Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of the Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Rapid AI prototyping slashed months of work to hours for agencies
• AI as a force multiplier, not a human replacement
• Unique "One K Challenge" game show for solving real-life problems
• Book clubs as a tool for communication and team growth
• Lively debate on the societal and ethical impact of AI's rise

Resources:

• Aisle3
• DevNoodle

Connect with Rob Cromer:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 03:08 -  And now my whole feeling is how do I create, how do I use AI as a force multiplier, not a replacement of human capital. And that's like part of the mandate of IL three doesn't allow me to like go down that deep rabbit hole of like, but I could fucking do this at like a 99% margin with one dude just to hit, hit buttons. 
• 10:46 - I think the consistent thread of why I left that agency, or they were great, but is always, oh, there's a flurry of work, and then they set it and forget it. And now I feel like I'm always emailing them to do something. Right? And we're always trying to ignite the wheel. So we are only as good as as proactive as we can be. And I think that the agile, really, when you boil it down, agile requires proactivity, consistent activity, consistent review, consistent input. 
• 19:40 - So I used Claude Cowork, it's still down in the blocks that then I put in.. and the first thing I had Claude do was, alright, take all this data and thousands of lines of data, take all this data and do a Freudian analysis of the me. And that was really fucking interesting. And then I took the same thing, put it back into ChatGPT, and told it to give me a Freudian.
• 36:57 - There's a mix in the world that's gonna be people building productive things for themselves, and then people who are gonna try to figure out how to, like, you know, make money on it. And there's gonna be so much slop, like shitty apps that don't need to exist that already exist that like, there's gonna be a gold rush right? In everything like this. And it's interesting to see the teams that will make it, like you're not looking at it like, oh well, we just made this thing, let's like make an app out of it and sell it. You're like, this is really helpful. Internally, we save ourselves 15 hours, like with anything AI video slot that came out, right? So it's gonna be a while of parsing through a bunch of garbage. 
• 55:41 - Well, for starters, we don't look at, I'm not looking at AI on how to replace somebody. I'm looking at how to make them more productive, right? That force multiplier effect. I don't want a company that is me and 25 agents running around, right? Like that is an interesting, I think we do things like company retreats that make sure we bring everybody together so there is some human contact because we're a remote workforce.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Benefits of the dealership model
• Insights on marketing agency partnerships
• Tips on using white-label services
• Importance of Google Business Profile
• Value of local networking for growth

Resources:

• Your Local Network
• DevNoodle

Connect with Jim Stewart:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 14:20 - When you're talking to that marketing agency, I tell everybody, just ask 'em this simple question, what else outside of what you offer should I be doing to help grow my business? Because a good agency will point you in other directions too, because we don't all do everything. So, you know, we're really good at certain things, and then we do other things, and then there's stuff we don't do. And I always have other agencies on my list where I'm like, I think this person would be a really good fit for you. You should call them because this is something that could probably help grow your business outside of the stuff I'm doing right now. And there's too many agencies out there, and they make us look bad as they're just out to sell the services they have and focus on that and nothing else. 
• 11:04 - The one was, you know, I got this, an email that I send out that reminds everybody about the event every month. And this guy probably has been on my list, my email reminder list for like 16, 18 months. And he finally showed, you know, he finally showed up for the event, and he spent five minutes thanking me for not stopping, you know, sending him the emails. He's like, thank you for keeping me on your reminder list. He goes like, every month I wanted to come out, something just came up, I couldn't do it. You know, he is like, I came out, he goes, I had two really good conversations that are gonna lead to bigger conversations here tonight. Thank you so much for continuing to send me the email.
• 32:14 - I do a ton of networking, and you know, you're in a room and you, you see that a person that's, you know, another marketing person and they refuse to talk to you, you know, because you're the enemy and you're just like, no, we're, we're not the enemies. We're, you know, we should be working together. I can help your clients, you can probably help my clients. 
• 37:11 - You're trying to grow your business, you gotta build your network. I'm a big believer in that. I belong to multiple chambers. I belong to BNI,  belong to a few other networking groups. I'm constantly out there. I just, I'm heading to my third networking event tonight for the day. So I had a morning one, I had my BNI lunch, and now I'm gonna be heading to a multi chamber happy hour. So I just tell people, you know, get out there, show up. That's the biggest thing. Just show up.
• 28:07 - It's a really interesting model, my perspective on it and why I think it works really well, you're able to offer more of a full digital marketing agency approach with billboards as well, in indoor billboards. And that network that's built out there, while still maintaining the relationship that clients get with being a smaller, localized agency. And that is rare, it seems almost impossible outside of this type of model, 'cause usually we seems, there'll be a small team of under 10 people that is a full-service digital marketing agency. And that specialization in all of the areas that you listed becomes impossible.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Boosting online visibility
• Domain authority insights
• Balance in agency growth
• Content's role in SEO
• Conversion optimization tips

Resources:

• Big Fin SEO
• DevNoodle
  
  

Connect with Michael Fleischner:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 22:47 - The problem is that today, and as you mentioned over the last year, people are going directly to ChatGPT to ask and answer questions. They're not going to Google, or at least not in the same way. And that's why Google's really, I think, sprinting to try to catch up with AI overviews and changing some of the results and how they're created. But you know, ultimately it's kind of like saying, oh, no one will ever unseat Facebook yet Facebook is unseating itself through Instagram, and TikTok is replacing Facebook. So we have these, these visions of grandeur around some of the typical search behaviors because we've operated that way for so long. 
• 36:40 - And that's kind of the manic depressive nature of agency ownership. And it's not for everybody. You know, again, I've been around long enough to know that all you can do is continually focus on delivering quality results for your customers. And you can do that, and they may still leave, you may not do that, and they stay, but you really have to, again, from my perspective, make sure that you're delivering the best quality and you're engaging in this idea of fair exchange or abundance exchange on a regular basis. And that's it. There's really no more to it. But over time, you know, the good news is you do get accustomed to, it's kinda like Game of Thrones when you're kind of getting into the characters initially, you quickly realize don't get attached to any of the characters, right? Like it's kind of the same dynamic.
• 21:37 - I've been in the SEO business, but it's longer than most. And this one is different. And what I mean by that is, when I started out almost 20 years ago, the way that SEO was changing was more an evolution, not a sea change, which is happening here. The evolution was, oh, this is what you needed to do to rank, oh, this is what you need to do to rank differently. Oh, this is a different kind of ranking. You know, now we have images showing up in search, so on and so forth, right? So like there was all this evolution happening in the world of search and it created a really cool dynamic for us and our clients. It helped kind of expand content generation and creating different types of digital assets, building authority, doing all these fun, exciting projects for clients, really to get them to show up in search results.
• 30:40 - Because LLMs, right now, they're inherently lazy. At least that's my perspective. They're not going even though it says, you know, taking a minute to think longer or deep research or yeah, they're just scanning more websites. But AI, but Google does that through AI as well. So it's, it's nothing, quote unquote new, but it is an advancement in terms of search behavior and how these machines return information. 
• 31:44 - Because we're now so used to, I remember like I had to, I took a course to learn how to use Google properly, how to properly think about crafting the search term or question or whatever it was down to get down to relevant results instead of thousands. And now a lot of that's gone away because you could just chat with GPT, and if you took a wrong turn, you naturally, as if you're talking to a person, ask the right question and get into that depth. What's becoming really interesting is once you get someone to your place, your site where wherever it is that you have them, that you want to have them learn more about your company and convert, they're still gonna have those same questions.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Over 80% of creators operate independently.
• Substantial growth through creators, not brands.
• AI manager negotiates deals for creators.
• Strategic M&A for operations improvement.
• The concept of "fan subs" to monetize content.

Resources:

• NeoReach
• DevNoodle

Connect with James Michalak:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 11:20 - There's things that look good, like, you know, you have the concept of a 10-foot car, you know, 10 feet away. It looks fine. We had a 10-foot business for a little while, right? So it's taking a look at those things and saying, Ah, I could probably make that better. Or, oh, we should focus some time and attention here to improve that process, improve that, you know, customer service, whatever. So yeah, I do a lot of that. It gets me in trouble both at home and in the business. But you're not, you're not moving forward unless you're making things better or trying to break stuff.
• 28:07 -  I think that the creator economy is still ripe for a complete rollup. I think what we're seeing from a perspective at the macro level right now is driven by agency holdcos that are like, oh shit, we need this capability. We're just gonna bring it in-house so we can, you know, charge out the wazoo for it and add in hourly rates and stuff. But for us, we've looked at it differently still through the lens of like roll-up strategy in the sense that there is a huge competitive landscape out there. Any individual or like single aspect of the creator economy has hundreds of organizations trying to figure it out. 
• 14:27 - I think everyone is swimming in the direction of continuing to service brands 'cause that's where at least the short-term dollars are. We're kind of going against the current, and we are focusing, I would say probably 80% of our attention now on the creators themselves. So building out tool sets for them to be more dangerous with their brand deals, building out ways for them to get paid more easily to do all the back office menial BS work that they don't really want to do. That's part of an activation. And then leaning into AI to make all that happen. 'cause the holy grail for us is being able to be that self, you know, full self-service aspect for creators to where we are also leveraging the data that they provide us to make informed decisions on the managed services side and possibly even use that to dictate where the creator economy is going. 
• 27:01 - If it's hurting creators more than it's hurting my team. We're doing the creator thing first, 'cause at the end of the day we're in service of them. They're the reason we exist, and our entire value proposition moving forward is built around them. So like how can I be a hypocrite and focus on us first rather than trying to, to make life easier for them in any way that we can. Whether or not it's like payment processing, it's new tool sets, different data sets, jumping on the phone and just answering questions, all that kind of stuff.
• 41:27 - Cause what we see all the time, even with the creators that we represent as licensed talent managers, brands, lowball, right? Brands have, they've got a bottom line that they need to preserve. So they're not coming out with their best and brightest or their best offer out of the gate. They're probably asking for way too much in terms of content or requirements from the creator as well. And these, the creators were looking to service, they're amazing, but they're not as well versed in how to negotiate with a big brand or even a smaller one, how to advocate for themselves. So this is us taking data, and backing that up, and putting an AI agent in their corner.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• The evolution from marketer to entrepreneur
• Importance of sales process in business growth
• Physical endurance events mirror business mindset
• Strategic financial understanding boosts business
• Embracing risks to push through business plateaus

Resources:

• SearchLab
• DevNoodle

Connect with Mark Bealin Jr:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 13:44 - And he just said, you can do anything for 24 hours. A human body can do anything for 24 hours. And I, if it got hard, I'd just be like, you can do anything for 24 hours tomorrow, you'll rest. Like, I'll be comfortable again. And that was a lot of like the training, what you realize is like, it feel if, like, especially when you're so outta shape, it's like, it just feels like this is never gonna end, but like really in a short period of time, you're gonna be in a comfortable shower, you're gonna be in a shower, you're gonna be in a comfortable car, you're gonna be, you know, it does, it ends. And so just reminding myself, you can do anything for 24 hours is very helpful.
• 24:15 - I progressed to the point, remember where I came from, like, I just hated this stuff. I progressed to the point where I did a three-day bootcamp at Wharton School of Business, where I, like, I remember walking around and being like, they're gonna find out I'm here and kick me out. Like, I shouldn't be allowed at this. Like all these Ben Franklin, Ben Franklin quotes on the sidewalk and everything, it was really cool. So we had Wharton professors teaching us all this stuff and case studies on humongous companies. And I just thought it was exhilarating, and I took away from it a bunch of things that are still involved in my business. I learned how to salary cap there. I learned how to like, manage numbers that are really important. So, so I've come a long way where now, I mean, it's one of the main things I talk about our finances. And it's been an amazing evolution.
• 13:55 - I've spoken on this before that I, I'm very aggressive in my head. I'm like, no, no, do it, do it. But that's the other side of it is I really think like, you know, my body, I  can do anything that I, I need to right now, and I'll take a break later, and you obviously feel so much better about yourself after I have put myself in the hospital. So I have tried too hard once. But no, I think the other side of it is also, you know, life is hard and when you do hard things, life, I don't know if it gets easier, but it allows you to approach things with a better lens, like hard problems with a better lens 
• 38:50 - I'm gonna just give you some numbers not to, not to like brag or boast or anything like that, but I just think it paints a better picture. So when you get going as a business, I was flat broke, like I had no money. I was coming, going through savings, like out to wazoo, and it was really stressful. And so then once I got to a certain point, I'd say there's like 20 grand a month coming in of profit, right? It was, it's so easy to just sit there and bathe in those profits and just say like, man, why don't I just stay here a little while and start making this money. And really there's no button you can push that says like, just keep me right here and I'll be fine with 20 grand a month. If there was, I might think differently, but I had to take risks to get to the next level in the game. And the temptation I think far too often is once, once things get comfortable, businesses kind of go like this, they kind of plateau and then they go up and they plateau and they go up and they plateau in those plateau periods or even before those plateau periods, as you can see an opportunity or a good, a good op like a good way to reinvest profits that's the time to jump.
• 33:57 - So the lesson I would give to anyone who's listening to this or to you guys is like, there was something that was going on there that nobody is, that I haven't talked about, which is, if I heard Greg in December of 9, 2019, I may all those hires during COVID, like during a period of a lot of uncertainty and when like, we were candidly like losing revenue. But there's my friend Will Scott, who's another agency owner, he used this, this buffet quote that I really like, which is, you know, Warren Buffet says like, be stingy when other people are being greedy and be greedy when other people are being stingy. And that really helped me because in that period of time everyone was being stingy, and I decided to be greedy and made a bunch of big hires, and it changed my life completely.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Getting deep on branding
• Personal journeys and business
• The influence of Peaky Blinders
• Mike Falkow’s creative process
• The problem with old agency models

Resources:

• Meritus Media
• DevNoodle

Connect with Mike Falkow:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 19:06 -   I hate being bored. I mean, if you really want to abstract it all the way down, that's it for me. Like I was having a conversation with my sister yesterday actually,  and she was like, it's good that you're doing things and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, you know, I despise the idea of being unproductive. It really bothers me. And so, I, wherever that comes from for me, who knows, I think it's not even worth analyzing all that deeply. But like, I find great joy in being productive. I find that my morale comes up. I find that I tend to feel like I'm exchanging more with the world around me.  I feel like I'm in a better position to help the people who I care about. You know, like all those added benefits, but like sitting still for too long really drives me nuts and feeling lazy and feeling unproductive, and like, I'm not contributing like that.
• 22:09 - And then also just having your biggest competition being yourself. Like, there's nothing that I can control about how that guy surfs that way. There's nothing that I can control about how that actor auditions for that part. Like, those are entirely out of my hands. So if I want to do the best job that I can do, all I need to do is focus on myself.
• 13:08 - You need to treat your business like your body of, like, it needs to be well fed, it needs to have good sleep, it needs to get exercise like you, you need to respect it and treat it as such. 'cause a lot of times, especially with small businesses and, one man operations, it gets into this thing of like, ah, I'm just gonna cope and try and, juggle the plates and do everything all at once. And, but it's like, no, take time to rest. Take time to exercise, take time to feed it, and we can sort of extrapolate that metaphor all the way down the road, but being in the present, I think that's, that's the business right there.
• 40:41 - ​​Mike: It's unethical. If I want to be straight up about it. That's just my view of it. I feel like that's unfair. If you're already paying me a retainer to be your consultant and your PR strategist, why would I upsell you if I'm finding opportunities for you to do paid branding? Right?
  Alex: That's interesting. That stems into a lot of different industries as well, and like the owning relationships and kind of keeping those to the chest, close to the chest, and then upcharging for access, really. Yeah, Where that access may not even be limited to that agency. Maybe Lucky Strike could have gone and knocked on that door themselves.
• 39:36 - Mike: The product is the commercial, but now you've got a product that you can sell at like massive, massive margins and then do these huge profits on media buys. Where like that's where the money is for the old agency model.
  Alex: So was that really in the relationship and them owning the relationship to those media distribution
  Mike: Products? Yeah, like if, if you look at like, okay, so Lucky Strike comes in as an admin example, right? So they come up with a great creative idea of how to put the commercials together and what that ad campaign would look like. But okay, so they're getting paid some for that. But the contract with the, with Lucky Strike is all in service of getting to the media buyers. 'cause the media buyers where, okay, I, I pay, you know, $50,000 or whatever it is, or a hundred thousand dollars for this, but the client is now paying me five or, or whatever it is. Because the media buy upsell is, is such a large margin.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Unique insights into legal marketing
• Tips on creating effective brand content
• The importance of website conversion optimization
• Storytelling in professional branding
• Discussing OpenJar's agency success

Resources:

• OpenJar
• A Bear with Pants
• DevNoodle

Connect with Adam Warren:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 19:06 - Just when you thought, especially as a marketer, you've seen everything. We haven't, we've only seen everything up to this point, but tomorrow is going to be another monkey wrench. And so I'm gonna be dealing with tomorrow with fresh eyes, with fresh experience, and having to learn as I go. And, you know, I think that is something that I reminded myself of in writing that book to keep it from scaring me away from doing it. And believe me, I thought about not doing it about 30 times. In fact, I didn't tell anyone but my wife and kids for the longest time that I was even doing it. In fact, the majority of people who know me didn't know until I finally had the book in my hand. So it was a big secret to sit on because I did not want to disappoint if I decided an 11th hour back out. But even in other parts of my career, my first movie, you know, I had no idea what I was doing. I just generally don't let that be the deterrent. 
• 31:56 - So it's easy for us to figure out what the client's budget is, figure out what they need, and then plug them into the media and the content that's appropriate for them. If there's something we don't offer, let's say I, would like to have some controls over the website development. We bring in a partner for that. Either we white label them or we let, let it be known from the start. We're always looking to identify vendors because someone always has something you don't and business owners who don't admit to that are full of shit. I think you have to recognize that sometimes you can't be, what is it omniscient? You know, we need to recognize as a company that strategic partners are important, and we have very much so built a company with strategic partners from day one.
• 20:16 - Because at the end of the day, everyone had to do something for the first time. And so, you know, we go to school, you learn a lot in school. What you really learn in school, if you're going to get the ultimate takeaway is how to deal with shit, how to problem solve and how to understand that what makes you uncomfortable might be what makes you grow the most.
• 39:41 - As a lead generator, when you start getting stuff below the fold, that concerns me that it's just gonna disappear. Not everybody is a long scroller. You know, I might like to see that his lead capture, his form feels were a bit more accessible. I thought they were too far down. And that's always something you can put on the, like, let's say he took this and just moved it off to the right, and it was there from the top of the fold. Like, Yeah. I mean you can't see where exactly where your cursor is. Like yeah. What if it was there? You know,, I think that people, the design challenge, the design challenge is, you have to remember you're dealing with the short attention span theater and maybe one of the greatest short attention span theater.
• 27:40 - We live in the age of content, you're missing the boat if you're not creating good content. It's all anyone cares about at, at least in terms of entertaining needs or engaging needs or who they work with. You know, there's an old saying, you work with who you like that's the most optimal person to do business with. Well, if you're never gonna be able to create a relationships with someone, you kind of can do that through content. People begin to feel that like they're building a relationship with you through content. And so I looked back on my history and said, this is the moment where I get to take those lessons of my past and put them into action. And it was right around when I was finishing this book, when I was finally moving towards doing my first really big ad in this industry. And it's just such a cool ad. It's this, we turned this attorney outta Texas into like a spy, it was like this Jason Bourne kind of leaning inspired project and it was so much fun and no one had ever seen anything like it.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Automation revolutionizing direct mail.
• Easy letter-sending tool with tracking.
• Pub talks: Informal yet insightful entrepreneur tales.
• Bridging theory and real-world application.
• Moving beyond the hammer-nail paradigm.

Resources:

• Zairmail
• DevNoodle

Connect with Dr. Wilson Zehr:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 10:52 - So Tim, once he told me that one of the things that people need, I mean, we always hear people talk in the industry, we talk about you need the expertise, you need people with the skills, and you need people, you need the money, you know, need the finance. But he said the other thing that people really need is heroes. They need people they can look at and said, if that person can do it, I can do it too. And we need more heroes and an entrepreneurial ecosystem.
• 24:30 - And then, you know, the Christensen talked about this idea that when you create new industries, when you're doing disruptive, what he called disruptive innovation, oftentimes, well usually favors the new entrant. Usually the incumbent is at a disadvantage for a variety of reasons, including the reason that it's not always in their best interest to do that. They've got an a market to pretend and defend, to protect and defend, but they also have new ideas, new specialties, in a specific area. And we would need to, I guess we'd need to take time to spend on the curve, but the idea of this model that we built on is the idea that if you're looking very early in a life cycle.
• 18:31 - But one of the interest, the really cool things that you see happening is that students, when you first lay out this project, you know, they just, kind of all the blood drain outta their face and they're like, oh my gosh, what did I get myself into? And they're really nervous about it. And because, you know, like any real world project, like I'm not out of the textbook, any real, real world project project, things are not always clearly defined. There's squishiness and you almost never have complete information, right? There's holes in that information. And you need to use what you have to work with, and you need to make assumptions to do that. So you need to try and make the best assumptions. And it may be that there is no right answer. There might be a series of right answers, wrong answers, depending on who they're for. It may be that, that there's only, you need to pick the least worst of the bad outcomes, right? 
• 32:14 -  AI is gonna kill everybody's job. And what history tells me is that it will reduce some opportunities, especially stuff that's systematic and repetitive, things that maybe people shouldn't be doing anyway. But it'll also create opportunities, and it's likely that it'll create many more opportunities than it actually eliminates. So, I mean, I'm not really worried about that technology at all. I'm more worried about the misapplication of it, people trying to use it to solve problems that's not well suited for than I am about it, eliminating everybody's job.
• 38:44 - I think that the trick for me is AI, just for the sake of AI, everybody today seems to have a need and AI story, but AI for the sake of AI is maybe not as valuable. I, what I'm really trying to do at the most basic level is I'm trying to solve important problems for my customers. And I might use AI to do that. I might not. And in fact, there might be other tools that work more effectively to do that. So that's the question to ask is what's the problem I'm trying to solve?

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Unveil growth tips from an expert
• Scaling and exiting companies
• System and process importance
• Identifying stages in business
• Mental transitions for leaders

Resources:

• Blue Magnet Partners
• Pat Alacqua
• DevNoodle

Connect with Pat Alacqua:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 16:31 -  I think everybody starts a business as much as you love it. You always [have to ask] if you're really going to get value out of it, you really got to say, how can it operate without me? Right. However, all that works. That's why I relate it to most of us. Parents can recognize the importance of letting our kids go. Right. So that's why I think that's a great analogy.
• 19:33 - So we had to, I always say something, as you go through every stage of growth, we as leaders have to learn how to think differently, plan differently, and execute differently. And that's a constant transformation. And our businesses can't make that transformation if we're not making that transformation when we look in the mirror and there's different, we have to be different people as we go through that, right?
• 28:14 - There's 2 ways to look at a business. There is your life cycle of every business is the same. OK, and you go from startup, you go to growth, you go to maturity. OK, where you either end up being, either make some adjustments at that point, and then you either continue to grow or you ultimately have to reinvent, right? because you decline, and that's where turnarounds come in, right? And then, without getting further in depth in that, every product has that same life cycle, if that makes sense, right? And when companies in that stage start to grow, A company might hit that maturity phase, right? Where you got a lot of competition coming in, you're not growing as fast, but the way they keep growing, if they choose to, is the next product.
• 10:33 - You know, when you're starting up a business, right, you're wearing every single hat. What sort of what working on it means is you sort of got to step back and say, okay, where do I need systems? Where do I need process? How do I replace myself? You know, you know, we, we, we all enjoy in, in starting something. We all enjoy doing it and, and accomplishing things ourselves and what we do, right? But, you know, and when you start working on the business, you really start looking at how do I actually replace myself, right? And, what does that mean, and how do you go about doing that?
• 50:56 - Pat A: So I think if you're on that journey in business and you wanna figure out how to get unstuck and tackle some challenges, I, think there's universal insights in that. And it's not all about me, it's about a lot of really interesting successful leaders that okay, you know,there may be some of 'em aren't on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, but quite frankly, they've got some great stories that we just wanted to highlight.
  Josh: I think, like you mentioned, I think that's exactly what we're trying to do with this podcast, too.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Turnkey sales & HubSpot solutions
• The impact of studying world religions
• Strategies beyond lead generation
• Improve business valuation tactics
• Insights on website lead conversion

Resources:

• Ninestone Partners
• DevNoodle

Connect with Alex Polamero:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 1:08:03 - Clients like it when we have skin in the game. For sure. Absolutely. Yeah. And if we can help two x three x or more their valuation on top of their annual revenue, they start seeing numbers in a different, in a different light, right? Oh, and we can help. Now that's a smaller company, right? Let's say like three to 15 million. If we can help the owner get out of being the only person doing all this stuff, that's major, right? Talk about lifestyle change.
• 28:04 - Alex P: I learned a lot from that experience, right? About working with partners about negotiating agreements. A lot of times when you're, buying or selling a business, you gotta think about the end game, even though it's kind of hard. What happens if one of you dies? What happens if one of you doesn't wanna work together? You know, all these things. And also the, the just the power of patience and perseverance, right? Because running an agency takes a lot of effort and there's a lot of, you know, trial and error and, winning and losing and trying to learn from others who've done it, you know, better than I have. So that was my journey.
  Josh: I appreciate you sharing that. Is there anything that you would do differently? Because it sounds like you did think about a few things and how this could go, but yeah. Would you do anything differently?
  Alex P: Yeah, I wouldn't have sold, I wouldn't, so I wouldn't do that. Like two years in business is not very long, right? There are a few key things that I would do. Number one, right? I would start, I creating systems in my business from day one, right? How, so? Scalability is about systems, which people talk about this all the time, right? But I was more of a sales person and technical expert in marketing automation. So I was like, well I can go get business and I could do the work, right? But the creating the systems for replicating that without me, that was the hard part. So I would start that much sooner.
• 22:41 - Alex P: So then how do you align that back to like your worldview for running a business?
  Alex G: I think, all right, let's see. I think let's take it one, one to one initially, like relationship based. Whether it's a relationship with your, your spouse or your child or your partner, whatever, you know, business partner, whatever, take it. I think that, I used to say that communication is the most important. I switched that to expectations are the most important. And I think that dives deeply into how you enter a situation with what expectations you have. And potentially those expectations are not aligned on the other side. So you have mismatch. And that creates, you know, you could take that on the product side as well. And that creates a spectrum of the expectation versus reality is essentially sat user satisfaction, user experience, right? You need to understand that. So that's kind of on a one-to-one level. And also going to a somewhat of a one-to-one level with a product. You, with a product as opposed to the relationship you have with someone else. And I think, you know, take that to a worldview. If we understand each other's expectations, maybe on a worldview we can identify those gaps and at least have a relevant conversation.
• 41:40 - We're we're telling them this is how we're gonna build your company, right? We're leaders in their company with them on their executive team. They love it when we show them a dashboard and it says, revenue going up, Right? Here are the awesome things. Here are any challenges we're facing and what we're gonna do about it. Right? And the shorter that meeting, the better. When we're not meeting expectations, going all the way back to the beginning of our conversation, that's when clients are like, I wanna micromanage and help, you know, solve all these problems. So the, the more we tie our work to actual results, the easier it is for everybody. 
• 21:42 - For us, at the end of the day, it's expectations and satisfaction. Obviously for us. Did we hit the due dates, right? Because we're doing technical work. It's construction a lot of times, right? So did we hit it on time? But that's not really what matters. What matters is the client satisfied? Did we manage expectations we could have delivered earlier and they're not satisfied or we could deliver late and they are satisfied. So we base that on how's the relationship with the client? Are they, are we aligned on expectations and what's their rate of satisfaction? And the more of those we get ultimately will lead to more for us, really, retention is more valuable than the initial sale. 

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Insights on B2B SaaS marketing
• Benefits of B Corp certification
• Improving website conversion
• Trail running and mental toughness
• Keys to onboarding new employees

Resources:

• Maven Collective Marketing
• DevNoodle

Connect with Erica Hakonson:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 60:00 - Erica: What I love about this and what I love about the B Corp community is that you are now a for-profit organization that is not just for profit, it's actually for the benefit of your community. And so when we talked about process a little earlier, Alex, you know, one of the things that helped me establish process even further was going through this assessment. ‘Cause it was things we were doing, but maybe not things we were documenting and it was community building that we were doing, but maybe I didn't have it in our staff handbook as something as a policy of ours or a mandate of ours. So we have pro bono volunteer hours that are built into our employees work and some of that we do together as a group. Some of that they find their own passion projects and work on. We try to find organizations that we align with value wise to give our time and energy and skillset. And so I know that it feels like when you're a small business, there's just so many things cooking, how could I possibly get to those pieces? But those pieces sometimes are what fuels us to get to that next step in our entrepreneurial journey. And for me for sure, having that as a part of our mission, having that as a part of our work and mandate and dedicating ourselves to an organization that keeps you honest about that, is a really huge opportunity that I'm excited about this year. Like I said, we're in assessment, we've scored enough to be in assessment and hopefully as we go through the process, we'll then become certified and get to join that amazing community of entrepreneurs and larger organizations that have the same vision and mission of for profit companies not being for profit.
  Alex:Identifying around that purpose is huge. So I think that's, yeah, that's amazing.
• 58:10 - I love the validation that you have on your site. I mean, you have partner client, you know, part partner logos, you have awards, you have scores and numbers and then you have testimonials, you have case studies. The only other thing is I would say that you could leverage on your case study in the, how we did it, I can't get to that right now, but there is, once you show, because you're asking for them to give their email address to get the case study, one of the potential that could be the main CTA on that, but a secondary CTA could be something like, you know, once you show these are the results before they get into the nitty gritty, it could be like, do you want this, you know, want the same results for your company and then whatever that free offer is for that first call. Yeah. 'cause if they identify with the case study and they envision themselves in that case study, then they're gonna potentially want the same results for them. So having that additional CTA for them to potentially, not just download it but to schedule a call with you.
• 46:04 - But if we're staying on the front side of things, I'd say you have a really clear message and helping your ideal audience solve the problem. So I mean, initially just upfront on this, above the fold, like building a website sales machine, who wouldn't want that? I'm an agency. I want that. I, I can have a website that does my sales. Excellent. And you have good calls to action or grow your website, see pricing, grow your website sales. So I would, and even that like little footnote around a free conversion strategy, like a very, very tempting and then you build trust right away by, by getting your brand banner in there to say like, look of all these people that we've helped, these people could look exactly like you and we could help you in some of the same ways. If you scroll down a little bit, I really liked the way you also did clear problem solving for the client. So you gave them a path and those paths are solving their problem. You know, you're either managing an existing website, you're starting a new website, or you're managing client websites. So I feel like all of those were really clear and, and helped me feel comfortable if I came with a problem, you addressed a problem that I would have based on again, who your target audience is.
• 31:34 - I think it seems like in each case you've stepped up to whatever the challenge was. Maybe that's just, that's seems to be just your personality. But I talk with some people all the time that wanna get into entrepreneurship or want to do something and they're waiting for whatever that right thing is or a situation changes and they're like almost crippled by like, there's so many decisions, I don't know which one to take. And I have this, this thought that it's, you just look at the skills that you've acquired can kind of like the talents that you have at hand and then what's the next possible best move, which it seems like you naturally do throughout. And then the clients coming to you stepped up to the challenge.
• 26:45 - So we need to approach it in quite a few different ways. And then we get them doing work quite quickly so that they can put what they're learning to use and then they can get feedback quite quickly as well. So they're, you know, everyone gets scared of the red pen. I mean that's a very old terminology, but like the best way to learn is through getting that editorial feedback or through getting that, you know, strategic feedback and then taking that into the next application. And you can just instantly see growth when you start to apply things that way where you're either surrounding them with tools and knowledge and then they're getting the feedback and then the next time they do something very similar. It's like, it's at a whole new level. 

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Haunted house becomes marketing goldmine
• Revelations from a Revenue Orchestration platform
• Design choices dissected by a web guru
• Mixing tech with creative for strategic success
• Insights on encouraging client content creation

Resources:

• Solid Digital 
• DevNoodle
  
  

Connect with Jesse McCabe:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 18:41 - So it's like, it's very much driven by like what, what gets measured gets done. Like that's one of my favorite sayings, right? It's like if I'm collecting data on something, I will see progress in some way or another. And I love the scientific method. So like, I guess like how that left brain of like creating software applies to then, like how do we drive people to do and act the way that we want them to act when it comes to like our marketing process, right? Like what I hate and what I will never, ever be is like one of these agencies where, you know, we have this one straight up SEO product and you come in and we're gonna do the same thing for you that we're always gonna do for everybody else. Like that just dr. Like we tried that. It's annoying to me. So like I want to have some sort of agile right process to the way that we are applying marketing. 'cause it's not always gonna work. Like at some point you are going to hit a ceiling if you stay stagnant and just keep doing the same things. 
• 11:11- And so we did that and then like two years ago we get this call from ABC and they're like, Hey, we noticed that you have a pretty popular home haunt. Like at this point we had like thousands of people coming and checking us out. What do you think about, you know, being on this reality show contest thing and basically like this Christmas light show that they have on ABC they did one season or yeah, one season where they like had these Halloween setups. And so, you know, this, the crazy thing is that meant that we had to start building in July to create this display so that they could record it in August. And then, you know, oh sure showed in October. So our neighbors absolutely think we're nuts at this point, right? It's like, what are they doing in July? Anyways, I'm making this a long story, so that's great. It's, yeah, it's awesome. I love it. So it goes, it goes great. We actually like scared the host like so much he fell on his ass. And we ended up winning the show.
• 16:58 - Josh: Do you take anything that's cool from your dev days, and bring it to marketing, you know, best practices, whatever it is? Anything?
  Jesse: Oh, best practices. I don't know about best literally practices. No, but like, I like, I love marketing tech. Like, I love finding new ways that we can use technology and campaigns integrate it with our client stuff. You know what I mean? Like, I'm, right now I'm like way into clay and AI enrichment for, you know, data and like how do we like automate stuff from, you know, coming into A CRM to then like exploring and finding more information about the brand and the person that is, you know, coming to the site and like how does that filter then down into like, you know, sales enablement and, you know, how do we find better qualified leads for our clients? It's all, you know, it's like there's all these new ways of doing this stuff and I just, I love it. I'm working on a WordPress plugin right now to like enhance the experience on our client's websites. 
• 26:50 - I think like when it comes to web design, there's like really kind of like three different types of agencies that do the work. So I think there's like your high-design creative agencies, like, they're typically like B2C kind of agencies where they're trying to always do something different. They're like highly brand-focused, like to the point of almost like changing the brand. And then I think there's like more tech kind of agencies where, you know, they'll find good themes and they'll use those. But the idea is like, we're gonna integrate you and get you like, going with all this stuff. I think a lot of e-commerce companies might use like agencies like that. And then I think like where we fall is we're more strategic. Like I think we have a good balance of tech and we have a good balance of design, but we're not gonna like, do something completely groundbreaking because it's more about like, well  what is this website supposed to be doing for the brand? Like what, how does the marketing team going to use this tool moving forward? Like, how do we get everybody set up so that this becomes a good hub for customers to come learn about who you are. But then like there's an intent, like we want them on some sort of journey that is going to bring value to the organization. And so like, that's really like where, where we end up. 
• 56:34 - Alex: Now this thing they can improve in this way.
  Jesse: And one of the things I was trying to do and I think maybe you guys could apply this for other interviews just like what is the thinking that goes around the difference between products and solutions. So what’s the debate that they’re having around why this decision was made. That was good that you called that out. Maybe you could say like what decision do you think was made to put this there. Because then it goes to the empathy of the person who actually had to put this together. And like maybe they’re going to hear me say something where it’s like yeah we did have that debate. And yeah I lost it you know but at least like it’s like not just saying like their final decision was crap I am literally putting that specific question right into my template, no, I actually until you said it I didn’t I didn’t consider it that way because for me I always hate it because I’m looking at it from the lens of the business owner it’s like I don’t care about your products. Like I have a certain thing that I need to solve I want to I want to find that.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Discussing the transformative power of planners
• Impact of correctly implemented processes
• The bridge between motivation and discipline
• The holistic approach to client problems
• Finding 'whys' for deep entrepreneurial efforts

Resources:

• Eleva8.io
• DevNoodle

Connect with Gary Garth:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 20:54 Because we all know, like you, you don't wanna be the the richest man in the graveyard, right? Or, you know, you don't want to be have, have no friends, no love, no connection. So I'm, I, for me it's, that's important. And so it starts with these exercises and then it segments into, okay, if you wanna accomplish this, what kind of rituals do you need to establish your morning ritual, your evening ritual, and how do you plan for your week? We all know like, if you don't schedule it, it doesn't get done. So it's kind of like, let me have this planner that's offline that integrated with all your notifications and apps, et cetera, that you can just sit and look at and reflect and that journal and put some thoughts into, if I wanna be here in one year, what does that look like? Where am I right now, what I need to do to get to that point? And you know, I always tell people it's just a, it's just a tool. Nothing is ever gonna be perfect. You look at mine, you're like, well, what the heck's wrong with this guy? It goes up and down and right and left. But it's, that's the journey. And that's the value that you are conscious and aware and working on yourself, I think. 
• 24:55 - So I think you can do several things. You can have constant reminders, reinforcement, like a planner. Another, another big thing I think is like, expression, birds of a feather flock together, surround yourself with the right, setting, the right people that you can feed off. I'm the same way. I'm very, I'm drawn to energy. So, you know, I like to, if I am around people that are disciplined, motivated, determined, I may be not sharing their exact view on things, but you know, it stimulates me and inspire me in the right way. So if you have that opportunity, you should embrace it. But I always tell people, like sometimes people write me, they bought the planner, they're like, I'm here.I'm living in this neighborhood somewhere that I have never even been and I don't have that opportunity. I'm like, you have the internet, my friend, or you have books. Start reading some self, some biographies and start reading and so you can get inspired in a lot of different ways and just program your mind and look at it like a muscle. It takes time basically. 
• 45:43 - I'm selling my shares, stepped out. I was like, shit, am I making a mistake? But I took that money and then I said, I'm gonna go out and change these statistics. 'cause I was looking into the market and I don't know if you know, but you know, because of social media and the whole trajectory of how everything is going, I think there's a lot of people that feel lost and one out of three Americans actually has, or even worldwide and I think, but America specifically is one out of three has some sort of mental challenge and suicides is at an all time high, especially with teenagers that have a teenage daughter. So, you know, it just freaked me out. I looked into the statistics of addictions, you know, with the opiate crisis and it's basically at a state that it kills more people than car crashes and homicides and everything combined. Basically you take all that and it's still the number one killer and it doesn't get any attention in the media. And then I was like looking at my friends and like, what kind of options would they have had? And then I learned that less than 10% of the 24 million Americans alone they have, that are struggling, that are suffering with some sort of addiction, less than 10% gets treatment. And I start wondering why is that.
• 29:42 - Even one year I was like a platinum member with Tony Robbins. But the whole point was, I remember I was this setting and he was like talking about these drivers of we have as people, right? One is, you know, certainty that we need certainty and then there's uncertainty as a second, you know, driver feeling there is significance, which is for me was always very important. You gotta achieve this and love and connection. But it's just like when you really wanna get fulfilled and what could be that lasting driver for your discipline is when you get tapped into the grow and the give. Because when you start growing as an individual, as a professional, as a, then all of a sudden you start, you feel motivated, that fuels your motivation even further. And then when you have the opportunity, the blessing, the privilege to actually give that back to somebody, then it's really rewarding because then when you're demotivated at some point, like, you know what, there's a lot at stake here. I'm actually helping other people. I have a lot employees here. We're helping a lot of clients. And then that can refuel your discipline. So I think if you can get beyond yourself and use those four first for about I'm safe or I need sobriety, I'm bored, I want to feel significant or had love of connection or draw. If you get beyond your ego, beyond that I just say grow and give. That helps with the drive and motivation.
• 39:55 - So I said the same way, you know, you have to have the right strategy, the right processes, then back the tools with it. And then the people's gotta be trained on that. When you have all of that in place, that's when you get the consistent results. And it's just a very tricky industry I'm in. So it's maybe, I think that's why so many people, some there's not a lot of marketing agencies, for example, cater to this vertical because you got legit script, you got hipaa, HIPAA regulations. There is constantly new leg legislation on like changes in the market. And it's very difficult. So clients, prospective clients come to us, say, Hey, want Google ads? I want this cost per patient. And I say like, before we even go anywhere, we have to have this process go through that calculator. I have to ask you all these questions. I'm not trying to interrogate you, I'm just trying to identify what you're doing. Right. What are you not doing? So we can calculate, start with the end goal, calculate backwards, say how can we hit that decide cost per acquisition, for example. And then we have to look at all those different factors and the clients that are savvy, that are data-driven, that appreciate, you know, the detail. I think we work great with them. We haven't had a cancellation, I think in like 18 months.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• SEO growth can take about a year.
• Outbound reach is key for SEO.
• Effective link building is not quick.
• Content should generate links or sales.
• SEO is competitive just like gaming.

Resources:

• Ranko Media
• DevNoodle

Connect with Nick Rubright:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 27:05 - Nick: But I do, I mean I would imagine other marketing agencies struggle with the story of like that first three months being tough where it's like an experiment and yeah, if clients come in and know that it's an experiment, that's the best client. Like when we had Twilio, they knew that it was an experiment and it's like the client saying that is like super helpful. Because then you're kind of like, oh cool, okay. They know that I'm just kind of experimenting and I don't know a lot of things and you almost have like freedom to mess up, you know? And I think the reason my own projects do so much better than client projects is because I feel like I have that freedom to mess up. Hmm. And any of the projects I've grown to like a million visitors a month, I had the freedom to mess up and it wasn't like, it wasn't like the clients attributed the mistakes to me. They attributed the mistakes to like the campaign and they're like kind of asking me like, okay, well this didn't work, so what's next? And those clients are the ones that are successful like a hundred percent of the time pretty much
  Alex: Because you're able to take risks and like you said, like it's the 20% where where it works. So you need to be able to take a lot of risks to see where's it gonna work in this industry. 
• 44:40 - We don't care about getting traffic to this page. This is just some stat page, right? We don't care about like links necessarily. We care about making money. So the way we make this make money is we go, you know, from this page that has all the links we link to our other resources on the website. So that could be landing pages or content pieces you wanna rank because you know they're gonna make money. Like if it's like, like if you're plen, if you wanna rank for like best buyer intent data, yeah. Top intent data providers, you would, you know, build this stat roundup and link from that to this, you know, intent data providers list and pass the authority there and that one would rise as a result. You wanna do this a lot. It's not like you do one and this one page gets a lot of links and then you're good. That can work in some cases with like content heavy websites, right? But if you have a page that you're really trying to drive authority
• 26:16 - Even though your market is like insurance or like gambling, right? The gambling niche is super competitive, but everyone's paying for links. So it's like, okay, just don't do that and you can win. You know? Like if you just do digital PR the right way and figure it out. And that's the thing is like once you figure it out, it's like, like, okay, now we can just like print links. But the process of like that first three months is kind of a trial. And I think that the first three months of anything is a trial. Like even when I, when I hire a new employee, it's like the first 90 days is kind of like, all right, we're kind of fucking around and like trying to figure out how this fits into this, right? And this is burn money, you know? And then we get to a place in three months where we're like, okay, now we have a lot of stuff that we can forecast off. But I do, I mean I, I would imagine other marketing agencies struggle with the story of like that first three months being tough where it's like an experiment and yeah, if clients come in and know that it's an experiment, that's the best client. Like when we had Twilio, they knew that it was an experiment and it's like the client saying that is like super helpful. 'cause then you're kind of like, oh cool, okay. They know that I'm just kind of experimenting and I don't know a lot of things and you almost have like freedom to mess up
• 37:53 - And not competing brands, right? So HubSpot's not really a competing brands, but they have a blog so they'd be a good one to research close, right? I've written for close before and this has an audience of salespeople. Like you basically want to think like referral traffic, like if I get on this website, are people gonna click through like is it a clickable link? Because that's how Google's kind of looking at it as a vote. So you wanna get votes from these like authoritative sources and you can't pay for these 'cause these guys care about their website and the guy running the website works for a company that, you know, they don't sell links. That's not their thing and they'll, you know, probably get in trouble for doing that. Like they can get fired. So it's not something. They just want interject real here real quick. It makes so much sense when we talk to our clients, we look at like buckets where their leads come from in terms of their partners. Like for example, they may have partners in other industries like attorneys or real estate agents or whatever it is, and they send traffic their way because in what they do in their business, they say, okay, you may need the service go over here. And this is exactly the same thing that's happening here. Someone's reading content here and as part of it, if they're referencing your data, they, they care about that recommendation. Yeah. They're essentially referring your business.
• 49:17 - And I learned that from Twilio, one of our clients. 'cause like one of the campaigns we did like an infographic campaign, it didn't do well at all and we had to pivot, but they were like, well we can use this for other stuff. And I was like, well, what do you mean? And then they're like, well we can have our sales guys use it or like, we can publish it on social media or share it on our blog or something. And I was like, dang, they make a lot of use out of this. So it's not so isolated. Like they're not like, I guess they're milking the investment a lot.
  Josh: Totally. Yeah. I think they're getting like sales enablement out. I mean they're literally getting, they're milking the content to get as, as everyone should be. And I think that lowers not the risk. I don't know if risk is the right word, but when you're able to use it in different, you know, avenues, I think it just gets more value out of the project.

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast. 

• Heartfelt philosophy meets business.
• Podcasting as a high-impact sales tool.
• Insights on account-based marketing.
• Stone soup story: value-first approach.
• Aiming for results, not just tactics.

Resources:

• Outcomes Rocket
• DevNoodle

Connect with Saul Marquez:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 32:00 - So the thing that I really wanna urge our listeners to do is to not forget that marketing has four pillars. And we were talking about this kind of bringing it back from the start of the show to now all those tactics are preceded with the strategy pillar. So you start with strategy. Once you have your strategy put together, you now can employ the owned, earned and paid verticals of marketing. And so we're able to help our customers in any one of, and any one of those verticals. But where we start is the strategy. And under strategy, you have some very simple things. Your brand house, which consists of your brand purpose, your brand differentiator, your brand attributes. Then from your brand house, you go down one level and you identify your ideal client personas, your ICPs, you clearly outline their pain points, you clearly outline their goals, common objections to why they wouldn't wanna work with you. And so that becomes another element of your strategy,
• 35:19 - And the earned is all about OPS, other people's stages. So you got your own stages, then you go on ops. Now the beauty of ops is that you don't, all you have to do is show up and add massive value. The people that host you. So Josh and Alex, you guys are hosting me on your stage and I'm grateful for it. And anytime I get an opportunity to show up on someone's stage, my intentions to add massive value. And so you go, you show up, you add massive value. There's publications, there's media, that's other forms  of earned very little. People think about user-generated content. So like UGC is essentially like if somebody, if you write, if you put a social post out there and unsolicited, somebody says, wow, like Alex and Josh did a bang up job on my website, like I'm getting conversions like never before.
• 16:21 - Josh: Okay? So if you don't have a plan,
  Saul: You become part of somebody else's plan. What does that mean? So this is a phenomenal quote that I love, and actually Josh, Alex, I was sharing with you guys with my son, you know, even I want him to know this. And by the way, for anybody listening, it's important that you also know this, if you do not have a plan, you do become part of somebody else's plan. And that is true for your brand, your personal brand, your company's brand. And the stat is very surprising. And that's only 23% of healthcare marketers actually have their content documented inside of a plan. And so what that means is the other 77% are becoming part of somebody else's plan. So the opportunity in this is that if you do put your plan together, there's an opportunity for you to have a competitive advantage. And so that's why I love, that's what I love about that is that the, you have the control
• 40:52 - So we actually started, like our business started as a podcast. Like, I did not intend to start an agency, but guess what happened? I, so this year, we'll hit 2000 episodes on the Outcomes Rocket. Amazing. What a pleasure and privilege it has been to sort of sit down with all these amazing people, all healthcare leaders. Not only have we built an amazing network of just business leaders in the industry, organization, leaders in the industry, the knowledge. And by having all these conversations, I started seeing patterns that there's huge gaps in the marketing business in healthcare. And we decided to address them. Now, one of our main business drivers is our podcast. So we use the podcast to create thought leadership content, but we also use it to meet with our ideal client personas, our ICPs,
• 44:00 - And what that story is all about, and you know, we talk about it at our company, is that sometimes you gotta make stone soup. And what that means is if you show up and you are asking for things, you're not leading with value, people are gonna close their doors, people are gonna hide their food. If you show up offering ideas and value, which is what a podcast does for you, right? You're showing up to offer, not showing up to ask people receive you more, more, more openly. The other thing here is it's the importance of how fast great ideas catch fire. So when you have a really interesting idea and you're creating awesome content, people wanna share, especially if they're part of it. So now you, now they're your guest, now they wanna share. So the network effect of that, like it happened with this stone soup story. Like, it is, that's what happens with your podcast.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Find your niche in marketing
• Leverage AI without losing the human touch
• The power of SOPs in streamlined processes
• Building a referral network for agencies
• Essential questions before buying a service

Resources:

• ZenChange Marketing
• DevNoodle

Connect with Diane Moura:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 28:29 - And something like that, I think can be a real game changer for a lot of businesses, whether, you know, if they're SMB, whether they're a startup, if they're SMBs and they're 10 years in, there's still I think a lot of value there and some of the key tenets are around first of all like, let's make sure that we not only understand the vision of the company, but how are, you know, how are all of the KPIs attached to that vision. You know, if you are, whatever your level is in a company, you should have clarity as to what you're doing and how that impacts the overall company. And so if the executives have KPIs that they're trying to hit and you know, maybe they're bonus eligible, you still need everyone else in the company who is going to have a piece of those KPIs so that it can all be effective. And then there's another, I think, really important tenant that is called right person, right seat 
• 14:45 - Let's make sure that, you know, we start with an MVP, you know, we make sure we test it, we test the market, you're always going to be kind of adding different features. You know, you might do some pivots to some extent, but you have to at least get something out there and get it working first. And the other thing, and this is coming from a marketer, is don't pull the trigger on marketing too soon. So if you don't have a product yet, you can burn through all your cash if you get really excited and you start pushing out all of the marketing that it's going to need. And especially I think with, with SaaS companies, because it's a, it's typically a pretty heavy lift the marketing that's required for SaaS. And if you start to do that too soon, then you know, like things are never gonna be delivered in the time that you think they will. There's always gonna be issues and you know, I worked with a client where they had the front end and the back end development were happening in different parts of the world. And when they finally brought them together, they actually didn't talk. So that was, that was kind of an issue. Had they been a little bit more conservative at the beginning in terms of their spend, they probably would've ended up in a better spot.
• 46:08 - We're not the, you know, give, give me a certain amount of money per month and it's all a black box and trust me, I'm gonna get your marketing done. We're very transparent in the services. So we basically say, okay, here's all the things that need to be done. Now let's have a conversation about what you have the capabilities to do in house versus where it makes sense to outsource and let's look to prioritize. 'cause a lot of SMBs, you know, if you ask them their budget, they really don't know. Some of them are attempting marketing for the first time. So we do need to have that discussion with them and say, look, if you have the people in in house who can, you know, do your own video shoots, great. If you don't, you know, we can handle the shoots for you. You know, if you have your own people who can do social media, you know, do social media, but then maybe engage us just to provide them with some coaching or maybe they're creating content but they're not actually out there doing engagement and you know, maybe they're able to do it for the main brand, but they're not able to do it for your personal brand. 'cause that's like a kind of a, you know, as the founder, you should be top of funnel for your business and so maybe that's not their capabilities. And so then we just, we have a very open conversation with them and we prioritize into phases and then usually that will lead to the engagement.
• 39:26 - And if you're not using that, you're falling behind. And I'm glad that you mentioned, you know, you'll have these unicorns with a few people. 'cause I've always had the thought that AI, if used properly, which you kind of went into pretty deep, which which was great, is essentially a company in a box or a marketing team in a box or like, and there still needs to be that oversight, but you know, it allows you for, and I'll tell you how I use it. Like, I have all these philosophical thoughts and that's why I love getting into Philosophy on this podcast. But I'm not the greatest writer. And what allows me to do is it is not gonna come up with a new philosophical theory, but if I pump in my theory notes, it makes me a good writer and then it makes it a lot easier for someone to read. So, so I, I just think everyone, you know, it is just this tool that makes people more efficient for bad writers. It makes us good writers. 
• 44:47 - Alex: It's really interesting. And the way that you described that, it sounds like you provide a lot of value. Where does that initial kind of discovery before you get to the engagement and where does the engagement start? Is that, that's something we've been talking with a lot of agents is about, you know, there's the initial building, the relationship and discovery. So what does that look like for you?
  Diane: Yeah, so typically, we'll have an initial exploratory call with a potential client because as much as, you know, if you give me an attorney and you tell me their, you know, personal injury attorney, you know, I've, I've probably got 85% of their marketing plan in my head, right? Because we worked with so many of them, but I don't have that extra 15%. So that has to be personalized. So we, we have conversations about, you know, their business and what has, what has worked well, what hasn't worked well, what resources do they have internally. So we're try,  you know, our initial meeting is we're basically capturing that information and we're sharing some things as well, but we really wanna make sure that we focus and target and then we go away and we do our analysis and we come back and we share that presentation that I described to you.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Explore cutting-edge CRO for law firms
• The importance of EOS in business management
• Converting legal expertise into successful sales
• Balancing work, life, and personal happiness
• Building a robust referral network among agencies

Resources:

• Growth Lab
• DevNoodle

Connect with Will Palmer:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 21:49 - Josh: And now I guess to switch gears from a little bit of that fear talk and talking about happiness. 'cause I know it's a topic that both of us really care about, all three of us really care about. And you have a quote on your LinkedIn that's, that I love and it says, happiness is a form of courage. So can you kinda explain what that means?
  Will: Yeah, happiness is a form of courage. I think beyond doing things that scare us, like we just discussed, there's this idea in life to sort of pursue our calling and understand what our calling is and to even understand what our calling is takes courage in my opinion because, you know, it requires a lot of inner work. Who am I as a person? What do I actually enjoy doing? Does what I enjoy doing give me life and fulfillment and happiness? Is that what I'm doing right now? And that certainly was me for many years, you know, in professional sales, selling for a payroll company, learned a lot of great things, had a lot of great people around me and it benefited my career. But you know, that's not giving me joy. I am selling a commodity service and it was all a numbers game with sales. So making those decisions to transition to things with a lot less security because it aligns with my personal values. And that is sort of the definition I think of fearlessly pursuing our calling to get to happiness. 
• 46:07 - Will: Eckhart Tolle, “The Power of Now”, don't read it, listen to it because it's very difficult to read. It's heavy. If you listen to it, it will make life much easier. But that is all about, you know, I get it, mindfulness presence, it's all like a big thing, but there's a reason for it. If you follow Dan Harris, the BC anchor, he's written a bunch of stuff and done some podcasts when he had a panic attack on air on Good Morning America. He's a cool, he's a cool one. So
  Josh: His book some, what's his, the title of his book,
  Will Palmer: 10% Happier is one of 'em. That
  Josh Hoffman: That's right. That's, that was one,
  Will: That's a good one.
  Josh: That he wrote after having the panic attack. Yeah.
  Will: So “The Power of Now” is kinda like that and, but Eckhart Tolle is like one of the OGs about presence and mindfulness and how just basically stop letting the outside world dictate your mood and, and stop letting other people and circumstances you have no control over dictate your pursuit in life. So that's a, that's a powerful thing.
  Josh: Powerful. My favorite topic in life is stoicism. And that sentence is essentially the, the definition of stoicism.
• 20:24 - Will: Well, not a lot hasn't worked. I will say that it has disrupted in a few different ways without going into specifics. The sort of, it's kind of rattled some cages of people that have been in a comfortable spot let's say. And that has been difficult because when you rattle cages to get the best outcomes for everyone involved, yeah it just can be hard. So, but it's necessary. So I don't know that a lot of bad stuff has come of it really.
  Alex: Okay. So like necessary challenges, it's kind of forced conversations or forced certain issues that might have been otherwise kind of, yeah. Just left out there.
  Will Palmer: Cool. You, I mean you have to slow down to speed up with it because we implemented ourselves and a lot of people are like, do you implement yourself or do you pay somebody to do it? We did it ourselves. So that takes a lot of time. And getting into the swing of things, I flew my leaders out to Kansas City to sort of launch EOS, so Oh cool. You know, there's a time and money investment that can feel like you're, if you're impatient like me and type A, you're just like, I want stuff fixed and move fast. And it's like, not yet.
• 39:55 -  Not really. I mean, my last couple years of selling for the national company, I was doing mostly virtual stuff. But it's a powerful thing to be local in a market and not just an inside sales rep and actually have a law firm. I feel like lawyers, when they really do trust a sales rep or a growth consultant, it's like, it's like a baby bird seeing its mom for the first time. It's like, you're my person. I don't care who else is on your team, you're my person, you're here, you're local. I've had lawyers jokingly be like, I know where you live and if you mess with me I will find you. And I'm like, ha ha. Yeah, I know. But I'm like, no, it's true. It's skin in the game. And I embraced that. I was like, yeah, listen, I'm local. If I screw everything up for you then what you gonna go trash talk the BS that's coming out of my mouth? Like it doesn't mean no good. So it's, it's good to have people in local markets that can build trust.

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Partnering and understanding clients.
• Rich Dad, Poor Dad SEO makeover.
• Importance of community and connection.
• Integrating German philosophies in business.

Resources:

• Digital Neighbor
• DevNoodle
• The Search Bar Podcast on Spotify
• The Search Bar Podcast on YouTube

Connect with Eric Ritter:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 38:55 - We work with bigger brands such as Rich Dad, poor Dad came to us, you know, saying, Hey, I'm getting my ass kicked by Dave Ramsey, he's getting a lot more traffic to his website. Can you help us out? We said absolutely. So we did a full audit of the website, worked with his internal team of developers and marketers to kind of say, Hey, this is what you need to do on your website. You have 12 years of like a lot of great content here, but it's kind of a house of cards. It needs to completely be restructured. So we helped with that to restructure it, working with them, helping them through kind of building a new website there. So that's, you know, where we work with people, we work with a lot of creative agencies that don't have in-house SEO or have in-house digital marketing, but they do a lot of creative work. They might build a website but they don't know how to market it. They don't know how to drive traffic there. And my background, right? I got my master's in advertising. So, and my first job was in traditional advertising. 'cause again, from a very small age, right in that walker, that's what I've cared about like TV ads, right? And kind of making that emotional connection with people. So we're really good at partnering with those creative agencies because we understand kind of how that works and how SEO kind of fits in with that because you know, you wanna make a a pretty website but you also wanna get traffic to it and you gotta kind of marry those two things
• 27:14 -  And so a lot of agencies can deliver results. They know how to do it. We all kind of have similar processes, but what really matters to me is are you a good partner? Are you partnering? Are you understanding your client, right? And so that's why I say we don't have clients, we have neighbors, right? Because that philosophy of getting to know someone, you're not just a number. You know, we're actually making real human connections here and we're working together to continue to get better results. And so that's, you know, been important to me in my personal life. And that's something that kind of bled over into professional as well through the agency and that philosophy that we give onto our, our clients or neighbors.
• 34:42 -  I don't wanna nickel and dime the client or I always want to do the right thing, you know, talk coming back, you know, Josh said golden rule and that's like stuck in my head, like the golden rule of like, hey, you know, if it's gonna take us 15 minutes more to make this kick ass for the client, they're not paying for those 15 minutes. Let's do it. Right? That's the right thing to do. And so at the time I was listening to a lot of Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary V right? And Gary V you gotta take it with a a take it a certain direction, right? Because he's very over the top sometimes of like, listen, you gotta optimize your day, you gotta be working all the time. You're sitting at home watching Netflix, you could be using that time making yourself better, right?. And at the time he had the message of if you're unhappy with your full-time gig, wherever you're working, find something and make that your side hustle until that side hustle becomes sustainable, then you can make that your main hustle. 
• 19:39 -  Alex:  Have you heard about the Gemba? Does that mean anything to you? 
  Eric - It doesn't, no.
  Alex: So in Toyota, basically going to the Gemba is going to the place of work and doing, and that's a huge, in part of Toyota culture and a lot of Japanese culture in general is going to the Gemba to see how work is done so you can understanding of what's happening on the ground floor. And that's a core principle of, of theirs.
  Eric: Yeah. And I think that's a practice. Very similar practice. Yeah. Very similar to kind of what, what's important to me as well is kind of understanding, you know, I call it in the trenches, you know, 'cause you know, I want people to trust me, you know, just like, you know, I'm in the foxhole with them, right. And who you're gonna trust more than someone who you've been into foxhole and been through battle.
  Alex: And you're able to see like root cause there really yourself instead of trying to operate from a high level taking just people's work for things.
• 28:13 - Josh: So I am very much in the same boat of just being kind and whether, you know, it's karma or whatever it is just like golden rule, a million things that kind of point into like, okay, yes, this is what we should be doing. However, you know, sometimes people can take advantage of that. So has that ever been the case where, you know, you are going in this nice kind approach, but someone tried to take advantage of it?
  Eric: Yeah, no, great question Josh. And absolutely 100%. You know, and it's really a gut punch, right? Because you know, for all of us in life, you're like, hey, if I follow the golden rule, I should get rewarded, right? Like I never, you know, cross the street when it says don't walk and then one time I'm running late and I do run across when it says don't walk and I get caught even though, you know, a million times in my life I've always done the right thing. And you know, so people are like, well why'd I even follow the golden rule? You know, if I'm gonna get in trouble? And same thing with us is, you know, when you give just a little bit in the business sense, there's people out there that can take advantage of that, right? Like, hey, you paid your invoice, you haven't paid your invoice yet. And like, oh yeah, yeah, we'll pay it, no problem. And then all of a sudden you're like 60, 90 days later you're doing all this work and they're like, oh, we're outta business, we can't pay you. And you're just like, oh fuck, you know, all that money, all that work we did, we're not gonna get paid for it. So that's been a really, I wanna say a hard lesson I guess for me as a founder is, you know, kind of being able to walk that line of wanting to be kind, wanting to help people out, but also it's a business at the end of the day,  you know, and I have a responsibility to my employees, I have a responsibility to the company to make sure you know, that we are to getting paid for our work.

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• TrioSEO's unique content focus.
• Driving organic traffic effectively.
• Insights on the entrepreneurship journey.
• The power of patience in business.
• Steven Schneider's SEO strategies.

Resources:

• TrioSEO
• DevNoodle

Connect with Steven Schneider:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 19:52 - I connected with Connor and he's like a big SEO guy in the space, kind of one of the top people there. So we kind of naturally hit it off, started networking, talking and texting. I met his partner Nathan Hirsch, they're best friends since college. They've been entrepreneurs together for 15 years. They have great success as well and just kinda had this natural flow and rhythm between us and felt like it was just something there. So yeah, one night I was texting Connor and I was just like why don't you guys have an SEO agency? Like this makes so much sense. Like you both have a ton of clout in the SEO space and just business in general. They had just come off their exit in 2019 starting a couple new companies, all this sort of stuff and they're like oh no we have it all mapped out. Like we have a 20 page document that is what we would do, how we would do it. Everything is planted to the T.
• 55:49 - And then there's optimizing towards human behavior. And the human behavior piece is we go through a process of understanding customer personas that a client has, mapping those out, understanding kind of, which pages relate to which customers and what are they trying to, like, what kind of concerns, questions, buying, you know, buying questions they have as they're on each site. And so we build it to be a sales, a digital salesperson, essentially. We need to answer these questions as we go down the page. And then as we're monitoring for that, we're looking how far down do they scroll. If 50% of the people scroll to the bottom of the page, that's not a good thing 'cause they didn't find what they were looking for. Yeah. They didn't
  Steven: Have their answer
• 33:42: I don't know if it's taught, but the one thing that I constantly remind myself of is patience. Like it is the most underrated attribute of an entrepreneur. I would say if you are just very, very patient and thinking years, that's kind of something that we always have. That's why we kind of also clicked is because like the agency within Nate and Connor and I, it was always like, year one is fine. Like we're just gonna hope, like focus on what I said, like processes and team and all that sort of stuff. And I think everyone is so blinded by trying to make a million dollars in 30 days, and it's like why aren't you making a million dollars in five years? It's like, it's like it's gonna be way more sustainable, way more successful and it's probably gonna last, you know, 10 plus 15 years down the road. So I think reminding yourself to zoom out, think about why you started, like no one gets into business to flip it and sell it in a year. And so it's like if you're actually in it for the long haul, like treat it like it's a long haul and do everything else that's very process-oriented and systems-wise so that your life is easier and you can actually scale. But if you're just constantly in the weeds, it's like you're, why, why would you start a business for that reason?
• 16:48 - That is a feeling you don't want to feel again. Like, you wanna minimize that feeling as many times as possible moving forward. So you're gonna create a system, you're gonna create a process, you're gonna have your team like hone in on that to avoid it. And so it's like that conflict, then let's change. And so if you can go into any situation thinking like that and knowing like, wow, the moment this sucks, like I hate this feeling but what can we do to make sure that we minimize this moving forward? And that is the change that will kind of like compound to become a successful endeavor.
• 28:47 - Josh: On that note, what do you do with customers who ask for something that you don't specialize in or, or don't have internally?
  Steven: We have a pretty good referral network so we'll just say like, Hey, we don't do that sometimes like with links right now we're starting to, well white label someone else's agency and bring them in under ourselves so that we can kind of still manage the communication, manage the billing, make sure all the reporting's good. Like it's just easier from the client's point of view where they just work with us, and then we manage everything else. But I think I'd say it's pretty few and far between where people will be like, Hey, I also want to do email marketing and it's a must that this happens. It's like people come to us knowing we do content. I would say the only kind of in discrepancy is when people want to do like local SEO, and that's just like an entirely different can of worms. And so we're like, we have a referral for that, and that's fine

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Entrepreneurial inspiration from family roots
• Balancing personal and professional challenges
• Leveraging team empowerment and leadership
• Navigating mergers and acquisitions successfully
• Fostering collaboration in digital marketing

Resources:

• National Institute for Social Media
• DevNoodle

Connect with Jennifer Radke:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 21:29 - I feel like, yeah, having the right environment for people to start thinking about the self-improvement and process improvement of the organization that will then ultimately help them. And then everyone else who's involved or associated with the company or the organization is huge. And I always come back to habits and creating triggers around something like if something happened, let that trigger you to then say, I wanna learn more about this, or I think we can use it in this way. Or just say something that way you can start just like, Celeste, is it Celeste? Yep. I said something about it. Yeah, I would like to do that. Now you have a full internship program, it's amazing. It's just the that little spark. And I'm wondering like, what was that trigger for her? And if that can be kind of harnessed and then be put into can we attach that trigger to something we already do and now, you know, there's a whole Yeah. You know, a whole environment for that to continuously happen.
• 18:43 - Yeah, that's always a good question and a thought that the leadership should be doing. And most of us, especially entrepreneurs, if we're small businesses, right? We're so busy pushing the business forward that we don't necessarily spend a lot of time doing that, right? I'm fortunate to be in a space that highlights and focuses in on professional development. So you would think that it would be inherent to me, right? Like a secondary nature just to say, Hey, we're gonna push you outside your comfort zone today and learn something new. But it's not because we just get into our routines and we get into the need to grow the business or to serve our clients or whatever the case may be. And so for me, what I recommend now and what we do now is really try to at least quarterly sit down and talk about, hey, what is something you want to learn? What is something you wish you could do more of? What is something you don't wanna do? 
• 43:53 - Most people do think we are an agency. They look past the fact that we are an institute and go straight to social media. You know it all. So here I'm gonna call you and I want you to do my social. That's usually the request, right? They have a marketing need, a social media management need, or they're hiring for positions. All of those I refer out to our community of certified strategists. So I gather some information from, the folks that are looking, what are they looking for, what are the skills that they need? And then I go to my community of social strategists are certified agencies if there's appropriate, right. And I'll make those recommendations or referrals through that process. We also have a job board on our website that is there for our community of strategists who might be looking. But it is a nice resource for an agency who's hiring or a company who wants to bring someone in full-time.
• 29:50 - What do women in Minnesota do for work? I had traveled about 80% of the time for the last four years within my organization, and I didn't feel like it was well connected to my community. And so I got introduced to the National Institute for Social Media through a friend and a real estate agent of mine who had gone to a business networking international or BNI meeting. And he met the founder, Eric Mills, and Eric was looking for someone to do business development, help build relationships between the institute and colleges and universities. And of course my friend thought of me and I was like, yeah, sure, I could do that while I figure out what I wanna do next. And so I did. So I chatted with Eric, I, I chatted with the investors that he had, and if I'm honest, I wasn't a hundred percent sold right away, right?
• 45:50 - So a few years ago on our website, we did have a directory where all of the certified strategists could fill in a profile. And if they were looking for work, full-time, part-time contracts, stuff like that, what their areas of expertise were, we actually took that off recently. And part of it was because if the strategists weren't updating it properly and often enough, and so people would not feel like they were getting the right service, right? Because they'd go on, they'd email and it was an old email or something like that. And so we've taken that off for now, but the conversation has come back, right? Like how do we create a place where we can not only showcase the amazing work that our strategists are doing, but also have and facilitate collaboration, facilitate work opportunities? And what that looks like going forward is yet to come. It might be another form of directory. Right now we do have some closed groups. So once somebody is certified, there are closed groups where that collaboration is happening behind the scenes. And if I get a request, I'll put it in the closed group, right? So I have a request from somebody outside, I'll put it in the group, and then those who are interested and available can respond and I can make some educated introductions. But we are thinking about how to make that front-facing. But I wanna make sure it's a good experience for everybody involved, and that takes a little bit more planning this time than what we had before.

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Childhood hustles shape a future CEO
• Building an SEO-focused legal marketing agency
• Specializing in law firm client needs
• The pros and cons of befriending competitors
• Finding balance: in-house expertise & outsourcing design

Resources:

• Everest Legal Marketing
• DevNoodle

Connect with Doug Bradley:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 39:40 - And that's basically as a way to break the barrier for a client, client. You know, our clientele, lawyers, they tend to dive first to try and solve a problem and they usually just, how do I write a check and solve this problem? And they've been bitten by that. And part of our, part of our, our pitch is that if we suck, you can fire us after two or three months. If you think we're full of shit and we can't do anything, you can fire us and take all of our work to the next vendor
• 13:20 - And the way that my agency is set up is you know when it when a request from a client comes in it go like we're usually getting them done same day especially if it's an easy request. We gotta be able to do the easy things fast because those are obviously the things that the client's asking for. So let's get those done quickly. And I found with a lot of agencies, especially larger ones, even, you know, it's like the old broken windows problem, eventually you get so large that it's hard to even solve just the tiniest of issues.
• 16:54 - And to the first part, I think like unlike other industries, the agency world, especially the marketing agency world, can be friendly with each other even if you're directly competing because there like truly is enough business to go around. Oh yeah, you nailed, you nailed the more important part, which is the referral part. Whether I don't have enough resources right now to even take on the project that I normally would, or any, or I don't do these services or whatever it is. But like you said, you know,  I think a good vetting process and sometimes you just, even if you vet 'em and they turn out to be okay.
• 08:41 - Doug: I actually started crying because it was like this whole emotional journey of creating something of value that someone wanted to buy.
  Josh: Alex and I are both entrepreneurs. We both started companies and we both know that feeling of it, there's nothing like the first sale. Yeah. Like, it, it's, it kind of blows your mind of like, I can't believe, especially if it was like your concept or something from the beginning Yeah. That I can't believe, like something from my brain got put onto paper, got executed, and then like someone gave me a dollar for it.
• 25:15 -  We only work with law firms. We know what you need, we know what you want, and more importantly, we know what you don't want. It's really important to know what client doesn't want, thinking, you know, going into a relationship thinking they might want all of these leads for this thing, and then they tell you months later, by the way, we don't do that at all. We don't want any of those. So, so we already have a, a pretty good knowledge of what clients want just because we only work with law firms.

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Shawnda's childhood quest for connection.
• The transition from radio to marketing.
• Building Tuuti Agency and its milestones.
• The role of introversion in leadership.
• Embracing the "award-winning" accolade.

Resources:

• Tuuti Agency
• DevNoodle

Connect with Shawnda Huffman:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 20:22 - I am a true believer on learning from failure, even though I hate it. As much as I hate when it happens, I'm like, okay, well what do we learn from this? How could we, how could we get better? And so and so, yeah, like I think with, whenever I share that, because to people that meet me who are in my life, they're like, really? You don't seem afraid of anything. And I'm like, I think it's my fear of control. Like to me, I will not allow fear to control me. I won't allow anything to control me. So for me, I categorize that the same. So even though I am afraid, I'm not gonna allow it to control my destiny and kind of what I do.
• 18:21 - Josh: What do you think is the difference between, you know, you who went through that stuff and we'll call it came out on top, versus someone who let's just say went through a very similar experience and wanted to be successful and didn't, like what would you identify as something that you did or traits or whatever it is that kinda led to your success based on that trauma?
  Shawnda: I think my number one trait is relentlessness. And I think some people, like, they get, they're really surprised when I say the scariest part of my scariest part of my day is waking up in the morning. I'm afraid of everything, but I refuse to allow fear to control me.
• 19:60 - Josh: And the quote that I think I came up with is the, your fear of regret should be bigger than your fear of failure. And I, and I think that's kind of what you were saying is.
  Shawnda: Oh yeah
  Josh: Should be worried about not trying it more than you should, like whatever the end result is. And, and I think that's kind of what you're highlighting.
  Shawnda: Yeah. I mean, it, it's kind of cliche to say because I mean, you hear that all the time, but it's so true and it's something to live by. Like I, me, like, even though I am so afraid, I'm afraid to fail, but I'm also knowing that failure is absolutely necessary to become better and get stronger and learn from it. Right? I'm, I am a true believer on learning from failure, even though I hate it. As much as I hate when it happens
• 35:20 - Sometimes people just deplete me and I need to take like a five day rest. But I also like, I'm okay. Like, people were also surprised because I'm so loud. I'm like, I'm like the megaphone of the business, but really I have to like pump myself up to do those types of things. I'm not just like naturally waking up going, yeah, let's conquer the world. I have to like go okay. Like, just kind of like a transformer, just kind of, you know, work myself into the day. But I'm just not naturally like that. I call it, again, going back to my childhood, is it trauma response? I don't know. I have no idea.
• 43:43 - So Kaylee is like the master of like grassroots, like if you have, because I think people get, give you, they have a kind of a negative undertone when it comes to pr. They think it's just media coverage and it's not, I mean it's like, it's, it's polarizing campaigns to grab attention for your business and then obviously that free advertising, free media comes, comes along if your message is right.

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• New job experiences and changing habits.
• The surprise of having to move houses.
• Breaking up and dating scene insights.
• LinkedIn's untapped potential for connections.
• Transitioning from athlete to business leader.

Resources:

• Lillian James Creative
• DevNoodle

Connect with Aaron Fulk:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 48:25 - And so it majorly changed the business but it's one of these things that I'm like I had to lose her to become this better leader become this better business and do all of this. And I mean you know I would love to give her a job back but now she's like soaring and I can't match this tech company she's at. And funny enough she's moved 2 neighborhoods over from me. We just reconnected and she's moved 2 neighborhoods over from me. And she's just like she's killing life and I'm so proud of her. But it was definitely definitely probably the most costly decision I've ever made.
• 20:41 - It's why we end up in our industries because we all, there's a great great Steve Harvey video. It's my favorite video. I watch it at least once a week, maybe still all eight years of my business. I watch it maybe once a week and it's called Jump. And he essentially talks about,  you have these gifts, and if you can figure out your gift, whether it is mowing lawns or being a, you know, a comedian, if you can figure out that gift and lean into it, you can make money and a whole career and a whole, you know, become a multimillionaire by leaning into that gift. And I think it kind of goes for the same with networking, right? So as soon as you figure it out in business and your industry and you lean into that, then you become great. 
• 24:06 - Josh: Maybe you already kind of answered this in that last question, but what does your self-talk look like the first time you're going through something?
  Aaron: Well, this has been a journey too, right? So my self-talk now is I've put enough people in my immediate circle, which is something I didn't have before where I don't necessarily just rely on my self-talk. I rely on like the facts. So I used to be a lot more feelings based and now I'm a lot more facts based, which is also not a always the best thing is a female specifically business owner, right? Because we're sometimes I'll get too fact-based and it can come off as rigid or some people call it bitchy, right? Which I don't always think that you guys have to deal with more. Like some of us women have to, 'cause I've become too facts where I used to be very feeling. So I think now it just becomes more fact-based. There's not too much self-talk that goes in that, right? Like, I'm just like, here's what it is, this is what can happen. What's the worst case scenario? One of my favorite, favorite mentors in the world told me, and she's had her business for 30 years. And she said, I always just figure out the very worst thing that could happen if I mess this up and then I work backwards. And she's like, it never gets to the worst case. So I kind of do a little bit of that and then I don't know, I like that a lot. The same mentor said, if you are doing the best you know how to do at that time, that's all you can do.
  Alex: Yeah. I think working your way from the worst, you envision the worst and you're like, okay, can I deal with that? Yeah, I can figure that out. And then you just, then you have the confidence to just go forward knowing that like that is the worst case scenario.
• 56:45 - So LinkedIn is our number one referral source for eight years in a row. Okay? 80% of social web leads in the B2B space come from LinkedIn. While I think that we're better at LinkedIn now as a society, I think it's still the most like unutilized for businesses. I don't think they understand it. I don't think it's ever especially, which is so interesting to me, especially Gen Z, and millennials. Millennials are getting there. But I Gen Z legitimately barely knows what LinkedIn is, which is so crazy to me 'cause they're so good at social media. LinkedIn is the only space on the internet where the Mark Cubans are still checking their own profiles, The Mark Cubans of the world. So we're talking about networking, we're talking about who, you know, you guys, I literally have made some of the most insane connections on LinkedIn of like actual real life, major, major, major, both celebrities, athletes, motivational speakers, because they're there, right? Anyone that understands money knows that LinkedIn's the space to be on.
• 35:33 - But for me, I think superpower wise is that I think most people with ADHD are just chaotic enough to where it allows people to find them interesting. It allows people to be like, hey, that you're kind of the life of the party or the life of the like, you know, like you're just one of these people like goes, goes, goes enough that people want to want to figure out what's going on. They wanna be around, they wanna be drawn to you a lot of times with ADHD because you have a hard time regulating your emotions, you say exactly what you think, right? And that for, I don't know how many perfectionist friends you guys have, but for your perfectionist friends, they wish they could have a little bit of that, right? So that draws them to you.

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Breaking the norm in marketing.
• Ownership and profits in business.
• The psychological edge in sales.
• The value of diversified experiences.
• Strategies for lasting success.

Resources:

• Kaizen Marketing
• DevNoodle

Connect with Kyle Barry:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 48:04 - I believe that the only way to find truth is to source out as many potential sources as possible. Weed out their personal relations, weed out their personal emotions behind X, Y, and Z, and find out how Malcolm Gladwell and Alex Hormozi talk about business and find the common denominators there. ‘Cause as you start looking through enough information, you'll find that all these things are very consistent across the board. It's why Kaizen has done so well for small to medium-sized businesses. Because in today's world everyone cares about the big fish. Everyone cares about the e-commerce business that's gonna be able to scale to a hundred thousand dollars a month. And they put every bell and whistle on that e-commerce client and they do a 10th of that for the local restaurant when in actuality they're the same structure. You need the same outreach email programs, CRM, support, communication tactics in an e-commerce business as you do in a restaurant.
• 09:12 - The greatest lesson was definitely getting suspended from high school. 'Cause I printed, I think it was like 6,000 menus out of the printer in high school. And I was like getting yelled at the end of it. Like, you can't do that. And I was like, no, no, it's fine. Don't worry about it. And yeah, my persistency there got me a suspension in school, but enough flyers to be able to go around my whole little town and put the flyers into people's cars, into their mailboxes, which is totally illegal. Didn't know that at the time. Into their mailboxes and everywhere else to start driving my own customers into the business that my father didn't have previously. So that was the best learning lesson I had from outside of learning how to cook. You know, it's a valuable lesson that I'll always have, but the marketing aspect of it is what I fell in love with it. 
• 22:53 - There is zero difference in your brain. The only difference is that in your frontal lobe, if you have a level of dopamine and you're happy, you become excited. If you have a high level of serotonin and you're not happy or you're depressed, you become, you get anxiety from it. You get anxiety from it. So to understand that it's the same exact thing, but you decide how you actually take that feeling and push it out to the world. Change the way I thought a lot about emotions, right? Because if I'm sitting here feeling anxiety and I'm scared and I'm start sweating and I have anxiety, if I can convince myself, no, it's not anxiety, that's excitement. I'm pumped, I'm pumped up so much that I'm nervous about it, use the excitement, hone that excitement and  I used to not be able to talk on stage. I used to shake when I was getting sales calls that all of that has changed.
• 32:16 - Everything that you think, everything that you feel is not part of this world. It's only a part of you. It only relies inside you yourself. You are the wall that defines how the world recognizes you when you put that out into the world, right? Every time you say something, you move your hands, you make a gesture. That's what you're gonna be defined as in this world. So make sure that you understand nobody else in existence controls how you are defined besides you, you are the one that are gonna take the emotions and the thought process and define what that really looks like as a representation of yourself. So as you were saying like that, that left and right brain ideology and the structure of how to see things, it is completely controlled by you. It is the hardest thing in the world to do, to find out how to control yourself and your own emotions past what you naturally feel. 
• 40:27 - But even when we send reports, I just got off a meeting right before this call where, you know, we start off the call with, Hey, you spent $2,000 on your meta advertising, we generated $8,000 in total revenue, then here's the consumer avatars, here's the creative that's working, here's the message test that we put out there. Here's the results of the success that we're having. But it always starts and we're forefront with, you gave me X and I delivered Y in revenue, which I believe is the core value for any agency out there. 

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Athletes as authentic brand voices
• The rise of NIL in college sports
• Harnessing micro-influencers at scale
• The evolution of athlete marketing
• Strategies for targeting 18-25 year-olds

Resources:

• PlayBooked
• DevNoodle

Connect with Brent Barkin:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 35:15 - And it's my personal opinion that that aggregation of their following is infinitely better than paying an Uber influencer or paying somebody with 10 times the following and paying them 20 times the money to do the same thing. And I also personally believe that athletes have a unique value proposition because their voice is really felt to be authentic that if they talk about a product and if they back something just like the uniform they wear that it stands for something more than themselves. So it's that authenticity of their voice that that really enhances the message.
• 43:11 - I think the worst thing that a marketing agency can do is pretend to be good at something they're not. I think it's dangerous and I think it's stupid. I would rather tell one of our clients that we're working with the brand or group and here's what we're doing. What a lot of them won't do is they won't tell you they're working with a third party. They'll just do it and then they'll just jack the rates up so their margin is the same. So it ends up being much more expensive. And I would say if it's more expensive, it's usually not as productive.
• 11:47 - I think the main thing is people don't necessarily know what they know, what they want to do, know what, what interests them. And what's so crazy is, you know, the more I do what I'm doing with, with PlayBooked and talk to student athletes, the more you realize how many different types of jobs there are out there in the world and every day you learn about something else that you never knew existed, right? So if you are at that stage, if you're a young person at that stage, I think the main thing is, you know, LinkedIn is a great tool. Talk to as many people as you can. Have one-on-one conversations with people and ask them what they do and if you have no agenda, other than I really wanna understand what they do, how they got that job. Do they like it? Do they not? If they don't, why? And if you're at that age where you're really trying to figure out what you want to do with your life, I think the first thing is recognize that there's 10 times more opportunities out there than you ever thought there were.
• 31:00 - What that kind of reinforced for me was when people are just on autopilot,  that they just get there and they do it. You don't realize how valuable that is for business to have people that just kind of know what they're supposed to do and do it without being told. And that's, you know, functionally you and I then started talking about the value habits and you know, the emotional effort or emotional energy it takes to do something that is, that your brain is recognized as a habit is a ton less emotional effort, physical effort often, and emotional energy. And when I say emotional energy, those tasks, if they require thought and effort and intellectual energy, they drain you. So just like that Roomba definitely imagine Roomba, but the Roomba doesn't have to keep going and being recharged. So if you as a person, as an individual create positive habits for you every day for yourself every day and you layer those habits on top of each other, you, your productivity skyrockets and your energy to do that, to do those tasks really stays almost the same. 
• 25:02 - Brent: We're a marketing company. Well we don't use AI, we only use people and that's right. And then somebody next door to you could use AI and eat your lunch and you're patting yourself on the back that you.
  Alex: So would you put it as a like the way as he was calling you an efficiency expert, kind of like internally focused on the company and creating efficiencies, potentially saving money. Whereas he was thinking externally, how can we grow, how can we attract new people, do more things?
  Brent: This was expensive, you know, you hear this all the time, cutting expensive to a profit. So you, instead of a company, the best way to grow profits is to grow your top line. Because even then the percentage you play the law percentages, if we had 10% bottom line profit, and I do twice the amount of money I did twice the amount of profit, right? All my fixed expenses drop as a percent, you know, all the variable expenses will keep going up, but you make more and more money. He was basically saying, I was more focused on how do we save money than how do we make money.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• SEO and web design referrals
• Leveraging first-party data
• Scaling up with Overstory
• Truth about incrementality in ads
• Building motivation and discipline

Resources:

• Bonsai
• DevNoodle
• The Book of Why

Connect with Matt Butler:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 34:02 - I would argue the ones, a lot of the people that have right to complain and don't end up being the most successful people that you meet typically. And I totally agree with you. I've always had this rule for myself of, you know, if you're gonna complain, either do something bad or shut your mouth, you know, like we don't have time for that.
  Alex: Yeah, 100%. You gotta look for the solutions right away. Like you spend your time complaining. It's just, I know Josh has this thing, he calls it stress-free shampoo. But you should basically, without going into, unless Josh, you want to, but you surround yourself with this like negative thought as you're complaining about the things and you just, you get into the cycle of consistently thinking about it instead of like, I gotta get out of this. What's the solution? Let's just focus on that.
  Josh: Yeah
  Matt: Failing is painful and a lot of people, like, I failed constantly, right? And it sucks. And you can put complaining on as a way to like, give yourself an excuse to not feel so bad about those failures
• 28:05 - Josh: Maybe we should have another podcast just called Fucking Motivation.
  Matt: Yeah, no, I do like, there's a, there's probably a market for that. No, I the way I would always feel about that is like, yeah, I mean, there'd be times when I would say I wouldn't try to go people into like, you know, razzing me or digging, digging me. But like, I do think I had a little bit more of a spark in the face of like, essentially that, you know, that you mentality as opposed to like, someone lavishing you with, you know, oh, you're great. Isn't this wonderful? Like, I didn't really, I never responded that well to like overarching phrase, but if you really wanted to get my gears going right, go ahead and, you know, like poke the bear a little bit, right? Like say like, yeah, no, you know what, you can't do it. Like I, I knew you couldn't do it right? Then it's like, all right, let's see about that. Right? Like there's, I think, I think that drives people in many ways. I think that's important too.
  Matt: And I think you need to call on that sometimes too, by the way. So like, there, your motivations and like the thing that will keep you disciplined and focused isn't the same every single day. And there's these periods that, you know, that might be something you need to tap into all the time, right? Like, if you're just like constantly acting like the world's against you
• 44:57 -  That's totally true. We had a few pilot smaller clients maybe before them that were, let's just say that I'm not sure they were really paying clients, but we were teasing out like, well, what is it that we do? Like how do we help an organization understand its information and then build a growth strategy on top of that first party data? But yeah, I mean like that's how it got going. 2020 happened, the pandemic happened, we got into a great relationship helping ancestry kind of rethink how they wanted to orchestrate and measure their marketing success, which then led into like a whole slew of where we're at today around like having an actual solution and technology to do those things and more. 
• 19:12 - Josh: The thing that like resonated internally for me though is like this idea of, I think sometimes people think of discipline and focus as being these sort of skills in a vacuum that you can, you know, oh, you need to have it, you can train it.
  Matt: It's just a matter of like powering up that discipline bar and then like, or you know, same thing with focus, right? And I think my big, maybe it isn't quite as straightforward as that. The discipline and focus comes when you have like a why behind it. Like a reason that you want something, right? And then there is that element of the belief, right? Like you speaking for myself, I tend to find that if there's something out there that I wanna achieve, if I tell someone about it, that's great. But by and large people don't, they're not necessarily not, no one's necessarily expecting success for you. And that doesn't comes across as really negative. 
• 35:20 - To close out that stress-free shampoo theory, a lot of it is basically like, you know, the people that are really stress, they usually surround themselves with stress-free shampoo and stress-free poems and stress-free whatever. And all you're doing is surrounding yourself with the word stress, even though it says stress free. And I think what Alex was kind of getting at is complaining is the same thing where, you know, you start to complain and then you make it your personality, even though, you know, you don't want to keep complaining, but it becomes you and you post memes about it and you post, you think it's a silly little Instagram post, but you're really like making your personality.

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Brand before marketing.
• Coffee as a societal loophole.
• Stoicism in modern life.
• Storytelling as a core strategy.
• Photography to brand strategy leap.

Resources:

• The Brand Storyteller
• The Branding Laboratory Podcast
• Fusion Photography
• Fusion Photography on Instagram
• DevNoodle

Connect with Deevo Tindall:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• And so I had this idea of what if I could bridge the gap between content strategy and deployment? And so I started like helping clients. It was sort of more on an ad hoc capacity. I know a bunch, I know so many people. And so I knew a social media manager. I'm pretty good at social media myself. I knew copywriters, I knew web developers. I knew SEO people. So I started like plugging and playing little solutions like, let's just take you for example, you know, you had this great content shoot that I had done for you, but you didn't really know how to do that. I was like, Hey Josh, I can take your content. I can put it on social media for you. I can get you on a website. Like all these different things. Well, I don't have a website. Well, I know somebody who can build a website, so let me get you, so anyhow, you can see where I'm going with this. And so one thing just led to an next, and before you knew it, I sort of was getting these different business things, opportunities because I had treated these people just as well as I had treated my other clients. So I was getting referrals and all these things.
• 41:48 - Deevo: Anyway, I was just genuinely curious in sort of the, the, I'm always been curious about the metaphysical connection. So I've, I grew up with God in my life and all these different religions and so I've never really believed in any one theory. I just had a lot of hypotheses about a bunch of different things. And I'm fascinated by that sort of micro macrocosm relationship of humans and this, you know, this idea of God. And then I started, you know, exploring, you know, there's plant-based medicines and all the different effects and the shamans and things that they espouse to. And then I started diving into like Native American histories and like all the different things that they did. And I was like, you know, the further I went down the rabbit hole, the further I started to realize that the information that we have been given was misinformation in order to guide us down a different rabbit hole of someone else's choosing. Right? And so it's one of the reasons I started my podcast unlearn everything is I started realizing that everything we have been told is a lie. Literally everything we have been told is a lie from politics to economics, to relationships, to sex, to God, to the universe, to literally everything has been a lie. And one of those things that I discovered was that plant-based medicine was also a lie. It has been ostracized so that they could push us into the direction of alcohol. For example, alcohol is one of the single biggest poisons on the planet.
  Josh: As pharmaceutical,  I put pharmaceuticals in there, in there as well.
• 1:03:20 - You need to get that down so that you, your team, anything that is associated with your business has consistency, clarity and cohesion so that when your customer reads it, they can align with that and they understand the language that you're sharing, the problems that you solve. Because not everybody is your customer, you know, very specific types of people are your customer. And so you wanna make sure that the language that you're speaking to them is the language they understand and that speaks to their problem. 
• 38:31 - And so I know I'm going different direction than you had hoped, but just to be vulnerable, I can tell you that we do always have a choice in how we respond to everything. And I would suspect that the people who have a better outcome are generally the people that choose a more optimal response to everything, every trigger, every failure, every inopportunity, ever anything that ever happens to them that doesn't go advantageously for them. Deevo number one would choose, would choose the lighter response and Deevo number two would choose the blame response. And like, it's your fault that I suck.
• 39:22 - I think introspective awareness, learning to find a time and a place to be by yourself and understand who you are and how you operate and have some quiet time by yourself is one way. Therapy is another. Finding good group of peers and mentors to surround yourself with. It's very important that you surround yourself with quality people. You become a byproduct of the six people you hang around with most. And if the six people that you're surrounding yourself are assholes, you're gonna become an asshole.

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Embrace chaos for business growth
• Finding fun in entrepreneurial endeavors
• Insights on effective customer engagement
• Direct mail as the backbone of sales
• Strategies for meaningful B2B connections

Resources:

• Olde School Marketing
• DevNoodle

Connect with Rusty Dycus:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 29:24 - If you get done with the end of your week and you have not had fun, you screwed up. So everything that we do, why are we doing it? Why do you do, oh well we need money. Do you really, do you really need as much money as you make? Or do you just like, why do we do what we do? So if you're not having fun doing it, why are we doing it? Money is not even real. Money is just something that we, the government's conned us into thinking that actually has value. It really doesn't, it has no value. We trade our time and energy for nothing.
• 49:49 - If you're not bow out, get somebody else to do it that's gonna do a better job. You can subcontract and still make a decent margin and that's okay. There's nothing wrong with subcontracting if there's nothing wrong with saying, you know, Josh, I'm just not gonna be the best at that. But you know what, I got a buddy and he's really good at art and he can make your picture and he can do it very well. Would you like me to get ahold of him and see if he'd like to work with you? There's nothing wrong with that at all. So know your own strengths and weaknesses and make sure you're doing for somebody else a good job. Don't take a job on that you're not qualified for. And I see it all the time. I see marketing agencies all the time screw people because they don't know how to help them. They just need the cash flow. They're just gonna take the job and then they hurt the customer and then they never wanna do business with 'em again. And then they got a bad rap on their sheet and then they get to talk to me and they're like, well, I got screwed by this person and this person and this person, and how are you gonna be any different? And that's what we're doing to ourselves. So as marketing agencies do us all a favor and stick to your swim lanes and do what you can do well and do it well and then subcontract or give it away.
• 15:07 - Honestly, money is not that appealing to me. To me, money is like a brick. I'm looking at money and it's a brick. And how do I take that brick and put concrete on top of it and put another brick on top of that and make something fun with it. So that's all money is to me. It's just a tool, it's a material and I need it to make more.
• 18:28 - Most of the time the failure comes from me. So everything rises and falls with leadership. If I could teach you to anything, it is that case study right there. If there's a problem in your company, if there's something that's not going wrong, Alex, look at yourself because we are the problem every time. We didn't say the right thing. We didn't motivate the people correctly. We weren't measuring the right things. We didn't employ enough with the right people to move us down the track where we need to be. So always, I'm always looking at these scenarios. I made a major decision 20 minutes ago and I'm moving teams and members around in order to accomplish a better goal that I was the problem.
• 24:45 - It doesn't matter. It's just business. I'm not on the roof swinging a hammer. Why would I swing a hammer? I I would suck at that. I would cut the board all kinds of weird ways and it would never fit. That's not my strength. So you take strengths and weaknesses and I'm always on, I want to hone my own skillset to where I'm focused on my strengths, not my weaknesses. So when I bring somebody into, I don't care what company, it's, we may have somebody and I employed them for the construction company. We're building a house and I find out that he's better at marketing. I'm sucking 'em over here into the marketing department. It doesn't matter. Put people where they're gonna flourish and then help them grow that. 

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Overcame heroin addiction
• Build MRR for growth sustainability
• Specialize to provide industry-specific value
• Learning curve steep for business finances
• Expanding reach beyond behavioral health

Resources:

• WebServ
• DevNoodle

Connect with Preston Powell:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 46:12 - Because more general answer that might apply to just marketers in general is just, is specialized. That's what I would tell to an aspiring marketer. Like, figure out one thing that you like, whether it's, you know, technical or creative or you know, whatever it might be. But just go way down the rabbit hole over there because you'll provide a lot more value. You know, I've tried to make sure that our departments are like highly specialized so that we can provide a unique value that that isn't easy to find. 
• 53:35 - Josh: The day that I realized that everyone's insecure was the day that I became a little bit more secure. And same thing. 'cause like, oh, like everyone's walking around just thinking about themselves and like, about all their little insecurities and everything. So I was like, that makes me feel a lot more secure. The same thing with imposter syndrome. Like if you kind of know that everyone's walking around doing it, there's like almost there hopefully is like a comfort level that comes with like, oh, that's like a normal feeling to have. And I'm not like, that's how progress goes with humans, right? Is you put yourself into
  Alex: This Yeah. The feeling of uncomfortableness and you wanting to show up.
• 33:09 - Initial plateaus were around like just not having the organization. So if I was focusing on service delivery, I couldn't focus on sales and vice versa. And then once we got to maybe a 100K we plateaued for a long time because we'd get clients, but we weren't retaining clients as well as we could. So we needed to work on retention. And yeah, there's been a number of plateaus. I think we plateaued again around 200K and exact reasons for each one are definitely somewhat debatable. But, mostly it's just that either you're not set up for growth, like you don't have the infrastructure for it or your focus is in, in the wrong area.
• 24:35 - I think it depends a lot. So I had a pretty, pretty high tolerance for like, I guess just like the pain that I put myself through and just really didn't have an interest in making a change. So like that kind of struck me. I, you know, I was so far beyond what should have been rock bottom for so long and  I wasn't in too much worse a state I'd been in for, you know,  the previous several months. But that was just something for like, that stood out to me as kind of like that fork in the road. But it is really hard. So like if you wanna like help somebody out that's struggling, their rock bottom or their turning point could be way higher than that. And hopefully for most people it is. Cause you can, I dragged myself through a lot of things that I didn't necessarily need to, I don't really regret it or anything 'cause I don't know if I would've just subscribed to like doing the right thing when I was in my teenage years and, it just wasn't my personality I, you know, was kind of a troublemaker for a long, long time. So  I don't know.
• 30:05 - It's never worked very well if you go too broad because one like behavioral healthcare is an industry where everybody knows each other. So if I do really good work in behavioral healthcare, everybody hears about it and I get a lot of inbound referrals. So kind of like free marketing there. Also, we put on a lot of events in the space and those are all just great marketing opportunities for us. And we go to every conference. So I've got like five business development people and at any given time I've probably got a couple of 'em in different states at different events

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Lessons from a business partner's exit
• Value of contrary opinions in business
• Transitioning from V1 to V2 self
• The thin line of business and identity
• Insight into balancing work and faith

Resources:

• Cascade Insights
• DevNoodle

Connect with Sean Campbell:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 24:42 - I mean, in short, I think what he was getting at, although it's not like you would say this about a second grader, I've said to people since then, I'm pathologically incapable of learning something and not wanting to teach it. It's like my first mo like I was out fishing this morning, that's why I was a little late for the show. If I find a spot where I'm finding fish and my buddy's on the boat, the first thing I do is like, Hey, I was throwing this and I was throwing it over there and why don't you go over there? Right. I've been wired that way probably ever since Father Boivin noticed in me. 
• 57:03 -  I'm not saying that's a horrible thing. They're trying to network, they're trying to grow. But at some point there's that fine line. It's like, is your identity the business? You're the only one who knows that maybe your spouse does. They could probably tell you, this business isn't my identity. It would suck if it went away, it would suck. But I'm still me. And I can tell you that if you talk to most business owners, you guys do it on the show all the time. I would say at best 50% of them could answer that question in the positive. Like if they were being honest with you. 'Cause you can see it, you can see it when you talk to certain business owners. Like they have not separated who they are from the business. And that's made a huge difference. 
• 38:10 - So one of the things you go through, I think, when co-founders leave is that you have to be humble. You have to be willing to go to clients who maybe you've worked with for years you wanna say, Hey, why don't you just trust me as I am? But they have legitimate questions. You've been through change, right? And so you have to be humble enough to say like, look, yeah, things are gonna change. It's under my leadership. I understand that trust is earned. We're a different company in some ways than we were before. 
• 38:09 -  So now you've got a whole different dynamic of how do you communicate to clients about the fact that your co-owners now in a different organization and he's competing with you, right? So there's a huge amount of, how do you talk about that and how do you do it in a way that, I mean, nobody, a client doesn't really care about our dirty laundry. It's the best way to put it, right? Like the Don Henley song back in the day, dirty Laundry, right? Nobody cares about it. They just wanna know if you're still gonna do good work. 
• 47:04 -  Somebody listening might say, you need a board of advisors and you need to go. Our experience with that was not that great, to be honest. We put in a board of advisors in the first company. Now maybe I just picked the wrong people. Right? That's fine. It's really hard to get board of advisors that understand your business, right? I mean, if you're making mistakes that are like classic, you know, like, oh, you know, I bought a new truck as an expense, right? And you need an advisor that says don't do that. Right? You know what I mean? Like sure, I think you can get good advice if you're struggling with business basics, but I think once you get past the business basics, it's really hard to find an advisor that you don't feel is just gonna be reading from like a business book on the Amazon shelf, to you kind of thing.

Here are a few o topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Selling t-shirts to managing socials.
• Affiliate program with a car giveaway.
• The struggle of scaling a business.
• Websites from 2004 vs. the modern web.
• AI and digital currency arbitrage.

Resources:

• Roosterly
• DevNoodle
• BiggerPockets Podcast
• Buy Back Your Time

Connect with Irfan Jafrey:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 30:25 - There's gotta be obviously arbitrage related to AI. There's arbitrage related to digital currencies. That's how Sam Bankman Fried initially was making a lot of money until he wasn't. But I mean, I think in digital currency, I think in things related to AI, we're gonna see a lot of arbitrage I think in PR, which is a very antiquated industry. No disrespect. We work with over 30 PR firms in North America to help them get their clients in the press quickly. And they all agree that it's an inefficient industry and I think we're going to see a lot of arbitrage there as technology makes things more efficient. 
• 24:10 - Josh: Because it's not very often that you hear actually marketing agencies. Actually, two things I'll say about that. One, marketing agencies don't always raise money. And the other thing I forget. So my other question would be, what was the goal for raising capital.
  Irfan: Yeah, so I think the important distinction to make is we do not consider ourselves a marketing agency. We do some marketing agency type things, but we raised money. Our capital raise was predicated on the fact that we built a platform to aggregate, curate, schedule, and post content based on combing through a person's LinkedIn profile or Facebook or Instagram profile without them needing to do the heavy lifting.
• 28:35 - The average person on LinkedIn, let's say at that law firm has five hundred to a thousand connections. If you're sharing one piece of really good content on different times throughout that firm, not at the same time, not at the same day, 'cause it's gonna look robotic and spammy, but you can get, extract 10 X, 20 X, a hundred X of value for that piece of content that you put together. 'cause it's syndicated throughout multiple people. So that's also part of our goal is to create the automation around that strategy so that piece of content, whether it's a press release, original content, curated content, has the largest lifecycle with the most impact.
• 32:21 - And so if you can imagine the giant waste of time to, well, not really a waste of time, but if you look at the amount of effort and energy that goes into dressing up and going to a networking event in Chicago in the winter time with the snow and sleet and rai,n parking your car with the risk of it getting a parking ticket and meeting people when you're not a social guy to get a business card so you can sign 'em up for something that's $49, it's quite painful. But as silly as it sounds that being able to do that 40 times was a factor in us able to effectively raise money. We had people that signed up and they're like, yeah, I like the service. Okay, so we're a real business, not a concept at that point knowing, sure, we're only making a, a whopping $800 at that point or whatever it was, but it was enough where the caliber of clients that we had was sufficient to showcase to investors that, ah, okay, this is something that a lot of other people could use. Okay. So, that's sort of how we started.
• 37:01 - Actually no, I would say that about 80% of our business comes through the meta ads that we run. That sort of, you know, Facebook, Instagram, take the rooster really two week free trial if you'd like it. Stay on, there's no contracts. That's sort of the entry point low-risk product to help clients understand if we're a good fit for them and vice versa. They can come back and say, you're fine. Your product sunk sucks. It stinks, I hate it. We don't wanna work with you. And that's fine. Well well you didn't risk, you risked $0. So you took that free trial and it didn't make sense. Or you come back and say, Hey, I really like the welcome book that you guys produced. I like the first couple of weeks of content, here's the changes that I would make. And we're like, yeah, absolutely, we'll make those changes. And then we go from there and then there's a step up to other different products and then they're, they might just come back and say, dude, this is way better than I could do on my own, or our team could do on our own. Keep doing what you're doing. So that's typically how clients get started. Now, 20% of our business comes from a mix of referral, referrals and affiliates. Other agencies, either white labeling us or not white labeling us.

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• ADHD as an entrepreneurial edge.
• AI's role in modern marketing.
• Importance of strategy in execution.
• Avoiding ego-driven superstars.
• Fractional CMO benefits for businesses.

Resources:

• & Marketing
• DevNoodle

Connect with Rajat Kapur:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 39:53 - And a lot of the people out there that are independent consultants are looking for a community and a home where they can hang out. We want to be that community. And then obviously we have a business to run, right? So if we can help those two get together, that ends up being a really good model. I think of it as like a very high-end boutique recruiting service because we'll get clients that ask us the craziest thing, they'll say, well I'm in this industry and I want somebody at this particular thing and they might want this geography. And usually within a week we can find three to five candidates in our community that meet almost all or some of those criteria. 
• 47:23 - Josh: And then a few questions I I tend to ask towards the end. If you had to teach something to other marketers, what would it be?
  Raj: That's a great question. There's a quote that I have adapted from the Art of War that applies directly to marketing. So it is, strategy is the slowest path to victory. Strategy without execution is the slowest path to victory. And tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. That's straight from that book and it totally applies to marketing. And what I find that happens in the marketing world today is everybody wants a quick ROI. Everybody wants to jump to execution. Everybody wants to get their ads up tomorrow or their social media plan implemented or those emails out as soon as possible. And sometimes it works, but when it doesn't work, it's almost always because you haven't done the strategy work. And the strategy work is never gonna go outta style and it's never gonna go bad. What does the strategy work? It is who are you, who is your ideal customer target? What are their problems? How do you solve them? What makes you unique? That's it, right? That's never gonna go outta style. And so if you think like, you know, in a couple weeks I'm just gonna turn on some Google ads and magically hit the right spot for that decision maker to make that decision, I would tell every marketer to go back to the fundamentals more than they think is comfortable. And that's almost always the right answer.
• 43:01 - Josh: And I guess I wanna understand, how can you work with other agencies or what services can you partner with other agencies? So in other words, what do agencies tend to reach out to you for?
  Raj: Yeah, that's great. So most of the time it's strategy, right? So most of the time an agency will reach out to us because they'll say, hey, we're great at the strategy. We can't do the execution that this particular company needs. I think they need a fractional CMO and the arrangements that we have there, I call it a boomerang. So if you're a marketing agency, you already have the relationship and you're able to bring us into potentially place a fractional CMO, you get the first right of refusal on the execution work. Absolutely right. So we have those successful arrangements already and I'm happy to build more of them. 'cause quite often that marketing agency tries to do the strategy strategic work, but they either can't find the budget or they don't have the people and the bandwidth to actually get it done.
• 39:08 - And what we basically do is we go out in the world, we meet companies who have hit a growth ceiling. They've either gotten rid of their marketing person, they never had a marketing person, they've never really invested in marketing and they're looking to get to that next level. And one of our fractionals can usually come in, help them set a really solid marketing foundation and then be their ongoing marketing leader. But as the name insinuates, it's on a fraction of their time and a fraction of the budget basis.
• 40:33 - We've built a really good community for those fractional CMOs. We provide them tools, templates, we provide them ongoing coaching. We have a regular speaker series where we have people that educate them on either building their own business or building their own or building theirselves as a marketer. And that's working really well. So I'd say the couple things are, you know, if you're a marketing in an independent marketing consultant and you're interested, go to our website, apply to be part of our community. If you have all of those criteria, I'd be happy to talk to you. 

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• RJ's vibrant SEO branding trick.
• Inside look at an elite marketer’s community
• Transitioning from the military to marketing.
• The art of gaining and giving referrals.
• Leveraging a mentor's wisdom for success.

Resources:

• Tipping Point Digital
• DevNoodle

Connect with Rina Jean (RJ) Bindi:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 17:16 - We're all here for the same thing, which is to add value to others, help them build and be successful. Like that's the big picture scene. And yet everybody's here trying to pay their cell phone bills, feed their babies, keep their employees going, keep their business going. And we need to do what we need to do in order to be our own unique versions of ourselves and to stand out of the crowd. And with marketing it's like, like there's a lot of noise. It's got a low barrier of entry. It's got people from all around the world who say they can do it. And it's just like the, I get you ranking number one over and over and over again and you're just like, come on man. Just be you. Stand out. Carve your niche, find your tribe, find your people. Find the people that are attracted to who you are, what you do, who you serve, and hold those people closest.
• 22:26 - I don't think there was the biggest thing. I mean, there were so many mistakes. There were so many learning opportunities. I needed to work a hundred times harder than I thought to get the results that I wanted. I needed to protect myself as a business owner by taking classes to educate myself about labor laws, employment. I got a payroll company, I got a bookkeeper, I took classes at the Larimer County Small Business development center and learned about like operations, finance, sales, marketing, and then the technician portion of every business. Like that's a really loaded question because it's not just one big thing, it's like business development in itself and how I need to duplicate myself and to hire team and to delegate let go of control.
• 26:32 - And I was just scribbling taking notes. And then I googled like 13 different words that he had talked about and I called him up the following week and I was like, I understand what you were talking about. Can you have another conversation with me please? Like, I mean you have to put yourself out there and you have to be ready for someone to say no, they won't mentor you or why would I do that? You have to be a not afraid of rejection, ego, like how I look, what someone's going to say or think about me. Like I have to care enough about my business and my family and my success to really put myself out there and ask over and over again until I find someone who's the right fit.
•  48:47 - Josh: and then a lot of what we're trying to do with that community and we kind of talked about it earlier, is again, we wanna make sure that we can understand, you know, where you need help and where you can help others. So to jump into some of those questions, how can you work with other marketing agencies or what services can you partner with other agencies? So in other words, you know, what do agencies tend to reach out to you for?
  Rj: They look for partnerships a lot of time. And as I mentioned before, it's when I, I haven't really had anyone who, I've got one or two people who also work with dudes in the trades and they'll ask for some support, but it's usually, it's not about like the process of what we're doing, it's more about the business building aspect and how that works. Not a whole lot of digital marketers really reach out too much unless they're doing like pay per click or something completely different. Or a videographer or someone that would be complimentary like a website developer. 
• 37:24 -  I actually reached out to a business broker and asked them about it and he, oh gosh. He's like, so I have a question. Do you have any relationships with other entertainment businesses? I was like, oh, I've got a ton of 'em. Like I know entertainment businesses all around. He is like, you might not even need me. And I was so grateful for him just giving me that little piece of information and he said, reach out to all of the businesses that know you, like you, trust you and ask them if they're in the market and would love to buy your business. I reached out to the biggest business that I knew nationally that I had shared some of my documents with some of my training procedures. I showed them how I automated the back office and had been supporting them. I supported a lot of other entertainment industry companies locally and when people would call and ask for support, I was like, yeah, sure, this is what you need to do. I, and they were just like, they jumped at the chance to own my company. They were like absolutely a hundred percent because they knew the reputation that I had built up, they knew about the systems, they knew how it was organized and I had all of the data and all of the numbers right there for them. It was super simple.

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Pivoting toward Full-Service Agency.
• The Why behind MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue).
• Diamonds are made under pressure.
• The power of identity in shaping behavior.
• Franchising: The Next Big Leap.

Resources:

• The Diamond Group
• DevNoodle
• Blue Ocean Strategy

Connect with Theresa Bassett:

• LinkedIn
• Email

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 36:50 - Like if all I'm after ever doing is seeking comfort and then I'm essentially seeking what I know. And if I'm always seeking what I already know, then I'm not growing much at all. And so I think comfort, you have to get, you have to allow yourself to embrace discomfort in order to embrace the unknown. And the unknown is where all of the growth happens, it’s where all the ideas happen. It's where all of the challenge happens. Yes. But it's also where all of the experiential learning happens. And that's where you grow in capacity and compassion and wisdom and all of those things. So yeah, screw comfort.
• 54:10 - Theresa: And that's where it has to tie back to that identity piece we were talking about. Because I think that you can set targets like those three categories we talked about, and those are the three categories that I recommend in the Uplevel System. But, there's targets and then there's targets, and then there's really good targets, really good targets that pull from a heart space because they're tied to your identity,
  Josh: Right? Yep, I've never talked about this publicly yet, but if I start this new podcast idea that I have it's all about this whole self-awareness, motivation, discipline thing, and talk. 
  Theresa:I love it. 
  Josh: Successful people and, and how they approach it and everything. 
  Theresa: It’s gonna be a wild success with that because I hope so. It's system on self-awareness that you've already baked into what fires you up.
• 46:40 - Because I would bet you that, I would bet if you look back at some of the things that you've started and maybe feel like you're undisciplined about maintaining, they're probably in the same genre of the same category year after year, year after year. Like totally right? And so you're practicing long obedience in the same direction, but you just need a different rhythm to being optimally productive. That is me a hundred percent. So I was doing these sprints without really realizing it. And then I was subsequently sometimes beating up myself up for not being disciplined enough, not being persistent enough. And then I'm like, holy crap, actually no, that's not true. Because I'm doing the same things that I'm working on some of the same things year after year, year after year.
• 45:36 - That was very personal to me because I have this whole theory that I'm sure I've mentioned before of like what makes a successful person and to me I think it's a combination and they all kind of work together of self-awareness, motivation, and discipline. And I do this really unfair thing where I'll start to like, you know, I'm like, oh, let me test this theory. Let me look at someone and like a friend, I know this is so bad, but like, okay, where do I rank them in self-awareness? Are they a plus minus or neutral? Same thing with motivation, same thing with discipline. And I think where my biggest weakness is, is discipline. I like to think that I'm self-aware. I think everyone does. I like to, I spend time focusing on motivation and really like capturing that and making sure I'm taking advantage of it. When I call it like the first half-life of your motivator. It's where you can kind of really capture that. But what I think I struggle the most with is creating that discipline after I get the motivator. And I don't really have anywhere that I'm going with this other than I love the idea of doing a discipline sprint. 

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Building a Culture That Amplifies Success.
• The Power of Experiential Marketing.
• Strategic Partnerships in Agency Growth.
• Maintaining Optimism Through Challenges.
• Harnessing Tech for Marketing Innovation.

Resources:

• GDX Studios
• DevNoodle

Connect with Aaron Gaeir:

• LinkedIn
• Email 

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 17:48 - What do you mean your DNA and your P&L, your profit loss has a line item for culture. Yeah. And I'm not talking about Taco Tuesdays, I'm not talking about vacations or more time off or doing, you know, happy hours on Fridays, that is, you know, that should be done anyways, right? I'm talking about how you structure building great culture or things like transparency, the way that people are paid, the way that people are compensated, not just in the time and money, and how that influences your culture and the people you hire, what I call PLU’s, people like us.
• 25:00 - Wouldn't it be great to work somewhere where as you create value, you can then create, and I'm not talking about taking out the trash or doing the windows or, you know, plugging in the computer or turning the lights off. That's, you should be doing that anyways. I'm talking about real value and everybody knows what that is. Real, real value. And that doesn't mean maybe a new client or new sales. It could be a new software, it could be uncovering a new employee, a new colleague, right? There's all kinds of things that you can do to create value and everybody can create value from the account bookkeeper on up to the secretary, you name it. Everybody has the opportunity to create value in our company and harness that value.
• 14:04 -  Aaron: It's the mental capacity to get through just really tough, tough mental challenges, you know?
  Josh: Yeah. I think still to this day, out of all the, the sports and workouts that I've done, I think a wrestling match has been the hardest and most tiring thing. And then not to go too far in this direction, but those tournaments, when you have three matches, four matches in a day, I mean, you feel a hundred percent cooked after one match and then you gotta recoup after, you know, an hour and then get back out there. It was, it was unlike anything I've ever done. 
• 01:28:00 - This is a gateway to getting to the spatial computing. This is the gateway of using tactile experiences to get people into the metaverse or spatial computing. So it's exciting new, very cool that I'm putting a lot of eggs in that basket so people in that space could use us big time. 'cause I'm having people like agencies, I got one guy in Prague that I love that does these amazing mockups and he, they're they're blown you away. 
• 01:04:15 - Aaron: It does feel good, right?
  Josh: Yeah. you know, I have this whole obsession of motivation, you know, which one's more powerful, a good positive, a positive motivator or an FU motivator. And as much as I want to pretend like the positive motivators are stronger, it tends to be the FU motivators are the stronger ones.
  Aaron: I had a whole company in that field of medical devo, you know, medical as you know, diabetes, obesity. I sold that to Cigna. And my IP was motivation. And it's two things. It's carrot or the stick. And you're right, the stick works better. Fear.
  Josh: Well said.
  Aaron: Losing eyesight, fear of dying from diabetes, fear of losing your leg is far stronger than saying, Hey dad, I want you to walk me down the aisle, get off the couch and stop eating cheeseburgers. That's powerful, right? I want you to be there for my grandkids. I want my kids to have a grandpa. That's powerful. But when, when somebody says, look, you're gonna lose your eyesight and we're gonna have to take your leg. Ooh, that's real powerful.

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Sweatshirt and white polos for weeks!
• Why choose consistent clothing?
• Tactical decision-making power talk.
• How a chance dinner talk led to a job.
• Transforming from peer to president.

Resources:

• Mediaura
• DevNoodle
• The Influence of ADHD on Entrepreneurial Tendencies (Masters in Marketing Agency episode with Andrew Aebersold

Connect with Amelia Veron:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 56:35 - It's 'cause I think it's so important. But you know, I always use the diner example. When you go to a restaurant that has everything under the sun on the menu, it usually means nothing is that great there. As opposed to when you go to those fine dining restaurants, and there's like three things on the menu, you know, that there's services or in this case, the food is probably a lot better per service or dish. So I think and to your point, we've talked to a few marketing agencies that their aim was to be that full service, and then they realize they're kind of diluting all the services and not providing the best service for their clients. So, you know, I think that's worth mentioning.
• 22:03 - Amelia: And that, not to say we haven't had our fair share of disagreements, but I think the trust is built there at this point that we can disagree and get into it and then the next day be like, I'm fine. I'm over it now.
  Josh: Well that was literally gonna be kind of my next question, which is like, does that ever get frustrating or is that kind of just how it should be? 'cause you know, I think there's a lot of power when it comes, I call it like diversity and thought.
• 33:57 - Your kind of production work doesn't really have much to do with your managerial skills. You know, I think, you have to be self-motivated. Like you have to be a problem solver and you have to just be a little tenacious. Like, I mean, stuff gets rough sometimes and you have to go home and be like, I'm gonna do it one way or the other, I'm going to do it. And sometimes people just don't have those qualities and I don't think you can make someone be that person.
• 38:32 - I call it like Aristotle's mean, or Aristotle's, I forget, but it's this idea that everyone tends to bounce up and down. Whether it's happiness, it can go into politics, it can go into anything and people bounce. 'Cause what they do is they identify that there's an issue, maybe everyone's upset so they try to go the other way and they usually go too far and then they identify that too far and then they come back. And the more someone can kind of close that, that gap or that parabola, that tends to be the better solution. So I think that was, a really good point.
• 42:36 - The beginning stage is mainly like, how are you doing? Are you getting the concepts like do you like it here? Do I mean frankly like, do we like you here? And so it's kind of us trying to suss out like the skills that maybe you can't interview about during that 90 days.

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• The art of strategic networking.
• Importance of community in agency growth.
• Innovative PR tactics that work.
• Hiring practices that set agencies apart.
• The impact of M&A on your agency.

Resources:

• NEAT: The Agency
• DevNoodle
• Invisible Influence
• My First Million Podcast

Connect with Jen Hartmann:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 38:11 - I pay for their coffee and I ask them all about them. I do not make the conversation about me. In fact, I talk very little when I am taking somebody out to dinner or coffee. I just wanna learn all about them and what they're working on. And then what I do is I do something for them. I don't expect anything in return. I want nothing in return, in fact in that moment. But I will make an intro to somebody who I think they should meet. I will review their website or their marketing strategy, their social media, I'll give them tips, I will send them a contact of a journalist. I do something just because I think I should do something for that person and that comes back tenfold every single time. They will open up doors for me that I would not have been able to open myself. And so that has been really impactful. 
• 28:28 - Josh: How did you guys get your first client?
  Jenn: Oh my gosh, okay. Let me think back. My network, this is still something I do a lot of, but I do a lot of networking and I go on a lot of coffee dates and dinner dates and whatever it may be. But I really leveraged my network to get our first couple of clients back in 2020 or back in 2019 really. And I still do it today. I still do a healthy amount of networking and that really helps to bring in clients. I mean of course we have a sales team and we're doing a lot of lead gen and closing deals on the phone, but like I'm still out and about having conversations with people. I've just noticed that when I meet people they, not to toot my own horn, but people like me very quickly. And when people like you, they trust you and they wanna buy from you.
• 47:34 - And that's truly not the way to do PR in 2024. I think that worked maybe 20 years ago. But things are just different nowadays. So for example, we do a lot of news jacking, which sounds kind of wild, but essentially what it means is we're constantly looking at trends and breaking news and we're figuring out how can we latch our client onto that trend or that breaking news topic. And so we get a ton of features for our clients from doing that. So other agencies see it, they like it, they bring clients to us.
• 20:02 - Josh: Because this is something that we've talked about a decent amount, especially if the owner was an athlete or something like that and they find a lot of value in hiring athletes. Do you see the same thing?
  Jenn: For sure. I would say that a high percentage of our employees played professional sports or competed at like the top level of their sport, whatever that might look like. And I think athletes do have certain traits, they know how to work really, really hard and they also know how to take feedback. They're very coachable. And so yes, I think athletes develop these skills that do carry over into the workplace.
• 36:31 - So a piece of advice I would definitely give people right off the bat is start building your network before you need your network. If you need a network and you haven't built a network, it's too late. Like you, you're already starting up behind. So start building up your network years before you need them. I have always been a really great networker. I think I got it from my dad. My dad has a great network, he's a talker, he's very friendly, people like him and I think I just saw what he did growing up and I took it and I started doing that when I was in college. So any networking event they had in college, I would go any opportunity to meet CEOs or CMOs from companies around town, I would go and I would take it. I took every internship opportunity I could throughout college just for the sake of building up my network. And it honestly really paid off.

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Sherri’s unique approach to getting hired.
• Influencer marketing: beyond the hype
• Staying in your lane for success.
• The impact of having immigrant parents.
• Building communities within agencies.

Resources:

• BabbleBoxx
• DevNoodle

Connect with Sherri Langburt:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 41:18 - Sherri: I think the cream thing was like, you could see all the stuff on your face, right?
  Josh: Not only that, but it was actually like, it was like a silly design. Like it was this, it looks like a push pop almost. And because even just the look of it was like anyone could put cream on their face, right? But it was like literally the look of the product was different, and for that reason, it ended up blowing up on TikTok. So Yeah. Yeah. TikTok is, and I'll be honest, I don't see it cooling off anytime soon. I, I see that as like it's, we're still in the ramp-up phase. I'm trying to think if there's like another example of something that took off and then didn't really go anywhere after two years. But I see TikTok shop or whatever it's called.
• 16:28 - Josh: And I guess since you, you know, you did talk about the box, can you tell us a little bit more about BabbleBoxx and who you guys help?
  Sherri: So we have all different kinds. So we're an influencer marketing agency. I say full service because we stay in our lane. We don't offer SEO and we don't offer email marketing. We only do influencer very specific, but we do a lot with an influencer. So when you think about influencers and you say full service, people are like, that's bizarre. But you know, we do regular campaigns that are not a Boxx. So any kind of influencer activation. We do our co-branded boxes, which are our BabbleBoxx, which are these themed kits that go out to brands. So they're multi-brand collab. So right now we have one for Super Bowl in market, we're gearing up for National Nutrition Month and we bring five brands in those boxes. They go out to influencers. And then because of those kits, then brands started to come to us saying, well wait a minute, could you do custom kits? So we do custom kits. I would say, my favorite way to describe them is these hype kits.
• 21:10 - Like we've had a lot of PR people say, could we become your in-house PR person? And I think we have to stay in our lane. And you know, it's funny, so many people come to me and say like, as I was growing this and people laughed at me when I launched this and what are you doing? And oh, now they're like, there's so much competition. There's like 30,000 ad agencies in New York, so there's a thousand influencer agencies.
• 29:05 - Josh: And I think I shared a story last time we spoke, but how do you listen to your gut? Do you have any, do you focus on specifically, do you think it's actually just natural to you now? Like what does that look like?
  Sherri: I think that I'm by nature very intuitive and I think that for so many years people told me, like with the Weight Watchers thing, like, you're crazy. You're crazy, you're crazy. And if you have that intuition, listen to it. Don't listen to the, I'm crying to the outside voices, right? And so it's like taking the outside voices and not listening to them is I think one of the biggest steps. It's even like you'll see it on social, like, why are you listening to all the noise? Or when I started this company and people are like, there's, there's one woman who kept calling me and really might wanna come work with you, but, and she would always find a thing and it's like the noise. But I think that it's something that you just feel. 
• 34:13 - Don't stay in your silo. Like, don't assume like so many brands, like, oh, men are not our demo. Try it, test it. Or women 50 plus are too old for us, or we need to be like with the hottest, you know, beauty people. What if maybe that's not like people want what they think they want, like it's really cool to have the hot women promote your product. Maybe that's not where your product is gonna shine, so don't stay in that silo.

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Community building insights.
• Teaching through experience.
• Marketing attention mechanics.
• Brian's podcasting journey.
• Referral importance in business.

Resources:

• Podcast Chef
• DevNoodle

Connect with Brian Mattocks:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 24:25 - If you give someone attention, you've beaten the game. The trick is how to give them the right attention in the right way. And how to direct that into something that's positive and productive with what you guys have done with the profiles and with building out the amount of research you've done, you are giving attention to somebody in a even more powerful way because the attention you're giving them is information about the most important subject in their life, right? Which is them.
• 37:36 - I had to deal with the fact that, you know, what I thought was clever and interesting wasn't effective. I had to learn that everything that you're doing in an environment like this is practice. And as practice as that experiment, you have to evolve your approach to solving those problems. And as I went through, you know, week after week, year after year, I learned what works and what doesn't in this case.
• 45:34 - Alex Garaschenko: That's really interesting. So we're starting our community with having done 60 some episodes, so 60 plus members potentially that will be coming into this community wonder, do you think that the initiation, when we start the community of all 60 coming together by us pairing people up, maybe in a way would that, how would you do the initiation for something like that where you already have a pool of people and now you're just.
  Brian Mattocks: I wouldn't have, I wouldn't take 60, I'd take a dozen, I'd take eight and make them the founding founding members, give them their own experience and then slowly bring in the rest of the, the outliers. Make sure that your initial tribe, as it were, are folks that you believe are gonna be spark plugs in your community, folks that engage folks that care and make them your founder circle.
• 47:02 - So, alright, so there's a couple ways to learn, right? I mean, you can talk about the learning styles, which has been debunked, but the best way to learn is from somebody else's experience, right? Because it's a force multiplier. I can go out and learn how to play piano by myself or I can watch somebody else who's learned how to play piano and get access to that, like in a video game, right? I'm a big video gamer, and so learning from other people is outrageously the strongest force multiplier you can get.
• 49:32 - Yeah, a podcast is great. Like how big is your network gonna be when you're sitting in your office by yourself? Even if you go to the local networking events, more often than not, the folks that are showing up there aren't sweet spot folks for you. They're not either great partner relationships or not good peer relationships. More often than not, those are a collection of local folks that don't want to sit in their office anymore. I'm not suggesting that face-to-face networking is bad, but focus driven face-to-face networking is so much better where you can control, or at the very least, get access to a limited audience that's specialized. That's why the conferences usually are a much better play when it comes to the networking conversation or do it on steroids, do it with podcasting. I can specify position an organization, I can specify size of organization, I can get folks to be on a show that really, you know, you can get down to some very, very fine level of demographic detail and you can't network that sharply that powerfully locally. You're just not gonna get there.
• 1:05:09 - The rest of it is just execution on that attention cycle. How can you give that attention in a way that is super powerful? 'cause again, the path you're on is the path to creating believers. It's lifelong, you know, partners, it's the kind of relationship that folks would give up last in the event that they had to give up a relationship because you made them feel great because you gave them attention in ways that they couldn't get any other way. So I would just say lean into that.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• The art of bad ideas vs. great outcomes.
• Building communities within in-house teams.
• External creatives enrich in-house ideas.
• Two-day co-creation sprints with experts.
• Process and creativity walk hand-in-hand.

Resources:

• Zite
• DevNoodle
• Win-Win-House

Connect with Kasper Sierslev:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 19:42 - What are this relatable truth that you and I know, but we never really talk about it. So I really like that. And I think it's for that part. I mean, I write a lot of these things down in my notebook or on my phone when whenever I notice weird things say, oh, maybe I could use this at something at some point. And I look it up whenever I have to come up with an idea.
• 20:38 - I mean, for the first, I don't know, 20, 15 years of my career, it was really scary showing your bad ideas and telling them it was like taking all your clothes off and just say, ah, here I am, look at me. But it actually, it's the best, best advice I could give anyone is just share all your bad ideas. Just lay them out there and it will at one point, if you keep going, inspire the person you're sitting next to come up with something slightly better.
• 26:04 - Sometimes we use AI to just spark something, something you can put up the walls. I mean, it's literally we put things on the wall, we [use] very old fashioned white paper black ink and so on. So if you can draw it badly and you can write it with an ink marker on a piece of paper and people understand it, then I'm sure it will work whenever you bring in photographers or 3D artists or whatever.
• 28:19 - I don't think inspiration is for amateurs at all. I think inspiration is really important. You have to visit places you haven't been before. Look at, I mean, I love going to a thousand Europe or Japan or something, and look at the advertising, look at the art, look at the streets and everything. Read magazines I haven't read before, hear new music, etc. Not necessarily to do something now it's just to fill up, as you say, you know, fill up all the brains with weird things and at one point you connect them. Creativity is really, you know, connecting.
• 42:10 - I'm not scared of the gut feeling, but I also know that if I have to sell it in afterwards, I have to do the rational thing. I was doing a lot of car advertising couple of years back and we always had like this, you don't buy a car for the meth or the specs, you buy it for how it looks or how it feels in the curves or something like that. But you need to have that kind of, we call it the pop argument when you are explaining it to your friends at the pop or your wife. You say, oh, but it really goes really fast on the mileage or it's really efficient or it's safe or something like that. But it's a feeling that you buy that makes you buy the car.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Battling COVID while still on the job.
•  Strategic shifts that spike agency wins.
• The intricacies of higher education marketing.
• Turn rejections into productive fuel.
• Insights on hiring the right agency talent.

Resources:

• Graduate Communications
• DevNoodle
• 2Bobs
• Build a Better Agency

Connect with Cheryl Broom:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 8:50 - She was in the back of the room standing and she was crying, crying. She was crying for me because she felt so bad that I'd finally, you know, gotten the nerve to get up and do this thing. And I had forgotten. And then I looked in the beginning in the front of the audience at the kids sitting on the floor. And this one really cool sixth grade girl looked up at me and it was like something out of an eighties movie. And she said, you can do it.
• 16:18 - I'm very much motivated by challenge rather than discouraged by it. And I think that's interesting like the MiraCosta example that the college, I mean women have been putting up with this for years. I mean, every woman at every community college for the last 50 years had been told that they didn't get maternity leave and they couldn't use their sick time past, you know, four to six weeks.
• 22:45 - Like I didn't set out to be like, I'm gonna destroy you. It was more like like I better get going if I'm gonna survive. It was like a fire under me to fight back to pro to protect myself and my family rather than to undermine someone.
• 25:10 - Yeah, we have, so we have a really creative team and we have people who are musicians, professional authors who, huge sports fans, even athletes. And I think that people that have that drive in their life just bring a lot of enthusiasm and challenge to the workplace. So we like to hire people who are outgoing and who have passion 'cause they bring that passion and it's makes work more interesting.
• 45:25 - I think being a good listener, I hear a lot of problems when I come in. When our agency comes in after failed relationships with other agencies, I'll always ask what, why did your last agency not work out for you? And usually it's because they didn't take the time to listen and to find out what the true problem was. They just jumped right into solutions. And now even in my scopes of work that I write, I usually put blocks of time to strategy rather than just jumping straight to a solution.

Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Discussing the future of digital communications.
• How to maintain a "clean digital footprint".
• Importance of community and EO networks.
• Cass shares acquisition and business operation insights.
• Center of Influence & Referral Network strategies.

Resources:

• Slice Communications
• DevNoodle

Connect with Cassandra Bailey:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 1:23 - I think a lot of times we get so fixated on the here and now of what does that social post say or what's in that press release? Is it AP style? Are we using an Oxford comma that like we lose sight of the fact that we have tremendous influence in the world. In a lot of cases we direct or advise CEOs on what to say and how to say it. We influence how nonprofits talk about their mission or their vision or their values. Like there really is a lot that we have to add to the world of the community and that is a superpower that we should take seriously and be intentional about.
• 8:24 -I think we would have, and I should have early on, clearly defined our roles in the company, understood our swim lanes. I think we should have allocated equity in the business based on what each of us had to bring to the table. That was an article that I read after I bought the company back that like, that's a common mistake that a lot of founders, especially friend founders start that. That they start with is that you just go in 50-50, oh, we're just gonna be 50-50. Whereas one partner might bring a certain skillset and another partner might bring a different skillset. And really 50-50 probably isn't the way that most relationships should be when they start as friends and then become businesses. that's just a default that actually isn't intentional or thoughtful and creates a lot of resentment from the very beginning. 
• 13:51 - That became a real big point of conflict in terms of how we were doing cashflow management and cash management. But neither one of us knew how to talk about it as cash management. And so that put us in a really uncomfortable and bad place around money early on.
• 28:57 - The company lost so much value and I didn't even know it. Like we weren't getting, so they took over all of our financial operations, our HR operations, which was also very attractive, right? We talked earlier about how like I had no business operations expertise and really no interest in business operations. So like they were gonna give us these platforms and this incredible technology that we could use to grow. We didn't see like bank statements or financial reports and is or like anything for months and months. 
• 45:10 - Oh my gosh. It's a whole thing about known and unknown and self-discovery and recognizing your blind spots, right? The clearing tool, the clearing tool has been an amazing thing that has changed trust and relationship in my agency. It is like six parts. It's amazing. I love it. It's the way to deal with conflict. 

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Growth through internal education.
• Effective client expectation management.
• Collaborating with other agencies.
•  Building enterprise value.
• The importance of conversion rate optimization.

Resources:

• Ardent Growth
• DevNoodle

Connect with Skyler Reeves:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 4:19 - I think it's, you know, when you're running a business, there's definitely some merit to the who not how line of thinking, I need to do it more myself. Frankly, I think if you know that you're the type of person who does like to learn or who does like to challenge themselves, I think that's where the real benefit comes from. So there's a certain, you know, when we give ourselves these self-limiting beliefs of I can't do something or I'm not capable of something that's very different from, I don't want to do something and it's the things that you think you can't do that I think are worth exploring and trying to get down to the core and really asking yourself, why do you think that way? At what point in your life did you start telling yourself that?
• 8:57 - I think it probably comes, a lot of it has to do with how you're looking at both the micro and the macro simultaneously sometimes. So in the micro, I don't think about the macro and I just think about what's the small win. But when I do feel like I'm kind of hitting against a wall, like whether I'm trying to, I mean in the world of software development, it's like a lot of times you're solving novel problems unless you're just on a team somewhere just banging out code for somebody. But in that world of solving novel problems, it's you're always gonna hit a brick wall at some point and there's always something that goes wrong. You gotta troubleshoot, you gotta figure out, you don't even know how to approach the problem. And I think what helps me push through there is the experience of, I look back and I say, things may be hard, but if I just start to calculate up the progress that I've made over a year, you start to realize what that golf looks like.
• 41:56 - Once things start to get boring, don't change. If it's making you money and it's consistent, just start hiring people to run your company at that point and just let it make money and you go solve whatever novel problems you want to on the side, but just let that thing start printing you money at that point. 'cause that's when you know you've got something. 
• 29:32 - Where you give a customer something to review like a piece of content and tell 'em to edit it. Most customers are not at trained editors, right? They're like, there's a way to edit content, there's different stages of editing, different types of editing. You have to kind of know what the writer's looking for, et cetera. Most writers or most customers are not trained editors, but everyone thinks that they are just like everyone thinks that they can write when half the time what they're really doing is just hitting keys on a keyboard. And so what happens is you ask 'em to edit it and in their mind think I have to provide feedback here, right? Like I have to, I have to do something, I have to, I don't know if it's like, I need to assert control or I need to assert my knowledge or what, right? So getting on a call with them, streamline that a ton because we can say, we're not here to talk about grammar.
• 34:34 - So it's like, look at the behavior and change the behavior. Like ask yourself like, what's the root cause here? How do I change it? And again, I think a big part of it's just fear. It's fear of telling the clients either a no or yes, but, they really don't care for the most part. Again, they just wanna know, they want the thing done. And if it's something that's like really urgent, okay, they'll let you know, they'll say, I really need this like this week, is there any way we can expedite this? And then there's your chance to make more margin just like sure, you know, 200% the cost, right? And if it's really that urgent, they'll pay it.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Trust as a team-building foundation.
• Video games' role in company culture.
• The art of mastering time management.
• The growing impact of AI on marketing.
• The synergy of PPC and SEO for success.

Resources:

• Digital Position
• DevNoodle
• The Yard
• The Game

Connect with Grant McKinstrie:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 4:56 - I mean, playing like Call of Duty and like League of Legends all these years. And also just like kind of reaching that final boss aspect of you just, you build yourself up throughout this entire time. You've learned so many different things. Oh, dark Souls is another one to get into it where it's like you just keep getting beaten down all the time. You die hundreds of times until you really like, understand all of your mistakes all the time. You make a bunch of mistakes throughout the entire period of time. And you just build up to this final outcome of like, we finally conquered the mountain, the demon, whatever it might be. And yeah, it's just like, it's the satisfaction of really like reaching an end result after just like busting your ass and like really working hard through it. 'Cause yeah, it's really easy to say that like video games are a fun thing, but there's like so many positive fundamental like building blocks that you can take out of it that you can just apply anywhere else too.
• 11:20 -  I was like, holy crap. Like this is just working out all in my favor and how could this possibly go wrong? And they liked me in the interview they're like, do you know anything about SEO? I was like, I know nothing about SEO, I have no idea what this is. And they're just like, come back next week, tell us what you learned. Go and read up as much about SEOs you possibly can and tell us what you learned coming back a week later. It's like, okay. And so I take an unbelievable amount of notes, I bring my notebook into the interview and they just said, we're really impressed that you even brought in all of your notes here. 
• 15:04 -15:04 - It was month to month to month to month constantly rinsing and repeating just how to do SEO in different forms. And I was like, I feel like I could be applying so much more knowledge and so much more value here. And that was when I approached the co-owners at the time and I was like, “Hey, I'm getting a little burnt out of SEO, I'd like to try something else”. And they're like, “Hey, this is perfect timing.” We are just looking to do like a pivot to like digital position 2.0. And they were like, “Hey, would you have any interest in trying PPC?” and I was like, "Absolutely!".
• 21:24 - I think is always the biggest part of trying to establish a process is who is responsible for everything at every step of the way too so that nobody is ever confused or nothing gets left undone because somebody assumes that somebody else is going to take care of it. So it was, as I was working through that, I started to knock out a bunch of other process client offboarding, employee onboarding, employee offboarding, employee training, pretty much everything that just sets a foundation of like where the business is going to be able to succeed from. 
• 35:51 - I think the, yeah, the trust element is so big and I don't know, I think it's, I think a lot of it does come from who is making the hiring decision to, like, the hiring is the biggest part of it is one, initially understanding and defining like who is that right fit to bring into the company, which we've certainly had some misses in the past and ultimately like we've, we've lost a few people because of that, but no one's gonna be perfect at hiring to begin with.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• The Power of Preparation
• Building a 'Solve City' Culture
• Pioneering a Team of Point Guards
• Embracing the "Mamba Mentality"
• Leveraging a Neutral Mindset

Resources:

• Unrivaled
• DevNoodle

Connect with Valerie Tyson:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 6:16 -  I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. But when you are on a team, your teammates don't let you fail because everyone wants to win. And so you coach up the weakest link. So I look, when I built my agency, I wanted to do something different than other agencies were doing. And you can't teach someone how to be a good teammate, but if they have the drive and it's also hard to teach effort, like that's almost impossible to teach.
• 8:33 - You don't have to be sick to get better. Everyone always thinks to be, well you have to be sick. And so I think that's not a Kobe quote. We work with a kind of a neutral mindset company and I was listening to one of their podcasts this week and they talked about, like, their quote was like, hey, and it was like really tongue in cheek, like, you don't have to be sick to get better. And I think that's just so like healthy. Like I, I don't, I don't, I wake up every day and I'm like, how can I get better? It used to be when I had like, you know, not such a neutral mindset, I was like, how am I less bad today? How do I make things less bad today? Which is a terrible attitude, but once you're like, how do I get better?
• 11:57 - So like, even if there's a challenge or someone think like someone took like in power says you can't do something, like I still think it's possible. So if someone tells you you can't, like, what do you mean you can't? Like, I mean obviously you can't like break into someone's house. Like I'm not talking about that. So no one do that who's listening to this. But you know, if it's something that you think is possible and you have a solution for it, like lay out your plan and test it and fail fast and often and figure it out. But I think that you can always challenge people when they tell you it's now too.
• 20:03  I don't get it right all the time. I mean, I probably get it right wrong more than I do, right? But I know now, like when you talked about like, hey, you know, like benchmarking and being down, like I know when I'm in it, like everyone gets in it, right? You're like, oh, I'm not enough or can I do more episodes of a podcast? Can I win more clients? Like whatever it might be. But like it's enough to know that it's happening and you're like, wait, like those are good problems to have.
• 29:45 - Everyone's not for everyone forever. And that's okay. Everyone's gotta go and explore and do everything they want. Maybe they found something one day, they probably come here and question that after that. But you know, to create like that initial commitment, like run through walls for me while you're here, until you don't want to anymore or there's something else and then great like then it's not, you know, it used to be people were like afraid about like, oh I wanna leave or I might wanna do this or can I try something else in the office? I feel like we're a little bit more fluid that we can talk about those things and those conversations are much more open.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Cash Miller self-taught SEO and grew his website traffic by collaborating with business coaches and using their content.
• Cash's first true client was a mergers and acquisitions company, and he ran their Google ads while still in Afghanistan.
• Transitioning from a veteran community to a group of fresh recruits brings about a significant change in experience and skill levels.
• The bigger an agency gets, the more challenging it becomes to maintain consistent communication, making it important to establish communication processes early on.
• Choosing a location for your agency should consider factors like political stability and the potential for disruption.
• Each episode of "Business Wars" consists of multiple stories of competing businesses.
• It uses voiceover actors and scenes to create a fictionalized yet informative narrative.

Resources:

• Titan Digital
• DevNoodle

Connect with Cash Miller:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 2:07 - So I ended up building my first website and I wrote a bunch of content, you know, like a hundred articles on, everything from accounting to marketing to management as you know. But eventually I got to the point where I was like, I don't wanna keep writing all this content and I also need traffic. You know, so how do I get traffic? 
• 17:01- I don't think business owners should worry about everybody's opinions, when it comes to your own staff, take it as input. But you know, if you think it's the right thing to do, then you're gonna want to do that. And if people disagree with it, they'll leave up their own accord.
• 22:11 - My team was kind of pushing a little bit like, yeah, so let's put together a plan. And I'm in the background going, no, not this guy. This is not a, this is not a good fit for us. And I was getting flashbacks of some previous clients that were just really difficult. And I said, look, this guy's a referral. We need to talk to the source that referred. And sure enough, that guy says, yeah, this guy's really high maintenance. I'm like, no, we'll take a pass on this. And so that's one of the things that you help other business owners, it's like, what are some of the red flags? So that kind of a shared experience. We've all dealt with it. Everybody, you know, everybody's had that bad client experience. And then you also have things, because as business owners you have a lot in common.
• 26:28 - The constant in the agency world is “I have too much work. Not enough people.” If you talk to the employees, that's what they're always going to say. They're like, you signed this next project, we don't have enough time for it or something. And so how do you, so communication is always one of those things, except for the biggest clients, it always gets put on the back burner, you know, 'cause it still takes time to write an email. And even if you have account managers, but they're busy onboarding new accounts, people forget the easiest [stuff] you wouldn't have to onboard as many new accounts if you took care of the ones you had. 'cause you would have less churn. 
• 43:29 - I could see warning signs all over the place that this was not gonna be a good relationship. And so I have to ignore those dollar signs. And if you do that, you know, I say you can grow your business and, but I do think I've seen some agencies that are so niche down that they're gonna struggle to grow. They're too specific, always remember if you're in business, did you create for yourself a job or a company?

Henry McIntosh is a marketing strategist and Director at Twenty One Twelve Marketing, specializing in creating predictable lead-generation systems for high-ticket businesses. With a knack for reinvigorating marketing strategies and reaching even the most elusive markets, Henry's agency has helped a diverse range of businesses scale quickly. He's also the co-founder of GLOW Festivals, bringing Alpine-themed entertainment to winter music festivals. 

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency:

• Proposing commercial collaborations as a strategic approach to business growth
• Positioning as a lead gen agency with a focus on partnering with complementary businesses
• Leveraging know, like, and trust to extend reach and drive results
• Reflecting on successful case studies to determine the most effective positioning strategy
• Offering industry-agnostic collaboration opportunities to a wide range of businesses
• Finding the right incentives is crucial for keeping introducers engaged.
• The power of natural, conversational episodes can result in valuable insights and content.

Resources:

• Twenty One Twelve Marketing
• DevNoodle
• Podcast Chef

Connect with Henry McIntosh:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 7:13 - “We break collaborations down into three segments. So the kind of thing you're talking about, which we'll be doing is what we call a value exchange. So, it is a win-win. So although I'm your target market, I'm winning because my personal brand is getting further out there. I might, you know, be heard by a marketing director who wants to work with us, right? For you guys leveraging me, I have a lot of agencies in my own network. So when the podcast episode comes out, I'm going to share it. So you are leveraging my trust within that network. So we call it value exchange, we call it co-created content.”
• 12:51 - “So we started off as creative collaborations and what we realized was: it was positioning us against creative agencies and, weirdly, although we can get super creative and we can bring that in, why clients like working with us is because we look at the… we get involved in their business, right? It's like, well how much margin can you actually afford to give away? You know, okay, we're only going to pay commissions on the first piece of business done. So we've got to look at customer lifetime value within that. But we get, we become quite close to a lot of our clients because they rely so heavily on us because we're advising them on, you know, that business development rather than it just being straight up marketing focus.”
• 06:09 - “So the way we position our podcast is there's a company we work with, Podcast Chef, they produce our podcast, they help us with some of the outreach and their value prop, which we bought into was that you can create a podcast for your network of best clients essentially, which for us is marketing agencies. We're a white labeled development partner for marketing agencies. And so that's exactly is what we did. As we reach out to marketing agency owners, we talk to them, we don't always pitch them, but if there's a need, it becomes a good resource for us.”
• 03:27 - “One of the lessons that he said, if you want to really grow as a business or as a business person, you need to go and talk with other people outside of your business. Like go and talk with like the artists and go talk with the engineers or whoever and that's how you're really going to grow.”
• 16:56 - Alex: “I told her about the show, and she said, oh, so you interview marketing agencies. She's like, we are going to, we're going to need a lot of help as I create the strategy for them, we're going to need people to implement. She's like, could you make introductions? I was like, I have a list of every single marketing agency we've interviewed, every service that they do. Let me know when you're ready. And so, yeah.”
  Henry: “Yeah. That's cool. That's really cool. It, it is a major resource right. To have that at your fingertips as well. And you know, if you were our client, we'd probably be saying that there are probably ways you can monetize that as well. Like whether you look at it as we, you know, got a big list, but are they going to refer back to you? Right? So if they're not, do you make it a commission? So we'll introduce you but we'll take 10% of the first year's earnings Right? Or something like that.”

Henry McIntosh is a marketing strategist and Director at Twenty One Twelve Marketing, specializing in creating predictable lead-generation systems for high-ticket businesses. With a knack for reinvigorating marketing strategies and reaching even the most elusive markets, Henry's agency has helped a diverse range of businesses scale quickly. He's also the co-founder of GLOW Festivals, bringing Alpine-themed entertainment to winter music festivals.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency:

• Selling branded shot glasses to college halls as a creative business venture.
• Referrals and reciprocation lead to the right projects and successful execution.
• A 30-page white paper and cold outreach to competitors resulted in conversations and increased sales by 80%.
• Creating a balanced give-and-take within a community fosters meaningful relationships.
• Collaboration and partnerships with other agencies can lead to mutual benefits.

Resources:

• Twenty One Twelve Marketing
• DevNoodle
• The Diary of a CEO
• The Hard Things About Hard Things

Connect with Henry McIntosh:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 19:35 - “When you're younger you think every business is kind of you're going direct to consumer. And you're so focused on the consumer, especially when you have a product like that. And what we realized was it was so much easier to find the right individual, hit them with the right message at the right time, which included a lot of benefits to them. Because they've got this budget to spend and they don't really know what to put in these packs.”
• 26:55 - “And what we realized was every single case study we had, there was an element of partnership marketing a really strong element. So I kind of looked at that and felt really, really stupid when it kind of hit me slap in the face and I turned to my team and I was like, we're rebranding to the commercial collaborations agency. And they were like “that sounds a bit impulsive”. I wanted to do it instantly. As soon as I saw it, I was like “This is it. This is who we are, this is our point of difference”.”
• 30:30 - “There's that Richard Branson thing of never saying no, just figuring out how to do it, which actually is just really dangerous advice in marketing because it takes you years to figure it out and then it's changed, but it kind of encourages you then to refer. And what happens when you start referring really openly and being really generous with it is people start to reciprocate and people start to give you leads back which are right for you. And when you get the right projects and you have the processes in place to execute for them, that's when things start to fall into place, really.”
• 37:00 - “Our client wins because they generate referrals at scale that don't waste their small teams time because they're coming from highly educated referrals who understand what quality lead looks like to them, and the trust is already built. So they can convert. So that's kind of the value exchange and we've got some other examples of that where we've generated enterprise-level leads by actually partnering one of our clients with their own clients to create content.”
• 01:02:45 - “What we focus on with our clients is becoming trusted advisors to them. And sometimes that means that detriment to ourselves. So we have a rule here that if we're upselling to a client, do we genuinely believe they need what we're selling to them? And if they don't, don't bother selling it because a lot of our clients we've worked with five years now, we have a really good relationship with the founder or the owner. And I don't want to jeopardize that for a quick buck.”

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.

• Wheels Up Collective was born during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on helping companies transition to a digital-forward strategy.
• Lean budgets force marketers to be more prescriptive and strategic.
• Rigor and accountability are necessary to avoid wasting money.
• Foster strong relationships through one-on-one interactions and build trust with your team members.
• Incorporate user-generated content to expand the reach of your community and share success stories.
• Focus on your strengths and partner with other agencies to provide a comprehensive service.
• Stay connected with clients even when referring business to others to maintain a strong network.

Resources:

• Wheels Up Collective
• DevNoodle
• Hard Fork Podcast

Connect with Amy Winner:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 00:47 - Well, you know, like every little girl when she's four or five wants a pony. And I was one of the brats who got one. I have horses in my blood. It's what keeps me working. So I can play at the barn, but yeah, I started grooming my own horses when I was young because I was a barn rat and wanted to do it myself. And, you know my parents said, if you wanna do this sport, it's expensive, you gotta figure out how to pay for it. And so I started hustling the other people at the barn and doing some work for them and built up quite the clientele base and ultimately ended up making enough money to put a down payment on my first house when I was, I think 25. So it was quite lucrative.
• 7:10 - Nobody really knew what Zoom was or the general public didn't know what Zoom was before the pandemic. So there was just this huge gap of talent out there to help companies adopt a more digital forward footprint or strategy. We actually had people reaching out to us that colleagues from Seattle saying, “Hey, can you help with this? Can you help with this?” And the next thing you know we got the gang back together. 
• 28:54 - It's so addictive. Which one of us wouldn't admit that like at two o'clock in the morning we're scrolling doom scrolling through like TikTok because the algorithm has it figured out, you know? I think especially in industries where you wouldn't think TikTok would be a hit. Like we've had clients use it and it's a small slice, it's a small slice of people, but if you reach the right people, it's not that expensive to do. We actually have a TikTok celebrity on the Wheels Up team. She's like an accidental TikTok celebrity. She ended up like a million followers without trying.
• 33:23 - I think you need to know what you're good at. I think like, especially in the early days, it's really easy to want to get like any business that you can, and I get it like you just need to get revenue through the door, but the wrong fit is gonna slow you down and it's gonna waste your time and it's gonna, you know, it's the opportunity cost of the, of the jobs that you missed and the opportunity cost of time that you didn't spend pitching and building the right relationships. 
• 34:32 - When I think about engagements that didn't work well, that's usually what happened. The expectation setting was not appropriate. You know, we didn't do a good enough job setting expectations and saying, no, we don't want this work when they pushed back or they were a little too early stage. So I would say know exactly who you are, sit down, write it down, write your messaging and positioning. It's so hard to do. It's so hard to do, but it's so hard to walk away from business.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast:

• Involving the whole team in different aspects of the business promotes skill development and interests.
• Brand ambassadors must excel in debating and pitching to successfully represent a brand.
• Radio and television professionals possess skills that easily translate into digital marketing and social media.
• New taco places like Barrio Queen provide an opportunity for easier start-up and customization.
• The rise in interest in owning businesses is fueled by people wanting to escape traditional corporate jobs.
• Connecting with people who may not be able to help you now can lead to mutual benefits in the future.
• The evolution of the podcast can create unexpected opportunities, such as forming a community.

Resources:

• Brand J
• DevNoodle
• Social Geek

Connect with Jack Monson:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 16:58 - I always say this, anybody who wrote TV or radio commercials in 15 or 32nd intervals is awesome at digital marketing and social media because it's about taking this big thing, this story that the client wants to put every word in the dictionary in there and make it, you know, an hour long. And it's like, okay, how do we boil that down to 15 seconds? Right? And that to me is what digital marketing and storytelling in social media is right now, is taking this big story, boiling it down to a headline and a little bit of information to keep them engaged.
• 06:07 - I think in the marketing agency world, in lots of industries, we've got a lot of people who are, the analogy I always use is selling cars, but they don't know how to drive, right? And if you're going to be out there promoting a marketing agency and promoting these clients, you might wanna know how to, how a website works fundamentally, right? You might want to know what it's like to come up with a 600 word blog, right? You might want to show yourself on some videos.
• 26:26 - I think that's the interesting part to me that all of the people out there who are interested in owning their own business, they all have different reasons for wanting to do so. They all have different, you know, sort of levels of investment. They all have different backgrounds. You know, nobody, nobody grows up saying, someday I'm going to invest in a Taco franchise. Right? You know, most people are coming from another part of their life and they're like, now I want to own my own thing. And I think that's where this entire industry has really skyrocketed in the past few years. 
• 44:53 - I think, biggest thing that some agencies get wrong is they're not focused on doing 1, 2, 3, or four things really well. They're trying to do 75 things and nobody does 75 things well. Right? So find the things that you're really good at, focus on that, and then maybe partner with up with some other agencies, to help with the other things.
• 36:44- The secret to networking is networking when you don't need to, right? Too many people will want to network with you when they need something, right? When they're looking for a new job or they want to be a guest on your podcast. I get that all the time. And it's like, if you would've wanted to build that relationship up with me a year or two ago, I could help you a lot more, right? But the time to start networking isn't when you've made a decision to move on. It's to start early. 

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast:

• Building a strong network and leveraging local events helped the agency gain clients quickly.

• Slow growth and prioritizing work-life balance were key factors in the agency's success.

• Collaboration with other marketing agencies can lead to mutually beneficial partnerships.

• Building in public allows for transparency, engagement, and the creation of loyal supporters.

Resources:

• Content Journey
• DevNoodle
• Patrick Lencioni
• My Marketing Assistant

Connect with Lindsay Miller:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 25:18 - Our mistakes tend to be very visible in marketing, which is also like a little side note to that, it's okay to make mistakes, and if we don't have clients that can forgive us for not being a hundred percent, a hundred percent of the time and they don't deserve our work and they don't deserve our time and attention.
• 14:51 - Well we're a very much “eat your own dog food” kinda company. We also aren't looking to scale to a gazillion dollars. So I think that's two pieces, right, is I know we want slow growth, we don't want fast growth. And I also know like when too much is too much because I remember I don't wanna miss those birthdays.
• 20:25 - I think that in order to be successful, no matter your industry, you just have to always be innovating and you always have to be like looking at the next thing. And so we're talking about it. I hate mentioning it, I get annoyed every time, but we're all talking about AI. But you know, it's been around machine learning, it's been around for a really, really long time and we forget those pieces. But I do think like we were using AI inside of content journey two years ago, so like barely baby little business, and people were already talking about it to speed up our processes.
• 1:21 - I think it's a pendulum swing for years of, I don't know, feeling like if we were struggling with our mental health or we weren't bouncing back from something that happened in our lives, that we were messed up or something was wrong with us. Right? And so I think that our culture entirely is kind of going the opposite way, which is wonderful. We all get to talk about it more and support each other at work and home and in our personal relationships. 
• 28:18 - I like having fun and I like helping other people succeed too. I think that this world is vast and there's so much business to be had, no matter the industries we focus on or the work that we do. And you know, all tides lift the boats right kind of thing. And so I work with people that are competitive to me. I work with auxiliary services, I do all of that. If we align in goals and values and can trust each other to do great work for the clients at the end of the day, there's a lot of ways I'll work with people. 

Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast:

• Andy's coding projects include an AI-integrated platform for strategic planning and a series of micro products.
• By combining AI with methodologies and structures, Andy aims to democratize strategic planning.
• Identifying personal strengths and weaknesses helps in finding the right team members.
• Recognizing that thinking one knows everything is a huge mistake in sales and marketing.
• Building partnerships with other agencies can be beneficial, especially when they complement each other's strengths.
• Hiring individuals with a passion for execution and a willingness to get involved in day-to-day tasks is valuable.

Resources:

• Insivia
• DevNoodle
• The E-Myth
• EOS - Entrepreneurial Operating System for Businesses

Connect with Andy Halko:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 10:53 - I've always talked about like bias and you go into a company and you talk to their salesperson that's been there 15 years and they're gonna tell you, this is how our clients think. Your sample size is only the people you've talked to. AI ignores that. We come in and do personas and we gather information from AI and it's using a wide range of different sources and data and all of a sudden you take it from, you know, the sales guy that comes in and says, I know our customers better than anybody else in the world and here's what they think and here's what you should do an ad about. And we know we're all sitting there going, oh yeah, okay, whatever. 
• 22:02 - “I've said for years the, you know, another effect, the Wiley Coyote effect of like, you see those cartoons and he runs off the cliff into the air and he's going until he looks down and realizes there's no ground beneath him. You know? And I think there's a little bit of that in every entrepreneur, but I definitely think it's strong in me of like, “just go forward and as long as you're moving forward and you don't look down, like you are not gonna fail.”
• 24:02 - “It's funny when I look at websites and designs, I try and like put myself in a bit of a childlike mentality of “I don't get it.” you know, that kid that keeps asking why, why, why? From a standpoint of “that's how people are.” They're, even if they're super smart when they're looking at stuff, they're looking at it with half their brain, you know, and they're not paying attention, they're not reading fully. I feel like you have to remove that bias of  [I think] people care about this or I know so much about it.”
• 14:58 - “If you're a great designer and you decide that you want to open a design agency, if you think that you're gonna be designing, you better either find somebody else to lead the company; or you better change your whole like, personality and outlook. I kind of had to hit that point at one point where it's like going from that executor programmer to being able to go do speaking engagements and networking events and sales and all that stuff to really actually turn it into something.”
• 25:46 - “We actually have some with different agencies where they have strengths, you know, especially ones that are stronger in design. But we've got a little bit more of the technology and programming chops behind us. I mean, I think a lot of agencies out there, they've got their specialty. I think sometimes making sure that you realize what your specialty is and being able to admit like, I need to bring somebody else in for this or not is, is probably the biggest barrier to get over. But when you do, you can find really great relationships out there.”

Alex Oesterle, CEO of Blue Bear Creative and host of the FMN Podcast, is a seasoned entrepreneur and expert in engaging millennial consumers through social media. With nearly a decade of experience, Alex's background spans digital marketing, finance, and operations. His insights into marketing to the millennial demographic and his success in building and leading a social media-focused digital agency make him an excellent guest for discussions on modern marketing strategies and entrepreneurship. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency:

• Alex transitioned from a career in finance to marketing while helping friends with their CPG companies.
• Engaging with customers is essential for building a successful brand.
• The content video forward ad strategy offers significant opportunities in the social media space.
• User-generated content will continue to be an essential part of content strategy.
• Social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram are integrating features for e-commerce.
• Blue Bear Creative offers comprehensive social media services, making them an ideal partner for marketing agencies in need of social media expertise.
• Posting at least one TikTok per day, preferably two, can help increase visibility and traction.

Resources:

• Blue Bear Creative - Social Media Agency
• DevNoodle
• The Lean Startup (Book)

Connect with Alex Oesterle:

• LinkedIn

Connect with our hosts:

• Josh Hoffman - LinkedIn
• Alex Garashchenko - LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 33:40 - “I mean social [media] changes so much on a month-to-month basis, even faster. I think the user-generated or user-forward side of content is going to continue to be a huge part of content strategy. I think there's a lot of smart partnerships and integrations that are starting to happen with the platforms themselves. TikTok for example, rolling out shoppable, the e-commerce features that Instagram has, but I think they're integrating really well with Shopify and into the website side of things.”
• 38:25 - “Probably say 60% of the work that we do at least is around the content creation. Whether that's planning, presenting the creative ideas based around a content calendar, putting together a content calendar. That's a big part of it. And as things have shifted from being this high production value kind of sexy or food porn, which I hate that term, but for us it's very, everything that we do is very food forward. There's still a time and a place for that, but started to enlist creators and build, curate a group of creators that we can kind of turnkey knockout content that is more of that user-generated type of look and feel more effectively.”
• 41:05 - “That user-generated type of content or the creative shooting that as an agency is very tough. Because you need talent, somebody on screen, ideally somebody different across brands, multiple different people across different clients. So it's not one person on every client's video. And then you need a location that looks like where you want to shoot, and then you need a crew there. Which is really why we started leaning into that creator pool. Individuals at their own house, just coaching them through how to shoot stuff, directing them remotely. So it's a one-person crew, one person shooting themselves on an iPhone. And it solves a lot of pain points that the traditional agency model or production model is kind of restricted to in terms of production”
• 49:25 - “I think a lot of people get hung up on follower numbers and impressions, but really the quality of your interactions and your fan base is the most important. And you build that through genuine one-on-one connections, whether that's through good content that leans into an insight of a specific audience or literally talking to somebody one-on-one by a community manager.”
• 17:00 - “We were talking about how we're trying to build this community and everything. And what I got of what you just said is it's not necessarily if you build it, they will come. You need to engage. It's not like you just put the social media out there or we just put the podcast out there and people just come and beyond this community. We're trying to give our guests a lot more, whether it's support or referrals or whatever it is, but we obviously understand it's not just let's start a Slack page and maybe do a round table like it, it has to be a little bit more engaging. And a lot of what we're trying to do is trying to focus on how you build the habits.”