How To Thrive After Starting A Business At Completely The Worst Time

So with me today is Drew Donaldson, who you're in

Pennsylvania, is that right? That's right. That's right. And how's Pennsylvania at the

moment? Cold. It is. It's been a pretty fierce winter here.

We, because of where we're located, we're in the southern portion of the state. It

never gets too cold, but this year is a little bit of the exception. So

we've had a few weeks here of 0 degree days and it is, it's

not fun living in an old house with radiator heat and drafty

windows, but we make it work. I don't know if your utilities are as

expensive as ours. Here in the uk bars are just like crazy. So we tend

to layer up rather than put on the heating because it's just too expensive to

run. Yeah, the way our heat works is it's hot

water based board so you really can't turn up the

heat. Like it's not like it will get any hotter. It's

preset to a temperature. It's just how long it will run. But the nice

part about that is that it really doesn't matter if my wife or daughter

tinkers with the thermostat because it's not going to do anything. Like I

can turn it up to 100 degrees, my energy bills are going to be exactly

the same. So that's good. Yeah, it's. We switched from oil to

gas to save some money on, on utilities and that certainly has helped.

But yeah, it's just, it's an old house. It's comes with

extensive bills everywhere, not just utilities. I'm sure it comes with

character. It does. It does have a lot of character. But I'm sure my guests

don't want to hear us chat about the weather and how cold it is. They're

probably going to go, who cares? We don't care about that. We care about marketing

and digital marketing specifically. So you're, you're the founder of Grow

House and you set this business up pretty much at the

absolute worst time that anyone could have set up a business. So tell me

about that. Yeah, I have great timing when starting businesses. I started

this business three months before COVID and I was

coming to the end of a consulting arrangement and I knew I could see the

writing on the wall. There had been kind of structural shifts within that organization.

I was like, I probably got a year left. I got to build something to

transition to because I've always been not one to work for other

people in a kind of, here's your cubicle and your assigned email

type capacity. And so I started building this with the

idea of I'll just take all these things I've been consulting with these corporations

on and I'll just do it for smaller

scale businesses because my family is all from small business owners. And so I know

that arena better so than I'd ever knew the kind of corporate

arena. And so I was like, I'll just, I'll build this business.

And we had a couple of wins early on. We brought on a

client in like February of that year and things were like, all right, hey, we're

starting to get our feet under us. And then Covid happened

and any hope of selling marketing at that point was, I'm sure

there's marketers out there that were successful, but they also weren't just starting their

agency. I didn't run into a lot of marketers in my boat at that

time that had either. Most of them had either given up on it completely

or were in the same boat I was where it's, we just got to sit

and wait and hope the relief checks clear. Like that's

the biggest concern. But it did give me an opportunity to interview

and talk to a lot of business owners and understand why

marketers are, are so distrusted and hated in the

entrepreneurial space. And once I realized, oh,

there's just a bunch of things that marketers do structurally about

how they run their business, I'll just build the agency that doesn't do any of

those things. And that's pretty much what we did. Yeah. I always find with, with

marketing agencies there's always the, you talk to clients and there's always

elephants in the room. Right. I, I always, I can judge what

people's past experiences with agencies has been by the

types of questions that they typically ask you during the sort of the,

the, the process of trying to recruit a new agency. So quite

often I think a lot of it is the person who is

hiring may well be under a lot of pressure because they may have hired

two or three agencies previously. Those agencies have made

false promises that they didn't deliver on that then puts them under more

pressure to make sure they get, make the right decision. So I, I

again I applaud people like yourself who, if you like pull the veiled curtain

away and just tell it like it is and identify some of the challenges

that agencies can have in terms of the way they sell them,

sell business to clients. But also a, I always, I always think it's like it,

it's a relationship that there's two Sides to. So you've got to have a good

client, you've got to have a good, relate good agency in order for that agency

client partnership to work. And, and I think sometimes the,

the questions that the agency ask of the client are not good enough

in the same way that I think the client asking the agency questions

are not good enough. And I think if you can understand what those questions ought

to be, then you've got a much better chance. And I think if you set

realistic expectations as to what you can expect and when you can expect it and

how you can expect it and, and I guess manage people's

expectations in the right way because I think a lot of agencies

make false promises that they just know in a million years they're never going to

be able to deliver. And at some point in time they're going to have to

face that they've let a client down. They may just go, I don't really

care, I'll just get some more. There's only a kind of like limited shelf life

for agencies that do that. I am the king of low

expectations from when I'm positioning my services because I'd always

rather over deliver than over promise. So I'm

always the one that's. I just had a call with a prospect last

Friday and we were, they were asking me, how long do

you think this will, this particular strategy will take? And I'm like, you're looking at

least four to six months. I was like, this is a very complex

strategy. This is not something you can just roll out overnight. And whereas

a lot of the sales and marketing would be like, no, you promise

60 days progress in 60 days. Yeah, but that's not what they're asking. They're asking

about results. So when am I. You're going to see results. You're probably going to

start seeing results on four to six months. Now there's other things. I can totally

promise that, yeah, you'll definitely see motion in 60

days, 100%. But I'm always very clear about what is that

motion. Does that mean that you're going to have a bunch of calls booked on

your calendar or does it just mean that we're starting to get indications that your

campaign is. And so it's, I feel like that

expectation component is what ends up burning a lot of

bridges with clients. Because if you sell them a bill of

goods in the beginning and you say, yeah, we're going to, we're going to hit

these milestones and then you miss the first three

milestones, the likelihood they're going to stick around for many more

misses is just not there. Versus if you would have been up

front and just said, listen, it's going to be take three months to build out

this thing and you just got to be patient and like, Rome wasn't built in

a day, all that kind of stuff. I found a lot of clients

are not only receptive to that, but they're like, that's the first time a

marketer actually been honest with me. I'm like, yeah, what good does it do me

telling you that I can get your results overnight when I know that's not

true? You know that's not true. Everybody knows that's not true. Yeah. That's

just not the way marketing works. Yeah. Every once in a while you launch a

campaign and it like blows up overnight. Happens. But that's not the

standard. The standard is we launch the campaign, we analyze it for a few

weeks and then we tweak and we. I've had things

that, you know, campaigns that go really well, day one,

they pull in a bunch of leads and they're oh my gosh, this is great.

I hope this lasts forever. And then they start talking to the leads and they're

like, oh, the leads aren't as qualified as we were hoping. No, that's all right.

That's all right. At least we got the hard part, which was getting people to

fill out the form. Now we got to do a better job qualifying them and

driving through the funnel. So it's. I always look at it as like a balance

of what kind of quick wins can you promise versus long

term outcome? What can they expect? Yeah, I've always worked on the basis

that whenever I primarily I run paid advertising for clients. Right. In

some regards, there is probably less of a likelihood

that will take longer than maybe some other. If you're

a SEO agency again, you can't make any promises about anything. You

have just. There's nothing you can do. You have no control over your environment.

With paid advertising, you have a bit of control. You don't necessarily have as,

as much control maybe as we used to have. Right. But you still have

more. And I, I always find that there's probably when I do an audit of

an account, I always tend to find that there's 10% of their money

positively and negatively is impacting their overall results. Right.

They're probably spending a bunch of money on keywords and campaigns and

strategies they really ought not to be doing, and they're spending a bunch of money

on things that are working well. If they had more money, they could probably do

better with it. Right. And equally they also, they live in

on the, the basis that and Google say our AI is

fantastic, we know what's best. And quite often that doesn't

agree with what the reality of that particular business is. They, they

always cite their sort of case studies. They're always big Fortune

500 companies and they say this is what this company did and this is the

results they got. And those results are not always typical for Main street

businesses. They just tend to be dramatically different in terms of

expectation and outcome. Right. So I've always said we need to try

and read around what and Google are saying and give you like

a cold heart dosha the truth, right? Because that's what again what a good agency

should be doing. A good or a good consultant doesn't need necessarily need to be

agency. I think sometimes the consultant versus agency

is always a difficult one. I was remember when I used to interview people in

my previous agency, I'd have people come in for a job and I would say

so what do you do? And they would say I'm a consultant. I said, so

basically that means you're unemployed, right? But I think now there are definitely an awful

lot of people that do consulting, right. I call my agency, I

say I'm a consultancy, right? So I do consulting and I

also have an agency. So in some cases I will run all of the

campaigns for clients, right. And in other cases I will help

train and consult on kind of what solution partners they

may want. So again, if they want to hire a TikTok agency, we're not

a TikTok agency, right? But I know the sorts of questions that they should be

asking a prospective TikTok agency if that's the route they go down,

right. So I might consult on what to do that. Right. We run

very similar businesses. Paid advertising is always has

a sweet spot for me because that's how I made my first money. It was

all through paid and we've extended beyond just paid. But

I, I think to your point about having a, a

small fraction of their overall spend actually driving results.

And you wonder what are they doing with the rest of the 90%? I think

a lot of that comes from these businesses taking best

practices from companies that are much larger, with much larger marketing

budgets, with much more sophisticated marketing infrastructures and

trying to compare apples to apples. And so what I always tell clients,

especially if they are a smaller shop, is I was like, you don't

need to be running 15 different ad creatives simultaneously

because frankly, you don't have the budget to support 15 different ad creatives

and then test them all effectively because, say, for a lead generation

campaign. Right. The minimum you ever want to run a lead generation campaign at A

minimum is $20 a day per creative. So if you

want to test four or five different creatives, that's $20 a day

times however many pieces of creative to be able to

a B test and say, listen, we ran this campaign,

these were our winners. If you're running anything below that, then not

only are you not going to get the leads you're looking for, you're going to

spend a lot of money on creative that you don't know if it performs because

you're at the wait so long. And the only thing

you're the, the biggest thing you're losing isn't even the, the money, it's the time.

Yeah. Because now if you're running 10 pieces of content at $2

a day on a $20 a day budget, it's going to take you months

to sort out which one of those is a winner versus if you just put

one piece of creative out, put $50 a day behind it, run it for 10

days, I can tell you yes or no if that campaign is going to work

or not. And so it's would I rather spend a bunch of money up front

testing one piece of creative that I believe in and then at the end of

10 days, being able to have the data to back up whether I should continue

running it or not versus try to spread myself too thin?

There's not a chance. I would never go and take the mass

approach to ad creation, especially if you're not

running a very sophisticated shop. Now if you are, if you're running a

Nike, then, yeah, you got a whole team dedicated to building and testing this

stuff. And then you look at some of the Alex Hermosi or Russell Brunson advice

on like how many ads they run. It's, oh, we do six new ads a

day. Yeah, because you're spending $10,000 a day on

ads. So it's like totally makes sense why you're doing that because you

have the budget to support it. So I think that's really the thing. I think

that most people are surprised when they come in and start working with us is

how laser focused we are on just getting one ad to work and then building

off of the success of that versus yeah, we're going to blow your doors off.

We're going to come up with 10 different pieces of creative and it's like the

old Mad Men thing where it's putting it up on easel. Oh, how do you,

what do you think about this? What do you think about this? It's none of

that really matters. If you just want leads, let's just focus on getting

leads. Let's not worry about is this, is it the A

version of the B version? Let's just run the A version, get you some leads.

If it doesn't get leads, let's go to try the B version. But let's not

do this kind of dance of oh, we only can spend a hundred dollars a

day. So now we gotta fit all these different creative variants into that hundred dollar

a day budget and actually see what works. So I'm always

like, spend big, spend fast and then get your answers in a much

more timely, timely period rather than bleeding yourself out with

a thousand cuts. Yeah. And that was always the thing. I always remember the story

of when Tim Ferriss was launching the four Hour Work Week

book that became the kind of four Hour Work week. I remember he

wrote, he ran Google Ads and he ran various titles and

descriptions, right? And obviously the title was typically the title of the book

and then the description would be for people to be sign up to get

notified when the book gets published, right? And he was able to use the data

that he got from that, running that sort of test of titles and

descriptions to give the sort of headline of what the book was going to

be called and then the sort of strat line of what the, the underlying, what

the story was going to be about. And then on that basis he was able

to have say this is what the name of the book's going to be. And

he used the data that he got from running ads on Google, which again I

think is quite clever the way he did that. And, and so many other

people have done exactly the same thing since then. And I think sometimes

people think that they need to do something brand spanking new. And quite often

some of the best successes we've had have come from

things that we read in like Claude Hopkins book which was written in the 20s

or whatever. And it's, you look at it and go how, how can something that

is so old be so current? Right? And it's true so much of the,

there's nothing really new about stuff, it's just the way in which it's

managed is, is probably the best, the best way of looking at that, right? There's

nothing new and exciting about Facebook ads or

Google Ads or Microsoft. It's all just people, people are looking

to buy things. People are looking to sell things and how can you put them

together in an environment that works for them? And I think sometimes people get lost

in the minutia. They, so they go for an E commerce business that have got

10,000 SKUs. They assume that they have to promote all

10,000 of them. And you really don't. You might say, I'm going to choose my

top five or ten bestselling products that I know from

historical sales that I could just put this one up and I know I'm just

gonna, I'm gonna sell out of it in like next to no time at all.

Because it's highly popular. Right. Rather than trying to spread

the budget across 10,000 SK, it just won't work. Right. Because

ultimately Google will find a way to spend money on

products that you just don't make any profit on. Right. So they're not looking at

margins, they're just looking at where's the demand. They can create demand

for an ad. Right. Which means that they make money. Right. There's no

guarantee that you're going to make money because at the end of the day they

may they that 10, 10. The 10 at the bottom could be where they

spend waste all your money on skus they shouldn't be running. Right.

You could have skus that you sell for $5,000 and then SKUs that you

sell for 55 cents. Right. And to them it's just, it's a sale.

Right. They just look at you, made a sale. Whereas to you it's like I

made a five grand sale and I'm making four grand profit. 55 cent

sale, you might make 12 cents profit or something like that. So there's no point

in having sales of something that isn't going to add value to the bot, to

your bottom line. Well, 100%. And when you were talking about Claude Hopkins, one

of the saddest things I think about becoming a great copywriter is

that it's learning all the magician secrets. You don't get to enjoy good

copywriting anymore. Yeah. Because you're just constantly analyzing it

and seeing, oh, I know where they got that headline from. Or oh, I've seen

that structure before. And there's, I think there's a time and

place for all of the techniques that we've, that have

been amassed in that strategic

copywriting mindset over the years. And I

think missed strategies is one of the most common things I see is like

someone will use a bunch of low ticket words to sell a high ticket product

or vice versa. And I think the other piece of it is not

understanding why you're running a campaign in the first place. Like the Tim

Ferriss campaign. He was running that as a data operation. Right. He

wasn't selling the book at that point. He was just trying to generate data

to help him title his book. Yeah, but a lot of people will

run campaigns that have these super broad kind of call to

actions or I should not call to actions but goals where if we're trying

to do market research, we're also trying to generate leads, we're also trying to generate

sales. We also want newsletter subscribers and when they get none of it they're

disappointed and they think the ad doesn't work. And it's because you are trying to

do a million different things with this one ad campaign. It would be way better

to reanalyze what is the thing that's actually needed

by spending money on ads. If it's the sales of those top 10% SKUs, then

just spend the money on those top 10% SKUs and then run another

campaign without a smaller dollar amount specifically to test the market

for a new product or find if you have those items

in your SKU sheet that just aren't selling well or they

just don't have margins and you don't want to promote them, make sure those are

not getting in promotion. Too many people like will go into the Google

merchant center and just dump their whole SKU list and there's like a 5 cent

add on part that like they're paying $3 for the

click to sell the 5 cent part. It's just, it doesn't make any sense.

No, but if you're not careful with these things and that's why I always try

to tell people like you anybody can go and learn how to do this but

it is not as easy as it appears you can. Anyone can go and launch

a Google campaign, anyone can go and launch a Facebook. It's really hard to get

them to work. I always say to people your credit card, in five minutes you

could be up and running Google Ads. But it's nothing's going to work. You may

make some sales, don't get me wrong, you may make some sales but you'll have

no idea what happened as to why you generated the sales that

you generated to be able to replicate it and scale it. Right. Because

ultimately that's what we want. They want the ability to be able to replicate

a solution and scale it to a certain level. Right to the

point again, I always used to hate it when I'M actually pivoting at the

moment from running E commerce to running lead generation. Because what I

found is that more and more E commerce businesses have so

many headaches and problems are their own fault, right? They're

making their own mistakes, right. They, they don't, they don't

understand. Again, we give them advice, recommendations. Look,

you need to have a certain amount of product. I hate getting calls like, especially

when it's like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, something like that. You get a

call, say you're gonna have to take the ads off, we've run out of product.

Right. When did you know that Black Friday was coming? Or when did you know

that Christmas is coming? Right. And we all know when they're going to

come. And I think that's sometimes the challenge is if you've got a whole bunch

of products sitting in a warehouse that you can't sell, that's money just

sitting withering on the vine, right? Whereas with lead generation, yeah,

fine, you have a, a finite number of leads that a particular

business may want, but it's something that they could bring on more salespeople to

generate more. And there's, there's again, there's going to be in every location, if it's

just local service based business, there'll be a certain number of people that will

require services at any given point in time and

some of those will be seasonal. So again, I think if you see, spread things

out well enough, you'll be okay. Like you mentioned about it being cold,

right. If people live in a place where it's like sunny and warm all the

time, let's say they lived in Hawaii. They're not really going to care too much

about heating. They're definitely going to care about AC because that's going to be far

more valuable right there. Again you look at some of the tragic things that

have happened with fire damage, but there's also flood damage. I mean here in the

UK we've had biblical weather. It's been just absolutely

dire. Don't know what happened there. Yeah, we've had like biblical weather in terms

of the quality of. Our weather has just been all over the place.

We've had so much rain, really high winds. So again, if you

were a company that did fencing, panel repair and

things like that, your phone is ringing off the hook, Right? But there probably are

times of the year when nobody calls you at all, Right. Because it's just not

the right time for people to do that. Right. So understand when that

demand is going to be and make sure that you're in the right place at

the right time with the right offer. I think that's that the offer is really

what it comes down to. And I think too many businesses that are naturally

seasonal in nature don't have a plan. And their plan really just

involves, I just have to sell as much as I can during the summer because

I know no one's going to buy in the winter. Instead of, okay, great, I

had a great summer. What can I sell in the winter? Yeah. What, what do

people need? And you see this, the people that do this really well often

are landscapers because they know there's not going to be any landscaping work in the

winter. But in cold climates there is going to be snow. Hey, when I'm

bidding your job for the, for your landscaping and

mowing your lawn, hey, we're also going to throw in snow removal and we'll call

anytime there's a snowstorm will come and get you plowed out within 12

hours or whatever the promise is. Yeah. And you can make

a full year's income doing that as long as you can get a truck to

show up. And I think the thing that keeps a lot of people from d

seasonalizing their business is this idea that I don't have the money to

invest in like a whole nother line of business. And

it's. You don't have to subcontract it out. Yeah. Find someone you

trust that's really good at snow removal and just send them the work

and collect the margin. Yeah. It's not as, as much money as you

would make if you were doing it yourself. If you're like a one man crew.

But it's still money coming in. And the, and learning

how to delegate and subcontract is what's going to allow you to grow your

business over time. So why not learn how to do it when you can't sell

anything in the winter or to your product

sense or your product example, you can still

sell beach clothes in the winter because not everybody is

experiencing winter the same way. So go and find

those outliers that are people looking for beach

wear and try to target it around when people are taking beach

vacation. So everybody knows spring break is coming up. I

cannot tell you. Every year I'm always shocked at

how late in the season beachwear companies push their ads

forward. They missed the whole first rush. They should be advertising in February

while people are packed getting ready to pack for their spring break in March. And

they wait. They wait until it's way too late to anything they order or doesn't

show up. And that's not all companies, but like a lot of independent companies make

that mistake because they're under this impression that we have to keep our powder dry.

We have to keep our powder dry. We're only going to sell between the end

of March and the beginning of August and after that it's just going to be

dead. And either add products that you can sell in the winter

or don't just sit on. Don't just sit back

like that whole time. Find where those markets are. Find what the

keywords are people are looking for. Figure out when travel trends

are where. People are going to do a lot of beach vacations around Christmas. They

are going to do them in February and March. So figure out what are those

hot days for you. And you can run lower ticket campaigns

during that time. And just like we were talking about market research, use it as

market research one year, run a campaign through February and see when

your trend starts spiking. Where it's like, oh, people are now interested, now they're buying

from the ad. Great, now you know where your actual starting line is. As opposed

to just assuming, okay, it's finally getting warm. I think it's time to launch the

ads. Yeah. Because people don't buy just based on today's weather.

They buy based on the future weather. Same with like snow clothes. Right.

When do people buy snow pants and stuff? They don't think about it in

July, but they don't buy all their stuff in November either. Like

a lot of it's getting bought at the end of September during back to school.

It's the same concept you got, but you have to run tests to be able

to figure that out. You can't just sit back and just hope for another good

season. That was always the thing that amazed me with, like when we obviously we

had the pandemic, right. And there was an element, obviously a lot less lockdown

in the states than there were in other countries. Right. But certainly in the States

there was an element of kind of locked down. And people were sitting at home

twiddling their thumbs, nothing to do. Right. They were getting relief and

re. Relief help from the government. Then I think they made

an announcement that they were going to give out these stimulus checks to stimulate the

economy because the economy had gone into a bit of shock. Right. So people

were going, I've got this like two grand or 1500 bucks or whatever it was.

I don't know what to do. I don't know what to spend on. So people

going out and randomly just Buying anything just because they

had money that they hadn't expected to have. Whereas as you

say most people when they're making purchases they will make

a planned considered purchase because they've done some research and they

have to do certain things. So again like things like if you have children you

can't just take your kids out of school whenever you feel like it to take

them away on vacation. There'll be certain times of the year that school

kids will be available to travel for vacation, right? So that's

typically when the cost of these flights, hotels and all that sort of stuff is

the most expensive. Because the airlines and travel agents

know that's where they can jack their prices up is all supply and demand. They

know there's going to be a high demand for a particular product so they can

jack the prices up and know that people will still pay them. My son in

law was, he's a big fan of Liverpool, right And he wants to take his

dad to, to watch a game and he was looking to see how much it

would cost to buy tickets to go and see Liverpool play a local

team, local where we are. And he was like shocked how expensive they

were. But I bet you at the beginning of the season, right the tickets were

probably a third or a fifth of the price, right? Whereas now

that they know that it's going to be high demand because Liverpool are

riding high, right? So therefore they know they can jack the price

up and people will pay that, right? What they're charging maybe 6, 700 bucks

for a ticket. People will pay 6700 bucks for a ticket because they want to

go and see them play, right? Which historically you couldn't give them away if there

was a certain team, right you'd be like the stadium would be empty whereas like

when it's popular it'll be full and they can increase the price as a result

of that. Yeah it's that same supply and demand works with

the ad markets. When all your competition is spending

all their money your prices go up for advertising.

Why not? If you're a smaller competitor, if you're trying to break out,

why not try to get the jump on them and advertise when they're not

advertising? I think there's a lot of this follow the leader as opposed to trying

to strike your own course and figure out and I think there's a

certain amount of listen if they've figured it out and that's when they're spending money

because that they know that's the biggest roi, it's okay, that's perfectly fine.

And they have tons of money to spend on that. But if you don't have

a ton of money to spend, then I would be looking at what are the

blue oceans that you can go to? What are the areas that you can sell

this to and not have such fierce competition, specifically

on a time. On a time basis. The same could be said for

any product. If I just go out and offer business coaching,

I'm going up against every person that calls themselves a business

coach out there, regardless of what their background is. But if I

brand myself as a business coach for this very specific type of

business, automatically I get an increased authority with that

specific audience because now all my marketing speaks directly towards them.

So, yeah, business coaching is a red ocean, a hundred percent. But

business coaching for this particular type of entrepreneur might be a

complete, completely blue ocean. So same kind of thing. I've

seen so many people, especially during the pandemic, a lot of people figured this

out pretty well because they had a little bit extra money coming in and ad

rates were so low throughout the pandemic. A lot of people could try things.

And there were some businesses that I got exposed to through either

interviewing people or just who come into my periphery that were doing,

like, really unique things that I couldn't

imagine them running it after the pandemic. So there was one

woman I ran into that was doing matching outfits

for mommy and doggy. So she would sell like a

dress for mom, and then she would sell a matching dress for the mom's

dog. And I was like, that's the. That's such a great

idea. Yeah. But it's. You first off, you have to create the

products. And then it's definitely an impulse buy kind of thing. It's not

something that like, oh, the kids need a new winter jacket. I gotta buy a

winter jacket. And then you have the factor of it being just

silly. Like it's not a. It's not the kind of purchase

that you could justify in any other way. Besides, I have this extra money, I

have to spend it on something. Yeah, but she launched this business.

It took off. She made a bunch of money during the pandemic. And

because she built that audience in a blue ocean, she was able

to continue that business past the pandemic because she already had customers

wearing her stuff and great social media content that was all

ugc. And she was able to build from that success

of Swimming in a Blue Ocean. Whereas now, if you tried to launch that business,

if you weren't immediately ripped off by someone who saw the idea and could make

it for cheaper, better or was already doing something similar and can easily move into

that space. They would. Or you'd be paying a fortune in ad costs because

you're competing with all the other things that people are looking to buy, whether

they're going on vacation or just around the house, what have you. Yeah. So

I think there's that blue ocean thing, figuring out

where your offer is going to have the least amount of

competition and honing that offer specific to that.

This is the difference between offer having a pressure washing business and having a

pressure washing business that focuses specifically on commercial

properties. Right. Like you can talk about

things in that offer that are relevant for

commercial property owners that are not going to be relevant for

a homeowner. You can talk about volume pricing. Most people only own one

house, so volume pricing doesn't make a lot of sense to the average homeowner.

But if you own 52 small business

locations and you want them all done, volume pricing

now becomes part of the conversation. I think that's the biggest thing that people

need to wrap their head around is like, just because you're in a competitive market

doesn't mean you have to stay in a competitive market. You just need to carve

out your own niche. And I think on the agency side, again, I'm always amazed

at how many agencies say we work with everyone and we

do everything right. And I think the reality of it is, I think I

start, I started getting a lot less stressed when

I came up with a really well defined. Right. Ideal

client prospect. Right. So it would be, these are the sorts of clients that

I really felt I vibed with in terms of being able to do the best

work. Right. So I had one, I had it for quite some time. It was

typically, I, I know it off by heart. It would be we work with

businesses that run on Shopify or Shopify plus typically doing

between 1 and $5 million a year in revenue, looking to grow

to between 5 and 50 million. And that was how we would pitch it. Quite

often people would approach us if we didn't like the, the look of the business

or whatever, we were able to just go, we work with people that run on

Shopify, blah blah, blah. So if they're on Magento, BigCommerce, whatever, we could

quite safely decline the business. But if we thought no, actually,

you know what, I like the business like the people, right. We could

still do it. And we did. I've still worked with people in lead gen, I

still work with people in E commerce even though we're pivoting now. Right.

So it just gives you the ability to be able to say no. Right. And

I've always said that the most successful agency owners that I know

are the ones that decline to take businesses that don't

fit kind of the ethos in terms of what they're trying to achieve as a

business. Right. Because they are going to fail as a result of it. Right. If

somebody comes along and says, hey, I want to run ads on, and you've never

run ads on Reddit yourself, you are unlikely to be able to get them good

result for probably a period of time because you need to go through that learning

phase. Right. Whereas if there is a Reddit specialist agency, as you

say, it's probably much easier for me to refer it on to somebody that

I know will do a good job than to try and do it and

hash it and make a kind of complete mess of it myself. Right? Because that's

not going to be good for them and it's not going to be good for

me. I'm going to have a bad reputation, right? They're going to go, don't go

with him because he doesn't know what he's talking about and they're going to get

bad results and they're going to be unhappy. Right? So I just think it's probably

better to decline stuff than to take it on and do a bad job.

Oh, 100%. When we first started, we were really, anyone that's

running a small business can use our services and

that was a huge mistake because at the time that

brought us a lot of revenue. But it made me have to

learn so much about so many different marketplaces that I could never

like hone in and focus on just one. I would be over here learning about

the E Comm world and over here learning about the coaching and consulting space and

over here looking at what architects needed in terms of

marketing. And because of that, it prevented me from being

able to really focus on what are my winners, what are the things that I'm

really competent at doing versus the things that I am still

in the learning phase for. And so one year or

two ago we redefined our own ICP and

it pretty much came down to if you are in the knowledge or service

space, that's where, that's where our people live and they're

usually coming to us with a very specific problem they're trying to

solve and they're not looking for an off the shelf solution. So what I tell

prospects all the time is I was like, listen, if you're just looking for someone

to post on Facebook for you, like, we are not your agency. That's not

our ethos. We are not the Walmart where you just come and you grab this

and you grab this, and then we total everything up at the checkout and then

you pay your monthly retainer and we just take all this off your plate. And

instead we're focused more on developing a specific

strategy unique to that situation. And then every once in a while, one of

those strategies will be something that we can say, hey, we could sell this as

a standalone strategy. A standalone service because it serves

the broader market. It can be used in multiple different capacities.

But a lot of our biggest clients have a very specific problem they hired us

to solve, and then we're building to solve that problem

specifically. So it might be a combination of lead

gen and content marketing and social media and ad buying and all of

that kind of stuff. But it's all tied to what is there. What is

the main problem. So, like, one of our clients right now we're working on. It's

a school. We're working on their enrollment. The problem was we need to get our

enrollment numbers up. So everything we built for them is to the

goal of how do we increase enrollment. That's it. I'm not

doing. There's nothing in that. We're just doing just to do it. It's

all targeted back to what is that initial problem they're coming in with? Yeah.

And so when we look at our ICP and we jump on a prospect

calls, if a prospect immediately is, I just need 20 hours a week of

someone to come in and build emails for me and do answer my

phones. It's. Yeah, it's not us. That's not who we're going to be. I would

say similarly, if we have. If you. If E Comm folks come in. Yeah. If

you're hiring an agency, you hire them for one of two reasons. It's either

utility or expertise. Right. And if you're hiring for utility. Correct. Not

us. Right. We are not that agency at all. Right. And that is.

It's. I just want something to do the grunt work because I don't want to

do it myself. It's not. That's not us. We add a lot more expertise

and we to the table. That. And I think that's that right

there. I wish every entrepreneur or founder

or business leader I talked to could understand that difference. Because so often we'll

get into a situation where they'll say, we got a quote from this agency here

that said they could do their paid media for $500 a month and you're charging

$1500 a month. Why is there such a difference? And I was like,

because that person probably has no expertise that they're

bringing to it. They're just going to apply the same framework that they apply to

every client to your business and hope it works. And if it

works, then they're looking forward to collecting your money every month

and not answering a lot of questions. You're looking for something very

specific that they're not going to be able to provide for

500amonth. They're just not. Because I know the economics of it. I know

how they get their price to be 500. Because if you assume the average agency

is running, let's just pretend 100% margins, that means

50 of that is going straight into the owner's pocket, which means they only have

250amonth to spend. Yeah. That is not enough money to be able to

generate high quality content, high quality ad, creative run

ads effectively, really perform analysis on how those things are going. It's

just enough to knock out a framework, put it live and

then not really look at it until you complain. I mean like even if it

was a junior person, it's probably two or three hours worth of somebody's

time. Right. In, in a month. Yeah. And you're like, what can you achieve in

two or three hours in a month? And again, don't be wrong. That there

is certainly an element of again, an

agency with good expertise understands that there are

things that they can automate. Right. So things like reporting.

Right. You don't need to spend a whole bunch of time collating the

reports. Right. That's something that can be automated.

Interpreting the data within the report and conveying that

to the client in, in kind of weekly or bi weekly calls or what have

you, whatever cadence you have. Right. And explaining what steps need

to be done to bring about improvement. And also again, forward looking, let's look

ahead, let's look at the next quarter, six months, half year, whatever.

You can be in a much better position then to be able to, to add

value based upon data. Right. So you're taking data and then

interpreting the data. Right. And I think that's where a lot of good agencies

will earn their keep. Right. And a lot of poor agencies will just go, here's

a report, here's all the things we did. So what to me, I always say,

does your reporting pass the so what test? So we, we have a lot

of clients that we Know, they never ever read the reports. They're

happy with the results, they're delighted with what we do for them. Right. We don't,

in all honesty, we don't need to send them a report. We do send the

report because that's just part of the process. But it's. We don't need to send

the report to justify our existence. Where I think a lot of agencies,

that's how they justify the 500 that they charge is we

produce reports. We did a weekly call, we did this, we did that. It's like

busy stuff that's not really moving the needle at all. And that

analysis is a huge part. Like just, we just had this happen over

the summer where we have a client in our coaching program. So our

coaching program is for businesses that are too small to hire us as an agency,

but we still want to be able to support them in that advisory role. And

so we run these group sessions each week where they can come in and ask

questions. And it's a great way that if you have to do this stuff

yourself because you can't afford an agency to at least get headed in the right

direction. And so he had been really successful with pay per click ads for his

business and it was a performing arts business. And he was really thrilled.

He was making money, he was closing deals. And then all of a sudden

one week we looked at the reporting and his cost per click

shot to the moon and his performance tanked. And he's

coming, he's. I don't get it. It's like, last six weeks have been great and

then this week, nothing like, should I turn this is the campaign

dead did like something happened. It was, the algorithm changed. Now

the $500 a month pay per click agency would just send you that

report without any of the context. What we did is we looked at it and

we said something happened in the world that caused this. There's

always a correlation to this. So let's figure out what was

the what. What's the correlation that we can identify. The Tonys were that

week. Right. The day his cost per click went up was

the day after the Tonys. Because that's

when all the people he's trying to target are looking for

businesses like his. So everybody, there's this huge rush of

competition. And as soon as we pegged that and we saw the

timeline and we went back two years and we looked, and every time the

Tonys was, there was this big spike in CPC every single

year. We could tell him, leave it running, it'll be a

Week of bad results. Next week we'll be back to normal. If

we hadn't provided that context and just gave a report. And when

he said, why is the ad doing bad? Sometimes ads don't work. I don't

know. It's an invoice. Yeah, exactly. I don't know. But you're

late. Like, it's one of those things that,

yes, you are always going to pay more for expertise,

but the reason you're paying for expertise is because you don't have that. Now,

if you say you're running a business and you have 20 years of buying

media and you just don't want to do it anymore. Yeah. Go hire

one of those agencies because you can give them an SOP and say, this is

exactly how we run our ads. Can you do it for this amount? Yes.

Perfect. I expect them to be at this level of quality. I will send

you the content on this schedule, and then I expect them up within 24

hours. Yeah, whatever. But now, because you're the one

that's actually analyzing the reports and you can see the trends and you can

tell what's working and what's not working, they really do just become a

utility, not someone you're leaning on to grow your business. Yeah. So

I think that's a huge. I've never heard anyone describe it

that way, but that is absolutely the way agencies break down. Yeah. It's

funny. And why. I think so many people are not satisfied

with marketing agencies because it's a huge umbrella and it includes both of

us, even though we can. I'm not saying you and

I includes both of us, but it includes the experts and the

utilitarian. Absolutely. And there's nothing clear communication between

those two about what is what and what is the other. Yeah, the. The differential.

I've always maintained that the. There are far more people that

need help than agencies that can provide the help. Right. Good.

Agencies that can provide the help. Right. And. And it is

the. The barrier to entry keeps getting lower and lower.

Right. So literally, you know, in a lot of cases, you don't even

need to have a website anymore. Right. You could probably create a whole bunch of

stuff in Notion, publish the website on Notion. Right. Never

having to spend a dime. Right. You could use Gmail, which is free.

Right. There's. So there's so many free tools that you can use. And I think

a lot of the people that are promoting the kind of

solo businesses and everything they say, I run my business and I do.

I do it all on the back of five free Tools. And here's what the

tools are. So people just assume that they can go and get the same tools

and do the same thing. Right? And for agencies, yes, you could set up an

agency if you got. Again, everyone's got a mobile phone so they can

go on a phone, right. There's so many kind of good AI tools now that

you don't even need to worry about the audio quality being that bad because you

can upload it to, say, Adobe Podcast. They have an enhanced audio

facility which basically I could record. I used to worry about I've got to

have an external microphone to plug into my phone to be able to record decent

audio. Right. You don't even need to do that. I posted some the other day.

I'm like, this is mind blowing how good this stuff has become. Right. And it's

free, right. So I'm thinking to myself, again, the barrier to entry

keeps getting lower and lower, but it also then means that the, the

likelihood that you're going to come up against five or six competitors every time you

get invited to pitch for something is going to be that much higher. Right.

And I'm at the point now where because I've run an

agency for such a long time, if somebody goes, we're, we're doing a

pitch process, I'm like, good luck with that, right? Because I am not, I'm not

chipping my hat into the ring for that. There's no business that I want to

work with that is so important that I'm prepared to throw my hand into the

ring to pitch, to try and win it. Because to me, that's just, that's not

the, the sort of the environment that I think would do well for my

agency. Right. It's not. I don't think we're good. I think we're very good. Right.

But I just know that when it comes to that whole pitch process that, well,

this agency said, we'll do this, and they end up with a bit of a

Frankenstein monster. They want the best of all five rather than

just choosing one that they, they can get the best results with. So, yeah,

I think there's like that pitch process. I, I

can appreciate that for some businesses, that's just a requirement based on

their structure. If you're dealing with government, they have to get the three

bids or what have you in order to move the process forward.

So I understand that. But I think there's a difference between

it being something structurally that has to be done, in which

case they are really looking at them as three separate elements. Ver

is the buyer who is getting three separate pitches because they don't really

know what they want. And that is a clear sign that's not going to be

a good client. Yeah. Because if you can't articulate, especially for an

agency like us that's also based around solving specific

problems. If you just come to me and you say, I just don't

think my business is doing as good as it should be, my first question is

going to be why? What's the symptom? Anyone can say that

might be doing great and just not have a clear perspective on how good you're

doing. And I, I say compared to who, who compared yourself

to. Right. To say you're not doing as well as you think you should be

doing. Right. Because I, I've always said I'm. I'm trying to be a content

creator, podcaster, right. I'm never going to be a Joe

Rogan. I'm sure Joe Rogan probably didn't think he was going to be a Joe

Rogan in the sense that he is now, right. In terms of let's just sit

down and like, record stuff. But I think, I think the reality of

it is, is that if you try and benchmark yourself against

content creators that have been full on video creators, they've got a

whole production team, right? They've got thousands and thousands of

dollars worth of gear, multiple people that follow them around, you're never going to be

able to compete at that level, Right. Because they have a completely different

sort of. They've got a much, much bigger head start on you than you could

ever achieve. So I've always maintained, sometimes it's that longevity.

Like the one thing that agencies cannot fake is they

cannot fake longevity. So the fact that you started your current

agency in 2020, right. That is

five years ago. It's been running for five years. That is a

long time in the agency. But most small businesses don't make it past

the first year. Right. Most podcasts don't get past three episodes. Right. So

it's so many benchmarks that you can say, if you've got past this point, then

they must be doing something right. And I've always maintained, like, I've tried to

say, let's just look and catch you in a bottle. What have we done right

for the people that we work with? And a lot of it is we've just,

we haven't really thought of it as a client agency relationship. We're just

like friends. All of the clients I have, they are friends of mine. And

I'm so in. In embedded in their success of the

business, as though it's almost like I'm treating their money like it's my money. Right.

Because it is. That's the way I view it if I don't want to waste

their money. Right. Whereas I think Facebook, meta. Facebook,

yes. They want you to have some success, but they don't want you to have

overwhelming success. Why? If that was the case, then they would sell the

traffic for 2 cents, 3 cents instead of $2. $3. It's the whole

line demand. They could afford to do it for two or three cents, but they

choose not to. They've set this sort of floor, right? This is the point in

time when the floor is going to kick in. And they set that floor a

dollar or $2 or $3. And some verticals, they set the floor at

$50. They basically said if you want to bid on any keywords in this

vertical, 50 bucks a click is the minimum that you're going to have to pay.

Because they know how much a lead is worth to a company if they're

successful. Right. Typically like lawyers and things like that, they cost a ton of

money. If you're a mesothelioma lawyer, you'll pay

150, $200 a click. Because they know payout

for a kind of class action is probably hundreds of millions of dollars. So it's

worth that to some lawyers to pay that money. Right. So it's worth

Google to charge that money. So. No, I mean it. It really is. I

always tell people when they complain about ad costs and like, why did my

leads cost so much money? I always tell them I was like, go to

Google Keyword planner and just type in wealth management

and you won't feel bad about how much your leads are costing anymore. Yeah,

because those guys are paying a hundred bucks a click every single day.

And there's no relief for them because the only people bidding

on wealth management keywords are wealth managers

with a lot of money in the bank so they can afford it. It's a

rounding error for a lot of them. But if you're a beginner wealth manager trying

to get your first couple clients, oh, you're smoked. You are. You would never

be able to make it on Google keywords or Google Pay per click

because you have such huge competition in that space. And Google is not

about to be like, oh, you're smaller, so we're going to give you the discount

rate. They're looking at it as a pure. There's a

limited amount of attention, even though it can seem unlimited and we are going to

charge the highest price possible that people are still willing to pay

in that space. And that's their prerogative.

Like they want you to have. I think it's a salient point that they want

you to have success, but not too much success, because at the end of the

day, they're a drug dealer. They want to keep you on the platform, they want

to keep you happy. And as long as you're on the platform and happy,

then you're going to keep spending money with them. Yes. What's

interesting is when they tinker with the algorithm in such

a way that drives. And they've done this a couple times. And

I think every platform is guilty of this at a time. I think the most

recent example is what TikTok did to their algorithm after the ban a

year ago went into effect. They changed the algorithm pretty

significantly with TikTok shop and the. And. And just an influx of

TikTok ads, which made the results on those

platforms go through the floor. And another benefit of working

with an agency that does have an expertise in a field is

that if you're just running Facebook ads or Google Ads or something and you're looking

at your results and you're like, these suck. You don't have any context

to just how that looks to a larger audience to

see if there's a similar trend. Yeah. And so like, we

used to advertise heavily on TikTok. We don't anymore at all. And has nothing to

do with a band. It has to do with they messed up the platform. They.

The. Between TikTok shop and letting more advertisers on to

advertise, the result rate dropped so

dramatically in the course of about a week, it was unbelievable.

And we could see it on our dashboard. We had overlays of all of

our clients running ads and we could see the day they made the change

because everybody's ads crash simultaneously. You would never

know that if you're just looking at your ads. You never had that

insight to say, is this just me or is this a broader market thing and

how much. You have to waste before you work it out. It's like, wow, we

spent 10 grand. And it's not really done that well. Right. Because I think some

people don't look at it in the. In the level of granularity that

most agencies, good agencies like us. Right. We would look at

things on a regular basis. And again, there's a cause and effect. Right. What's caused

this? What's the effect, what do we need to do to change it? And again,

it could be as, as you did, just like, let's just stop running ads

on TikTok. Unfortunately, I think one of the challenges is that like a lot of

people were bullish on TikTok ads, much like yourself at a certain period of time

because it worked well, right? So they dove straight into it head first,

throwing a whole bunch of money in TikTok and they. And they probably did well.

Right? But unfortunately a lot of people would then go, maybe

retrospectively, six 12 months after they bailed on TikTok,

see them all posting about how great it is, dive in there and probably spend

a bunch of money without getting the success that they had and go, I must

just not be very good at it. And the reality of it is the platform

is not as good as it was. Right. That's not to say that there are

not going to be advertisers that are still doing well on TikTok. I'm sure it's

going to be very much horses for courses sort of solution.

So where are you if you're not running on TikTok, where are you going to

switch your allegiance to now? So I'm really bullish on Meta. I

think one of the big advantages that TikTok had over meta

when they first came out and just for clarity, the time to run on TikTok

was 22 and 23. Those years were the I made the

most money off of TikTok than any other social

platform combined when it comes to just true

roas from, from the ads I was running. So

that time period was absolutely phenomenal. And one of the reasons

behind it was because TikTok had an AI targeting

feature built into the platform. You didn't have to do manual targeting like you used

to have to do on Facebook. And when you just gave it the content, the

setup was very simple. You gave it the content, you let it go.

The thing would produce leads far cheaper because it

wasn't hindered by any of the kind of targeting. Like you didn't have to worry

about getting your targeting just perfect to be able to reach your buyers. It

would just run. Now Facebook picked up on this. They've now implemented their

own AI platform into the ad buying and it is now

better than TikTok's was. You're actually getting cheaper leads from

the Meta platform than I was getting on TikTok and I'm getting

the same amount of reach and same amount of engagement. In fact,

we had one particular client after all this stuff.

After we pulled all our clients from TikTok they had requested to go on

TikTok because they felt their audience was going to be there. And so we gave

them the whole spiel about listen, we're not really bullish on this platform. The

last few campaigns we've run there have not done well. All of our other clients

have moved on. Do you still want to do this? They wanted to. We

ran it. Absolute stinker of a campaign. Client was like

we had spent so much time creating this ad. I was in love with the

ad. I thought it was just absolutely perfect. Did not work at

all on TikTok. And so I said let's try it on Meta. Same

exact ad, no changes, no copy edits, all of the same

content. And they produced I think 250 leads in their first

month from the same exact piece that absolutely flopped. Didn't generate a

single lead in a two week period on TikTok. The same

budget generated 250 leads in the first month. Wow.

So it's just one of those things that's like that. Implementing

that AI on Facebook really unlocked the

ability to make the advertising on that platform so much more successful

than it had ever been for us. And so now my

perspective is if you're an E comm and you have a TikTok shop

and that's what you want to push and you're handy with UGC and getting other

creators to create content for you, TikTok makes a lot of sense,

especially if you're not in the U.S. if you're in the U.S. i don't know

if I would go and invest because we don't know what's going to really happen

with the platform. I have my own theories, I have been proven right up until

this point. But we will see how much further I am correct in

my beliefs and how this whole thing's going to play out. But if you're outside

of the US and you want, you have e comm, TikTok is a good

place for it because they're set up, they want to compete with Amazon, they

want to be a marketplace and that's really that is that

change of course is one of the things that killed the ads that I was

running that was more for knowledge and service businesses

where that's not the thing TikTok wants to sell. They want to sell tangible goods.

Yeah. And so because that change in

their percept, their perspective had ripple on effects through

the ad market that where we were playing. So I would go

Facebook and instagram first. I think there's still a lot of room to run there.

I think Zuckerberg's recent backtrack on

the kind of Big Brother approach to Facebook that

he's held on to for the past 10 years is a good thing. Yeah, I

think making it more of that

community, making it more of a free and open community to talk

about the things you want to talk and not have to worry about getting banned

or shadow banned is a good thing. I think Twitter is also ripe

for the picking. I think specific for specific types of businesses. I think

the attention on that platform is very cheap in comparison to a

place like LinkedIn where it's very expensive and yet you can still find the same

level of professionalism. I know a lot of people left Twitter at its heyday

and have not been back since or have thoughts about Elon Musk

and so they refuse to join the platform. But the reality is that if you're

a business owner, you really have to put politics aside and do what's best for

your business. And I do think X has a very good

opportunity to, especially in all the advancements they've

made, to be a real place where you can run ads successfully. So that's really,

that's where I'm putting my money. I wouldn't put it. LinkedIn's great if you have

high ticket, if you have very specific targeting, you have a really good offer. We

have a couple clients on LinkedIn right now, but again they're, they

are not worried about spending fifteen hundred dollars a month on ads

because they know the net gain of those, that fifteen hundred dollars is far

and away and getting fifty clicks and yeah, so it,

it's definitely. The world keeps changing and I'm sure if you ask me

in a year I might be more bullish on one than the other. But right

now, if I was going to put my money in anywhere, it would be the

meta platform and the artist formerly known as Twitter. Drew, this has been

great. I'm going to take you up on that. I'm going to, I'm going to

invite you to come, maybe come back at a point in time in the future

where we can maybe look back and look at some of our predictions and go,

wow, we were completely off track there or we were completely bang on. But

it's been fantastic to meet you first of all and to get to know a

little bit about your business. All your contact details will be available on the show

Notes, which will be available after the podcast episode. Just remains for me to

say thank you so much for being fantastic guest on the show today. And I

look forward to speaking to all of you on the next episode of Digital

Marketing Stories. Thanks a lot. Bye for now.