market better. That's called Brand. Sell. Profit. It actually is also the title of my latest book, Brand. Sell. Profit. And then my website, of course. You can find the website at swagstrategy.com. And I'd like to offer your audience a gift, Rob, if I can. ROB: Please do. RACHEL: I've been talking a lot, as many people have, especially people in business, about pivoting and the importance of being able to pivot, especially in this environment. That has probably become a buzzword, so while I think it's really important to pivot, I think there is a way to pivot. I like to think it's better to pivot strategically. So I have a virtual program called Pivot 2 Profit, and I have a portion of that – I'm offering one of the five parts of that that you can check out. There's a video. It's absolutely free, and I talk about a couple of those ways to pivot in a strategic way. You can find that by going to – and this is a shortened link – bit.ly/pivot2profitnow. ROB: Fantastic. We'll work to get that into the show notes. I imagine you have some excellent points there. You pivot, keep one foot planted if you move the other one. If you move both feet at once, it's just dancing. There's some good stuff to find there. We'll get it in the show notes. Rachel, thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations on the talk at Inbound. I heard they had very, very large audiences for that. RACHEL: Yeah. ROB: I hope they have us back in person next year. I'd love to connect up and record live. RACHEL: Absolutely. Thank you. ROB: Have a great one, Rachel. Be well. RACHEL: You too. ROB: Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Jay Taylor is the Managing Director of Leverage, an award-winning digital marketing agency and Certified Google Partner. Leverage partners with its client brands to help them dominate their market with custom-tailored, location-based digital marketing strategies and concentrates on verticals in legal, healthcare, real estate and construction. The goal is to position a client company at the top in terms of search visibility and digital presence for each of a client's geographic locations and practice areas. Key to this effort is utilizing a "hybrid strategy," embedding websites with obvious search terms and then including other less competitive, highly targeted keywords. Jay provides the example of a "Tampa personal injury attorney," whose keywords might also include "Tampa dog bite injury attorney" and "Tampa slip and fall attorney." While great content is essential to successful SEO, the agency recommends adding paid search, PPC, Google Ads . . . all of these combined can be "very effective.: The goal is to get a client's site to show up once on the first search results page, and quite possibly once on the second or third pages, with a possible first position in Organic . . . AND in the paid results above that AND in the right-hand side knowledge panel. Is that enough? Not yet. Jay believes reputation management is essential for establishing a successful online presence and even more critical for establishing a successful search presence. Companies need to have a reputation generation and management strategy running alongside their SEO and PPC efforts. The objective is to beat competitors with both the number of reviews AND with a higher average rating. Perception: More ratings + higher average rating = CLEAR WINNER! Jay started his career in marketing working at someone else's agency. He studied finance and marketing while pursuing his MBA and started Leverage Digital upon graduation in 2006-2007, way too soon, he says, in retrospect. A few more years of experience at an established agency would have provided him with the opportunity to learn how run an agency, "from sales to operations to account management," and to understand the services. He confesses to googling "how to write an invoice" upon securing his first client. Jay gave himself a deadline of "being profitable within 12 months" and two years later started hiring staff so the agency could grow. At the same time, he shifted his personal focus from technical work to working on client strategy. Today, Leverage's creative team handles design and copywriting, the development team handles programming and website development, and the account management team services the accounts. When Covid-19 struck, his agency went remote. They are back in the office now, masked, and with social distancing measures in place. They meet with clients either remotely or in person, depending on the client's preference – but the focus is always "on safety." Jay defines agency growth more In terms of growing the size of the accounts they have rather than adding to the number of accounts. Leverage has received a number of industry accolades and honors, including those from the International Davey Awards, Hermes Awards, W3 Awards, and Communicator Awards. In 2018, Leverage was named the 9th fastest growing company owned or led by a University of South Florida alumnus. Jay notes that it important "to focus on your strengths and be the best in your area of expertise and not try to be all things to all people." Jay can be reached on his agency's website at leveragedigital.com and on LinkedIn at: linkedin.com/jaytennysontaylor Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Jay Taylor. He is the Managing Director of Leverage, based in Tampa, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Jay. JAY: Thanks, Rob. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me on. ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about Leverage. What is your specialty? What is your superpower? JAY: Sure. We are a digitally focused agency here in Tampa Bay. We are specialists in helping our clients engage their customers at the local level with custom tailored location-based digital marketing strategies. Essentially, what that means is that whether our client has one location or 100 locations, we help them dominate each of the markets that they serve in terms of their search visibility and their overall digital presence. ROB: With that in mind, help us flesh out that idea a little bit. What are some examples of types of clients that you tend to work with? JAY: We have concentrations in the legal, healthcare, real estate, and construction verticals. A good example would be a law firm. Let's say a law firm that has five different locations in five different markets. Each of these locations really needs to be front and center whenever somebody is searching for whatever the practice area may be. Let's say they're searching for a personal injury attorney. If their customers search for a personal injury attorney within one of the markets that they serve, we need to make sure that our client is populating at the top of the search results for that particular search within their market. Then we replicate that for each of their markets. Again, whether they're serving one market or five markets or more, we make sure that they dominate the search results in each of those markets. ROB: That's really interesting. For the example you gave of personal injury attorneys, they can be, shall we say, very aggressive marketers. I would imagine some of those search terms are pretty competitive. What is the state of the art in 2020 to get somebody ranking for the terms they want to rank for in a local market? JAY: That's an excellent question. Everyone tends to go after the obvious search terms. We actually try to avoid those. We try to help our clients outmaneuver their competition in terms of the search terms or keywords that they're going after. Sticking with the personal injury example, a law firm here in Tampa that specializes in personal injury are going to, in most cases, want to target "Tampa personal injury lawyer." That's an obvious term that all of their competition is going to be going after. It's very competitive, and probably not the best use of resources. What we would recommend or advise is, hey, instead of putting all our resources into going after a handful of highly competitive keywords, let's go after lots of less competitive, highly targeted keywords. Let's go after "Tampa dog bite injury attorney" or something along those lines, or "Tampa slip and fall attorney," something that's not as obvious and not something that all of your competitors are also going after. By having that what we call hybrid approach where, yes, we're going after the competitive search terms as well, but we're also going after a lot of the less competitive, more targeted search terms – and by more targeted, I mean they'll convert at a higher rate – we are able to help our clients compete at a lower cost and also outmaneuver their competition. ROB: That sounds like a meaningful long-tail strategy. That informs a little bit of what terms you're targeting, but sticking a little bit into how are you targeting, in 2020 is this still a game of content marketing? Is it crafting specific pages really well? Are there supplemental non-SEO strategies that are coming to bear there? JAY: Absolutely, all of the above. Content marketing is a significant component if we're talking about organic search or search engine optimization. Content really is the foundation of a successful SEO campaign. We do recommend adding a paid search component. SEO and paid search or PPC or Google Ads, whatever you want to call it, combined can be very effective. What we like to do is help our client literally dominate the search results page for each of the keywords that they target. What I mean by that is, instead of just showing up once on the search results page – let's say they show up once in the second or third, maybe even the first position in organic. We also want them to show up in the paid results right above that, and we also want them to show up in the knowledge panel on the right hand side. We refer to that essentially as the holy grail, if you will. We have them listed three times on the Google search results page for one single keyword. And if we can replicate that for 20 keywords or 30 keywords, that is a very effective overall search marketing strategy that consists of both organic and paid search. ROB: Makes plenty of sense. One thing we've often heard when it comes to local marketing is the challenge of local reputation management, of ensuring that your contact information, whether due to a lack of maintenance or due to maliciousness, is not being shown as incorrect. Is there much of a trend around the need for reputation, or is Google getting better about that, and Bing and Yelp and so on? JAY: Reputation management is critical in terms of establishing a successful online presence in general. I believe it's even more critical when we're talking about establishing a successful search presence. What we advise our clients is that you cannot have a successful search presence without also having a great online reputation. We typically advise having a reputation management strategy in place that coincides with your SEO and PPC efforts. When somebody finds your website on Google, as an example, they see that you have fifty 5-star reviews while your competitors probably have fewer reviews than that, and they're probably going to be somewhere right around 3 to 4 stars while you're closer to 5 stars. Because of the volume of reviews that our client has and because their overall rating is going to typically be higher than their competition, they're going to be the clear winner from a perception standpoint that a prospective customer might have when they find them after performing a search. ROB: Reviews have certainly become a battleground for getting noticed. These days, some businesses almost have so many growing reviews that there's a question of authenticity around that. How are you seeing that question of, "Are these reviews for real?" And sometimes maybe they're even not for a competitor. JAY: That's interesting. One thing that I see is sometimes all of the reviews will come from people who work for the company. That's great; it's great to get feedback from your employees, from your staff, and it'll give you that 5-star rating on Google in particular. That is good to a certain extent. There's nothing wrong with getting reviews from your employees, again, getting positive feedback. But at the same time, that's not what your customers are looking for. If they dig a little further and they start to actually read the reviews, they're going to quickly discover these aren't reviews coming from other customers. These are reviews coming from employees of the company, and they're probably not going to have much faith in those reviews. It's much more effective, much more powerful to have reviews from actual customers. It's pretty obvious when a real customer is leaving a review versus somebody that is not being authentic. Sometimes you'll see a review that's way over the top and it almost sounds like it came straight from the owner. And in some cases it might have. It's pretty obvious. I definitely would not recommend that. We recommend developing a review generation strategy, having a system, a program in place to request legitimate reviews from legitimate customers. That's the best way to handle it. ROB: So getting reviews just becomes a process you execute as a business, just like you would pay your bills and order supplies and whatnot. JAY: Absolutely. It just becomes a part of your marketing strategy. ROB: Perfect. Jay, if we rewind a little bit, what is the origin story of Leverage? How did you get into this business? JAY: It's a pretty long story, so I'll give you the short and sweet version. While I was getting my MBA, I figured out that I wanted to start working in the marketing and advertising industry. I got a job working at an ad agency here in Tampa and really fell in love with the work, fell in love with the day to day challenges. I was studying both financing and marketing while I was getting my MBA, so I was learning the theoretical side of marketing, but I was also getting the practical experience at my job. This was right around 2006-2007, and then the recession hit and I said, "Probably not the best time to start a business, but I've always wanted to start a business." At that point in time, I was right out of school. Really didn't have a lot to lose at that time of my life. So, I said, "I'm going to take the risk and I'm going to do it now because it's now or never." That was my mindset. I took what I learned in school, I took what I learned working at that advertising agency, and I used that to help launch Leverage. This was in 2008. At that point in time it was just me, and I was working out of my house. Bootstrapped. I didn't take any loans. I didn't borrow any money from my parents or anyone. I really started with a few hundred bucks and used that to purchase my equipment, purchase the necessary software. I did everything. I designed the websites, I programmed the websites, I did the SEO, I ran the Google AdWords, as it was called at that time. I did everything. Then after doing that for a little while, I realized, "If I want to grow, I have to start to hire." I also realized that I really enjoyed working on the strategy side of things with clients, and if I was building websites and doing a lot of the technical work, I didn't really have time to work with my clients and communicate with my clients and work with them on developing their marketing strategy and overseeing that. So, I started to hire and fill those roles that were needed to meet our clients' needs and ensure that we were providing them with the best outcomes, because I certainly wasn't the best graphic designer. I certainly wasn't the best programmer. I went to school for business. I didn't go to school for these things. So, I hired experts who did, and here we are. It's been a long road, but a good journey, a fun journey. ROB: At what point on that journey did it become clear to you that this was going to be able to be more than an experiment and a "why not?" and that you were probably going to be doing this thing for a while? What did that look like? JAY: I gave myself one year and I said, "I want to build a profitable business within 12 months. I have to be able to support myself within 12 months, and if I cannot support myself within 12 months – meaning be able to comfortably pay my rent, buy my groceries, have food on the table, put gas in my car – if I can't do those things after 12 months comfortably, then I'm going to go get a job." So, to answer your question, I gave myself a 12-month deadline and I was able to meet those goals. I was able to get to a point after that first year where I was still working out of my house, but it was comfortable. It wasn't a situation where I felt like I was being stretched too thin. By Year 2, I was able to rent my first office. By Year 3, I was able to begin hiring employees. Year 1 was by far the toughest, and then after Year 1, I really started to gain some traction and go from being a solopreneur, as it's called, to building a team and having a legitimate operation. ROB: I'm going to press in a little bit. I think a lot of people would want to know – just wondering how other people are handling work life and structure as we're 6 months into this COVID pandemic. How did you first adjust your team structure and working patterns, and what does that look like for you now, in October 2020? JAY: We went remote for a while, especially when things heated up in terms of the pandemic, when things got really bad there for a little while. We went remote. We thought that that was the responsible thing to do, the prudent thing to do. It was challenging because we're a very collaborative environment. We're in the office every day. So, it was challenging, and we really relied on technology to help us get through that. Lots of Zoom calls. As of today, we are for the most part back in the office. We've altered the way the office is situated so that everybody remains 6 feet apart. Everyone's wearing masks. It's a very safe environment. We want everybody here so that the collaboration can continue. And yes, you can collaborate through Slack and other means, but that face-to-face interaction I feel really helps us deliver the best outcomes for our clients, and ultimately that's what we're here for: our clients. So, we maintain a safe environment, but without sacrificing that collaboration that really allows us to achieve the best outcomes for our clients. ROB: That's really helpful context there. What are you seeing in terms of clients and their receptiveness to meet? You mentioned you have multi-city clients, so some of them I'm sure you would get on planes to talk to. Where are clients at in this day and age? JAY: For the most part, they're fine meeting via Zoom. We have meetings pretty much every day with clients via Zoom. It's worked out just fine. A lot of our clients are not local. That was not uncommon before, so it really hasn't impacted the way we do things now. But we do still meet with clients in person here at our office in Tampa if they're local and they prefer to meet in person – of course, adhering to social distancing guidelines. So, it's a little bit of a mix. But I would say that our clients who are local do have a preference in some cases, still, to meet face to face. ROB: Got it. Little bit of everything, and I'm sure it comes and goes a little bit. JAY: And Rob, I just want to mention this. At the end of the day, we're here because of our clients. We try to be flexible and meet our clients the way they want to meet. If they prefer to meet by Zoom, then that's what we do. If they prefer to meet in person, then we make that work as well. Ultimately, taking care of them is our number one priority. ROB: Absolutely. Jay, when you reflect on the life of Leverage so far, what are some things you might do differently if you were starting from scratch today? JAY: [laughs] I laugh because that is a very easy question to answer. I would have stayed with the agency that I started with a little bit longer. I think I probably jumped in with both feet a little prematurely. I think there would've been a lot of value in continuing to work with that agency, and if not that agency, another established agency to gain more experience and just learn more about the business before going out on my own. But of course, like every twenty-something, I thought I knew everything. I thought I had it all figured out. At that age you tend to be very confident in yourself and your capabilities, even though you probably don't know as much as you think you do. I suffered from that affliction and decided I was going to do it right then and there. So definitely getting a little bit more agency experience before venturing out on my own is what I would have done differently in hindsight. ROB: What are some of the things you think you might have learned staying and learning in that agency environment faster than you did on your own, or you had to maybe take some lumps? JAY: I think there were probably a number of things. I think I would've learned a bit more about the business itself. Just how to run an agency, and just the simple – everything from sales to operations to account management, and then of course the actual services themselves. I think I probably would've learned a lot more in all of those areas. I definitely took the more challenging road, which was basically "just figure it out as you go." I remember when I first started the agency – this was probably within a few weeks, maybe a month of starting the agency. Landed my first client, and I had to google how to create an invoice. I had never created an invoice before. Google was a great resource for me at this time. This, again, is in 2008. So I googled "how to create an invoice." I did not even know how to create an invoice because I'd never had a reason to create an invoice before. Just things like that. ROB: You might not even know how to get money from people. At least you knew that you needed to send an invoice, so that's helpful. You learned some in the other agency. It's a good start for sure. You started off – you mentioned that 2008 timeline. I think until recently you were known as Leverage Digital. I'm sure when you mention something like a personal injury attorney, there's probably a steady pull to get into other lines of business. I think attorneys are very famously – out-of-home advertising, buses, billboards, you name it. How have you decided which lines of business to open up and do and which ones to still stay out of? JAY: In terms of the types of services that we offer and the channels that we focus on? ROB: Yes. JAY: You referenced our recent brand refresh from Leverage Digital to Leverage. We did that because Leverage is easier to recall, it's easier to say. There's too many syllables in Leverage Digital. Even hard for me to say, even though I've been saying it for over 10 years. So, we dropped "Digital" for those reasons, and also because we feel digital is becoming somewhat antiquated. 10 years ago, it made sense to have that in the name, and now I think digital is expected if you're a marketing agency. I don't think there's a marketing agency – at least there shouldn't be – on the planet that doesn't do digital. That used to be a unique characteristic of ours; I don't think digital is unique to us anymore. So, we dropped it for those reasons. But we still decided to focus on digital because that is what we excel at. A lot of agencies that have started doing digital over the last few years, they're still learning it. They don't really know the space yet. They don't really understand it. There's still a lot of trial and error and a lot of testing, whereas we've been doing it for over a decade. It's in our DNA. It's what we do. There's really no reason for us to get outside of that and to start doing billboards and outdoor advertising and things like that. I truthfully am not interested in doing those types of things. Of course, we could if a client asked. We always want to be accommodating and we'll help them, but that's not really our focus. That's not what we excel at. I think it's really important to focus on your strengths and be the best in your area of expertise and not try to be all things to all people. ROB: That definitely makes sense. The focus thing, you were even able to categorize early on some of the vertical markets you work in most often. There were plenty of things we didn't hear. Some people go deep into auto dealerships. Some people go deep into restaurant marketing, multi-location restaurants, franchises, etc. So, there's definitely some focus there. When we look at what's next for you and for Leverage, if people look you up, at least on LinkedIn, it looks like you've got a few people that work with you on this thing. So, what is coming up next for Leverage or broader in marketing that you are excited about? JAY: With the pandemic and some of the external factors that we've all been dealing with for the last year, or at least for 2020, digital channels are really becoming more competitive because budgets are shifting more and more to digital. Advertisers are – as the example we cited earlier regarding billboards, they're less inclined to get a billboard because there's less people on the roads. That marketing budget has to go somewhere. If it's not going to billboards, it's not going to tradeshows, it's not going to conferences – it's going to digital. That is making digital more competitive, but it's also creating opportunities for digitally focused agencies like ours. We're well positioned to help our clients compete and remain dominant players in the markets that they serve, and we're also well positioned to help clients that we don't yet work with become dominant players in the markets they serve because we have that expertise in digital and we've been doing it for so long. ROB: That makes perfect sense. How do you think about, within the agency, scaling up? When you think about the next 25% of people you're going to bring on board to serve your clients well, how do you think about structuring? Are you in a pod structure when it comes to clients? Do you have more departmental responsibilities and more vertical focus – this person focuses on content, this person focuses on creative, etc.? JAY: The latter. Basically we have our development team and then we have our creative team. Our creative team handles the graphic design and copywriting. Our development team obviously handles the programming and development of websites. We have our account management team that handles account servicing. And I'll tell you, in terms of scaling, I'm not so interested in scaling in terms of growing the size of our agency as much as I am in growing the size of the accounts that we work with. We're not a volume-based agency. We're more selective about who we work with. We prefer to have fewer, larger accounts than having lots of small accounts, if that makes sense. By doing that, we're able to provide our clients with a very high level of service. And that's really what it's all about for us: the level of service that we provide. If we have lots of clients, then we're going to have to have lots of people to service those clients, and they're probably not going to get the same level of service because we're managing so many different strategies for so many different accounts. By having just a few larger accounts that we can really learn and invest in and invest our resources into, we essentially are able to function almost like an outsourced marketing department for our clients. And they get the same level of service and they get the same or better outcomes than if they were trying to do everything in-house. ROB: That's great to think about the benefit, even for your team, of giving them the ability to focus on serving a client well rather than having to switch contexts between serving 50 clients, and maybe something slips and then you're serving more clients not as well as you'd like to. JAY: That's right. I've learned over the years that whether a client is spending $1,000 a month with you or $100,000 a month with you, their expectations are not that much different. Everybody wants to get great results. Everybody wants great service. There's no wrong or right way to do it; it's just the way we do it, we've discovered that we want to be able to give our clients the best level of service and the best possible outcomes. But we're realistic and we know we can't do that if we're spread so thin because we're working with a high volume of accounts. So we really prefer to be selective, make sure that we're the right fit for them and they're the right fit for us, and that we can deliver on their expectations. ROB: Got it. That's perfect, Jay. When people want to find you and they want to find Leverage, where should they go to track you down? JAY: Our website is leveragedigital.com, and I can also be found on LinkedIn. I'm going to try to do this from memory – I might get it wrong, but I think it's linkedin.com/jaytennysontaylor. ROB: Excellent. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Jay, and I hope people will look you up. I learned a lot, and hopefully we all will together. JAY: My pleasure, Rob. Thank you for having me on. ROB: Be well. Thanks. JAY: Thanks. You too. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

John Saunders, Founder of 5Four Digital, honed his SEO, SEM, and PPC digital marketing skills when he started his career working for an agency that provided dealership-level marketing services for automobile manufacturers. When John figured out that he wanted to use his skills for different kinds of projects and a more diverse clientele (SMBs, tech-startups), he started his own company. Today, 5Four focuses on brand identity (logo design and brand guidelines), and website design and development on Shopify, Webflow, and WordPress platforms. In this interview, John explains how to build automated linkages that will increase customer engagement and discusses 3 "shopping" platforms: WordPress, Shopify, and Webflow. John says WordPress was a game-changer – it made CMS (content management systems) "accessible" for people with lower-level HTML and CSS skills. The platform is flexible enough that amazing sites can be built with either the supplied templates or with custom code. A disadvantage of WordPress is that it requires the use of an extensive array of plugins for website "attributes," and these and other security measures need to be maintained. Wordpress with a WooCommerce plug-in works well for ecommerce, but John has found that Shopify allows the agency to more quickly scale stores for its clients. One Shopify app, Teelaunch, provides companies with low cost, high-quality print on demand products so customers can create an MVP (minimum viable product, Eric Ries: The Lean Startup,) and build their own brand for less than $1000. Another CMS option, Webflow, can produce outstanding websites. It has a slight learning curve but is easy to use and highly flexible. Although John currently sees Webflow as "the future," an organization's decision to use a particular CMS platform should be based on a number of considerations. Through the years, John has developed systems and standard operating procedures which allow him to delegate tasks to his staff or to automate processes, so the work gets done automatically. One tool he has found to be particularly helpful is Zapier, which provides a way to "web-hook" different websites, platforms, and apps. John uses Zapier to cross-integrate his company website contact form with Slack (to notify John that the form has been filled out), and then with Mailchimp to send a "thank you for your interest, here's another form." Response to that drives another form for scheduling . . . and that information is sent to Colony. John says Zapier can be used to link Facebook to Gmail, Facebook Forms to Google Sheets, with up to 10 such linkages free. John recommends written website SOPs to facilitate task handoffs to clients if the client prefers to maintain the site. 5Four Digital was already running remotely when Covid-19 hit. John's SOPs and integrated technology continue to keep the agency operating smoothly. Many of his team use Asana to manage tasks. He notes that not everything he has done succeeded. However, the failures often provided the tools, resources, and experience he needed for subsequent projects . . . that did succeed. John recently started a company offering downloadable illustrations featuring people of color so sitebuilders have beautiful pictures that promote diversity. BlackIllustrations.com. He is also involved in digital education and sees a lot of that in the future replacing the traditional four-year degree. John can be found on his personal website at JohnDSaunders.com and @JohnDSaunders on Facebook and Instagram. His agency's website is: https://www.5fourdigital.com/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by John Saunders, Founder at 5Four Digital based in Miami, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, John. JOHN: Hey, Rob. Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to be here, man. Thank you. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. Why don't you start us off with an introduction to 5Four Digital and where you specialize. JOHN: Absolutely. My name, of course, as you said, is John D. Saunders. I'm the founder of 5Four Digital. We focus and allocate our resources towards a couple key services. Those are brand identity, which is logo design and brand guidelines, as well as website design and development for Shopify, Webflow, and WordPress. Those are our main focus areas. ROB: That makes perfect sense. WordPress obviously has been around for a very long time, Shopify a decent amount of time. Webflow is a little newer. How has that development of competencies happened? Did you start in one of those areas? How have you decided where to keep your skills sharp? JOHN: Great question. I started in WordPress – man, it was at least 10 years ago. WordPress put CMS, or content management systems, on the map in regards to making it accessible for people that either have an entry level to HTML and CSS or high level. You create these amazing websites either using templates or doing custom code. I started doing that with WordPress, and man, it was an exciting time because I started out and I learned everything I could from YouTube videos and other things like that. This was in the infancy of WordPress, so it was before they even had all these templates and themes. I was able to build a site for my mom, who's a teacher, and we built this tutoring site. Kids were able to go on, fill out the contact form. I was able to take this idea I had in my head and make it something tangible. That's when I was hooked. As the agency grew, we really thought to allocate our resources toward a few key resources, and WordPress was that main one. As ecommerce started to build up and develop, I thought, WordPress is great. We have WooCommerce, plug-ins that integrate well. But I feel like Shopify was the perfect platform because we were able to scale out stores for clients at a quicker level than WordPress. So, we did that with Shopify. Then a couple years ago, we heard about Webflow, which is another content management system or almost like a live builder, and man, I built my first site in Webflow and I was like, this is definitely the future. It's easy to use. Of course it has a learning curve, but ultimately you can build essentially whatever you want in regards to your website, have your own custom CSS in there, and the designs and things we've been able to create with Webflow have been really, really dope. ROB: Right on. If somebody has a WordPress website, they'll probably stick with WordPress for the time being, although any given revision to a WordPress site can certainly be an entire rebuild. But if someone's starting today, how would you help them consider the decision of whether to go with WordPress or whether to go with Webflow? JOHN: That's a great question. If they're an existing business – let's say they've been using WordPress for 5 or 6 years and they just want to do a refresh or redesign their site. They already have historical data or historical SEO attributes to that website, so I probably wouldn't recommend completely changing over to Webflow unless the site was new and they didn't get a ton of traffic. If they're doing over 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 hits per month, we'd probably stay with WordPress and scale out that website in regards to building out a new design. If the business doesn't get a ton of traffic and they're not really worried about pulling all that traffic to the new site, I would absolutely recommend Webflow. One thing I like about Webflow is a lot is the transition in regards to using the platform is easier. You can build out sites how you want. You don't necessarily need a ton of plug-ins, which is one of the issues I have with WordPress; you need plug-ins for a lot of the attributes you need to add to a website. It also takes a lot of constant upkeep. Every month you have to make sure the plug-ins are up to date. You also have to make sure WordPress, the framework, is up to date, and you're open to malware and malicious attacks from people because the CMS is so popular. The good point about that is there's a ton of resources on WordPress and information out there. Thousands of plug-ins, thousands of resources, developers, designers. It's an open source platform that has a lot of people linked to it. With Webflow, it's a little bit newer, so it's smaller. But the level to entry isn't as steep as say WordPress, and it doesn't need that constant upkeep. You can build out your site, you can set up Zapier to set up web hooks between different websites and platforms, and you're pretty much good to go. ROB: Wow, it sounds like you're deep on the Zapier stuff. That's a whole other unlock there. JOHN: Oh man, it's like a cheat code, dude. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] Tell us about that a little bit for folks who aren't as familiar with Zapier and what sort of directions you can take that toolkit. JOHN: I'll give you a precursor. The first thing is I'm a big proponent of standard operating procedures or setting up systems within the business so I can delegate to either staff, team members, or create automation. That way no one has to do it and it just gets done automatically. I'm a big proponent of that. I work from home. I have five team members on our team, and I love to have the freedom to be able to focus on big picture. With that said, Zapier is a great way to connect different platforms easily through a platform seamlessly. I'll explain that. For example, when you visit our agency website and you fill out the contact form, that form automatically pushes to Slack. As soon as the form gets filled out, I get a notification that someone's filled it out on Slack with their information. That keeps me up to date. Secondly, we set up a Zapier so that it integrates with MailChimp. So as soon as someone fills out that form, they get an automatic email response saying, "Hey, thank you for your interest. Would you mind filling out this free form?" Once they fill out that form, then they get another automatic email push that says, "Hey, great, go ahead and book a time here," and then we've connected Colony. All Zapier does is just connects different apps to each other. You can connect Facebook to Gmail, you can connect Facebook Forms to Google Sheets – the possibilities are endless. I think you can do up to 10 for free and then you can pay for different Zaps. ROB: Very nice. Thinking about WordPress versus Webflow, you get the site designed, you get it developed, you hand it over to the client – is either one of those more conducive to clients being able to manage things themselves? Or is it just the case that clients, even if you give them all the tools, aren't going to manage things themselves to make minor changes in the future? JOHN: It really depends on the client because they're both very user-friendly, especially on the client side, for the most part. It's easy to add blogs. It's easy to update pages once either you're using a third party platform like Oxygen or Divi or Elementor, the page builders. It's pretty easy to use once you get over that initial learning curve. Both WordPress and Webflow have a client-facing side so that they can make updates. So that part is pretty easy. What I like to tell people, especially agency owners, is it's a good idea to set up SOPs, or standard operating procedures, for your clients in regards to the handoff. If you're a web design agency, there's one of two things you can do. You can either manage and host that website for the client, and then they pay a fee every month, or you say, "Hey, here's a repository of my trainings on how to use the platform, how to jump in, how to add blogs. Your team can use this." Because sometimes you'll build a project and give it to their staff. They might have a marketing team or a content marketing team that can create that content; they just need to know how to use the backend. So, you want to have that in your back pocket so that way when a client is like, "Yeah, we don't really want you to manage it. We just want you to build it out and then hand it off to us," you already have that repository of operating procedures that you can give them. ROB: That all makes sense. John, if we rewind a few years, how did you come to start 5Four Digital? What's the origin story here? JOHN: For me, I was at an agency. I worked there for about 4 years. I moved up in the ranks and became marketing director. It was an automotive dealership agency, so we dealt primarily with a lot of the car manufacturers – Audi, Land Rover, Ford – at the dealership level. We would do the marketing at the dealership level. Being in that position taught me a lot because I was able to use SEO, SEM, PPC, all these different services under the digital marketing moniker. It helped me develop my skillset. Once I did that, I got to the point where I wanted to work on different types of projects. I got kind of burnt out from the automotive side. I wanted to work with maybe SMBs, tech startups, and that type of thing. That's when I left and I started my own company, 5Four Digital. I was focused on more so on the product as opposed to how it looked. I didn't need to have a fancy office or anything. Honestly, when I started, I didn't really have much money. I was on the ramen diet, and I was saving money because I had segued from a full-time position to doing this on my own. The biggest thing for me was to really focus and allocate my resources towards providing a great product to the client. I didn't have an office. I was working from home, and I started to build my team remotely. When other agency owners were like, "You need an office, you need this, you need that," I was like, instead of paying $2,500, $3,000, $3,500 – because I am in South Florida – for an office, I can take those resources and I can pay a developer, I can pay a project manager to help scale this business without having to have that burden of a physical location. ROB: So, you were completely ready for the shutdowns this year. Did very much change for you as a business, either with how your team worked, or maybe with some of your clients when some of the COVID-19 shutdowns started to come through? JOHN: I do want to say that a lot of people are going through a lot currently. People are being furloughed, fired from their jobs. It's just a lot. The transition for us prior to COVID and to now hasn't really changed much because we were already running remotely. All the platforms and things that we were using were already conducive to that environment. A lot of our team and our staff work through Asana, our task management system, and that's what we work by. This is when something's due, and team members can work at night, in the day, they can take the day off and take their kids to the park. For me, ultimately you work when you're comfortable because I feel like that's when people work the best, and then we follow the structure of the due date within the task management system. ROB: That makes sense. When I look at your LinkedIn profile, some people are all-in on one thing and some people have a whole portfolio of interesting things they're involved in. What can you share about some of the other projects or businesses that you're involved in that keep your attention and you feel are worth pursuing? JOHN: For me it's about building an agency that not only works well for our clients, but for us internally also. I always recommend those that have the skillset to build an agency because (1) you can help build and develop clients, and then (2) you can build your own products or your own projects that siphon through your agency ecosystem. For us, when we have an idea and we want to build something internally, we're just taking that project or that idea and running it through our client cycle. For example, I have a business called BlackIllustrations.com, which we launched in April, which is a platform that allows folks to download illustrations for their websites, for their projects, featuring people of color. Because I didn't see the market have a lot of that, and as a website builder, there just wasn't a lot of diversity in the illustrations. Now, I've seen some beautiful illustrations, and we've leveraged a lot of them online, but I just didn't see that and I saw that opportunity. When that happened, I put together the process, I told the team, "Hey, this is what we're going to start building out," and then it's essentially just walking them through that client lifecycle. It's almost like taking the ideas that we have and pushing them through this conveyor belt of the business and then being able to make another business that has its own separate income as an entity. BlackIllustrations.com launched in April; we've already had 40,000+ downloads, over about half a million visitors to the website. I'm really proud of that, and a lot of that comes down to creating those procedures and then running it through that cycle. ROB: That makes a ton of sense. With those different projects, you can imagine that some of them are going to thrive, some of them are going to perhaps not thrive. Some of them over time you might need to put to rest. I wonder maybe if even there's some projects that you have brought through the process, they lived a good life, and then you put them on pause. How do you think about the lifecycle and lifespan of these internal projects? JOHN: Essentially, for me it's really about learning as much as I can from the process. In one example, as an entrepreneur, you know we have a ton of failures. I'm not going to act like everything I touch turns to gold. I had one project in particular – it was a Kickstarter campaign. I was trying to raise funds for an app. This was 5 years ago, 6 years ago maybe. I went through the entire process of hiring a videographer, getting footage, walking through the process of creating this crowdfunding campaign, and it was a lot of fun doing it and experiencing it. Ultimately, we flopped because we didn't get to 100% of the goal. I think we got to around 60%. At first, I was like, man, I'm a failure. I didn't do the right thing. But, ultimately, I learned a lot through that process. I learned how to start a crowdfunding campaign, how to create engaging video that converts folks, and how to leverage an audience. So, I like to look at it as an experience as opposed to a failure, and I'm able to use those resources and those things that I came up with and allocate them later on in the next project. ROB: Each project is its own success, even if the project itself doesn't succeed. In that case, how fortunate to assess demand for an app. It's an inexpensive experiment to launch a crowdfunding campaign versus building the dang app and then hoping somebody likes it. JOHN: Exactly. ROB: Very good. John, you mentioned some lessons you learned there. When you look back over the history of 5Four Digital so far, what are some other lessons you've learned along the way and things you might consider doing differently if you were starting from zero? JOHN: I would look at delegating faster than I did prior. I think in the beginning, especially the first year, first couple years, I was trying to do everything and do it all myself. When I started the agency, we were doing SEO, SEM, Facebook ads, social media, web design, web development. It was a complete agency, full service. Which is great, especially if you have a good amount of employees, but it was just me. So I'm working with clients and one client is doing SEO, one client is doing PPC, one client is doing web design, and it's just a lot of work, especially changing your mind and doing the different things and turning off that creative and turning on the analytical side. It was just a lot. I started to get burnt out. One of the things I wish I did was niche down to a specific set of services. Not even niching down to a specific client set, but only offering a few core services. That would've helped me really streamline my process and be like, "This is the process we go through every time we take on a client" as opposed to doing all these different services myself, especially as a small agency or even a freelancer. It was just a lot. So, I wish that was one thing that I did: focus on a few core services. Secondly, I wish I would've started to make my operating procedures in the initial or in the beginning. Really start to think about, "These are the core services we have. These are the things we want to offer." But I think it just took me time to get acclimated to providing a high-quality service to clients and then documenting that process. Then the third piece is hiring faster, hiring either a part-timer or an independent contractor in the beginning to help facilitate some of these things instead of trying to do it all myself and taking hours and hours in the wee morning trying to do it. ROB: How did you go about finding some of those fractional or independent contractors that you could trust to do the work in a way that's going to keep your clients happy? Did that involve the clients at all in the conversation of shifting who was doing the work? JOHN: Great question. For me, finding great people – and again, this is a process as well – comes down to not even necessarily their full skillset. A lot of times you'll try to find the perfect candidate in regards to their skills. I try to find a good quality designer, for example, but I also want them to be able to fit into our team dynamic. The fact that they're fun, engaging. The fact that they get their work done, but they're able to balance that and know that it's an open work environment where they'll be able to have fun and enjoy cultivating their creativity. So, for me, it's really finding someone that's a good fit for the team as opposed to just focusing on skillset. ROB: I hear a recurring passion for process. Is that something that has come naturally for you, but you didn't initially apply it to the business? Or has it been something you've discovered in some way as you've built the agency? JOHN: It's definitely something I've discovered while building the agency. There's a book by Michael E. Gerber called The E-Myth, another book by Tim Ferriss called The 4-Hour Workweek – those are two great reads – that talk about building a process so that you can delegate. For me, ultimately, in the agency right now I'm pretty much the project manager. I'm the one that talks to the client, that organizes the projects, that puts in my two cents and my recommendations and helps the team navigate through the buyer journey or the customer journey. I love being in that role because I'm able to pull out of the day to day and focus more so on big picture. I'm able to convey my ideas to the team, and we're able to implement together on what works best. ROB: I can definitely understand that, and there's probably some future date where you're thinking about that second project manager role that takes that over. That's probably a whole new round of hire. John, you mentioned in your previous agency experience that you had done some work with auto dealers. For people who don't know, that can be a whole segment. A lot of agencies that do auto kind of only do auto. It sounds like you're not doing much of that anymore. One concern I have heard from people who are heavy into that space is some different constraints to the budgets of some of the different dealerships and what they want, and sometimes even the technology. What is your experience with that then, and was there any consideration of that when you decided not to focus on that as much with 5Four? JOHN: Can you repeat the last part of the question? It cut out for a sec. ROB: Oh, sure. How much of that distinction of the constraints of automotive clients drove your decision to focus less on that when you started 5Four? JOHN: Oh man, there's a lot of red tape you have to deal with. Just getting a webpage up or going through a brand discovery session, there's so many people that it has to go through that by the time you get the thing live, it's already dated. [laughs] It was really hard to move and grow the design and the marketing side of it because we had so many constraints in regards to the industry. But nowadays, especially working more so with startups or Series A companies, they have a lot more freedom to move around and upward. If there's new technology that comes out that we want to implement, you don't have to go through three C-level executives to get it done. You can just talk to a couple people, tell them, "Hey, this is how it works," do a small test – if it works, great. Scale it up. It's a totally different dynamic. ROB: I've also heard a number of complaints about the technology that is even able to serve the auto dealer industry. Is that true, number one? And if so, why do you think it is? I've heard often there's a completely different marketing stack for that particular customer. JOHN: I will say in the last probably 2 to 3 years, there's been a lot of companies doing cutting-edge stuff in the automotive industry. Of course, outside of that you have Tesla, which is doing phenomenal things. But there are platforms, especially like for example Dealer.com, which is an automotive digital marketing company – they crush it, man. They do a lot of these different things – it's almost like Google, but in the automotive industry. They have all these different solutions and resources. So, I will say in the last few years there's been a dynamic shift. Of course, you have startups coming out like Carvana that are doing a really great job of showcasing and making the process easier for the customer. I think the automotive industry has taken a while to understand it, but a lot of people don't necessarily want to go into the dealership. They don't want to go through that long process. They're trying to accommodate this fast shifting economy. ROB: I understand that. It's nice that there is some future that is not really, really dated marketing stacks for that industry. John, when you look ahead a little bit, what are you excited about that's coming up either for 5Four Digital in particular or for marketing more generally? JOHN: Man, I'm a tech guy, so I love being a part of this process and being in this industry. Some of the biggest things I see coming down the pipeline are one-click or headless ecommerce. A lot of folks have been talking about it. It's an ecommerce experience where you literally push one button and you're able to purchase, similar to what Amazon has and a lot of these sites that are coming out, but it actually works across the entire internet. That's something I've been hearing a lot of buzz about. In regards to the education side of digital, I'm really excited about it. As we move or shift into this new world dynamic, a lot of people are realizing that traditional college degrees might not necessarily be the best bet for us all. There are just so many options. I have my Bachelor's, but there's just so many different opportunities now. You have all of these educators, people like myself and yourself, who are great and skilled and adept that can create courses and teach other people our processes and the things we're doing. So, I'm really excited for the digital education frontier, I guess we could call it. But I think a lot of people are going to start segueing or moving towards that because it's super affordable. You can buy $500, $1,000, $50 bucks for these courses and learn these tangible skills that can pay you well into the six figures. So, I'm ultimately excited for that. ROB: Do you have some of your current projects or future projects in that online education space? JOHN: Yeah, we have a few resources. My biggest thing is providing value, value, value, value up front so that way you can position yourself as a thought leader, you can gain the trust of the people, they actually take your advice and leverage it and use it, and then creating more high-level, detailed courses for those people that are really trying to dive in heavily. We have a couple courses. We have a Web Design Studio Accelerator, which is for people that want to start their own web design accelerator, and then I have other job templates and SOP courses that people can leverage to learn and apply these skills. ROB: Solid. The SOP courses seem like something you can even also show to your team for training. JOHN: Oh yeah, that's what we do. We probably have 100+ videos for our team. We have one business – it's called IllustratorHub.com; the whole business runs on an SOP. I don't do anything with the business. It's automatically updated. Our team manages it, and it's just a great platform and a great example of creating these operating procedures in your business so that way you can thrive. ROB: Wow, that's excellent. Looping back to one thing you mentioned earlier – and I think I let it go a little bit too quickly; you mentioned beyond Webflow and WordPress – we dug into those differences there – but you also mentioned that you do work on the Shopify platform. If you look at their stock, they're not quite Zoom, but they're pretty close. This seems to have been a fairly banner year for that approachable "get an ecommerce store online" platform. What have you seen in terms of either how clients are investing differently in Shopify now or people who are putting stores online that hadn't quite gotten around to it yet? JOHN: I'm glad you brought up the Shopify stock, man, because it makes me feel like I'm Warren Buffett out here. [laughs] I bought 20 shares when it was like $60 bucks because I believed in the company and I saw what they were doing. With Shopify, I think, like you said, this year is their year. So many people are home. They want to start a business. They want something that's easy, that they can leverage, that they can create a high quality product. And that's what Shopify does. You look at some of the top stores, you have Kylie Jenner's Cosmetics, you have Allbirds, I think Warby Parker at one point was on Shopify. You have all these major brands running through this platform. It just goes to show you that it's made for commerce. People that are starting out like, "I want to sell some t-shirts" can open up a Shopify store, they can integrate it with Teelaunch, and then they can have these high-quality print on demand products with their own logo, their own brand on it. It's really low cost out of the gate. You can test and you can create this MVP, or minimum viable product, as Eric Ries would say, the writer of The Lean Startup, and ultimately you can really build your own brand for less than $1,000 bucks. ROB: Is Teelaunch a Shopify plug-in, or how does it work? JOHN: Yes, it's a Shopify app. They have hundreds of products – teacups, t-shirts. They even have air fresheners. It's ridiculous. [laughs] ROB: CafePress used to sort of let you do this, but you were listing stuff on their site. This is your own brand store. You can have your custom underpants, whatever you want. JOHN: Exactly. And they fulfill on your behalf, so if someone goes on your website and your shirt is $24.99, they go and buy that shirt – the app is integrated, so as soon as they make that purchase, it pushes to Teelaunch, they charge you the $12, $10 for the shirt and then the shipping, and then you take the rest for your profit. Then they ship it on your behalf to the customer, so you don't even have to touch the inventory. ROB: Very, very cool. John, when people want to find you and when they want to find 5Four Digital, where should they go to look you up? JOHN: They can find me at JohnDSaunders.co. That's where all of my resources and guides are. Also, I'm on Facebook and Instagram @JohnDSaunders, and that's pretty much where I'm at. ROB: Excellent. What's the "D" for in John D. Saunders? JOHN: David. ROB: Excellent. Perfect. JOHN: I have that because there's a famous ESPN newscaster who passed away a few years ago and his name is John Saunders. So, I had to put that "D" in there to add a little difference. ROB: Yep, I know that name. I remember that sportscaster. John D. Saunders of 5Four Digital, thank you for coming on the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. JOHN: Rob, thank you for having me, man. I'm happy to be here. ROB: Thank you much. Be well. Bye. JOHN: You too. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Ian Garlic is CEO at authenticWEB. He started his career in marketing about 15 years ago as a consultant for one of the world's largest information companies – back when good video production required hiring high-end, expensive, technically-savvy videographers. When Google purchased its video competitor, YouTube ten years ago, Ian saw opportunity, left the information company, and started authenticWEB. As a video marketing agency, authenticWEB crafts journey-stage-specific, people-story videos designed to reach "the right customers at the right time." The goal: to engage potential customers with emotionally riveting content to "earn their love." For each client, the agency develops 10 to 100 video packages from micro content to 15- to 20- minute mini-documentaries. The different types of videos they produce include: the overview video (most people's commercials), service commercials (covering the different services provided), how-to videos, process videos (explaining complex processes so people understand what happens at different times), topical video blog posts (including social), videos covering frequently asked questions, About Us videos (Ian notes that "About Us" is the second most useful page on a website, an important page for conversion, and that people usually go from the "About Us" to making contact with a company), and video case stories. The most effective video case stories involve interviewing a client's customers and searching for that gem of a story that will evoke a positive response in viewers. Ian says there is no way of telling who will give a good interview and who won't. From raw footage, authenticWEB parses different edits and formats for different clients at different stages of the customer journey. Ian develops videos content to help customers identify a client's business as an "authority" and "a new best friend." The agency's clients include attorneys, doctors, dentists, and other agencies (because agencies often have a hard time marketing themselves). YouTube: The Next TV In this interview, Ian elaborates on the increasing importance of YouTube in marketing outreach – he likens it to "the next TV." YouTube videos need a "to be on point, perfectly messaged, and . . . delivered at the right time." A website only gives you a piece of the interaction data. YouTube gets all the interaction data: including total and percent view time. That kind of feedback facilitates cross-platform video and content improvement. Online video production does not require the same high-end equipment used in the past. Ian notes that today he does his own videography and that he travels "light." The production process is simpler, so that the focus stays on story and editing the story for the audience. Ian recommends reusing content. He explains, if you drive traffic to your YouTube videos, YouTube will increase your rankings. YouTube's search engine is second only to Google. A Google search will start a well-indexed video at the exact moment in the recording where the answer to the searcher's question is provided. Some people think they can buy YouTube followers . . . enough to get their own URL. Ian reminds us, "You can't buy love." Purchased followers won't necessarily view your content, so view time is sacrificed. Ian also discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of some of the online production tools. He can be reached on Linked in or on his agency's website at: https://authenticweb.marketing/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Ian Garlic, CEO at authenticWEB based in Orlando, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Ian. IAN: Rob, it's great to be here. Thank you for having me. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. I think you've got a very distinct perspective that our audience will enjoy. Why don't you start off by telling us about authenticWEB and what your superpowers are? IAN: We've been around for a little over 10 years. We are a video marketing agency. We do some other stuff too, but it's all around delivering people-story video. We're really good at finding that story, understanding how these videos have to be crafted depending on where they are in the customer journey, and then crafting them to deliver and get a response. We create anywhere from 10 to 100 video packages for clients, and then ongoing we create video, do video SEO. Really, what we do is, like really good marketers, we help connect the client's story to their prospect's story and make them the authority. When someone walks through the door, they feel like already they're their best friend and the authority, and that's what the video does for our clients. So that's what we've been doing for about 10 years. We've worked with all sorts of professionals. We work with attorneys, doctors, dentists, and we're working with actually a lot of other agencies now. We have a lot of other agencies, which is fun, because the agencies have such a tough time marketing themselves. I have that problem. It's nice for us to help other agencies market themselves. ROB: Fascinating. I think I heard you say 50 to 100 video packages. That sounds like a lot. Is that different formats for different platforms, different edits? Or is that just that much content? How do you put that together? IAN: It's a little bit of all of it. It's different edits, different formats. You've got to consider where they are in the customer journey. One of the things we're known for is our video case stories. People fly me around to interview their clients to get that story out. I don't try to make people cry, but I kind of do. When you can ask the question the right way, you get that emotional response from your customers, and you have this powerful tool. We get these 30-minute interviews with their customers, and parts of that story need to be used in different ways, in different parts of the journey, from early on, just to get attention and awareness, to longer form customer stories. We're doing some 15-20 minute ones, like mini-documentaries. And then pulling micro content, little clips out of there. Plus, we make essentially 9 to 10 different types of videos. We make your overview video, which is most people's commercials. We make this thing called a service commercial – because most of us have different services, and we want to have a little commercial for each service. How-to videos, which are important, especially on YouTube. Video blog posts, where someone's discussing a specific topic. Under that video blog post, I consider a lot of social posts. We just call it video blog posts. Frequently Asked Questions are a big one. The core videos that we make besides those are micro content, but besides that, we're really known for video case stories and About Us videos. That's the second most useful page on a website. Most people throw up either a bio or some funny video, but really it's a converting page. If you look at your analytics, it's not only going to be in your top three or four pages – it can be out of there depending on what you're doing, but it's top three or four pages. But where people usually go after that is some sort of contact. So really having a converting video on there. And then process videos. We make a lot of process videos because people don't know what happens at different points. The more complex it is, the more people need to understand what's going to happen next and how this is going to look. When you add it all up and you do all the different points and all the different variations, it really quickly adds up to a ton of content along the customer journey. ROB: I've talked to people where they feel like they're intimidated to ask their customer to be on this sort of video. What have you found in terms of overcoming that fear? Is it ever really well-founded, or would people be surprised that more of their customers are willing to get on camera than they might ever expect? IAN: They'd be surprised. There's people you'd think would be great on camera that aren't. It's a numbers game. There's people you'd think would be poor, but have these amazing stories. One of the other things we do is audio interviews like this and then make them into videos with pictures, so it makes it a little easier. But it's the timing of asking, it's how you're asking. One of the things I always tell people is never ask for a testimonial. I don't even like using the word "testimonial" because that's when people really freeze up. If you've done an amazing job for someone and they're really, really happy and you ask them for a testimonial, it's like, "Oh my God, these people did such a good job for me. I'm really nervous about screwing this up for them." They get nervous. So, I always tell people to ask someone for their story. Talk about something specific that you know is important. That will help. But this is the number one piece of advice I can give for anyone's marketing: install asking for those stories into your process at different points. People want to know what the onboarding is like. What is it like right after the sales process? What's it like if you have a strategy? What's it like a year after you're done with your project? Ask along the way. And you can ask the same people multiple times. You've got to dig for those, though. You've got to make it a habit. ROB: You mentioned you have been at this for a little bit. I think you said around 10 years. Talk about the difference in – I think there used to be a perception of video as being expensive, and it's probably still more costly than some methods of marketing. You mentioned I think a little hack in there of being able to take audio and turn it into a video. But how has your production process changed with the advance of different production equipment and tools over your time running the business? IAN: When I started 14-15 years ago now in marketing, I was in New York, and I would hire high-end videographers. I saw that, especially when we came online, we didn't need that high-end production. Now, I think production value is very important, but I see it inflate a lot because people are like, "I need this gear and this gear and this gear." I've definitely trimmed down our production gear. Especially since I travel, I like it light. [laughs] I would say that's the number one thing. It's gotten lighter and easier to set up. There's a lot of cool things you can do now, especially with B roll, to make it interesting. So, it's easier now to – everyone can have a gimbal, everyone can have a slider. There's a few of these other things – you can get a nice 4K camera inexpensively. So we're doing a lot of that stuff still, but as far as the production process, we tweak it, but for the most part we've just been improving how we get the story, how we edit the story, what parts need it. I would say the biggest evolution – I started really in video around when YouTube was purchased by Google. That's when I was like, "Hey, this is going to be a big thing. This is going to be huge. You're going to have this search intense, and people are going to be able to find things on Google and find your video right at that perfect moment." At that point, we still edited really well. We had a process for editing, but our editing process has evolved and evolved and evolved because now there's so much content out there. Your video needs to be on point, perfectly messaged, and needs to be delivered at the right time. Those are the things that we constantly improved, adding more copywriting principles into our video process and that type of thing. Those are the big ones, and then post-production has definitely evolved. We've evolved the post-production side and we're constantly talking about that. What can we do to make this look different, be exciting, be entertaining on the post-production side? ROB: There's a lot of acquisitions that show up as sort of interesting. What do you think it was about Google acquiring YouTube that really made you sit up and pay attention? IAN: (A) It was Google, and (B) video was just happening. There was this idea that you can get your face and your voice in front of someone using video. We can do that, but now Google was not going to let YouTube – that was doing okay at the time; it was having these moments – it wasn't going to let it go away. Then when they started blending the YouTube videos into the Google search results, that's when I was like, this is going to be a game-changer. If you get a video thumbnail into the Google search results, you can be anywhere on that page and people are going to click on it. They're going to recognize your face. They're going to recognize your voice more often. I knew that was going to be the game-changer. Google wasn't going to let that not happen. ROB: In hindsight, the acquisition price was significant. I think it was around $1.5 billion or so. What I think is interesting there is there's actually a cohort between them, Twitch, and Instagram. All of them, I think, were around $1+ billion in acquisition and all of them are probably right in the middle of what you do every day now. IAN: Yeah, for sure. Look at the YouTube acquisition; at $1.5 billion. Of all the acquisitions, that was a steal. It's the second most used search engine. We're putting all of our time and effort into YouTube because it's going to be the next TV. It already is. My son watches it. He's 6 years old. He knows exactly how to navigate it. My niece wants to be a YouTube star. She asked me all about the stats, and she's 10 years old. "What's the view time? How many subscribers does that person have?" At 10 years old. Other stuff will come and go; YouTube is not going away, and if anything it's an essential part of our life. ROB: Just got to keep her away from the comments a little bit – but we probably all should stay away from the comments. IAN: [laughs] For sure, for sure. ROB: Ian, what led you down this path to start authenticWEB in the first place? What were you doing before, and what made you head in this direction, which can be a little bit intimidating at times for some people? IAN: When I first moved to New York, I was still getting back into working in a hedge fund. Worked for one for a little bit, didn't like that. I worked simultaneously in commercial real estate. I was trying to decide – and I worked at one of the top restaurants in the world, actually, as a bartender. Just like, "Okay, what do I want to do when I grow up?" type thing. I was looking at the theme, and the theme was always marketing. I loved marketing, and I always loved digital. I've been on a computer since I was like 6 years old, which is a big deal because I'm not a millennial. [laughs] It all made sense. So, I went to work for one of the largest information companies as a marketing consultant. Loved it, but the advent of Google and YouTube I knew was going to be a huge thing, and also, I saw them not spending time getting to know the client story and really making good marketing. Everything looked and felt the same. It really did an injustice to especially the smaller people with the smaller budgets, because at that point it was who threw the most money at that search channel or whatever. Now, we separate it out and go, "I can serve and connect people with their perfect clients, and when they do that, they're going to love their business so much more. When people walk through the door and they know them already, they're going to love their business." That's really cool when I get that phone call. It's like, "Man, you're right. People feel like they know me when they walk through the door, and it changes how we run our business," which I always love. I knew we could do it better, so I started the agency, and yeah, it was easy since then. No, I'm just kidding. [laughs] Not easy. It's always this endless cycle of – you get the improvement, everything's awesome. It's a rollercoaster. We improve with systems and stuff over the years. Spent a lot of money on consultants, spent a lot of money on a lot of information, and it really improved and created all of our systems. That's helped a lot, but there's always things that are going to come up. But I always know, too, all I have to do is go look at LinkedIn one time and look at jobs and I'm like, "I cannot imagine having to go to a job." I mean, I guess a lot of people aren't going to a job now, but I cannot imagine someone telling me what to do. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] A couple of looks at a job posting and maybe whatever some people have to wear to their office when they go to offices and that's enough? IAN: Yeah. I just look at LinkedIn for a few minutes and I'm like, "Oh no, I could never do this." I could never go for another job interview. I'm officially unemployable. ROB: I think I heard you speak a little bit about discoverability within YouTube and video. You could sort of call it SEO, with YouTube, as you mentioned, being the second largest search engine. We've talked a good bit about the evolution of SEO for web on this podcast; we haven't really talked a lot about the evolution of search on video. Is search on video still fairly understandable? Are there hacks that people used to use that are busted and gone and bad tactics to listen to if you hear them? IAN: Yeah. There's hacks, but unlike a website – a website you kind of get some interaction data. YouTube gets all the interaction data. Yes, keywords are still important – matching up the keywords, understanding the keywords, going for the longtail – but getting that view time – that's why I talk about getting that reaction, getting them to take action. Total view time and percent view time are huge, huge things. So really understanding those "content hacks" of getting the view time is super important. Those are the big ones. I actually had someone the other day like, "I think I'm going to buy followers so I can get my own" – because when you get to I think 1,000, you get your own URL. I'm like, "But if you go and buy followers, on a percentage basis you lose that view time because they're not going to watch your videos. You're going to have these followers that aren't watching your videos and aren't interacting and you're going to lose that visibility." Those are some big ones. I would say those are the big things. And then always be reusing your YouTube content. One of the things I see so much that people don't do is they don't use their YouTube content in other places. You can email it out on a regular basis. If someone has seen it before, they can see it again, as long as it's not just a straight-up ad, if it's informational. Send that content back out. Those are the big ones because if you're driving traffic to your YouTube videos, YouTube is going to reward you with higher rankings. ROB: Got it. In some ways, Google may have seen this on YouTube first, because now in search they'll look at where you land; if that site is running Google Analytics and you stay there longer, they'll consider that as a search ranking factor. But it may have almost been inspired from the video realm. IAN: Yeah, the scroll and everything. It's a lot of the same stuff, I'm sure of it. They can't actually tell what you read, but they can tell what you scroll through. Also, now with YouTube, they're now indexing inside of the videos, and if you add the different parts of your video into your description with links to it, you can actually get indexed for that exact moment inside of Google, which is pretty cool. So if you answer one question in there, Google could pop it up and show – I'm sure we've all seen this now – where it starts the video at 3 minutes in because you answered this one question I just googled. That's another little bit of a hack I think everyone needs to be doing. ROB: That seems true certainly across really almost anywhere Google is doing structured meta data. They don't collect that data for nothing, and if you see them start to add that sort of meta data – they do this for recipes, for song lyrics, for your sitemap – they're going to use it at some point if you give it to them, it seems like. It's great that that makes sense on video as well. Ian, you've been doing authenticWEB for a little while now. If you were starting over today, what are some things you've learned along the journey that you might do differently if you were starting fresh right now? IAN: I would've niched down faster and harder. People fight the niching down, and I think it's more important than ever. I would've gone into paid ads for us faster, I would've been emailing my list more, and I would've spent more time on my sales through onboarding systems. We did a lot on our backend systems. I was always big into that. Within a couple years, we had it down to almost an assembly line. Obviously, there's art inside of there, but it allows us to fix things when they go wrong. But I didn't spend enough time on my sales and onboarding systems, and I've really nailed that down and it makes such a difference. ROB: What made you realize that you needed to focus? Was it outside feedback? Was it one day where you realized for the bajillionth time you didn't have quite what you needed? How did you come through on that? IAN: All of the above. I'm constantly looking at the business as a whole. Yes, I'm the technician and I like to know a lot about marketing. I love it. I have a podcast, the Garlic Marketing Show, and I'm always learning stuff. We just did the Giants a video learning from 40 experts' techniques. But really working on the business as a whole is a constant, constant struggle. Not a struggle, but it's exciting. It's like, "Hey, what can I tweak here? Where did this go wrong and how can in fix this?" That's a big, big thing. I've been in masterminds. We've had consultants. I'm still in a lot of groups. I talk to other agency owners all the time. And that's another mistake I made, too: thinking early on that I needed to do this all on my own and that everyone was my competition. Now I don't even view people inside that do the exact same thing as my competition. It's the same thing I told my clients Day 1, and I didn't listen to myself. We all want to work with someone slightly different, and if you market yourself right, you're going to get that person. The more of a community you can develop around yourself, the better you're going to be. ROB: That part definitely makes a bunch of sense. Ian, you've been in this for a while; there's always talk about new platforms, new exciting things. What is coming up for authenticWEB or maybe video marketing in general that you're genuinely excited for and think is worth paying more than a little bit of attention to? IAN: I still think it's YouTube. Honestly, I think using YouTube – here's another shift that we did. Once again, it wasn't in production, but it was a distribution shift. I'm always looking at how we're distributing the videos. YouTube used to be the platform that we'd put on the website and people would watch the video there. Now we're really trying to drive people onto YouTube as a whole because we want to get them into those suggested videos. We want them to watch more of our content. They want to watch video content. And when you're a professional, if you're an agency owner, if you're any type of service business, and you get people to see your face and hear your voice on a constant basis, that is the best marketing out there because you get that mere exposure effect. They will trust you more and more. YouTube is going to keep evolving it. They're getting better and better and better. They're changing around the algorithms, and it's hooking people more and more and more. I think TikTok is evolving, and if they don't completely screw with it with the government, I think it's got some legs now. But as far as really marketing a business and becoming an authority, I think it's all-in on YouTube. The other part is it's really hard to get spammed on YouTube because there's no messenger or anything. LinkedIn feels like it's gotten almost too spammed. I think people are going to have a tough time killing YouTube. ROB: Sure. It's certainly 5 to 10 requests a day that are straight-up pitches for business, at least, in my experience. IAN: Yeah. ROB: Are there any platforms – you mentioned TikTok; TikTok seems promising but early for both paid and organic. YouTube is pretty mature for both. Are there any platforms that are maybe not primary for organic content that you still see as being pretty effective for paid, even if that gets into ad insertions in other digital formats? How are you thinking about that? IAN: I honestly think TikTok for B2C, almost everyone needs to be there. If you think that moms and dads are not there, they are. They're watching their kids and then they're getting hooked. I think organic-wise – they have this crazy algorithm, too, that's so good at suggesting stuff for you. I think it's a great place also to test. But as far as other platforms go, then moving back to webinars, I think webinars are coming back. Using Zoom in a different way, using more of this course work, and we're going to figure out new ways to have groups on and have smaller groups. I think webinars are making a resurgence because so many people are now used to being on Zoom for a little while, where they weren't before and they couldn't really pay attention. Now they're used to it and you can really control the messaging there. ROB: Got it. I heard you mention Zoom, and I was wondering – is Zoom especially good at the webinar thing, or is it simply that the average person's familiarity with Zoom at this point is so common that it's not even worth trying to force them to learn something else? IAN: I think it's the latter. Everyone's on Zoom all the time. I remember with GoToWebinar, you have to download software and whatever, and some of these other webinar platforms are really glitchy. Zoom, yes, it had a shutdown recently, but for the most part it's pretty smooth. I think other things will evolve out of there and we'll get used to them, but Zoom works well for livestreaming. I personally use Ecamm, which I love, but Zoom is easy for people to use. I think that's the big thing. ROB: I'm not as familiar with Ecamm. For those who aren't, what does Ecamm bring to the table that's worth paying attention to? IAN: I've been doing a lot more livestreaming. The algorithms are really paying attention to the livestreaming. Plus, if you do it right, Ecamm allows really high quality, almost like a TV show, to your livestream. You can add text overlays really easily. You can do different scenes, you can do an intro. You can essentially be your own TV show manager with Ecamm. I loved it. It does really, really cool stuff and makes your livestreams that much more interesting. You can pull people in, pull people out. The other day I was on a livestream with Gino Wickman from EOS and people were making comments, asking questions. You can instantly pull their questions up from the comments onto the screen, which is really nice interaction. I do love things like Zoom and livestream because of that. We're seeing this hyper-personalization. And that leads into the other one, stuff like Bonjoro that make it really easy to hyper-personalize videos for clients and send them to them right away. That's where I'm seeing things going, this interaction – because you get that feedback and then you get improve your videos and improve your content and get across a few different platforms, getting that feedback and improving your content constantly. ROB: You're talking about that live TV show. One thing I just started playing around with a little bit, and I wonder if you've seen this and how it compares – have you seen this package called Mmhmm? It's very hard to pronounce. IAN: Yes, I have seen it. I haven't used it yet. I have seen it. It's similar to what Ecamm does. I think it has a few different features. But yeah, that's the kind of thing I think we're going to see more and more of, because you've got to keep them engaged. Those tools allow you to add that to your livestream videos. It's not just the livestream; you can keep them engaged and do a lot of those cool things. ROB: Right. The tools just keep on getting more impressive. Certainly, at the beginning of this pandemic, some good news was it was filmed from a home, but it was filmed with a real production team behind it. But the tools keep on getting pushed down and simpler, and you start to be able to imagine producing this Daily Show-looking production just with you and a pretty simple piece of software. It's shifting. It's remarkable. IAN: It is. That's where we have to get better at the content, which is great for everyone. It has to be more about the content, understanding who you're talking to, getting niched down and super specific about who you're talking to. It's not just about having video. ROB: That's true with search, that's true with video, and it's true with the production quality of the video. Everything seems to keep coming back to content and all the little tricks. You can play a trick on TikTok and get somebody to loop your video one more time than you thought by lying to them, but it's all going to catch you in the long run unless you make good content. It sounds like that's what you all at authenticWEB are focused on doing. IAN: Yeah, always making it better and better, figuring out better ways to get it, better ways to deliver it. That's what we do. ROB: Brilliant. Ian, when people want to find you and authenticWEB, where should they go look for you, other than sending a spammy LinkedIn request? IAN: You can send me a LinkedIn request. Just don't make it spammy. Tell me who you are. Tell me you heard me here when I was talking to Rob. That's a great way. Or you can go to authenticweb.marketing, check out our website, and hit me through the form there. Seriously, if you want to open up a conversation and text me on LinkedIn, go ahead and do it. Now, I do get a lot of LinkedIn messages every day that are 90% spam, so if I don't respond to you for some reason, I apologize. Feel free to follow up and say, "Hey, I just wanted to make sure you saw this." ROB: Fantastic. Ian, thank you for joining us on the podcast. Thank you for sharing that journey and so much excellent knowledge, especially thinking about how to go deeper on YouTube and realizing that that ship has not sailed, that game is not over, and good content can still win there. IAN: Yes. It was great. Thanks for having me on, Rob. I appreciate it. ROB: It's a pleasure. Be well. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Justin Seibert is President at Direct Online Marketing, an agency that focuses on and excels at – direct online marketing – to move clients' ROIs in a positive direction. In this interview, Justin describes the process of developing strategies to drive quality traffic to its clients, converting that traffic into leads, and sending leads through to generate sales. Justin says the process of vetting potential clients is "very long." Some of what the agency looks for to get a good fit: Medium-sized businesses provide the greatest opportunity to make an impact. Smaller businesses will not be able to get benefits commensurate with what it will cost them to work with DOM. In the case of larger businesses, the agency will not be able to move the needle as much. Highly niched businesses, either the lead brand or the challenger brand within a specific niche. These businesses are not "household names" unless the household is one already familiar with that particular industry. Almost any industry. The agency works heavily with a number of SaaS (Software as a Service) companies, higher education, and ecommerce retail and less so with everything else – from "manufacturing to finance to entertainment." In 2001, Justin started his career in Los Angeles, working for a company in the financial industry. The company had been highly successful with radio marketing but was looking for the next thing . . . and assigned Justin the task of figuring out how to use the internet to generate quality leads. His office was right next to the sales floor, so he got fast feedback on how good a job he was doing. In spring of 2006, Justin moved into his basement and blogged at least five days a week, trying to get the word out about digital marketing. By October, he hired his first part-time employee. Justin says he always liked the idea of hiring people . . . because of the positive impact it would make on those individuals, their families, and on the community at large. But, planning and timing the growth of a company, especially when there is no outside funding, is a challenge. Justin explains, There are two classifications: 1) the revenue producers (sales, marketing, and 2) the internal administrative staff. He now has the confidence to hire for those internal functions when he perceives it is best for the company. For "client-facing" employees, Justin looks at the current book of business and the pipeline to decide which functions to hire and when. The problem is in the timing. If he hires ahead of need, he may not have the cash flow to support those new hires. If he hires when everyone is swamped, the workload increases even more because the new employee needs to be trained. Cultural fit is paramount – but not intransigent. The agency's employees are virtual due to Covid, the culture has changed, and, in the middle of all of this, Justin has been hiring. Two things Justin notes as important when starting an agency: 1) Know what your process looks like. (He cites Marcus Lemonis's "People Profit Process.") and 2) Get some sales training early on. Sales plus process is key. Justin can be reached on his agency's website at: directom.com or on LinkedIn at Justin Seibert (S-E-I-B-E-R-T). Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Justin Seibert, President at Direct Online Marketing based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Welcome to the podcast, Justin. JUSTIN: Thanks for having me, Rob. Excited to be here. ROB: Excited to have you here. The name of your agency is tremendously straightforward, but tell us how that points you, points all of us, to your superpower and what you do best as an agency. JUSTIN: I love it. I realized going into this that I'm really horrible at picking out names for agencies, but the reason that we chose it was I believe in being very straightforward. I just want people to know what we're good at doing. What I imagined this agency and what my strengths were and what I wanted to be able to offer to clients is about results, and not about being clever, not about being funny or winning awards. It was about how we could actually move ROI in a positive direction for them? So "Direct" was really important to be part of the name, and then "Online Marketing" just being what we specialize in. If you fast forward to today, what we do really, really well is strategizing on how to drive quality traffic to our clients and then help them convert that traffic into leads that become sales. I hate saying this because it sounds so cliched, but clients see us as trusted partners, and that's so important in this industry, as you're aware, just because there's so much snake oil out there. We want to be able to be that beacon for people that they can say, "Yes, we know that our agency has us covered, and they're acting as an extension of our team." ROB: Makes perfect sense. One challenge that can happen that I've seen when you're setting that expectation with a client who is coming to you because they expect results – that can mean different things to you and to a client unless you align on expectations. How do you set that initial engagement and the expectation that all the leads are not going to show up tomorrow, but they also shouldn't be waiting a year for something to happen? JUSTIN: I think it's really important to get on the same page up front. I speak with a lot of people, our team speaks with even more people, and we turn down partnerships all the time just because we don't feel it's a good fit. We have a very long process, longer than some people would like. A lot of times it's "Hey, can't you just send us a price list or something like that?", and we're like, "How can we do that when we don't understand what your goals are yet?" So, we spend a lot of time to understand what their needs are, who they are, to then evaluate to see if we even believe we're a good fit. Assuming that they still think it's a match, then we continue down that process. And a lot of times, depending on the particular service we're talking about, we are even sending them a projection range of what we think is realistic to see if that aligns. Sometimes it doesn't, so they choose not to go with us; sometimes it doesn't, and they rethink if this is even the right strategy for them. Sometimes it doesn't align and they say, "Do we really need to rethink what our expectations are?" Because when we haven't done that, Rob, it's exactly what you're talking about where we get into it – we know from doing this all the time and knowing the industry and knowing what is reasonable that we may be hitting something really well, but it's not what their expectations are. So we really try to get that up front as much as possible. ROB: Totally makes sense. Even within this performance and driving leads market, there's such a wide range of customers. You can look at anything from the medical profession and elective medical procedures to local services, plumbers and whatnot, all the way through to Software as a Service and almost bleeding into potentially high-end commerce. What sweet spots do you see for Direct Online Marketing? Is there a typical client that you find yourself engaged with? JUSTIN: There is a typical client in terms of some respects. Number one, it's a medium size business. A smaller size business, probably for the price of doing business with us, it's not going to drive the value that they need. If it's a larger business, we're not moving the needle as much. We're not being as impactful as we'd like to be. So, it's that medium size business, it tends to be a good fit. The more niched they are, the better. We typically tend to deal with clients that are the leader or the challenger brand within a particular niche, where if you talk to somebody on the street who isn't familiar with that industry, they have no idea who the client is, but if they're familiar with that group, they go, "Oh yeah, of course I know who that is." We've worked with some really big brands, but that's not common for us. What's common is that market leader or the challenger in a medium size business. When you're talking industry, we're all over the map. We purposefully made that decision when I started the agency that we weren't going to specialize in one particular area. Again, there's some common traits, but in terms of industry we do a lot with SaaS, Software as a Service. We do a lot in higher education. We do a strong bit in ecommerce retail. But outside of those areas, anything from manufacturing to finance to entertainment, all the way down the line. We've worked in dozens and dozens of different industries. ROB: When you say higher education, I can't help but obsess in a little bit on that. I would imagine at the onset of this pandemic and the first year of virtual for many of them, there's been tactical adjustments. But when they're looking ahead to 2021, what are you looking at for the education world, and strategically how they are setting themselves up to recruit that next class in such a pool of uncertainty? JUSTIN: That's where the partnership really comes in. I love this question, by the way. We have to understand, how are they adjusting? Depending on what they're looking to do and depending on where they are geographically has a big impact on what their approach is going to look like. I'm thinking through one client right now. They're taking students in dorms this year. They are, for the most part, not doing anything but singles, and there's more spacing. So, they had to find more housing and had to get really creative with what they were going to do there. Or they had to turn those students into virtual, or they had to turn them away. Fortunately, they were able to find some solutions for that. Understanding what ground rules we have to work with is really important to understand that. I think the bigger thing within the industry is – and this has been coming for a little while now – "Am I getting the value out of the dollars I'm paying for higher education, particularly if I'm taking out student loans, which could be $60,000 per year?" It's really imperative on the schools to be able to show the value they're getting and what they're able to do to help students post-graduation. I think that's what the universities and the colleges are trying to convey right now, and we're trying to do in terms of helping more. ROB: It sounds like a good challenge. But to your point, this is a strategic challenge that has been underway for a while, and like so many things, it has been accelerated during this time. That makes so much sense. If I believe your LinkedIn a little bit, it seems like you have been in this industry, in this business, for a little bit. Rewind us back to how Direct Online Marketing came to pass and what made you decide to do this instead of going to work for somebody else. JUSTIN: I started getting my feet wet and really learning everything when I was living in Los Angeles. A company in the financial industry had hired me. This was back in 2001, very much the Wild, Wild West days still of digital. I was there for a few months, and they said, "We've been really, really successful in, of all things, long-form radio marketing. For us to grow, we need another marketing leg. We think it's the internet. Go figure it out." I had no background in this whatsoever. This was brand new to me, like it was brand new to most people. What was really awesome – I had so much latitude to try things. If you remember this, for people that know the search engine days, this was back when it was goto.com. It was the first year of Google AdWords at the time. So, everything was brand spanking new. But what was so instructional for me was that I sat right next to the sales floor. This was all about generating quality leads. If I was sending them bad leads – I'm looking at my numbers thinking, "Hey, I'm doing an awesome job," but if they were getting bad leads, not only was I not producing and wasting their time, but then they would start to look at my leads as a waste of their time and not put the effort they needed to into those conversations. So really getting that feedback from them on what I could do to keep the numbers up but also improve the quality of leads – and then really seeing the fruits of my labor, where if you looked at the sales board, I could see by source what was going in there. If we fast forward 4-½ years later, when I moved away from Los Angeles for family reasons, when I started with them, they were a $25 million a year company total in revenue. When I left in 2006, they were doing $35 million a year just attributable to paid search. I don't say that to brag. They had a tremendous, tremendous management team, they had an awesome sales force, it was a good market. But I bring that up because if you still remember back to 2006, as crazy as it seems today, people still weren't sure if Google and digital marketing was really a thing or if it was something that was just a fad, the way that they saw the bubble burst back in '99, 2000, 2001. I had that knowledge that this was a real thing, and logically it makes sense. This is direct mail on steroids. I couldn't have been any luckier to have that as my background for when I moved and then looked at my next opportunity. ROB: Once you decided to go in on building this business, did you have any partners early on? Or was it just you and a card table in a closet coffee shop early on? What did it look like? JUSTIN: Absolutely. It was me in my basement, trying to keep the kids and the dogs upstairs so I could do some work and go out there and hustle. I used to blog every day, literally at least five days a week. I had to do something to get us out there and to get known a little bit and build that up. That was in I guess April/May of 2006. By October, I hired my first employee that was part-time at the time, and got some really horrible office space, but it was the only one that was correctly priced. So, it worked out for my needs. Then went off to the races from there. ROB: Excellent. Maybe from Day 1 you had a pretty good degree of confidence from your experience. At what point did it become evident that you were going to be doing this for a while and with more people involved? JUSTIN: That's a really good question. I think there's two ways to approach it. Some of this is more apparent today with the advent of the solopreneur. I don't think that model was quite as prevalent back then. But I could do that and be a contractor, or I could hire other people. One's not better than the other; it's just what fits you. I like the idea of hiring people for a variety of reasons. One, when you look back at what my dream was, I really take a lot of pride in being able to employ people and to help them make their livelihoods and to add to the local community and to help support their families. I feel very blessed to be able to play some small part in those things. So that was part of it. But part of it, too, was there are so many things in life that I am horrible at, or at least not very good at, that by being able to bring in people that are better in those areas than me and to be able to concentrate on the one or two things that I'm okay at was helpful. And then the final thing was, do I ever want to be able to take a vacation or a sick day? Of course, as an entrepreneur, you don't at the beginning. But do I want to be able to do those at some point? I really can't if I'm just doing it on my own, or it's a harder process. So, to build out a team – we have a tremendous one these days, and really, I've been lucky through the years with having really great people – that really was the right model for me and for DOM. ROB: Along that journey, have there been any pivotal hires that you realize in hindsight really helped you scale beyond yourself? JUSTIN: Yeah, there's been a few things that have happened. One of the challenges with growing the business, especially if you're not taking outside money, is you're in this position of "Do I hire now or do I wait?" If you're basically operating off of cash, you have to wait until you have the business to be there, so then you scramble to fill that position, get there, and then go on to the next spot. As you get bigger, then you're putting real strains on your people that are already working to the bone as much as they can, and now they have to become less productive because they're going to train somebody up and then move on from there It's been a constant battle for us. It's been getting better now that we get larger and that we have a little bit more flexibility with the things that we do. But I guess for agency or just business owners in general, what I'd share is that there are stages of the business. There are certain things, like getting our operations in order, that I couldn't really have somebody dedicated to for a long time. That's the type of thing where they're not being "productive," even though they're incredibly important to being productive for the agency and for our clients and everything else. Everybody had to take their own pieces of that. I would say we've had a few different instances where it was great to be able to get to the next step. At the beginning of this year, we changed our model up once again and broke out a new department. So we're always looking at those areas. But I've been really, really lucky to have so many tremendous people that work here because without them, none of the success is possible. ROB: That's excellent. You mentioned outside funding. Very, very few agencies are able to raise outside funding, and arguably it doesn't really make sense to, either, in most contexts. You mentioned within that cash flow and the challenge of stressing the team, when to hire. You have some people on the team now; how have you resolved the decision of when it's time to add people or when it's time to stand pat with the team that you have? JUSTIN: If you look historically, sometimes you have your hand forced and sometimes you have that situation for yourself. When I had a little less gray hair than I do today, I remember we were a smaller company – I would guess we were maybe eight people, nine people at the time. I don't remember the exact number, but I had two key people that were managers of the company. I got notice from the one woman in the afternoon, let's say on a Thursday, and I go to sit to talk with the other one Friday morning, and she's like, "Well, I have more bad news to give you." So, within 12 hours, I had all of my management team give notice. That was a scary proposition, and we had to learn from that and what we could do, but we got through it. I would say, as tremendous as those people are, we're better off today because of the learning from that. We're at a point now, though, that there's two classifications. There's the people that are in some way revenue producers from the standpoint of they're in sales, in marketing, or there's some other need that's not a client-producing function. Maybe a manager of a department, something along those lines. Where I've gotten now, I have enough flexibility that when I've identified that, I'm no longer scared. I just say, "I need it. This is what's best for the company. I'm going to go do it." On the client execution side of things, that very much is more a function of, what does our book of business look like today? What does our pipeline look like? And then based on that, knowing which functions we need to hire when. ROB: You mentioned having two managers leave quickly – all of your managers, in fact. JUSTIN: Yeah. ROB: What do you do in that scenario? You can elevate internal staff, you can try and make a quick hire – although sometimes that doesn't work out so well – you can just eat the pain for a while and figure it out yourself. What path through did you take, and what would you do differently now, maybe? JUSTIN: I want to think through what I would do differently now, but let me answer the first part of that, which is a combination of factors. One, leaning heavily on some outside resources, from mentors to HR teams to other people that could give advice and help us get through it. One is putting my head down in the sand and just getting through it until we can get through those different pieces. I think you always have to take a step back and evaluate, why are you there? What do you need to do differently to avoid these issues in the future? Part of it can be through hires. But really, that was a turning point, along with going through a program with Goldman Sachs and Babsen College called the 10,000 Small Businesses. I don't want to derail, but I came to this epiphany all around the same time of how important culture was. And shame on me for not understanding that before. I had kind of taken the path of "I don't want to force culture down people's throats. I really care about these people in a very deep way, but I don't want them to feel like work is their life. I want them to have a work-life balance. So, if they don't want to share things with me or the office, I don't want to force that on them." I didn't understand how much people were looking for that culture and how important that was. When we look at the things that led to our success and all of our growth in the last 6 years, fixing the culture to now where we have a really strong culture – and it makes hiring easier, it makes retention easier, it makes our outcome better – has been such a huge part of what we do. ROB: I definitely understand that desire not to overwork people. But also, I think people want to come to work. They want to like where they work. They want to like the people they work with. It sounds like that's something you've been able to form over time. What aspects of culture have shifted during this season of people largely being virtual, and what things have stayed the same, but maybe in different ways you didn't quite expect originally? JUSTIN: I was really worried about that. I think there were a couple things that helped us out. One is the fact that we have such a great team already, and we have people that are bought in and interested. The other thing – we added a lot more communication. Everybody was already used to Zoom; we'd been using that with our clients forever, so those things were pretty easy. And we're a digital marketing agency. We're not a manufacturer. So, switching to home wasn't as challenging as it would be for other people. But I think one of the things that helped us out, based on some comments and some feedback I received from the team – I think they were really appreciative of the fact that they weren't getting furloughed, they weren't getting their salaries reduced, and in fact they actually saw that we were hiring. We were growing and adding more people during a very turbulent time when everybody's world was turned upside down. I think some of those things played in our favor and didn't really have anything to do with me figuring things out. But the big one was really just increased communication. I will tell you one of my big worries still is I believe there's benefit to people being in the same office and bumping into each other and overhearing conversations, and that's gone right now, for the most part. Our offices are open; some people are choosing to come in. We've left it to them for now to decide whether they feel comfortable with that or not. We have a few people coming in. Most are staying home. But I look forward to getting to a point when we can continue to have some of those in-person conversations. ROB: Absolutely. Likewise. I definitely miss that camaraderie and the knowing each other in that casual way that comes from being in the office. You mentioned a little bit the lessons learned from that management shakeup that you had, but what are some other things as you reflect on your time running Direct Online Marketing that you might consider doing a little bit differently if you were starting from zero? JUSTIN: Looking back, January 1, I always say "I can't believe how stupid I was last year." I am constantly on the move for how I can get a little bit better and how I can learn a little bit more. The one that I'll say from an agency – and then I'll give another one that I talk about typically with entrepreneurs – from an agency perspective, I really didn't get how important operations was, which I sort of touched on before. It's "We're marketers. We're so smart. We just figure this stuff out." That's a really good recipe for letting things fall through the cracks and not being consistent. I would just say understanding what that process is going to look like – start out with it from the beginning. If you're not one of those people, like me, that is – I'm not the person that likes setting up processes. I can do it, but it's not what I'm naturally attuned to. But spend the time and do that. Very much the Marcus Lemonis's "People Profit Process." That's the process part of that. The other one that I talk about frequently is I wish I would have done sales training earlier. What people don't realize when they come from another office, they worked for someone else, to then starting their own endeavors – whether you like it or not, you're a salesperson now. You are out there building the business. Sales has such a dirty connotation in our world. People don't like sales. They think of used car sales. But sales is really, ideally, just providing value and providing aid to somebody and being able to match that. We don't do hard sales. If you're a good fit, we'd love to talk with you. If you're not, good luck. I hope you find somebody that's a better fit for you and hope you are going to be there. The process of sales training is just learning some techniques that work for you to make sure that you're aligning with the person, you're understanding what their challenges are and how you might be able to help. The business could've grown much faster had I done sales training earlier. ROB: Was there any particular sales training that you went through that you found effective, or is it really almost anything is better than almost nothing? JUSTIN: I would say the latter. I've gone through a few different ones. I've had my team go through some different ones, and I think you pick the pieces of things that you like out there. I think Sandler is a pretty common one that I got a lot out of, that my team has gotten a lot out of. But if you look at it, I think there's an emphasis of finding the pain, and to me it has more of a negative connotation when you think about it that way. It's true you have to have the person understand what their challenges are and how you can help them, but I'm more of a positive person. I try to be. So I'd rather orient myself around what's my solution to help them. That's why I say, again, I think it's great – some people are diehard advocates. It's a wonderful system. For me, I take about 95% of it and just tweak a few things. ROB: Sandler does come up a lot. I think what you've hinted at – a lot of marketers find themselves much more relational sellers rather than the process and pain. It can feel a little bit more formulaic than maybe an entrepreneurial marketer. JUSTIN: Sorry to interrupt, but on that front, I think the formulaic part is really important because there's certain things you need to do. My sales process has become much longer than many other agencies out there, but I've found that it's really important for me to do because when I skip those steps, I'm not getting the right solution that the person needs or we're not aligning on it. So, I do think it's really important to develop your formula, whatever it is, and practice it enough that it's natural. I understand why people don't like that idea, but I think that if you're doing those things, it still can really help. ROB: Absolutely, yeah. Feeling natural versus unnatural is perhaps one of the bigger obstacles that people do have. Justin, when people want to find you and they want to find Direct Online Marketing, where should they go to track you down? JUSTIN: Easiest thing is to go to our website, directom.com. I'd love to connect with people on LinkedIn. That's where I'm most active on social media. If you look me up, it's pretty simple. I'm sure if they're listening to this, they'll see the spelling of my name. It's S-E-I-B-E-R-T. I would love to connect with people there. ROB: Sounds great. Justin, congratulations on the journey so far and the success so far and, heck, even staying in business through one and now arguably two recessions. That alone is something, but to do that with a team around you is quite a thing, and to go through so many transitions, starting from the world of Google ads being surprising to people to having to master so many more channels just to serve a customer well. Congratulations on everything so far, Justin. Thank you for sharing your story. JUSTIN: Rob, thank you so much. ROB: Be well. Thanks. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Twenty-nine years ago, Alvaro Psevoznik, CEO of DM Agency, was a 19-year-old Argentinian law student, designing flyers for hospitality clients in exchange for admissions into nightclubs. Alvaro found himself frustrated with Argentinian politics – which is plagued with fiscal instability, political corruption, de-motivational handouts for a large percentage of the (unemployed) citizenry, and a cycle of massive financial crises every 5 or 10 years. Alvaro's experience was, no matter how hard one worked and saved, bank accounts could disappear overnight. This constant uproar, Alvaro says, makes it hard for people in South American countries to plan and work toward a future. Alvaro moved to the U.S. in 2002 and went back to hospitality marketing. He claims that early adversity provided lessons that helped him survive the 2007-2008 recession (which closed some of his small- and mid-sized clients' businesses) and prepared him for today's Covid-19 challenges. In this interview, Alvaro talks about the importance of positive messaging, adaptability, and being "transparent" when faced with crises. He emphasizes that changing Covid-19 "rules" requires fast response. Today, DM Agency is a comprehensive, full-service, one stop shop for digital marketing solutions. Alvaro explains that there are costs associated with trying to provide a wide range of client services—you either risk people discovering that you are not as "good at everything" as you claimed, or you find yourself supporting an expensive, diverse "stable" of top talent in order to be able to "deliver." If he were to start over today, he says he'd focus on specific industries and doing only what he was best at doing – lead generation through online advertising. Most DM clients are restaurants or hotels, but DM has also started to expand into the Esports -- organized, online, multiplayer video game competitions that produce $2-3 billion a year through advertising and sponsorship. Esports, Alvaro says, is huge. DM has virtual offices concentrating on Esports in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and South Florida. Alvaro has created "splinter" agency entities – pretty much the same staff/different "labeling" – that focus on specific unrelated industries in order to avoid such questions as, "What would a restaurant marketer know about marketing windows?" Agencies often advertise that they are "bilingual. Alvaro says that DM is bi-cultural. Speaking Spanish is different from thinking in Spanish or Latino. DM understands that the Spanish community in the US is not a homogenous group – the culture of origin varies significantly by geography across the US. The agency divides Hispanic marketing into four regions: Mexico and North America, Central America, South America, and the South Florida Cuban community. Aside from South Florida, how do cultural differences play out across the United States? New Jersey, New York, Chicago have strong Puerto Rican communities with some Mexicans and Dominicans. Mexicans as a majority are located more on the West Coast – Arizona, Texas, and California. Because the words, the accents, the thinking patterns, and the cultures in each community are different, marketing needs to be different. Alvaro hires Hispanic staff that mirrors each targeted audience – so the messages "rings true." Google translation does not work. Neither does human translation if the culture, vocabulary, and thinking patterns of the translator are not the same as those of the target audience. Authenticity cannot be faked. Alvaro can be reached on his company's website – DM agency, as in digital marketing agency – dmagency.us Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Alvaro Psevoznik, the CEO of DM Agency based in Hollywood, Florida. Welcome to the podcast. ALVARO: Hey, Rob. Thank you very much for having me. ROB: Yeah, absolutely great to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about DM Agency and what makes DM great? ALVARO: DM Agency is the conclusion of 29 years of evolution, learning, growing, going back to small – especially after this pandemic – making mistakes, and many other things. Fortunately, good things, I'd say. When I was thinking, "What makes us different?" I said, "Too many things." But I want to put in three things. Full service – I mean we offer for real a full service solution, a one-stop digital marketing solution to our clients. We can help most industries, but we realized a few years ago that we are really good and we have a lot of experience with hospitality. Mostly restaurants and some hotels. Now we're stepping in the Esports niche and we are doing really good things in that niche. We are a bicultural agency. It doesn't mean that we are bilingual. You can have anybody in your company speaking Spanish but thinking in Spanish or thinking in Latino is a very different thing, and we are different because of that. We've got this mindset and we understand the Latino community, the U.S. Hispanic community – which is not Mexicans only, like a lot of marketing managers or marketing directors think. These are the three things that make us different than most of the other digital agencies that I see in the market. ROB: That's fascinating, especially with that "not bilingual, but bicultural" distinction there. And for certain, the U.S. Latino population is not homogeneous in any way. How do you even think about bridging the gap? Because you could even get into many, many cultures beyond the Latino community. How do you find that messaging that transcends maybe some of the different cultures? There are different countries, and each country is different. We think our country is different; you mentioned you're from Argentina. Argentina is different from Mexico, Mexico is different from Cuba, and on and on and on. How do you balance it? Because obviously, many marketers are not going to go in for a 20-culture campaign most of the time. ALVARO: Yeah. It's not a 20-culture either. Mostly we divide Latin America when it comes to marketing let's say into four regions: Mexico and North America, Central America, South America, and there's a fourth one that applies mostly to South Florida, which is the Cuban community. When we build content for South Florida, where you also have Dominicans and you've got a lot of Mexicans as well and you've got a lot of Venezuelans and Colombians, the job is a little more difficult. But since most of the community are from Cuba, we focus on Cuban-oriented content. We're used to it. I moved to Miami 18 years ago, and the first thing I heard in Spanish was a Cuban accent and Cuban words. So, we got used to it. New Jersey, New York, Chicago is a different thing. You've got a lot of Puerto Rican community mixed with some Mexicans and Dominicans. So, the message is different, the words are different, the accent, if you do some video content, is going to be different. And then you've got the Mexicans, which are located mostly on the West Coast – Arizona, Texas, and California, of course. The message is not that complicated when you have to target these audiences. Now, I was talking about accents and words; there is also a cultural thing that you have to consider when you are building a message. These days we are focused mostly on digital and mostly on social media. I don't want to go deeper into this, but I'm going to just give you a quick example. When we build a campaign for the West Coast, when we know that most of the audience is first, second, and probably third generation Mexicans, we hire Mexican copywriters, Mexican voiceovers. We adapt the message to the community or to the target audience by using people with the same background. We do the same thing here in Miami and South Florida, and we apply the same system in other markets, and it works pretty good. ROB: It's sensible, but it would be completely opaque to somebody who didn't know how to break it down so clearly into four cultural segments. I think that's really, really fascinating there. I want to highlight also something you mentioned about your tenure in the industry. We are here – I don't know where we are in the midst of this COVID thing anymore. Are we in the middle? Who knows? But it is August of 2020. With your time in the industry, this is not the first set of economic headwinds you've seen where you've probably had clients react, you've had to think about changing tactics, changing messaging. How many times would you say you've navigated business through a downturn at least kind of like this? ALVARO: I'm laughing here because it was more than once. [laughs] Going back in the day, I started 29 years ago, when I was 19. Argentina is a market that goes up and down every 5 to 10 years. You've got a huge crisis every 5, maybe 10 years if you're lucky. So, I've seen a couple of crises in the market. But moving forward to the States, I had to deal with the 2008-2009 crisis. It was not only a recession; it was a huge crisis. I remember a lot of my clients went out of business. They just closed their doors. We had to downsize our company and adapt the message. Back in '08, it was the beginning of social media, and we were exploring that niche and that industry. I remember that we had to adapt the message to something very positive. People were doing really bad in those days. A lot of people lost their homes, lost their jobs. That was a huge impact, especially for mid-size companies and small size companies back in the day. The way we did it back in '08-'09, and now because of the COVID situation, was being very transparent. You've heard, Rob, this message, "We are in this together," and it's true. We are in this together. At some point we were so tired of reading and listening on the radio, "we are in this together," but at the end of the day, we have to adapt to the situation and understand that there's a lot of last-minute changes to do in your communication in businesses. I'm going to give you a quick example. We work with a lot of restaurants. Here in Miami, we got a lot of back and forth with regulations after COVID. "You can open up to 50% of capacity"; 48 hours later, they closed the restaurants again. It was chaos. We had to adapt to that. I feel the frustration of every restaurant and hotel owner, and I also understand, and my people understood, the frustration on the other side – customers, making plans for a wedding, for a bar mitzvah, for a vacation, and being frustrated. This is when we as an agency had to adapt our message and be very close not only to our clients, but to their customers as well. ROB: You mentioned a greater frequency of downturn in Argentina. For those of us who are not from that orbit, what's the difference maybe between the occasional big messes we have here, and it sounds like a more frequent – is it even more expected, perhaps, in Argentina? ALVARO: Yeah, the biggest word that synthesizes everything is corruption, like most countries in Latin America, some countries in Africa. Argentina is a big country. It's a rich country with poor people and rich politicians. I don't want to make this interview a political message about Argentina, but I think it's the situation that a lot of countries in Latin America have to deal with. Something worse than Argentina is what happened in Venezuela in the last few years. You've got a huge percentage of the population below the poverty line. In Argentina now – we used to have a populist government that gave all kinds of food stamps and all kinds of help to people. At the end of the day, you've got a government that is supporting a lot of people that are not working. A huge percentage of the population are not working because they get a check every month in the mail. That's what makes Argentina a country that doesn't give you the chance to plan long term. That's one of the reasons I decided to move to the States back in 2002 and start from scratch. I remember December 2001, the government froze everybody's bank accounts. Business and personal accounts were frozen. If you had $100, you were done. If you had a million dollars, "I'm sorry, but it's in the bank. We don't know when we're going to return that money." That's why when you move and you start doing business in markets like the U.S. market, it's a completely different thing. You can plan ahead. Even if you get a pandemic, even if you are in the middle of this situation that we were talking about in 2008-09, the recovery is much faster than any other country I would say probably in the world. That's one of the things that I love about this country. We can recover. We will recover. And this is not a political statement. It's a fact. We're going to recover sooner than later. And I agree with you, we don't know when this pandemic is going to stop, when the effects of the pandemic will cease. If the pandemic probably stops, I don't know, in November – I don't think so, but let's say November – but the effects are going to be long term, especially in a couple of industries that I have to deal with: hospitality and tourism. It's going to be really, really hard. ROB: Yeah, restaurants may not be the same for a while. But there may certainly also, I think, be fresh opportunity for the ones who really iterate on their model. I appreciate the broad perspective you bring on Argentina and those differences and the downturns that you see there due to corruption. I don't feel like it's political. It is certainly helpful. I do want to take a turn towards some of the aspirational things you have going on in your world. You mentioned when we were talking beforehand that you have not just DM Agency, but you have a little bit of an empire growing. Tell us about the sister/sibling agencies that you have to DM and the broader marketing ecosystem that's on your mind on an average day. ALVARO: Empire is such a big word but thank you very much. I like it. [laughs] When I was doing this in Argentina during the '90s, my first customers were restaurants. The work that we were doing was really good. I had no marketing education back in the day; I was just a law student designing flyers to get free admissions into nightclubs and free drinks. Our first customers over there were restaurants. So, when I started again my business, now in the United States, back in 2002, my first customers were restaurants. A few years ago, I realized that half of my clients were in that niche and the other half was getting confused. "Hey, you're working for a lot of restaurants, and I sell impact windows and doors," which is a huge niche here in South Florida. "I don't trust a guy that works for restaurants to reach people looking for windows." I realized that I needed a second brand. It's not a second agency; it's almost the same team except for a couple of professionals that are focused, like myself, in the food and beverage industry. We created Foodie – which is a social media term that came out a few years ago – we created Foodie Restaurant Agency, basically offering the same services, a one-stop shop of graphic design and branding, social media, Google ads, Facebook ads, reputation management – which is very important for restaurants these days. Then, with a couple of partners, and after getting a couple of licenses to operate in Latin America and the U.S. Hispanic market, we started a third brand called EsportsHQ. As you know, Rob, Esports is a huge $2-3 billion a year industry when it comes to advertising and sponsoring. That's basically one big team under the DM Agency umbrella and a few small teams specialized in restaurants for the Foodie Restaurant Agency and Esports for the EsportsHQ Agency. That's how I distributed my team and our marketing. When we have to market ourselves to restaurants, we go as Foodie Restaurant Agency, and the same thing with the Esports agency. ROB: When did you start in Esports? ALVARO: We started back in October 2019. A friend of mine who works in a big company told me, "Hey, there's something big called Esports." I said, "That's gaming. That's what my son does when he's bored." He told me, "It's way more than that." He introduced me to the industry, and he told me there's a huge opportunity for the U.S. Hispanic market. As you know, there are two budgets. A national company is going to have two different budgets – when it comes to advertising, I mean: one for the general market and one for the Hispanic market. When it comes to TV, for Univision or Telemundo or all the radio stations in Spanish. That advertising money comes from a separate budget. So, he told me there's a huge opportunity for the U.S. Hispanic market and also for the Latin American market. I couldn't do it by myself, so I invited him to join me. I got a couple of customers in Colombia and in Argentina, and we started this company, EsportsHQ. Because of the pandemic, some things were a little delayed, but so far we've got virtual offices in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and here in South Florida. We are closing a couple of deals for Q4 and Q1 2021 with big brands that understand that you've got a huge number of gamers, but you have a much bigger, way bigger, number of viewers. There's a lot of people that, instead of watching TV or watching a movie on Netflix, they are watching games now. Instead of a football game or a soccer game, they are watching people playing Fortnite or League of Legends, and there's a huge market over there, and we are after that. ROB: I was going to ask what the key games were right now. League and Fortnite. And then what is the marketing opportunity? Are they sponsoring teams? Are they sponsoring streaming broadcasts? What is the advertising opportunity? ALVARO: They are sponsoring everything. There are brands sponsoring teams. They're sponsoring players. I always use this analogy with soccer, which is my favorite sport. Or basketball. You as a brand sponsor a team. You can sponsor a player. Let's say Adidas. They are sponsoring soccer players with their shoes or their clothes. You can run ads during a game broadcast. You can place ads on the commercials. It's the same thing on Esports. When you are a sponsor, you can put your money in all of these different fields. That's what we are doing with a couple of companies we're dealing with. They are going to sponsor a team that is huge in Mexico. They won several tournaments all over the world. They are going to sponsor and buy airtime on Twitch, which is the most relevant platform for gaming. They also want to have their own tournament, to be not the sponsors of the tournament – the owners of the tournament. This is how big Esports is becoming these days, Rob. ROB: Wow. When you get into it, it sounds more like sports than you would ever imagine, even all the way down to the equipment. I have a friend who's been running a company for a while called Control Freak, and all they make is add-ons for video game console controllers to make you better at playing Esports. When he first told me, I thought it couldn't possibly be a business, or a good one, but it certainly has been for them. It's a big, big ecommerce business. ALVARO: It's a big, big business. A few months ago, we were writing down a list of everything that is related to Esports, and I think we got like 95 or so different things, from sponsoring a game to mousepads. I'm serious. Mousepads, keyboards, headsets – you name it. There's opportunity for every single industry in this niche. Like I said, it's between $2-3 billion a year on advertising only. You didn't hear that 2 or 5 years ago, right? This is huge right now, Rob. ROB: Wow. I heard it from your mouth, and I believe you. Alvaro, when you look at the time you've been in business, you've got a good bit of experience. What are some things you might do differently if you were starting over today? Not that you would want to do that; I'm sure you've earned what you've earned. ALVARO: We are a full-service agency, so we've got all kinds of services. If I could start over, I would focus on two or three. I can't do it now because most of our clients like us because we give them everything under one roof. I could say now a virtual roof. But we give them a one-stop solution, so it would be really, really hard for us to change that. But if I could do it from scratch, I would say "I want to be the best on this or that service. If you need those other services, we can introduce you to our strategic partner or we can refer you to somebody else, we can work with your agency for this or that service." That's one of the things that I would change if I could. One of the learnings that I have and I'd like to share with everybody is focus on one or two niches. I know we can do ads for window specialists, we can do random campaigns for dentists, jewelry stores, liquor stores, hotels – at the end of the day, it's so complicated because they are so different. Those industries are very different from each other. Even if you use Google ads for all of them, even if you post on Facebook for all of them, the industries are so different and the audience is different. So, one of the things I always tell my colleagues – even we were talking earlier about my presentations at some universities. One of the things I told one of the guys that was starting his agency at the age of 22, almost the same age I was when I started back in the '90s, is by showing that you know everything and you can do everything, you won't keep a customer. You may seduce the customer. You may sign the customer. But in a 3-6 month period, they're going to realize that you are not good at everything. Or, like in my case, we pay a high price to be good at everything we do – because we are good at branding, at social media, at reputation. The high price is that I have to have very expensive human resources to have the best people on each different department. So, make it simple. Focus on one, maybe two services that are related to each other, and keep it there. You're going to do great. That's what I would do if I could do it again. ROB: Where would you focus today and why? ALVARO: That's a good question. I wasn't ready for this one, Rob. [laughs] I would focus on lead generation through online advertising. I would leave social media – of course, I would use social media as an advertising platform, but I would leave social media content and engagement, reputation, web design, I would leave everything out of the picture if I could. I think this is where I would focus. ROB: What's appealing about those particular areas right now? Is it you know how to find the expertise? Is it opportunity to differentiate in those areas? ALVARO: I think as an agency owner, it's a very good source of income. When you bring your customers solid and qualified leads to their businesses, they pay very well. They don't mind paying. The reason I would do that only is because of the good income that I would get from that. ROB: Got it. So, at this point, you know what the margins are in different lines of business; you know if it's just creative, do people know how to pay more for that? Maybe they don't. But they definitely know how to pay for twice as many leads. ALVARO: Yeah. When you bring value to your customers, they don't mind paying. A very good lead and a qualified lead is value. That's what they need. Out of the restaurant industry, of the few customers that are not in that niche, we work for a company that sells and installs impact windows and doors. They were struggling with three or four different agencies, and the problem was that – yeah, the signs were nice, the website was cool, everything was okay, but they were not getting leads. When they came to us, they said, "Hey, we like everything that we got, but we have zero leads. Nobody calls our phones. What can you guys do?" So, we took over the account. That was almost 4 years ago. We built a strategy for them, and we understood where the problem was. I don't want to go deep into that, but the thing is, we created a strategy, we understood the problem, we did our market research to understand the industry because we were not familiar with that niche, and it's been over 3 years that we are bringing results to these guys. What do I mean by results? Leads. The website is there. It's cool, it's nice. The designs are nice. The content that we put for them on social media is okay. But they are getting the leads they're after. And especially during this pandemic, when everybody was downgrading their budgets, I told them, "Hey, do what I'm doing with my agency. I doubled my advertising budget. You do the same. If it doesn't work out, I don't know how, but I'm going to pay you back." So, these guys went from around ten grand a month to $22,000 a month, and guess what? It paid off. They had to hire more people to work for them. It really worked. So, lead generation, when it's done in the right way, with a strategy and understanding the market, understanding the culture – because by the way, we did campaigns in Spanish and English. Not only translated from English to Spanish, but talking to people in their language, not doing just a translation. You know what I mean. ROB: Yeah, I get it. ALVARO: It works. When you understand the market and you tell them what they want to hear, and you come, of course, with a good offer, like affordable windows and doors, there's no doubt that it's going to work out. ROB: It probably felt like a disadvantage for a while, but such an advantage now, coming from your own background – you're here and you can find people with an expertise in the American market any day of the week, but to find people with expertise in the Latino market that want to work for someone for the right reasons, you have that credibility naturally. I'm sure it's a hiring advantage. ALVARO: Yeah, it is an advantage, and our customers – I am so thankful that they understand that we are not just a translator. You can use Google Translate. I've seen actually a lot of things in Spanish that were translated with Google Translate or from somebody who speaks Spanish in the office, but it's translating. It's not creating the content in Spanish and for that market. It's a huge advantage, definitely. ROB: Fantastic. Alvaro, when people want to find you and the DM Agency family, where should they go to find you? ALVARO: Very simple. DM, as in digital marketing: dmagency.us. ROB: Excellent. Thank you very much for joining us today and sharing your broad journey and experience across bicultural marketing, Esports, hospitality, and so much more. It's quite a journey. ALVARO: Thank you, Rob. I really appreciate it. I enjoyed it, and I hope we can do this again in the future. ROB: Sounds great. Let's find a good time. I'll catch you soon. Be well. ALVARO: Thank you. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Melissa Libby, owner of Melissa Libby & Associates (MLA), started her career in hospitality. Today, her friends call her the Restaurant Whisperer In this interview, Melissa talks about the challenges restaurants have faced in the face of Covid-19, the changes yet to come, and the lessons she has learned in her 27 years of restaurant marketing. In recent months, MLA has helped its clients pivot to curbside delivery, takeout, and/or to serving different retail markets. Some of the adaptations? Restaurants have: Started low-overhead ghost kitchens/pop-ups that provide different menus from what is available in brick-and-mortar restaurants Converted parking lots into patios for outdoor dining Elevated curbside packaging and pickup to elegant "experiences." Started selling off their wine cellars, offering some great wines at good prices. Melissa advises, to further support your local restaurant, "Tip well.". Because restaurants typically do not have a lot of money, they value public and community relations over traditional advertising. As restaurants open back up, which clients are most likely to return for dining "in"? Turns out demographics provide no clue. Dining in is the more profitable option . . . but it's tough to figure out who to target with the "come back in" messages. Each individual will have his or her own level of comfort and timing for when it "feels safe." Melissa notes that "online ordering technology is glitchy." She has seen some improvement already and thinks it will quickly evolve to something "way better, very quickly." Third party delivery services take a significant cut of the food delivered. So, she says, order from the restaurant, and pick it up yourself. Melissa lauds the Georgia Restaurant Association for lobbying to get the necessary changes made to help Georgia's restaurants survive. When Melissa talks about the early days of her business, she says that she did not plan for success. She did not ask "What do I do if I get more clients than I can handle," she asked, "What am I going to do if I fail?" She feels she would have done better to plan for success and to prepare for success. Melissa used a siloed PR business staffing model until she figured out that did not work for her. She then divided her staff up by what they liked to do best and where they excelled. This made her staff happier, and her organization more resilient. Now, when an employee leaves the agency, the body of knowledge connected to a client remains intact because everyone in the agency has been working with that client. Melissa can be reached on her agency's website at: ThinkMLA.com. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Melissa Libby. Melissa is the owner of Melissa Libby & Associates based in Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome to the podcast, Melissa. MELISSA: Thank you, Rob. ROB: It's fantastic to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about MLA and MLA's superpowers? MELISSA: All right. MLA is 27 years old, based in Atlanta. Our superpower is restaurant marketing. My friends call me the Restaurant Whisperer. [laughs] That's what we do. We help restaurants get business and keep business. ROB: It's quite a time to be thinking about restaurant business, because here we are in – what month is it? August, I think? I have to check my calendar – of 2020. We are still in various stages of COVID-19 lockdown. So, in this time, in August 2020, what are you seeing/doing/hearing when it comes to restaurant marketing? MELISSA: Well, it's a strange new world, that's for sure. It's changed over the past few months of what we've been doing, and it continues to change as things happen. But it all comes down to getting the message out to the people who want to support a restaurant, want to dine at a restaurant, or want to have takeout. We've helped our clients pivot to curbside or takeout or a whole different retail market. Whatever they need to do to stay in business and stay afloat, we help them with that and help them get the word out to people. And then as Georgia reopened and people were able to dine in at a restaurant, we started getting the word out about that. What's interesting from a marketing perspective, and something that I hadn't really thought about – you can't pick a demographic and say, "Okay, this demographic feels comfortable walking in and dining in a restaurant and this one doesn't, so we have to focus on this." You can't say, "Older people don't want to dine in a restaurant, so let's market to the younger people" because that's just not the case. What I've found is that there are people in every demographic that feel comfortable dining in and in every demographic that don't. It's an extremely personal decision, so it's been really, really hard to figure out who those people are and how we get to them. Because with the dine-in, that is going to be the more profitable avenue for the restaurant. There's been a lot of that going on. A lot of messaging, a lot of safety messaging to make people feel comfortable, a lot of internal messaging to the staff, a lot of website writing, a lot of social media message crafting. It's just been really, really challenging. ROB: It's interesting that you mention the dine-in diner as being more profitable for the restaurant, because I am a big fan of restaurants. I am a big fan of good restaurants. I am a big fan of many of the restaurants that show up on your website. Even from early on in COVID – I think I felt like I was trying to do them a solid by doing pickup, but even continuing to do so, because I am one of those folks who's probably not going to dine in at a restaurant. But what can I do as a pickup order diner to help with the profitability of a restaurant versus maybe what someone dining in and sitting down is doing for them to make them a better customer? MELISSA: Definitely picking up instead of ordering through a third party delivery service is certainly a help to the restaurant because the third party delivery services take a pretty significant cut of the price. So, if you can go and pick it up, that's what you want to do. If you don't want to dine in, do that. Now in Georgia, they're about to let restaurants sell alcohol, so if you can order your beer or your wine – a lot of restaurants have cocktail kits – anything like that helps them. I have several clients that are selling their wine, basically, their wine cellar. And these are amazing wines that you can get at a really great price. So, do that, tip well. That's what you can do to help. I feel like with dine-in, they get that alcohol order that they're not going to usually get with the takeout, and they also obviously have the service staff who receive tips, the people that wait on you. So that's what you can do to help. And don't get me wrong; all of my clients are very, very grateful for the people that are coming, even if they're not coming to dine in. They're grateful for them. So please keep it up. Another thing – and I should've mentioned this – everyone is doing outdoor seating now. So that might be your gateway one day when you're ready to dining back in, to go sit on a patio somewhere. People are turning their parking lots into patios. They're doing anything they can to get some patio seating, and people are loving it, even as hot as it is here. ROB: I know some places have given a temporary reprieve on allowing restaurants to sell alcohol and also in terms of compromising what is allowed for outdoor seating. Are the alcohol sales becoming something more permanent that is being permitted for pickup? MELISSA: No, it's COVID specific. It would be great if they would make it permanent, and I guess it's a possibility, but that has not been discussed. ROB: It seems like it would take perhaps – and I don't know this industry as well from the side that you see it from – it seems like it would take a more potent restaurant lobby than maybe has formed up to now. Or is there a stronger restaurant lobby that is forming in recent years to help represent – because independent restaurants just don't have the same leverage that let's say a large chain has. MELISSA: Yeah. The Georgia Restaurant Association is absolutely amazing, and they are our lobbying group. I don't know if you recall that we got the Sunday Brunch Bill passed. It used to be you couldn't drink alcohol until 12:30 on Sunday, and now I think it's 10:30 or 11:00 or something. That took like 3 years or more. It's ridiculous. It takes forever to get these things through. But the Georgia Restaurant Association and Karen Bremer, who's the head, they are big-time our advocates from the restaurant community standpoint. They have been instrumental in getting all of these things to happen. ROB: That's good to hear. MELISSA: They are definitely representing everyone. They really, really are. ROB: When all this started, I'm sure you had some clients who were already doing online ordering, some who resisted it very much at the onset, probably some who flipped over, maybe some holdouts. What were the stages of technology enablement that you've seen across your client portfolio? MELISSA: It was very interesting to watch that. Anybody that was already doing online ordering immediately took it up a notch and they were great. And then you have fine dining restaurants like Aria and Umi, and they're like, "How am I going to do takeout? How can you take out sushi?" It goes against everything that they have ever dreamed of for their restaurant. Then a couple of weeks go by and they're like, "Yeah, we've got to figure this out." And they did. In the case of Umi, they got beautiful packaging and they really figured out a way to create the Umi experience, even insofar as how you drive up and how you're greeted and how you receive your food. Everything about it is very Umi-like, and it's probably some of the more expensive takeout you'll ever get in your life. Umi has a broad menu that you can choose from. Aria took a different stance and they do two choices a day, and they post their menu every single day of what's tonight's menu. Some people get Aria three or four times a week because it's different every night. They've got a beautiful curbside pickup. I guess we probably have a couple that don't do online ordering or takeout, but it's few. It was hard, because we had to get the technology set up, and that's always painful. ROB: I imagine in Umi's case, they may have also been tracking – I think there was a sushi restaurant up in New York that went to some sort of like $800 takeout. Did you see this? MELISSA: [laughs] No, I didn't. ROB: Yeah, there was a New York sushi restaurant that went to $800 takeout. I saw some very elevated packaging from Sugarfish, which is a smallish/medium-ish sushi chain, that really did elevate that experience. My own experience has really been that during this time, it has become a time for those who are in the hospitality industry to think about hospitality far more than just being in the food and feeding people industry. MELISSA: Absolutely. That's exactly right, and Umi is the perfect example of that. They took their current offering and put it to go. They really did. And the love and care that they give you when you're dining in, you receive via takeout. They have now opened it for dine-in, but the takeout was such a hit that they kept that going. I wonder to myself if they will continue that when they don't have to anymore. ROB: I'm very much excited, especially the restaurants that have figured out how to be hospitable in their takeout and have that passion for serving people. I'm indeed curious how that will continue onwards. You mentioned that MLA has been in the hospitality industry – you mentioned you've been in business for 27 years. Have you been deep into hospitality from the onset? Let me start there. MELISSA: We have. I started the company in 1992. My background was I had a job at Hyatt. I was working in the hotel business. My contacts were already in the hospitality business, so those were the type of client leads I was getting back then. Then as '96 and the Olympics started getting closer, Atlanta's hospitality scene started to beef up a little bit. then when the Olympics hit, I think the whole world saw Atlanta for the great place that it is, and before I knew it, I was focusing on restaurants. I don't think I could've done that when I first started. I don't think there would've been enough restaurants to keep me employed. But that changed, and I was a part of it. It was awesome. ROB: It's amazing to stick with it for that long. I think some people start off in the serving hospitality, but they find a hard way to make it a rewarding business for themselves as entrepreneurs and they start to get wandering eyes for how to better serve other clients. Particularly, I think there's a perception – and a reality, depending on the client – of the margins in the world of being an agency driven around the hospitality industry. You seem to be happy to have made it work for coming up on three decades. How do you attribute that ongoing passion for the industry – and also, you've been able to hire people as well. You're not a one-person show, just scraping by, taking pictures yourself and posting pictures of food. How has that worked well for you? MELISSA: There's no question that I love the industry, and I think that has to be – I'm sure I could go work in another industry and make more money, but I do love the industry, and I love working with the restaurant owners and the chefs. It's a very creative group of people. It's a very entrepreneurial group of people. I really enjoy working with other people. I love to be in a meeting and go, "Hey, I have a great idea. Let's do this!" "Okay, that sounds good." Boom, off you go and start doing it. It doesn't have to run up a flagpole of approvals and all of that stuff so that by the time the idea is finally approved, it's completely different and 3 months later. I really enjoy the atmosphere of what we do. I feel like from focusing the way that I do and focusing my team in the way that I do, we're just incredibly efficient. The fact that we represent a lot of restaurants makes us a huge value to the media, so they can just make one phone call and say, "I'm looking for recipes using apples" – and this is a true story; got it this morning – and I can make like eight calls and then, 3 hours later, call the reporter back and go, "Okay, I've got" – and this is true – "a Brussel sprout and apple salad, I've got an apple pie, I've got this, I've got this." The reporter has only had to make one call and spend 5 minutes. So, I think that's made us very efficient. You're right; restaurants don't have a lot of money, but I have to say that they value public relations and community relations and communications over more traditional advertising. Because it stretches a little bit more. Their money will stretch a little bit farther with us than it would two ads that month. It really has been – I've made a living. [laughs] I pay my bills, almost always on time. ROB: And sometimes you get some good meals along the way, and that's pretty good too. MELISSA: I definitely do. I definitely do that, yes, for sure. ROB: Wonderful. When we think about some of these clients – entrepreneurs, and I think restauranteurs sometimes in particular, may have a reputation of being a little bit hard to corral. When someone comes in with that need for that story, for that recipe, some of them might not even read your email until the next day. I think a lot of people, even more broadly beyond the hospitality industry, would wonder: is there a secret? Is it that you just know so well into the businesses that you can maybe bypass the entrepreneur and go straight to a chef internally? Is it that you tend to work with restauranteurs who have their details together more? Is it that you're sometimes able to just know things well enough that you can be a proxy for them? Or a combination of everything? How do you tighten those lines of communication? Because everybody wants, I think, that level of execution and responsiveness to be able to pull something from an idea to a published-in-the-media message quickly. But clients may not always make that easy for you. MELISSA: Oh, for sure they don't. [laughs] The answer to your question is certainly all of the above. Every single client is different, has a different way that they like to be communicated with. We just have to learn, "Okay, this guy, if we text him at 2:00 it's going to be our very best time to get his attention. This one, we've got to call because he knows if I'm calling, it's got to be really important. Otherwise I'm just going to send him an email. This person likes all five things put in an email at the end of the day. This person likes everything in subject by subject email." We really just have to figure them out. But they all are paying us to get the word out, so if they take too long or don't answer or whatever, I just let them know, "Hey, you missed an opportunity. This is why, so next time, here's what we've got to do." They get it. And we also know on our end who's fast to answer – and I tell clients this when I first meet with them about "Are we going to work with you or not?" I always say, "There is no question, the people that answer us quickly and thoroughly are the ones that get the best press. So that's what you've got to do." They always go, "Okay, okay, I'm going to do it!" And then some do and some don't. But it's the truth. You get out what you put in. But if we get a last-minute request and we don't have a lot of time, we have our go-tos because we know who's going to respond. That's the goal, to be a go-to. ROB: You've been in this business a while longer than some of the recent shifts in the food media world. It seems like between web outlets, between review sites and increased interest in the TV landscape around food, the culture of food and interest in good food has shifted mightily. What is trending now? What is evergreen now, and what is withering away in terms of getting attention within the hospitality industry? MELISSA: That's a really good question, and I'm not sure, given everything going on, that I can answer that with any great knowledge. I've seen the food industry go through all kinds of changes, and I think that food as an entertainment avenue is here forever. I just can't see that going away. But I think that with COVID and the concerns of the large gatherings, and even the very tight quarters, that's going to – I don't want to say go away, but I think there's going to be less of that. I think people that are opening restaurants right now for sure are not cramming tables in. They're also not making a humongous restaurant. So, I think we're going to see some more medium-size restaurants with a lot of space. I think we're probably going to see some lower priced menus. Just a more mainstream, low-key, as everybody gets back into it and figures out – I just can't imagine people opening a big, flashy, fancy restaurant right this minute. And that's not to say that they won't, and that's not to say that they wouldn't be successful. But I think if you were making your decision today, that would probably not be what you would do. Now, there are people that are well into the planning for a restaurant that's supposed to open next week or in a month or whatever, and they have to go with what they've got and use the guidelines from the state until they don't have to anymore. ROB: The intersection that you sit at, I'm sure that your existing clients and people getting into the industry even look to you to an extent for strategy as well. One thing you hear swirling in the restaurant industry is diversification of business model. Some people are already going into events. That's obviously changing a little bit. Some have been going into additional retail product lines. What are you suggesting to clients as they think about where to go with technology enablement and where to go with overall restaurant business strategy, possibly diversifying? MELISSA: One thing that's big is the ghost kitchen/pop-up idea. I have a couple clients, Drift in East Cobb is doing a lobster roll pop-up calls Pop's Lobster Shack. They did it kind of out of necessity during COVID. They made this takeout window – and I don't know if you know this, but lobster was really, really inexpensive. I don't know if it still is, but all the lobster fishermen didn't have anybody to sell to because all the restaurants up there were closed, so everybody got lobster really cheap. I don't know if people are noticing, but you can probably get lobster at Applebee's right now. I don't know. But anyway, they started this lobster roll special called Pop's, and it's been unbelievably successful. We had a meeting the other day and they were like, "I think we're going to just keep this going. When lobster's out of season, we'll do something else." I already had some clients that were talking about that sort of ghost kitchen idea, where you do something different than what you already do in your restaurant, you have a different menu offering, but you don't have the building and the huge branding and all the expenses that go along with it. You just sell it on Door Dash or whatever the situation is. So that's definitely happening right now. As far as technology, I think the online ordering is glitchy right now. I see it already getting better, and I think it's going to get way better very, very quickly, and people are going to be able to, as you suggested, order merch and maybe seasonings and all that stuff in a much less clunky way than they even can do right now. I'm excited for that to happen because it's been painful, some of these online sites that we've been working with. ROB: I can't imagine, and it sounds like you've had to. Melissa, as you reflect on the business as you have built it thus far, what are some things that you would consider maybe doing differently if you were starting over from scratch? MELISSA: That's a very good question. One of the things that I always tell people when they say, "What should I know before I start a business?" is I did not plan for success when I started. I planned, "What am I going to do if I fail? When am I going to decide it doesn't work, and then what am I going to do?" I spent a lot of time thinking about that, but I didn't spend any time – not even a minute – thinking about, "What am I going to do if I've got more clients than I can handle? What am I going to do if there are not enough hours in the day for me to do all the work by myself?" I never thought of any of that. I spent probably 2 or 3 years running like a crazy woman, trying to hire a person here and there, do this, do that. Always that's my first thing that I tell people: plan for success. Have some people lined up. Have some things lined up to support you if it goes well. That's always been my best learning, because it's like "Why didn't I do that?" And then many years ago – but it was still well into the business – I realized that the traditional PR business model or way of setting up your staff didn't work for me. You probably know this, but it was always account supervisor, account executive, assistant account executive, little silos, and they did everything. They met with the client, they wrote the business plan, they wrote the press release, they sent the press release, they did everything. I realized I would come back to the office and go, "Hey, we got a new client," and everybody would duck their head like, "Oh my God, don't give it to me, don't give it to me." I was like, oh, this is not good. So I divided everybody up by what they like to do best and what they're best at, so now we have writers and we have media relations people and we have social media people and we have client services people. If your thing is meeting with the clients and writing timelines and writing plans and checking off lists, then that's what you do. And if you're a great writer and you can sit in a quiet room all day long and write, write, write, write, write, that's what you do. It was just a huge help, and it changed everything. And then there was an added bonus of if someone leaves, the brain trust does not walk out the door because everyone has been working on the client. So that was a big learning, and it's something that I'm glad came to me at some point in the years. ROB: Sure. One thing I think adjacent to that is in this case – and it's fairly common in the PR industry – your name is on the door, and that can be a challenge in bringing in other people. How have you addressed the challenge where Melissa is quite often the person who goes out and earns the trust of the client, and your reputation is a big part of the value that you bring, but at some point your client's going to have to work with somebody who's not Melissa? How have you handled that scaling yourself problem? MELISSA: It's a good question, and it worried me so much for a long time. I felt like I had to be at every new business meeting, I had to really, really be involved and really assure the prospective client that I was their main contact and all of that. I think the true answer is good people. I have people that have been with me 11 years, 8 years. I've been really fortunate to have long-term employees who are awesome, and the client just wants somebody that's going to help them get the work done. I love client meetings, so I go to as many of them as I can. The beauty, though, is I don't have to write the agenda. I don't have to take the notes. I don't have to do the follow-up. I'm just spending that hour of my time brainstorming with that client or advising that client or listening to that client. So, I'm giving them my best. I'm giving them what they expect from me and what they value from me, but then I have a very competent person and a whole team behind that person that's going to take care of the details. Over time, I've just gotten more and more comfortable with it – and that's truly what it was: me getting comfortable with it. I think it was more in my head than it was anything else. I think the clients are fine with it because, once again, they're being taken care of. If they weren't, I'm sure they would say, "Melissa, you schluffed me off on this person and they're no good." But fortunately that does not happen. Also, one of my key employees took on the new business development role a few years ago, so she is bonused on the new business that she brings in. She takes a really instrumental role in that, to the point where now sometimes we have to be sure that the prospective client realizes that she may not be the person that they're going to see every day too. It's funny. It's kind of transferred over a little bit. ROB: It definitely makes sense. It sounds like one of those things you find along the way; you took it from your name and your person being the reputation to when people bring in Melissa Libby & Associates, your reputation is also the people you bring to the table and who does the work. MELISSA: Yes, exactly. ROB: The brand is still you; you haven't shied away from that, but you've expanded what it means. MELISSA: Right. And as you'll notice, we a long time ago started using MLA as our logo. Our web address was MelissaLibbyPR.com; now it's ThinkMLA.com because we wanted to expand beyond the PR and be more than that, and then we also wanted to shorten it and use that MLA more. It just takes my name out of it a little bit. Just a little bit. ROB: Perfect. Melissa, when people want to find you and MLA, where should they go to find you? MELISSA: ThinkMLAcom. ROB: Excellent. Even in the website, it's changed a little bit. Or was that always the address? MELISSA: No, it's changed. ROB: Very good. Melissa, thank you for enlightening us on your journey with Melissa Libby & Associates as well as the journey of the hospitality industry during this time. I've learned a lot, and I think the listeners will have as well. MELISSA: Thank you. I enjoyed it. ROB: Be well. Thank you. MELISSA: All righty. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Chris Carr, President and CEO of Farotech, started his agency 19 years ago as a web development company, moved into SEO, and then transitioned to what Chris calls conversion science. Today, Chris says, his agency builds integrated systems that generate leads, nurture leads into clients, and then convert clients into brand ambassadors who refer new clients to the brand. Chris says that most companies spend a majority of their time and effort generating leads – and then alternating between generating leads and reacting to the results. He emphasizes that businesses can't depend on a single marketing platform. A properly designed system, like a flywheel, maintains consistent momentum, gains power, and generates "really great results." Farotech "deep dives" for 2 months into a client's marketing, discusses a client's unique selling proposition, compares it to customer search volumes, and applies a software that identifies first top ten relevant Google search results in a client's market niche. Evaluating the "winners'" readability, content, content length, infographics, and backlinks yields information about what the client company needs to do to beat the competition. After Farotech understands a client's messaging requirements for both global audiences and the client's segmented audiences, the agency writes great, value-imbued, data-based content. Pushing data and information makes content sharable, Chris says. The agency provides a strategic 3- to 5-year roadmap that highlights gaps and opportunities and, over time, recommends messaging tweaks to keep the client "at the top." One technique Farotech uses to great advantage is placing Pixel on a client's page to track visitor conversions, optimize ads, build targeted audiences for future ads, and remarket to people who have made a purchase. Pixel is very useful for capturing "lookalike audiences," people who are unaware of a company and its offerings, but who are demographically similar to a company's "good customers" or similarly challenged. Finding the "lookalike" audiences for a client's emails and for its website users greatly expands opportunities. Chris says that blog messages should be targeted, polished, and personalized and delivered at least once a week in order for the blogger to be recognized as a thought leader. Chris says he likes to "fail as fast as I can, and then adjust and then keep going and keep going." He believes it is very important to invest in training staff, and lauds Greg Crabtree's book, Simple Numbers, as an effective guide for "when to cut and when to hire. Chris can be reach on his company's website at: farotech.com consultation. Those who would like a consultation should email: info@farotech.com. He believes most companies will find this initial consultation invaluable. "He says, We work really hard to tell you where you're weak, where you should go from here. Even if you don't use us, these are the three things you should be doing, things like that." Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk. I am joined today by Chris Carr, President and CEO at Farotech based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Welcome to the podcast, Chris. CHRIS: Hey, thanks for having me. ROB: It's fantastic to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about Farotech and what superpower you all bring to the world of marketing agencies? CHRIS: Thanks for asking. I stared Farotech about 19 years ago. We started out as a web development company, then slowly moved into SEO, and then from SEO into what we call a conversion science. What I mean by that is when clients come to me, they usually say, "If I could only figure out my SEO, then all my problems would be solved" or "If I was only good at social media" or something like that. What I often say is, "Hey, if you are basically wrapping all of your marketing around one particular solution, then you're building your house on sand." What we try to make the argument of is we build systems, not solutions. If marketing is done right and it's turned into a system, essentially you have a system that generates leads, nurtures leads into clients, and then converts clients into brand ambassadors. And those brand ambassadors are going to be those loyal fans who create referrals for your brand. So, the superpower that I would have is I'm going to help strategize that in the beginning of the process and help our clients get to that spot. ROB: Where are they typically starting from? Are they just spending on anything? Are they trying to do some of these tactics that someone told them they should do, and they're coming to you because they're trying to be amazing at SEO even though they can barely spell it? Where are they coming from? CHRIS: I think most people spend the large majority of their time in lead generation. They're going to come to me saying that they might write a couple blogs. What I find is that most companies are what I call reactive marketers as opposed to proactive marketers. The reactive marketer is the idea that we live this life of quiet desperation. We have a tradeshow, so we sprint for the tradeshow, or it's Christmas season and we need to get our products ready for that. I worked a lot in the healthcare space; certain sports change how they market. You sprint and then relax and then sprint and then relax. A system doesn't do that. A system is kind of like Jim Collin's Flywheel. It just keeps spinning and spinning and spinning. Momentum turns into power, and power turns into really great results. ROB: I think a lot of people aspire to this sort of thing, but they very quickly realize that they don't really know what they should be talking about that's interesting to their audience. How do you think about that? What's an example of an industry where you've seen it could be hard for them to think about what to say, but in fact there is a system that can be put in play that makes a lot of sense once you get your head around it? CHRIS: That's a really great question. Unfortunately, I think Google tells you what to say in a lot of ways. You know your general topic; you have great products and services. It's shocking that when you say it the way you say it and then I look in Google and I'm saying, "Hey, what you think the audience wants and what they're actually searching for – you can try really hard to be great at your brand, but you're trying to convert the masses on something they don't even know about." What happens is I'll sit down with a client and we'll talk about their unique selling proposition, and then I'll compare it to search volumes and say, "Hey, we create your messaging. These are the tweaks you're probably going to have to make. Do you agree or disagree?" If it's your brand, I want it to be sacred and I want to protect that, but if it's about volume and generating leads, then we might have to tweak or pivot or move. ROB: That certainly makes sense. Are you looking at that through the lens – I think level zero of this is you type what you think you're talking about into Google and see what else gets suggested, but then there's this deeper level of maybe search console and some other keywords. How do you dive down that rabbit hole and start finding out what they're actually talking about in the eyes of their customers? CHRIS: We develop a gap assessment right at the onset of working with a client. That's a 2-month deep dive into a client, their marketing. It's a 3- to 5-year roadmap to understand where the gaps are, where the opportunities are. But most importantly, I've got to understand your messaging and what your vision is and how you create effective messaging for not just the global audience, but to segmented audiences too. Within that process, what we try to do is once I've figured out your messaging, we have certain pieces of software that before we even publish, it's going to tell you who's in the top 10 spots on the first page of Google, who those top 10 companies are, and what kind of content you've got to create to beat them. I might look at readability, I might look at the length of content, I might look at the fact that they have infographics or backlinks. As I start to create that message, I'm going to say, we're going to base this piece of content on data, not on hunches. That's where we start. We start with the data. ROB: Interesting. It seems evident that at some point you're going to want to atomize this content, push it out into social, push it out into paid social, push it out even into – maybe what resonates even turns into some press. How do you get down to that next layer? I think there's probably some ways where the search data is the truth and the tools you have are the truth, and there's some places where on each platform, the audience is looking for something slightly different. CHRIS: At the genuine level, we write content for our clients. We'll interview our clients through a number of different ways so our writers write really great content. It starts with writing great content. That's table stakes. You've got to have great content. It has to have value. I always say that it should push data and information because that's what makes content sharable. But then it has to go into the system. I'll just get very tactical about it. We write content for blogs. Blogs get syndicated through social media channels. Then we'll use paid channels to reach certain target audiences. We'll use multiple different platforms but say it's Facebook. I'll Pixel on my client's computer. We'll find out, what are the visitors doing when they come to your website? Then I'll be able to get your messaging to that target and then a lookalike audience as well. So now I'm reaching people that don't even know you exist, but they are similar demographics or have certain challenges and things like that. ROB: Very interesting. That's been surprisingly effective for quite a while, but it kind of makes sense. Figure out how to drive the audience and then make sure you Pixel for retargeting and the lookalike audience. That combined with, maybe if you're capturing some emails, a lookalike on the email audience, those are sometimes those core four audiences: your email, the lookalike email, the web, and the lookalike web. CHRIS: Yeah. That's it in a nutshell. I forgot to mention that we do – not email blasts, but we do very targeted emails. I think the key you also want to include into that mix is segmentation. If you send one message to your entire audience, unless you have a very niche product – for example, we have a buyer persona that's a general business; then we have SaaS companies, then we have healthcare companies, and then we have manufacturing. There's very specific information that I share to healthcare companies that I don't want my manufacturing potential clients to hear. It just doesn't make sense. And I don't want to water down a message that can be used for everybody. I'd rather send a very segmented, polished, personalized message to a smaller audience than carpet bomb your entire database with a generalized message that doesn't bring value. ROB: Sure. How do you think about frequency amongst those different segments? Do you just hit each one when you have something to say? How do you make sure you're not neglecting something too long? CHRIS: We try to do at least a minimum of one blog a week. Everyone talks about Google's best practices, and I think we make them up as we go along. But we found is what we call it link velocity. If you can keep up that link velocity from an aspect of at least one blog a week, usually what happens is you establish yourself as a thought leader and Google starts to recognize that. What I don't believe is that you should just be a mill. Don't just publish content to publish content. What we do is sit down with a client and we develop an editorial calendar. In an editorial calendar, you're going to know what content goes out in the next 30, 60, or 90 days. We leave some room for things to be nimble because things change, the news changes. Pandemics happen. ROB: Yes, they do. CHRIS: But for the most part, you want to be in a scenario where frequency of about once a week is pretty good. Especially if you're sending out email communication as well, you don't want to be blasting people every day. It's kind of funny; I have a cellphone, and I also ride a bike. It's just something you do when you're old to stay in shape. I bought my iPhone case from a company called Rokform. Probably shouldn't have said their name. Anyhow, the case is really awesome. Connects to my bike. Really, really awesome. But the fact that they feel like they need to email me every single day is beyond annoying. It went from me being a loyal fan to me being like, dude, I've got to get around to unsubscribing, but I shouldn't have to unsubscribe because you should know your audience better. Like, how many phone cases are you going to buy in the next 5 years of your life? Two? One? Just a pet peeve, but it relates to the frequency of communication. ROB: Yeah, our own experiences certainly inform those conversations around frequency. I'm sure a lot of people can relate. You buy a pair of shoes and then a week later they're like, "Do you want some more shoes?" It's like, I am not that customer segment. I am not the weekly shoe buying guy. I buy a pair of shoes about every 6 months, and if you want to retarget me in 6 months and ask me for some shoes, I'll probably buy some. CHRIS: Yeah, you should be talking to my wife. [laughs] That's my wife's rhythm, about one pair a week. But for me – yeah. ROB: Different customer segments. There it is. CHRIS: Big time. ROB: Chris, you mentioned that you started off not really even intending to start an agency, starting off in web development. What made you realize that this was actually going to be a business that was viable, that was going to stick around for a little bit? CHRIS: Started the business about 6 months before 9/11. I was working at a private company called Vanguard. They're an investment company. I was trying to get into IT there. Thought I wanted to be in IT; what I really wanted is marketing. I got that job, and then 3 days later, 9/11 happened and they said, "Hey, we're going to have to put you back at your old job." I was a phone jockey. I was a registered rep, and I was talking to people on the phone at a call center like 8 hours a day. It was at one of those spots where I'm sitting in the parking lot like, "I just don't want to go in there." Anyhow, 6 months later, 9/11 happens and I have no wife, I have no kids. It takes me a whopping $1500 a month to pay my life and my bills. I was like, "You know what? Screw it. I'm just going to go out and do this thing." Started the business. Got immediately gobbled up as a consultant for a couple years, working in a marketing company that specialized in pharma, and then 2 years later went on and started the agency. How do you know it happens? You don't. It's funny; my business partner was texting me this morning and talking about payroll and he's like, "I think I have kidney stones." [laughs] You never wake up and feel like, "Wow, this whole agency this is just a dream. There's never a bad day." We started a dream, wanted to do this thing, created a product, got a client. That client led to two clients. Two clients led to more employees. More employees led to more clients. You just wake up one day, 19 years later, 150+ clients, 50 employees, and you're just – I joke around that it took 19 years to be an overnight success. ROB: [laughs] It becomes a lot of mouths to feed. I think one of those temptations for many folks in the agency world is to maybe look a little bit jealously at their SaaS clients. Of course, the grass always looks greener on the other side. How have you looked at that? "Man, it would be nice to have a product with 90% gross margins and the money keeps coming in." CHRIS: Yep. Well, be careful what you wish for, because I have SaaS clients, and they say, "Getting them to buy the software is the easy part. We make all the money in the service." I'm like, dude, I'm a service company that wants to build a product. You're a product company and you want to start a service. [laughs] Dude, you don't want to talk to people. It happens. One of the things that's very interesting in the SaaS space is if you don't have VC funding or you don't have a pretty good cushion, marketing is scary. What I mean by that is – I use the analogy of Photoshop. Photoshop would sell for anywhere between $300 and $500 back in the day before SaaS was actually SaaS. Do you remember Photoshop before it was SaaS? ROB: Oh yeah. I remember people asking who was going to buy Photoshop on a monthly payment when you can just buy the shrink-wrap or the download. CHRIS: Yeah. Honestly, I think most of it was just downloaded illegally anyway. It was terrible. [laughs] It was the early 2000s. Napster was there, and software was not free. But yeah, nothing like going on a podcast and admitting illegal activity, right? ROB: "I have a friend." CHRIS: I have a friend, right? [laughs] It was a decade ago. But let's say you go out and buy the software and it costs $500 bucks. Now you're like, "We're going to lower that barrier of entry and make it $19.99. No one's going to cancel on us because we got them for $19.99." I'm like, that's like $480 in cash flow that you don't have right now. It's going to take you 30 months for you to reclaim that other $500 bucks. It's awesome in the aspect of you've eliminated your barrier of entry, you stay competitive and stuff like that, but cash flow is king. I have SaaS clients, and the number one thing I'm looking for is, are you sustainable? Because if you don't have that core number of clients, man, it gets scary pretty quick. ROB: Right. You being in Philadelphia, I know there are some investors there, but it's not the Bay Area and it's not even New York, I don't imagine. That services dimension of it can be a function of SaaS survival in a non-VC-heavy market. CHRIS: Yeah. It's a critical call to make. How do you want to live? Sometimes you've got to do the service until you can just be product only. And I respect that. I respect anybody who's going to say, "I do what it takes, and when the landscape changes, then I'll pivot." I can respect that. ROB: Oh yeah, I've certainly been down that path. It's hard from a pride perspective, and I'm sure we all get told what we're supposed to be when our company grows up and how it looks and what you're not supposed to do. Sometimes practicality and eating that pride – and also just realizing who it is that you want to be instead of who it is that other people want you to be is such a key step. CHRIS: And then you're also worrying about – I think there's a phrase that says for every level, there's another devil. What happens here is that you switch out of that service-based model, you're basically just a SaaS company from the regular sense of the word, but then your whole day is lead generation, lead nurturing, and then most importantly – which is something you didn't have to worry about before – you're always worrying about retention. It's one of those things where when a pandemic happens, you might be the first thing that goes. And that's a scary predicament too. I remember specifically, our company hadn't taken a hit. We thought we were going to take a hit. My business partner – he's the COO, but he also does the CFO type stuff – came to me with this long list of everybody that we buy from, and he's like, "This is the list of the people that can go. They're what I would call 'nice-to-haves.'" That's a scary spot to be in if you're SaaS. One of the things from a SaaS standpoint is the same thing I say to people that are in employment. Make yourself unfirable. If you are a SaaS product that lives on the periphery of "nice-to-have," you're nice to have, but you can also be very forgettable. ROB: That's true on SaaS. I think there's an extent to which that's also true in services, though. You can have a contract, but when March 15th, 2020 hits, if a client comes to you and says, "Hey, we're going to be done for a while," what most people are going to do and what's probably prudent is to say, "Okay, I understand. Let us know how we can help you." You're not going to fight and be like, "You've got 9 months left and another $90K on this contract, so you've got to pay up, bud." CHRIS: That's where, for us, we always have a roadmap. The roadmap is even clients who say, "Hey, we're not seeing the results," I'm like, "Great. We charted this roadmap together. Where did we go wrong? Where do you disagree? Because you agreed to the same roadmap too. We might not be where we're at right now but look at where we're going. If you don't believe in where we're at now, do you believe in what's a mile down the road?" If they say yes, then you say, "Let's journey on this together. I'm on this journey with you." I want to be in a scenario here where I can be very vulnerable with you and just say, "Where are you suffering? Which part of this process isn't working, and what can we put a little bit more energy into?" as opposed to cutting the cord. I think one of the things we try very hard to do is to not be a vendor. We try to be a partner. I hate people that overuse that, but that's exactly how it works for us. We have clients that are like, "We've got to do another advertising campaign, and I forget what we said about this, this, and this. Farotech, what do we say about that?" I'll be like, "Dude, it's your company. You don't know what you said about that?" I mean, it's an honor and a privilege, but you become so ingrained in who they are that they forget what's been said about them, what they even say about themselves. ROB: Makes sense. Chris, you've given us some nuggets already, but if you rewind and think about the 19 years of the company, what are some lessons you've learned along the way that you might do a little bit differently if you were starting afresh in 2020? CHRIS: I got this questionnaire from you before we started talking and I knew this was coming, and it's so funny – I told my assistant, it matters what day it is. Literally, I consider myself a lifetime learner, but I also say that those last 19 years, I've Forrest Gump'd my way to this spot right now. Meaning I like to fail as fast as I can. Everything I'm saying here sounds cliché, but I like to fail forward, I like to fail as fast as I can, and then adjust and then keep going and keep going. I think the number one lesson that I've learned is if you just keep on swimming, if you just keep on pushing through the hard times, usually what happens here is the sheer diligence is enough. Especially in the service-based industry. In the product-based industry, it can be a little bit tougher because of competition. ROB: Sure. Those landscapes can change and there's things that can happen. It doesn't matter how much you keep swimming; you're not going to rebuild your Groupon competitor today and have it thrive like crazy. CHRIS: I don't think Tom from Myspace is going to make this dramatic resurgence against Facebook. I think at this point Mark's got him. But for the most part, I've seen two economic downfalls. Now I've survived through a pandemic. We signed our first million-dollar client; a year later, we decided to part from that client. I had all the staff from that client that I refused to let go of, and I tried to be a solider and say "I'm going to sell my way out of this," which I failed miserably. They ended up hating me on their way out anyway, even though I'm putting their salaries on my credit card. It's terrible to say – took me almost 7 years to dig out of that hole of salaries. However, I would do it again because of the things I've learned. Nothing would have forced my hand like reaching the bottom of the barrel. That's just the way it is. ROB: Right. It's not that you would do it that way again; it's that doing it that way taught you more about the next time. CHRIS: Oh, I'm sorry, yeah, I wouldn't say I'd do it again. I'd say I wouldn't change it. In other words, unfortunately I feel like God wanted me to take this road so that I could – I don't think I would've learned if this didn't happen to me. ROB: Yeah. How do you now think about that alignment between the team that's working on a client, the revenue and team – you never want to think about when to cut the line, but there's a very tight alignment between revenue and staff in a services business. CHRIS: Yeah, we had to hire a consultant. Right now we use two different companies. One is called CEO Think Tank, where we run all of our numbers through them. The other one is called Simple Numbers. Simple Numbers is this really advanced accounting and virtual CFO service. They look at our numbers. We live and die by data of utilization rates, of client growth, of sales growth. There's a balance between knowing who to have on your team and when to have them on your team and stuff like that. We have an exceptionally high retention of employees, which has been wonderful, and that – I don't know how to describe it. Training is probably the most expensive part of an agency because we do what we believe is some radical things, and you can't just pull a geek off the street and say, "Hey, guess what? You have an account now." So, investing in people, investing in training has made a big dividend for us. When we look at the numbers, we're really hard and we really push back when the numbers say your staff is bloated. We get that a lot. We have more staff than work. We get that a lot, but our pushback is that the more trained our staff is, the better job they do. The better job they do, the more clients stick around. And when you have a retention rate of clients in the 90s, you don't have to sell as much because your clients stuck around. If you bleed clients, you might think you're saving money because you have fewer employees, but you're spending way more in sales and marketing to try to get new clients that just fell off the bus. My analogy is falling through, but you get my point? ROB: Yeah. Simple Numbers – is that Greg Crabtree and the labor-efficiency ratio and all that jazz? CHRIS: Oh yeah, you're from that area. I think they're from down that way, aren't they? ROB: I think he's over in Alabama. I could be wrong. CHRIS: Yeah, he's a total rock star. Read the book. The book, to me – it's called Simple Numbers, but it could've been called "Simple Greek." I require a business partner who can read that stuff. I pay someone to do my taxes. I pay someone to read my email. [laughs] All I do is talk marketing. They show me the numbers and they show me the stuff, and then we make decisions from there. But for the most part, if you trust the data, it all comes out well in the end. ROB: That makes sense. People should definitely dig in, read it. It's a good guide. When to cut, when to hire. All helpful in there. Chris, when people want to find you and Farotech, where should they go to find you? CHRIS: They should go to farotech.com. You can email us if you want to get a consultation. It's info@farotech.com. One thing I will say is that if you reach out and we do a consultation, this is not a glorified sales pitch. You're going to learn more about your business in an hour than – we try really hard to bring a lot of value to the client as opposed to just using that as an opportunity to market and pitch our services. We work really hard to tell you where you're weak, where you should go from here. Even if you don't use us, these are the three things you should be doing, things like that. ROB: Fantastic. We'll put that in the show notes. I hope people will reach out. It has been a pleasure, Chris, getting to know you and Farotech. Thank you. CHRIS: Thanks again. ROB: All right. Be well. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Jay Owen, Founder and CEO at Design Extensions, started building basic websites at age 17. He worked for a number of years as a "solopreneur," hiring contractors as needed, and, as a company, made as much as six figures. When the economy collapsed in 2008, Jay's business was still doing well. He looked around. People were losing jobs. Things were in crisis. Idea? He'd create a full-time job for somebody. His StoryBrand Certified Agency and HubSpot Goal Partner has been in business and growing for over 20 years. Today, Design Extensions employs about 20 people, a great size because Jay has been able to create scalable systems that don't break with the absence of one person. In the past 5 years, following Mike Michalowicz's book, Clockwork, the premise of which is that there should be no one person in which the company is dependent, Jay has "replaced himself" at every level. The company can now survive, even if Jay is gone for as long as 30 days. Jay says, "A lot of business owners find marketing very confusing and expensive," and it often does not work. He explains that the agency's job is not to build websites, put pixels on a screen, or write good content for clients. Applying Design Extensions' proven growth strategies to clients' businesses helps them grow – by clarifying their messages and developing and executing effective plans, the agency enables clients to gain attention and acquire customers. The agency plans to add a consultancy arm to provide coaching and strategy direction, to make sure businesses have clear growth plans for both marketing and business fundamentals. In this interview, Jay recommends a number of books that have been pivotal for his agency. The agency's messaging is built around Donald Miler's "StoryBrand," as described in his book, Building a StoryBrand. Jay says that most people talk about themselves too much when they should talk about the customer's problem and how the company's solution can help the customer win. The customer needs to be the hero of the story. When Design Extensions changed the message on its homepage to align with StoryBrand concepts, incoming leads doubled. Telling the one thing that makes a company "special" is rarely all that special. Three unique things can become very special. Kim Scott's Radical Candor inspired Jay to have the courage to "be exceptionally clear with where improvement needs to happen," as long as that correction was paired with caring immensely for the individual. Jay believes it is his "responsibility to create a space where people can fail without failing catastrophically." Little failures will make people stronger. Gino Wickman's Traction provided the framework for the processes, procedures, and systems needed to make his business scalable and long-lasting. His final hiring interview, from Dave Ramsey's EntreLeadership, involves Jay and his wife taking the prospect and spouse to dinner. Jay's book, Building a Business that Lasts (Without Sacrificing Family) is currently available on his website, jayowenlive.com, for the cost of shipping and handling. He has a podcast of the same title available on that website and he is on "all the social media. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Jay Owen, Founder and CEO at Design Extensions based in St. Augustine, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Jay. JAY: Thanks for having me, Rob. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don't you tell us about Design Extensions and what superpower you all bring to the marketing agency world? JAY: Absolutely. I find that a lot of business owners end up in a situation where marketing is very confusing and expensive. They're not going to waste a lot of time and marketing on money that doesn't work, so what we do is help them clarify their message and then put together the right plan and then execute that plan so they can get attention and acquire customers. We've been doing that for the past 21 years, and we've grown every single year. We love taking those same business growth strategies we've used for ourselves and applying those to other businesses to help them grow. That's our focus. ROB: You've kept the pitch pretty tight. I think that speaks to what you might be able to do for someone else. And 20 years is a while to keep the same business operating, and particularly in the marketing world, where things keep on moving. What are some of the constants that have been true throughout the life o the company, and what are some of the changes you've seen that you've been able to incorporate into your own story? JAY: Gosh, so much has changed over time. When I started this thing, first, I was only 17, so I had no idea what I was doing. I was just building basic websites at the time. If that's all we still did today, we would probably be in pretty big trouble as far as the company goes. Plus, that first year I only made about $5,000 in total revenue, and that wouldn't work these days. [laughs] A lot has changed. This is probably one of the most dynamic industries that exists with regards to the speed of change. When I started this business, AltaVista was one of the leading search engines. Yahoo was the king of the internet. AOL was a monster player still. Now the landscape is totally different. There were no iPhones back then. There were no mobile sites. You couldn't have an application on the web. The idea of having a Software-as-a-Service business online was not a thing. All of that has changed over time, and we've just had to adapt with it. Ultimately, it's rooted in what our mission is. This is what I tell our team all the time. Our job is not to build websites for people. Our job is not to put pixels on the screen. Our job is not even to write good words for them. Our job is to help other people grow their business. Now, that often looks like some of the things that we do, like help people clarify their message so they can have a clean, clear message that actually gets attention. It looks like building websites. It looks like running marketing campaigns. It looks like developing applications. But the root of it all is, are we helping people grow their business, yes or no? If the answer is no, that's not a service we should offer anymore. That's really been the guiding light, that clarity of mission over time. But gosh, I've learned a lot along the way. ROB: Absolutely. Is there maybe a service that you did stop offering with that degree of clarity where you came to a moment and said, "We shouldn't do that anymore"? Is there an example we could look at? JAY: It's funny because there's one specific one that just happened recently. We'd not been offering this service for a while, but my office admin was going through some expenses and cleaning out some company stuff and said, "Hey, do we need this 'print@designextensions.com' email address anymore?" We're not really doing print work anymore. We used to do a lot of print work back in the day, and print is still needed sometimes; I'm not one of these digital marketing guys that believes all of traditional marketing of print and billboards and radio and TV are useless. They're not useless. They have a place. They're often overpriced, but that's a different situation. But we don't do that at all anymore. We don't print materials for clients; we'll send them out if they need to be. So that's a service that we ended up cutting. It wasn't in the best interest of us or our clients and it doesn't exist anymore for us. ROB: Even though in a moment, it might be the most reliable time to reach somebody with some direct mail. JAY: Yeah, I'm not opposed to direct mail at all. There's plenty of opportunities for these kind of things, like I said. It just didn't align correctly with our vision as a service. But with that said, we might help somebody craft the message that's going to go on their direct mail. For example, one of the biggest problems most people have is they talk about themselves too much. Really what they should do is talk about the problem that their customer is encountering and how their solution is going to help them solve that problem and help the customer win the day. We often want to position ourselves as the hero of the story, and really the customer needs to be the hero of the story. So even with something like direct mail, just changing some of the words that you use on those postcards or flyers or brochures can have a massive impact on the outcome. That's where our focus is more on versus actually producing the deliverable in that case. ROB: You mentioned that "hero of the story" language and framework. That's definitely become more prominent. It's strange, because it's the most timeless of stories, but it's become much more prominent recently. Have you seen an evolution in understanding of how to build a good story over the life of the business? JAY: Yeah. I've always said that everybody's selling something; it's just a matter of what. Our job is to understand that and help tell the story to basically get the customer to buy. But over time, one of the things that's been hugely helpful for us is a framework called StoryBrand by a guy named Donald Miller. He wrote a book called Building a StoryBrand, and we use that framework in our messaging now. It's stuff that we essentially already knew, and they're not totally new ideas. It's just a matter of packaging it together in a way that's so clear that it really, really works. We started using this framework for ourselves, and just by changing our messaging on our homepage, we doubled our incoming leads. When we found that out for ourselves, we thought, "Hold on, this works really well. We should do this for everybody." So now we're actually a StoryBrand Certified Agency, and that's one of the power cards in our deck, if you will, of things that are really helpful when we're helping a company grow. ROB: It's a big name behind that. I think sometimes when agencies look at that sort of program, they worry that if they affiliate with that instead of maybe cultivating their own secret sauce, they're going to become a commodity. How have you looked at using the StoryBrand to elevate rather than reduce value of what you do? JAY: Great question. I think I have had those same concerns over time, and there certainly are pieces of the puzzle that we go, "Hey, this is how we do it that's exclusive to us." But I've been in business long enough to know that there's only so many ways that a wheel's going to go around, and sometimes you just need a clear plan on how to get that done. I think a lot of companies, regardless of whether they're a marketing agency or any other type of business, are looking for that one thing that differentiates them. I think that's a mistake because I think it's very rare that one thing differentiates a company. What I do believe is that if you take three unique things and put them together, it becomes very special. For us, for example, three of our uniques would be something like we're a StoryBrand Certified Agency, we're a HubSpot Goal Partner, and we've been in business and grown for over 20 years in a row. If you combine those three things together, there's only about three or four agencies in the entire country that fit into that model. That's where there starts to become a uniqueness. And just because we're tied onto the HubSpot bucket for one thing or tied onto the StoryBrand framework for this thing, I don't think that makes us a commodity at all. I think that it's a combination of knowing how to use those things across multiple areas that actually gives us a lot of strength, and we can take strength from multiple other experts in order to make that happen. ROB: I've heard that referred to sometimes as talent stacking. To be able to take that large Venn diagram with big circles – there's even a decent number of agencies that have been around for 20 years; not a ton, but some – but some of them are still trying to sell you on 15-year-old SEO tactics, and that might not be such a good idea. HubSpot also gives you potentially the differentiation of some of the different levels. Is that something you're conscious of as you're building the business? You're not going to drive a customer to something that's not helpful to them, but some eyes on when you're ready to level up the HubSpot to show that you have been even more successful than some people with HubSpot? JAY: Yeah. The other thing too, though, is I will drop either one of those things if I don't think they're the best for our customers anymore. HubSpot, for example, we were a HubSpot Partner years and years ago, and it just wasn't the right fit for our client base at the time. We ended up dropping it and using other tools that we piecemealed together. Now we've come back to it, and HubSpot's changed a lot over the years too. Now they have a great free entry level product, so we can put lower end clients on it that might not be ready for a very expensive marketing suite where they're paying $1,000+ a month just for their software, but they can enter on the free level and it works really well. Ultimately, for me, we're going to use whatever tools or services we think are the best fit for the client. I always tell my team, I couldn't care less how we did it before; all I care about is what the best way is to do it. We're going to develop what we believe is the best practice across all these different disciplines, and we're going to keep doing it that way until we find a better way. And as soon as we find a better way, we're going to change it. That's how I operate. If anything, I have to temper that a little bit because I am very comfortable with change, and that can be disruptive for a team if you don't give them some stability over time. ROB: It's that balance of both change, but also there's probably an inversion point that you've had to go through in the life of the business. There's one point where in order to grow things beyond yourself, you have to define a process and have somebody follow it. And then there's a limit where you now have people who understand these tools better than you and have to be able to come to you and come to the organization and recommend change and a better way to do that. How do you think about getting that expert feedback from your team back into the agency, now that you're a couple of steps up in scale? JAY: I like how Andy Stanley puts it. He says as organizational authority increases, individual competencies decrease. I think you could also say as an organization's size grows, even if you were the one who did all the things at the beginning, which I was, at some point you're no longer the best anymore. It's funny because it's an interesting transition where – I used to always sell clients back in the day that they got to deal with me the entire time. That was the pitch. The pitch was, "Hey, the great news is you don't have to deal with a sales rep who's going to hand you to an account manager who's going to hand you to a team who's going to do all these things. You can deal with me from beginning to end." That was a true advantage at the time, in the same manner that now it's a true advantage that you don't get to work with me anymore. [laughs] Because my best and highest gifts are in overarching strategy; they're not in building a website for you. And the proof is in the pudding because the websites we produce today are a thousand times better than anything we produced 5 or 10 or 15 years ago, and I have nothing to do with them anymore. I think that's the big challenge for a lot of entrepreneurs, especially agency owners, I find, because many agency owners started as a professional in the craft. They were the ones who put the pixels on the screen. They were the ones who wrote the words. At some point you have to transition from being the marketer to being a business builder, and those are different things. ROB: You indeed mentioned that you started as an individual contributor building websites, and then it morphed and evolved. At what point did you realize that maybe this was going to be a company that could employ some other people and was going to be a long-term thing instead of – I think we start off building websites sometimes – it's a thing you can do. When you're 17, you're like, "I'm going to do this for the next 20 years." JAY: Right. For me, years ago – gosh, I guess I was probably 21 – I'd just gotten married. I got married pretty young. The company I think at that point was making about $25,000 a year. I was waiting tables on the side and also going to school, and my wife was doing the same. I didn't think I could make it work. I didn't think it was going to be a full-time business. I thought it was really a hobby to some extent, just based on the dollars I was able to bring in. I went to work for my uncle in that season because he ran a successful insurance agency. I thought he would fade out, I would fade in, and why not? It was kind of a silver spoon. It seemed like a good idea. He's got a black Mercedes and a house in the mountains and a house towards the beach. "I would like to have that," so my 21-year-old self said. But I worked for him for 6 months and hated the insurance industry. One day I came home, and I knew I'd married the right woman when I came home, I was kind of upset, and I said, "Babe, I could do this, and I probably could make a lot of money at it, but I think I'm going to hate it my whole life" and she said, "So quit and do what you love." I remember that season going, "I wonder if I'll ever have enough work to keep myself busy a whole week." But what I didn't understand at that time was the difference between owning a business and owning a job. What I really owned at the time was a job, not a business. I didn't pay myself very well and I didn't have very good hours, and I had the opposite of what most people want when they start a business, which is time, money, and freedom. I had none of those things. It took time for me to finally get that working as a solopreneur, if you will. I used a lot of contractors eventually and had my own thing. It was working pretty well. I got up to a point where I was making six figures as a company and feeling pretty comfortable, but then the economy collapsed in 2008. I'd used a lot of contactors but never had a full-time employee. I looked around, and people were losing their jobs everywhere and things were in crisis. My business was actually doing pretty good, because it turns out people need marketing in downturns because they need to get attention and acquire customers. I thought, "I think I can make a job for somebody. I think I could create a full-time position and pay somebody as a W-2 employee." That was a big change for me at that point over using contractors. So, I did. I created a job. I did a really bad job at knowing how to hire or fire or do anything else, but I learned along the way. And now we have a team of about 20, and it's a great size because – I always said I never wanted to be more than 10 people, but I realized at some point a couple of things. In order for me to create scalable systems that didn't break when one person was absent, I had to be a certain size to pull that off, and I also had to be a certain size so that when one person went on vacation, I didn't get two jobs for the week. There were years where I dreaded the summer because I'd have one person go on vacation and I'm like, "Great, now I have two jobs this week" – which is fine; I'm not scared of the work, but it gets exhausting after a while. Now it's very different because we've worked really hard the last 5 years to make sure there's no one person the company is dependent on, including me. We proof tested that about a month or so ago. I took a 30-day RV trip with my family and didn't work the whole time. That's a big barrier of success for me, even more so than anything money can provide. Once you lose money, you can always go get more of it, but once you lose time, you can't get any more. Especially with my kids growing up fast, that was a big deal for me. That's kind of the story of growing it over time. ROB: When's the next trip? JAY: Next year. I plan to take the same amount of time off pretty much every year. I don't know if we'll do an RV trip every year, but I think it's healthy for the business for me to take that amount of time off. The idea actually came originally from a book called Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz. Same guy that wrote Profit First. It's called Clockwork, and he basically says an owner or a founder needs to be able to leave for 30 days and the company keep functioning, because typically most companies go through a full cycle of business in 30 days. It's the only way that you know that you've actually replaced yourself at every level. The company becomes more valuable, number one, but it also protects the team as well, because what happens if I walk out and get hit by a bus? Does the company collapse in 2 weeks because there's no figurehead anymore? If so, I didn't do a very good job of building a business that lasts for them, and ultimately for my family as well. So that's how I think about it. ROB: Excellent. What was the timeline from when you decided to take that trip and maybe when you started telling people, and then when you actually took it? What was that timespan? JAY: I planned the idea of it before the pandemic, first of all. [laughs] Last year I read this book Clockwork, and over time I had been working my way up to being able to take more time off. First of all, I love the work that I do. I don't need to get away from it. But I do. I say I don't need to – a lot of entrepreneurs are like that. We say we love the work that we do. I love to work all the time. That's great, but our brains actually do need physical rest. That's why we often have these bursts of ideas in the shower or while driving or right before we fall asleep or right after we wake up. There's real science behind this stuff. Our brains are able to come up with things that they wouldn't otherwise come up with when we give them the space to do it. So last year I read this book Clockwork and I thought, "All right, I'm doing that. I've done 2 weeks, so now I'm going to take a full month and see how that works." My plan was to do that around this time of year this year. I actually ended up taking it earlier because of the pandemic, believe it or not. We sold our house right at the beginning of the pandemic; we have a new one that we're building. So, we had about 3 months where we had nowhere to live and I thought, "This is the time. I'm just going to do it now." I'd like to say there was some kind of grand plan. I had told the team that was my intention this year and I needed them to be thinking about that, because every time I leave, one of the questions – even if it's just for a week – I always tell the team, "If there's anything you get to where you go, 'We need to wait till Jay gets back before we can do X, Y, or Z or before we can decide this or figure it out or whatever else,' that's a problem. Whatever that is, write that thing down, and then we need to fix that so that it's no longer dependent on me." I think that mentality has been a huge driver for our growth. What happens if I'm not here? How do we grow the company? It gives everybody else the opportunity both for success and failure, and that's one of the big mistakes I think a lot of leaders make: they don't want their team to fail. But when you think back, how many things did each of us learn from failure? The answer is a lot. I believe it's actually my responsibility to create space where people can fail without failing catastrophically. I don't want people destroying the company, obviously, but some little failures here or there are good for everybody. ROB: That's such a good lesson there. When you talk about mistakes or maybe things you'd do differently or things you've learned from, what are some other things you've learned along the journey of building Design Extensions that you might do differently if you were starting it up today? JAY: Two big things come to mind. The first is however much time you think you need to hire the right person, you probably should quadruple it because it's so important to get the right people in the right seats. When we rush to hire people because we're in some kind of super busy mode or whatever it is and we think we need to fill a seat, I almost always mess that up. Patience in hiring has been a hard one for me because I'm a very fast mover. I'm like, "All right, let's go. You seem like you could figure that out. Let's make it happen." So I'm very patient in hiring. The other thing for me personally – this is more of a personal weakness – is being willing to give direct and candid feedback early on. Some people don't have a problem with this at all, but I do. Ultimately I've realized that it's because I want people to like me. I want to just be one of the team. I want to be everybody's friend. I want that so bad that at times, I'm willing to not be clear enough when there's problems, and that is a massive mistake. It is not in anybody's best interest. So, I've had to really work hard at that. A book that really helped me with that was Radical Candor by Kim Scott. She talks about this idea that you can care immensely for someone and be exceptionally clear with where improvement needs to happen. Those things are not counterintuitive. But some people fall off one side of the cliff or the other. They're either exceptionally clear, but they don't seem to care about the people at all – and she calls those people "obnoxiously aggressive" – and the other one, which is where I tend to fall off the cliff, is you show that you care deeply but you are not as clear as you need to be when there's problems, and she calls that person "ruinously empathetic." Which is interesting because when I was younger I wasn't empathetic at all. I had no empathy. I think through almost 20 years of marriage and five children and 20 years of business, you start to develop – you've walked through enough fire that you do have more empathy for people. But the danger is believing that trying to be super kind to them at the expense of truth is going to be helpful for them, and it almost never is. Not for them, for you, or the company. ROB: It's really good to share both sides of that on Radical Candor, because I think some people have heard it and run into somebody who maybe learned too much of the wrong lessons from it. It's always good to go back to the source and process through these things through our own filter. You mentioned this situation where things are really busy and you really need to hire someone, and you're talking about taking longer to make that hire. To do that, how do you manage the onslaught of work in that season while taking the time you need to make the right hire? JAY: I think a lot of it comes down to being able to think far enough ahead. If I need to hire somebody, the chances are I needed to be thinking about that a month ago or 2 months ago. So, taking the time to evaluate what the issues are for the company and plan for that makes a big difference. I think most people can wing it. If you're scrappy enough and smart enough, you can probably wing it to about 10 people and a million dollars in revenue, but after that things start to fall apart really quickly. For us, one of the big things that helped was a book called Traction by Gino Wickman. I know I'm throwing a lot of books out – which ironically, I used to never read because I'm dyslexic. But they're really, really a helpful framework. I am that traditional entrepreneur that really has a problem with process and procedures and systems. I feel like they're a cage for me. I feel like they're very corporate-y – but they're not. They're required in order to build a scalable business that will last. Traction gave us the framework for that, and as it relates to hiring, what happened is because we set these annual goals and we have these quarterly planning meetings, both as a leadership team and as a full team, we can see ahead of time what the issues are, when we're going to need to hire, and plan for that accordingly. Right now, we're working on hiring a new role, and we're just willing to take the time for it. Matter of fact, one of my team members the other day was like, "We could probably cut that last interview to speed things up." I'm like, "Nope, not doing it. I'm not cutting the last interview." I even go to the extent – this sounds kind of crazy, but it's actually great – I stole this from Dave Ramsey out of the book EntreLeadership; I will do a spousal interview at the end. It's not what it sounds like. Basically what happens is my wife and I will go out with whoever the team member is and their spouse, assuming they're married, and we'll just have dinner. The idea behind this is be with somebody in an environment that is not a traditional interview, because most people, including probably you and I if we were in that scenario, exaggerate and are moderate liars in interviews because we just instinctively are trying to put on our best self. When you see people out in the real world at dinner or something, they can still put on their best self, but you start to get a picture. I also think it's important to realize that when you're hiring somebody, if their spouse is like a monster, you might be bringing that into the company too, and you've got to be aware of that. ROB: You've mentioned a lot of books. I think there may be one other book you haven't mentioned yet. I do believe you have a book of your own that we should know about. JAY: Yeah, I do have a book. It was one of those things where everybody kept saying, "You should write a book. You should tell all these stories and put them together in one single plan." I never felt confident enough to do that, but I finally did it. It's called Building a Business That Lasts. My podcast is actually by the same title. The idea is, what does it take to build a business over time? Most businesses fail in the first year. The vast majority do. Many more fail within the first 5 years, and very, very few make it to the 10-year mark. So on the podcast, for example, I interview people that have been in business for 10 years or more, and selfishly, I learn a lot because I get to talk to other business leaders and entrepreneurs and hear their stories. The book is just my story, my framework of how I have made that work, and the subtitle is important to me, too. It's "without sacrificing family," because I've seen plenty of people along the way that have grown great businesses at the expense of all of the people around them, especially those closest to them. I probably have risked that at points, but I'm doing my darndest to try and stay married to the same woman my whole life and have kids that grow up and are as well-adjusted as they can be in this crazy world. ROB: For sure. That is excellent and noble and worthwhile. Where should we find that book? JAY: You can get a copy by just going to my website, which is jayowenlive.com. There's a button right there that says, "Get Jay's Book." We actually have a free offer right now; you just cover the cost of shipping and handling and we'll send that book out to you. Also on my website is my podcast and other materials that might be helpful if you're looking to build a business to last. ROB: Excellent. Jay, what's coming up next for you and Design Extensions that we should be looking forward to you hearing about? JAY: Great question. We are adding a new wing onto the company over the next couple of months and into the next few years. We've always been an agency. What I mean by agency is we do the work for you. But what I've found over time, especially in this new economy as people are starting new things, is they might not be able to afford the agency. They might want to be able to do some things themselves. They might even have some team members in-house that can do some of those things, but they need some guidance along the way. They need a guide who has been through it before and knows how to help them make those things happen. We are in the process, in the very early stages right now, of building onto the agency a consultancy. I see those two things overlapping. The idea is essentially for us to be able to provide coaching and strategy around building a business and making sure you have a clear plan, not just for your marketing, but for business fundamentals as a whole. I run a marketing agency, but you can hear just in this conversation we've had how many things we've talked about as it relates to hiring and firing, teambuilding, how to keep yourself sane in the midst of it all. So. we're going to be building a consultancy on top of the agency. Both of those things, though, really feed well into who we are as a company as a whole, which goes back to that mission of helping other people grow their business. ROB: Fantastic. Jay, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. We know where people should find your book; where should they find you and your firm when they're looking to find you, online or otherwise? JAY: They can still just go to my website. That's the main place I want people to go after this interview, jayowenlive.com. My agency is linked to on there, the podcast is linked to on there, the book is linked to on there. Depending on who they are and what they need, those are great places to check me out. And obviously, I'm available on all the social media, so wherever you happen to be, LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram, I'm out there. If you want to connect, you can always find me in the DMs on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn. ROB: That's excellent. Jay Owen, Founder and CEO of Design Extensions, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been a pleasure. JAY: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Rob. ROB: It's a pleasure. Be well. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Kevin Hourigan is President and CEO of Bayshore Solutions, a digital agency that started in 1996 as a branch of a managed services provider – a 3-member team building and maintaining client networks. Two years later? Thirty employees. Decades ago, one of the Kevin's engineers developed a company website and asked 100 of the company's clients if they would be interested in a 3-page website for $500. Client responses were either "What's a website?" or "We'll never need one of those." One client agreed to give it a try. That $500 website cost $5,000 to build, but two years later, in 1998, clients came begging for websites, which were now more profitably priced at $7,500 and up. The company failed in its attempt to go public in the late 90s and survived the dot com crash in the early 2000s. Its base of paying clients plummeted 90%. In response, the company slashed its staff from 225 to 12 in a year. Larger agencies, the ones Kevin considered as his mentors, the ones that went public . . . failed. Bayshore Solutions is one of only 2% of the digital agencies that survived the dot com collapse. When Kevin realized that what he had left of the company would never again be "an aspiring dot-commer on the verge of going public, spending money like it's going out of style with clients spending money with us like it's going out of style," he knew it was time to rebrand. He wanted the new name to be "agnostic," that is, not tied to any transient technology. Bayshore Web Development could become obsolete. Baysore Solutions, on the other hand, would not be tied to any here today, gone tomorrow technology. For almost 25 years, BayShore Solutions has helped clients create advertising campaigns that drive qualified traffic. It designs and develops powerful stakeholder-targeted websites with the right marketing mix to help its clients succeed. The agency markets itself as a digital expert, applying strategies horizontally across a variety of verticals, transferring experience from one vertical to another completely unrelated (and non-competing) vertical. Every solution is unique, with a balance of the "bleeding edge of new and the tested, tried, and true." Around 90% of implementation strategies are things Bayshore KNOWS will work. The 5 to 15% that is experimental will vary depending on the phase of an industry's business cycle. After Kevin had excellent experience working with a CEO coach, he decided to let his leadership team hire an executive team coach. The result? Tighter vision and a better definition of core values (working together, winning together, and solving problems together), with the team all learning together, rather than receiving the information from "an informed Kevin. He says, "Having a team coach, we're hearing the same thing at the same time." In response to the impact of Covid-19, Kevin explains that his company has reduced unnecessary expenses and increased its marketing budget by 50%. He says the company's strategy is to market and sell its way through the crisis, rather than trying to cut its way through. The results so far? Leads are up, traffic is up, and sales have met December's forecasts. He plans to continue operating this way and says the agency's next 90-day plan is to remove unnecessary operational expenses and reinvest that money in sales and marketing efforts. Kevin can be found on his agency's website at: BayshoreSolutions.com or by email at: kevin@bayshoresolutions.com Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Kevin Hourigan, President and CEO of Bayshore Solutions based in Tampa, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Kevin. KEVIN: Hey, good morning, Rob. Nice to be here. ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about Bayshore Solutions and where you are excellent? KEVIN: Appreciate that, Rob. Bayshore Solutions, we're a company that's about to celebrate our 25th year of providing services to our clients. I think what makes that special – we started this company in January of 1996, when America Online or AOL or however you might know of them was still on Version 1, and many people were still just getting introduced to the internet. As a digital agency, we've probably been around more than probably the top one percentile of the industry's experts. For almost 25 years, we've been helping our clients design and develop the correct website that's going to speak to their primary stakeholders as well as creating the advertising campaign that's going to drive qualified traffic and help our customers grow through a combination of the right website to the right audience with the right marketing mix. Enjoyed 25 years and still having fun at it. ROB: That's remarkable. Congratulations on those 25 years. If we rewind to 1996, what do websites look like, and what do your scopes of work look like at that time? KEVIN: It's too funny. I love telling the story, Rob. In January 1996 when we went to market, this was a new division of a company that I had. Back then, we would be what you might call a managed services provider or your outsourced IT department. But essentially, my company at the time really helped companies manage their computer networks – which, back then, there was no cloud; they were all in some kind of closet in the corner of a company's office space. We managed their servers, their desktop computers and things of that nature. One of our engineers was getting into web design and built our company's website and wanted to see if we could do the same for a couple of our clients. I told him I don't have any blockers to it. I wasn't super excited about the idea, but he was knocking on our clients' doors, and he was offering them a three-page website for $500. Of the first 100 people that he asked that were existing clients, they had two responses: "What is a website?" or "We'll never need one of those." Finally, finally, one of them said yes. We built them a three-page website. Really, all it was, was a digital version of a trifold brochure that they had, but I think we spent $5,000 building this $500 website. But sooner or later, all that came back. About a year or two later, all of those companies that said, "What is a website?" or "we'll never need one of those" were banging on our door and saying, "Hey, listen, that website thing you talked about a year or two ago – I think we need one of those." But the good news is they weren't $500 anymore; they were $7,500. I think we were such an early adopter to this that we were truly to educate a market on a need they were going to have, and they weren't ready yet. But when they were ready, they came back to us, and I think that's part of our viability. We're fortunate; we're one of only 2% of the agencies who survived the dot-com bubble burst. I think it was those early seeds we planted in building a good client base that helped us survive the dot-come bubble. We were a company that went from three employees when we got started to two years later having 30 employees to a year after that having 225 and blowing up huge in the dot-com bubble. But when the bubble burst, we went from 225 employees down to about 12 in a matter of a year period of time. If it wasn't for that early foundation of clients that we had found, I don't think we would have survived. There's an old saying, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Certainly, we learned a lot of experiences from that. But very thankful for that original client base that we had. ROB: In that timeframe, a lot of web companies went tremendously, tremendously upmarket. I don't think people realize how little you would get sometimes for a million-dollar website in that era. KEVIN: Yes. ROB: Kind of the iXLs and the Razorfishes of the world. Did you ever swim up to that scope and scale of website, or did your MSP roots also keep you grounded in – KEVIN: As I tell the story, we started out in '96 with $500 websites. In 1998, the average value got to be $7,500. In 2000 that went to $216,500. You just see how that was growing. iXL and Razorfish were what I would call my mentor companies. I'm very fortunate that I've had some great personal mentors in my career, but I had some corporate mentors. I looked at iXL and Razorfish as those two companies. I don't know if these are the right words, but I think we got cocky a little bit. We put billboards right above the headquarters of iXL of our company's brand. [laughs] So companies or employees going in there knew who we were, and we used that as one of our marketing tactics. Then, fortunately, I got a chance to actually go through the offices of Razorfish on a couple different occasions as our company was about to go public in the journey, and the bankers that were going to take us public also took Razorfish public. So, we got a chance to go see how Razorfish operated and things of that nature. But I think one of the blessings we ended up receiving was just that we didn't go public. iXL didn't survive; Razorfish changed ownership numerous times, bought and sold for losses during the journey. Because we didn't go public, I got to own the decisions that we had to make to navigate that journey. While it was no fun to deal with the downside of the dot-com bubble bursting, I do think it was a savior that we were able to make the changes necessary and nimble enough to be able to survive, where some of those mentors that I looked up to didn't have the same outcome. ROB: It's interesting. I think everybody in that time was a little bit cocky. You mentioned you had the billboard by iXL, and Milchem today puts billboards near their competitors just to spite them a little bit, although they are a cash machine. But iXL I believe also had a movie theater on their roof, so I think everyone was a little bit cocky. KEVIN: For sure. Cocky or stupid or a combination of each. Unfortunately, I think a victim of the times – everyone thought those were the right things to do. At that time, I joke like everyone in 1999 or 2000 was changing the name of their company to something "dot com." I remember seeing State Farm change their name to "StateFarm.com." Sears changed their name from Sears to "Sears.com." Everyone thought if they didn't do that, they weren't going to survive, but fear was motivating their decision, and often good decisions aren't the outcome of fear. I think the dot-com bubble exploded for numerous different reasons, but one of them is everyone was chasing after something they didn't understand, and everyone got caught up in that momentum. The good news is that wasn't the right momentum, and correction needed to take place, and it did and everyone got better and stronger as a result of it. ROB: For sure. Amazing that you were even able to survive. How do you navigate that sort of path from 200+ employees to around 12? Obviously, there's the financial aspect of it, but there's also the psychological aspect, the identity of the company and your role shifting so quickly. How did you navigate that healthily and keep the business rolling as well? KEVIN: Of course, downsizing is never fun for anybody at all, but the reality is that the companies who paid me $500 for a website or later $7,500 stayed with me. The companies who were paying $216,500, it wasn't their money. They had investors, and when the dot-com bubble burst, those investors weren't funding those projects anymore. 90% of my clients could no longer pay their bills anymore, so I had to send a cease and desist letter to all my clients that if they couldn't meet their current financial obligations to our company, we had to sever services. 30 days later, I lost 90% of my client base. But who did I still have left? The people who paid me that $7,500, who had realistic expectations of what their investment was going to make for their business and how it was going to help them grow. The ones who had unrealistic expectations were someone who raised zillions and millions of dollars with this fantastic idea and spending money like it was going out of style – and then it went out of style, and there was no money to be had. I think in the journey of going down, some of my coworkers were cognizant enough to know that what we thought we all were working towards, the opportunity had gone. Others weren't quite there yet, and I think there was a hope that it would go back to the way it was. Unfortunately, some self-selected themselves to go somewhere else, and unfortunately we had more than one round of layoffs that helped some of that reduction as well. At the end of the journey, Rob, to your point, I ended up rebranding our company because the company that we were wasn't the company that we were going to become. I didn't want that brand of who we were – an aspiring dot-commer on the verges of going public, spending money like it's going out of style with clients spending money with us like it's going out of style – that went away, and I think I had to rebrand my company and find people how accepted the fact that it was never going to be what we thought it was, where we are going to have stock options and be worth a lot of money. I had to find a core team who realized that wasn't on the table anymore. I had to change the company's brand because I didn't want us hanging onto a lost hope that wasn't going to be a new reality. ROB: Wow, that's quite a shift, but it's tremendous to think about getting the right team on board for that shift. You mentioned you've been in business almost 25 years. KEVIN: Correct. ROB: One thing you see with agencies that stay in business for a while is sometimes they get mired in the previous generation of the marketing that was hot. There are still web design development agencies. There are still SEO and pay-per-click agencies. But the bar keeps on moving. The target keeps on moving. How have you navigated which lines of service and which technologies, which tools, which marketing channels to bring into the mix and which ones to hold at arm's length? KEVIN: That's a great question. When I rebranded the company, we came up with the brand Bayshore Solutions. Why'd you come up with Bayshore Solutions? The reality is very similar to the question you just asked. I named our company Bayshore Solutions, one, because our office was adjacent to Bayshore Boulevard in Tampa, Florida, so that's where the "Bayshore" came from. [laughs] But the "solutions" piece was I didn't want our company's name to be associated with any service that I didn't know would survive the outcome of the dot-com bubble burst. At the time, it could've been Bayshore Web Design. It could've been Bayshore Web Development. It could've been Bayshore SEO. It could've been any of those. But I didn't want to tattoo the name of our company and associate it to a service that may not be what the new norm was going to become. So, very agnostically, I used the word "solutions." That gave us an opportunity to not be positioning our brand name with a particular area of the industry that you didn't know would still be surviving. Then on an ongoing basis, under Bayshore Solutions, the services that we provide – I've always said that at the end of the day, the value that we bring to our clients is a level of expertise over and above what they have. Our tagline is "Digital expertise to grow your business." It's my job and our company's job to continue to find a balance between the bleeding edge of new and the tested, tried, and true. It's finding a solution that isn't too risky to be on the bleeding edge but isn't that lack of scalable to be leveraging the tested, tried, and true, and always be bringing a solution to our clients that balances a little bit of both, minimizes their bleeding edge risk, but maximizes their ability to have their investment have some scalability. It's always having that next level of expertise that our clients value and can appreciate, and the services around what we can do for them are going to help them move their needle towards growth. ROB: Is there a percent range of budget you recommend, often, towards more experimental channels? Less proven, in your words? KEVIN: It's a great question. I think while every client would love to hear every dollar that they spend absolutely is intended for strict ROI, the opportunity to find the right mix is putting a percentage in the media budget and services to some experimental type things. I think while every solution is unique and different, some are in the 10% range. Give or take 5 points is probably the right answer. So 5% to 15%. Often that variance can be where particular industries are in their particular cycle. Almost every vertical market has cycles. Some are in an upcycle, some are in a downcycle. Where you spend your exploratory dollars on an upcycle is probably a bigger percentage, and on a downcycle it's probably a smaller percentage. But it's finding that right mix, whether it's opportunity to grow in each particular vertical market that we're providing services for, and educating our clients that part of the opportunity to find their secret sauce is finding a budget that we can use for some exploratory services. The other neat thing that we do, Rob, is we market ourselves as digital experts horizontally across numerous verticals. When I talk to our clients every month and I ask about what's the value we bring back to them, what I hear them say is they have a choice of picking an agency with vertical market expertise or one who's more of a generalist across many vertical markets, and they appreciate picking Bayshore Solutions, who has this horizontal approach to many different verticals, because we're bringing ideas to their vertical that, if they had a vertical-focus-only agency, that agency wouldn't have that awareness from. And as we're able to share that expertise that we're learning in other verticals, it's not coming at a competitive risk that we learned it on one company that may be competing against another company; it's coming from experiences outside from another industry. So as we have that exploratory budget for each of our clients, a lot of the learning lessons don't come at the cost of their budget, but it comes from the learning lessons of other verticals and what seems to be working that can be applicable to that particular industry. ROB: I hear a through line, a sense of balance across what you're talking about. You talk about there's a balance in the channels of not too, too experimental and not too staid and old. There's a balance in your client base. There's a balance in choosing solutions as being forward-thinking but also flexible. Even in the Bayshore part, people who have been to Tampa and know Tampa know that there are parts of Bayshore Boulevard that are tremendously lovely and picturesque and evocative to someone who is from there and may or may not be able to afford to live on Bayshore Boulevard, but it seems flexible also. You mentioned that you also have an office in Denver. So, the name itself even can be about a place but is also not about a place, is also more general. When you have two offices, how are you thinking about that balance of local clients, regional clients, or location agnostic clients? What's the reasoning on the second office? KEVIN: That's a great question. The real purpose of the second office, Rob, was just an opportunity to expand our talent pool. Tampa's been amazing to us, but we wanted a complementary talent pool to be able to find digital experts in. Secondarily, we want to be able to serve our clients as easily as possible, and our clients are nationwide. So, we wanted a second office for that talent pool opportunity, but also to be able to serve our clients in their same time zone or one time zone away. As we expanded to a second office 8 years ago, we looked at either Mountain Time or Pacific Time, and that would give s the ability to serve same time zone or one time zone away. We looked at 13 communities and ended up picking Denver, Colorado, and couldn't be happier that that's where we ended up picking. I had no idea Denver would go gangbuster great and we'd be this community that's just been thriving like crazy, but I'm so fortunate that we did. It's funny, talking about Bayshore Solutions – I thought I was so crafty in coming up with this agnostic name. While it wasn't very attractive or – I hate to use the word "sexy" – it was very agnostic at the time, but certainly "Bayshore" in an application in Denver doesn't necessarily fit. I remember opening up the office out there, I'm like, man, I wonder if someone's going to question, "Why Bayshore Solutions? What's 'Bayshore' mean?" out in Denver. It was probably about 3 years into being in Denver that we were having a kickoff meeting for a pretty significant size company, and the CEO of that business wanted to attend the first hour of that kickoff meeting. He said he was going to exit and leave it up to the rest of his team; he wanted to take me outside for just a moment and say a couple words. He goes, "I've got to ask you. Bayshore Solutions – are you guys from here?" I was like, finally someone asked that question. I knew it was going to come. [laughs] And it happened to be a company that was probably about $800 million in revenue that the CEO asked me for that. I'm sure if it was Denver, it should be "Snowcap Solutions" or something along those lines. What's really interesting about our journey is that very intentionally, we're headquartered not only to be able to serve our clients in the same time zone or one time zone away, but secondarily, Colorado and Florida are two of the top eight states that have the most digital talent within them. The advantage to Denver and to Florida is we don't have the cost burdens of a few of the others, but certainly California, Illinois, and New York. So very strategically, we are in two of the top eight most digital-rich talent states, but without the cost burdens, and secondarily, able to serve clients in the same time zone or one time zone away. That isn't accidental. That's very intentional, and I think it's been a benefit to our company and our customers as a result of some of that very intentional decision-making. ROB: It also seems aligned from a city culture – I have not lived in Denver per se, but both places are places where there are reasons to get outside. Those reasons are different, but both places have very many reasons to have a life outside of work that isn't just going to your house and hiding in the air conditioning, as if you'd gone to Phoenix or something. KEVIN: Right, exactly. No doubt about it. Culturally, we were a fit. In our dot-com rise, we did go from one office in Tampa – we had six offices total. Two of them were in California and one of them was in Chicago. I think we gelled well culturally with our Chicago coworkers. California was always different. We did research in four cities in California when we were doing our expansion, and when we got down to the final datapoints of what we were seeking from a data perspective, the list of 13 communities we looked at got narrowed down to just two. It was Denver, Colorado or Orange County, California. Then I had to make a decision, and I used this terrible logic to make my decision, but it was twofold. One was about 20 years ago, I made a commitment to myself I would never fly on a redeye the rest of my life. I only cheated on myself one time, and it was coming back from Orange County, California, and the only return one-way flight to Tampa from Orange County is a redeye. So, for that reason, it had a scar. Secondarily, I recalled having two offices in California, one in San Francisco and one in Los Angeles, and culturally, while they did a great job performing, there was always a cultural riff between our California coworkers and the remaining part of our company. For those two reasons, I picked Denver, Colorado, and again, I think I'm very fortunate that that's what the final decision was. I couldn't be happier about our progress in the Denver community. ROB: That's fantastic. Kevin, you mentioned that you made it not only through the dot-com bust, but the financial crisis. I'm sure come around March, or maybe sooner or maybe slightly later depending on how you look at things, in 2020, there was probably a little bit of a sense of, "Oh, here we go again" with the pandemic and the knock-on effects from that. Was there anything you did when you started seeing things shut down – how did you react and prepare, and how are you thinking about the situation now? KEVIN: There isn't a "COVID for Dummies" book published yet, so we're all flying this with our own experiences as a navigating tool. I think everybody's approached this in different ways. My company has taken a stance that when times get tough, we've reduced a lot of not necessary expenses, but we've actually increased our marketing budget by 50%. We're aggressive in trying to market and sell our way through this versus cut our way through this. We're having some upward trends. Our leads are up, our traffic is up, sales met expectations from our December forecast. We've had a couple months where we actually met those forecasts where I don't think, if we didn't go more aggressive from a marketing perspective, we'd have any ability to do so. Our company has tried to market our way through this, and that's continued to be what I think we're going to see ourselves do for the remainder of 2020. When people say, "Hey, what are we going to do in…?", I'm not stating or committing to anything I can't own. Right now, I feel like I can own 30 days, 60 days, maybe 90 days, but I'm not comfortable that I know I can really own anything much further out than that. So, we are communicating frequently with our team on what our next 90-day plan is and removing any unnecessary operational expenses and reinvesting that into sales and marketing. We haven't had to lay off any people. We're trying to keep our great team together, and the way to do so isn't by cutting; it's by being aggressive and going to find business a little bit more intentional, a little bit more aggressive. There's companies out there that need help, and we're out there seeking those companies. That's how we're positioning ourselves in this pandemic. ROB: I think not even cautiously optimistic, but just optimistically – not even cautious. There's just an intentionality to it that I think is really worth looking at and listening to. It's not panicked. It's looking at opportunity without being opportunistic. I think that's a really good stance to consider. When you look back at the overall journey, it sounds like you've navigated a lot and learned a lot through that path, and we've talked through some of the changes, but overall if you look back and you could do some things over, what are some lessons you've learned along the way that you would maybe do differently if you were starting this 25-year-old company today in 2020? KEVIN: That's a great question. I used to have a CEO coach, and he asked me this loaded question one time. He said, "Hey Kevin, do you know how you get experience?" And I knew it was a loaded question. I knew his answer was going to be the only answer. I'm guessing, and he's like, "No, that's not it. That's not it." I was like, "Coach Chris, tell me, how do you gain experience?" He said, "You gain experience by making mistakes and learning from them." As I look back, I certainly didn't make every right decision, but I've gained a lot of experience. I think some of the things I might do differently – one is when we started our company in the dot-com era, we had a very, very focused culture that we were driving towards, but it was caught up into the dot-com era, which wasn't real. Then when that dot-com bubble exploded, that culture had expectations that weren't necessarily real. I think part of it would just be making sure that our culture is partially organically created and we have likeminded people that fit our core values, but also intentionally corporate-driven and that it's meeting the expectations of our customers, our coworkers, and our company altogether. So, I think maybe an added focus on an intentional organic culture as opposed to an intentional focus or an organic focus. It's a combination of both of those. Over the last few years, I think our company has really worked on a great balance of an intentional organic culture and really spending more time identifying the core values of Bayshore Solutions and finding people to work with us who meet those core values and use those as real true guiding posts. The result of that is the amount of internal friction within our organization is significantly less than it has ever been before. The cohesiveness of the team – they have fun together and meet all of our goals and objectives. I think in the past, we either had fun and didn't meet our goals and objectives, or we highly met our goals and objectives but sacrificed fun. Today I think I've learned that there is a fine way to balance both out and meet goals and objectives with a team that you appreciate working with every day, and everyone's having fun in the journey. ROB: You mentioned core values. Are those something you're able to share with us? I think it can often be helpful for others to hear each other's core values. KEVIN: Absolutely. First up, we work together, we win together, we solve problems together. Those are probably the three core values that we live by. We have a few others, but certainly we work together, and it's not just as a company. We work together with our clients on one digital team. We form a digital team with our clients and our coworkers on it. We work together, we win together, we solve problems together. We come to work with a positive winning attitude every day, problem-solving. We own our own accountability; we don't point fingers at others. That's really worked well, finding people who have that likeminded approach to who they want to work with and how they want to work – not only from a coworker perspective, but we see clients that meet those values also. Clients who don't necessarily share those same values become clients who maybe you don't have the same relationship with. So, it's not only who we work with, but who we work for, finding likeminded customers and coworkers. In that journey, we've enjoyed that journey much better from a customer and a coworker perspective. ROB: You mentioned a coach that you used to work with. Sometimes it's interesting to hear people's processes on working with a coach. Do you still work with a coach? How have you met that need for a voice outside of yourself? KEVIN: I don't have a personal CEO coach anymore, but our company has hired a coach, and in my journey of having a coach, it was great. It helped me see the blind spots that I couldn't see. So, the coach was very beneficial. But almost 2 years ago, I elected to switch from having a personal CEO coach to my leadership team having an executive coach. We all picked a coach together, and we started following Gino Wickman's Traction program called the Entrepreneurial Operating System. It goes by the acronym EOS. We found an implementer to be all of our team's coach – not just Kevin having a coach. The journey using Traction's EOS has been amazing for I think our entire leadership team and our entire company. It's given us a tighter vision, a better definition of what those core values are that we just were talking about. But instead of me learning on my own and trying to bring those lessons in to my leadership team, we're learning that all together as one cohesive team. When we hired our implementer, we made it a team hire, not "Kevin found one and brought him to the table." It's our coach, not Kevin's coach. There's an old saying, "If you want people to be part of the plan, make them part of the planning process." Having a team coach, we're hearing the same thing at the same time. Following Gino Wickman's Traction Entrepreneurial Operating System, this is stuff we're learning together. We're all part of the planning process. So being part of the plan comes much more easily and understandably to the whole team versus me creating this on my own and bringing it to them. It's just been far more understanding and aware and excitable as we've gone from "Kevin's CEO coach" to a team coach. ROB: That's a great lesson in bringing a lot of the pressure, even, off of yourself, bringing your team into the decision. I think we all need to think about and learn from that a little bit more. I was reminded yesterday when somebody on my team solved a problem better than I ever would have, but I felt like I needed to solve it at first. KEVIN: No doubt. Quite frankly, it's just finding the right people in the right roles. It's helped us complement each other. I don't have to have all the answers, and I think prior, I had to have all the answers. Today we have a very strong, strong leadership team here. We all know what we do well and the areas of the business that others do better. We're comfortable being very vulnerable and exposing where our strengths and our weaknesses are and dividing and conquering, and working together as one cohesive team. It's been highly effective. I used to joke, before we were following this Entrepreneurial Operating System, which goes by the acronym EOS, prior to all of us following the EOS, I joke we were following the KOS. People are like, "What's the KOS?" I'm like, "That's the Kevin operating system." No one's written a book yet about the Kevin operating system, but there's tens of thousands of companies following this EOS. For sure it's been great guideposts to help us continue to find the right people to help us accomplish the things that our company seeks to do. ROB: Super-duper solid. Love it, Kevin. When people want to find you and find Bayshore Solutions, where should they go look you up? KEVIN: BayshoreSolutions.com, find us there. Love to hear from everybody. I'd like to have some ongoing dialogue. I'm easy to reach; it's just kevin@bayshoresolutions.com. Rob, I enjoyed the opportunity to share some of the Bayshore Solutions story with you today. ROB: This was great. It sounds like an excellent journey, and it's still rolling, so congratulations. KEVIN: Thank you. ROB: Be well, Kevin. Thank you. KEVIN: Thank you. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.