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

Jim Banks [00:00:00]:
So with me today is Drew Donaldson, who you're in Pennsylvania, is that right?

Drew Donaldson [00:00:04]:
That's right. That's right.

Jim Banks [00:00:06]:
And how's Pennsylvania at the moment? Cold.

Drew Donaldson [00:00:08]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:00:27]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:00:36]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:01:04]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:01:15]:
I'm sure it comes with character.

Drew Donaldson [00:01:16]:
It does. It does have a lot of character.

Jim Banks [00:01:18]:
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 GroHaus 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.

Drew Donaldson [00:01:38]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:02:24]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:03:18]:
And that's pretty much what we did.

Jim Banks [00:03:20]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:04:14]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:05:01]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:05:36]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:06:04]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:06:44]:
Yeah.

Drew Donaldson [00:06:45]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:07:07]:
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?

Jim Banks [00:07:27]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:07:50]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:08:19]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:08:58]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:09:50]:
So I might consult on what to do that. Right.

Drew Donaldson [00:09:53]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:10:51]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:11:20]:
Yeah.

Drew Donaldson [00:11:20]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:12:22]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:12:59]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:13:15]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:14:09]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:15:05]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:15:24]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:15:43]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:15:59]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:16:10]:
Yeah.

Drew Donaldson [00:16:11]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:16:49]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:17:58]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:18:15]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:18:55]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:19:18]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:20:12]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:20:40]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:20:46]:
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?

Jim Banks [00:21:03]:
Yeah.

Drew Donaldson [00:21:04]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:21:28]:
Yeah.

Drew Donaldson [00:21:29]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:21:48]:
Yeah.

Drew Donaldson [00:21:48]:
Find someone you trust that's really good at snow removal and just send them the work and collect the margin.

Jim Banks [00:21:54]:
Yeah.

Drew Donaldson [00:21:54]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:22:37]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:23:08]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:23:30]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:23:52]:
Yeah.

Drew Donaldson [00:23:52]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:24:18]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:24:38]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:25:15]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:26:26]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:27:27]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:28:21]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:28:31]:
Yeah.

Drew Donaldson [00:28:31]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:28:50]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:29:26]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:29:35]:
Yeah.

Drew Donaldson [00:29:35]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:30:30]:
You just need to carve out your own niche.

Jim Banks [00:30:31]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:30:59]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:31:34]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:31:56]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:32:36]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:33:46]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:34:32]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:34:48]:
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?

Jim Banks [00:34:54]:
Yeah.

Drew Donaldson [00:34:55]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:35:11]:
If you.

Drew Donaldson [00:35:11]:
If E Comm folks come in. Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:35:13]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:35:19]:
Correct.

Jim Banks [00:35:20]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:35:27]:
That's not us. We add a lot more expertise and we to the table. That.

Drew Donaldson [00:35:32]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:36:15]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:36:29]:
Yeah.

Drew Donaldson [00:36:30]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:36:45]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:36:51]:
Yeah.

Jim Banks [00:36:52]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:37:14]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:37:41]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:38:07]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:38:21]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:38:56]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:39:30]:
So let's figure out what was the what. What's the correlation that we can identify. The Tonys were that week.

Jim Banks [00:39:36]:
Right.

Drew Donaldson [00:39:36]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:40:16]:
I don't know. It's an invoice.

Drew Donaldson [00:40:18]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:40:38]:
Yeah.

Drew Donaldson [00:40:38]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:41:07]:
Yeah.

Drew Donaldson [00:41:08]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:41:15]:
Yeah. It's funny.

Drew Donaldson [00:41:16]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:41:31]:
Absolutely.

Drew Donaldson [00:41:31]:
And there's nothing clear communication between those two about what is what and what is the other.

Jim Banks [00:41:36]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:41:47]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:42:03]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:42:21]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:42:51]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:43:24]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:43:47]:
They want the best of all five rather than just choosing one that they, they can get the best results with.

Drew Donaldson [00:43:53]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:44:29]:
Yeah.

Drew Donaldson [00:44:29]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:44:50]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:45:08]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:45:51]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:46:11]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:46:34]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:46:52]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:47:22]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:47:33]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:48:10]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:48:48]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:49:15]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:49:40]:
Yeah.

Drew Donaldson [00:49:41]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:50:02]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:50:20]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:50:34]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:51:18]:
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?

Drew Donaldson [00:51:31]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:52:13]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:52:54]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:53:13]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:53:38]:
Wow.

Drew Donaldson [00:53:39]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:54:42]:
They want to sell tangible goods.

Jim Banks [00:54:43]:
Yeah.

Drew Donaldson [00:54:44]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:55:34]:
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.

Drew Donaldson [00:56:26]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:56:32]:
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.

Jim Banks [00:57:04]:
Bye for now.