Episode 212 – Amy Anderson

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Automated Transcription

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[00:00:00] One is strategy before tactics. You know, you don’t want us to begin implementing right away without thinking, without asking, without interviewing five of your ideal clients, without doing a competitive positioning review, without doing a messaging blueprint, a brand guideline so that we are all operating from the same place.

[00:00:20] So it’s very important to do that analysis up front before we start implementing campaigns and concepts and writing and making web changes and doing social media. And it requires a little bit of patience. This isn’t two months, it’s maybe five weeks, four weeks. So I think that’s important. The second is when you build it, they do not just come.

[00:00:41] That is so true.

[00:00:43] And it’s still happening, Richard. Like we started this a long time ago and it’s still happening. They won’t just come. So you can’t build a large eCommerce site and invest $500,000 in products and think it’s going to sell because you’re there. And even if you have media. There is an infinite amount of traffic and addressable market in some cases.

[00:01:05] In some cases it’s broader, but those budgets matter that you do need to invest in boosting some paid, you know, some mid funnel, Google PPC, AdWords activity. They don’t just come no matter how phenomenal you are, your product, the awareness, there’s so much clutter. There’s so much out there you have to break through and it has to be budget plus creative plus product.

[00:01:31] Heroes are an inspiring group of people. Every one of them from the larger than life comic book heroes, you see on the big silver screen, the everyday heroes that let us live the privileged lives we do. Every hero has a story to tell from the doctor saving lives at your local hospital, the war veteran down the street, who risked his life for our freedom to the police officers and the firefighters who risk their safety to ensure ours.

[00:01:48] Every hero is special and every story worth telling. But there is one class of heroes that I think is often ignored the entrepreneur, the creator, the producer, the ones who look at the problems in this world and think to themselves, you know what? I can fix that, I can help people, I can make a difference.

[00:02:01] Then they go out and do exactly that by creating a new product or introducing a new service, some go on to change the world. Others make a world of difference to their customers. Welcome to The Hero Show. Join us, as we pull back the masks on the world’s finest HERO preneurs and learn the secrets to their powers, their success and their influence.

[00:02:16] So you can use those secrets to attract more sales, make more money and experience more freedom in your business. I’m your host, Richard Matthews. And we are on in 3…2…1…

[00:02:25] Hello, and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name’s Richard Matthews. And today I have live on the line. Amy Anderson, are you there, Amy?

[00:02:31] I’m here.

[00:02:33] Awesome. Glad to have you here. I know we were just chatting a little bit before we got on line. You said you were coming in from Florida where in Florida?

[00:02:40] I’m in Naples, Florida. Another day in the swampy summer paradise.

[00:02:43] Yeah, I feel like most Floridians have like lied to me my whole life. Cuz we got stuck here in 2020 in the pandemic. It was one of those things like we pulled in and then like they shut the state down and the whole country down and like everyone canceled all our reservations. We spent 11 months in Casimi in 2020 right in the middle of summer. And I remember thinking to myself, we’re gonna hate this because Florida is supposedly the worst in the summer and then come to find out Florida’s actually amazing in the summertime.

[00:03:11] And like, it rarely gets over 90 degrees. And as soon as it does it rains and drops it down, I’m like, Hm,I think I love Florida.

[00:03:18] Well, I think it’s a best kept secret or it was, I think before people got a little bit more mobile, but you’re absolutely right. It doesn’t get over a hundred.

[00:03:26] I was just in Atlanta with clients last week and I haven’t really felt heat like that compared to here. It’s so humid. It’s swampy, but who doesn’t wanna have, you know, sort of breathe some water every now and then I think it’s nice.

[00:03:37] Yeah. I do tell people, you’ve gotta bring your breathing spoon, so you can scoop the air and chew on it to breathe. But other than that, it’s really nice.

[00:03:45] I think it keeps us looking young. I do. That’s what I convince myself and go out for a run in that hot weather and your body will show you what you’re made of. I think, so.

[00:03:54] Absolutely. So I wanna start real quick with just a brief introduction and then we’ll dive into your story.

[00:03:59] So you’re the founder of Wild Coffee Marketing and which is a marketing consulting firm that helps businesses grow better team of thinkers and doers means that we handle everything from strategy all the way through execution. And you operate as like an extension of your client’s teams. So what I wanna start with is what is it that you guys are known for? Who do you serve? What do you do for them?

[00:04:19] That’s such a good question. We are actually a team of client side marketers. So when you look at a marketing firm or an ad agency, a lot of times that’s an agency function. We actually serve as the marketing team for companies from stretch zone, which is one of the largest, fastest growing stretch franchises in the country to Carolina skiff boat manufacturers.

[00:04:40] So we don’t just get handed a strategy and we implement campaigns. We actually are the strategists and then implement campaigns on top of it. So we’re doing the thinking and the doing at the same time.

[00:04:53] So you guys step in like where someone might hire a marketing director, they’re actually bringing your team on to take that whole role.

[00:05:01] Exactly. Because right now in marketing, Richard, like people are expected to go so wide and so deep with the skill set. So imagine an in-house team wherein you have to have an SEO person, you have to have a pay per click person. You have to have a long form writer, a short form writer, digital designers, print designers, creative directors is just so many people now.

[00:05:19] And so many required skills that it makes sense to have a fractional team that you hire, but it’s led by strategists. So our consultants are actually client side marketers, and they have a minimum of 10 to 15 years experience. So our clients have sort of a true chief marketing officer, true VP of marketing, running a business.

[00:05:38] Yeah, that’s amazing. It’s one of the things that like we talk about with our podcasting agency, like, you know, you can bring podcasting in house if you want, but there’s a lot of skill sets you have to bring in house, right? You have to bring in someone who has to do auto editing and one who knows how to do video editing.

[00:05:52] And you have to have a graphic designer and you have to have a writer and you have to have someone who can do transcriptions and knows how to do the SEO optimizations for all those things. That like, if you can find one person that has all those skills, you’ve hit the jackpot, but that’s not like a normal everyday thing.

[00:06:06] That’s a lot of skills. And a lot of experience you have to bring in, in order to do that in house where, when you bring someone in like your team or like our team, we’ve already done all of that work and we can operate sort of a lot more.

[00:06:20] Or you get a generalist right? So you get a generalist, it’s almost like a hybrid bike. Right. So it’s like not great on the road and not great on trails, but it’s okay at both. And then it’s kind of an all right experience. It’s sort of the same here. Right? You get a generalist who can only go so deep in several areas. So the design’s okay.

[00:06:40] Maybe the campaigns are performing all right. But they’re sort of basic. We have these skills, but you don’t have to hire, you don’t need a social media person, maybe full time. We have a team of five. But you need some of that skill, but it needs to be really good. So we tend to have very long term engagements with our clients.

[00:06:56] We’ve been around for five years. Some of our clients have been with us that entire time.

[00:06:59] Yeah. That’s amazing. Same thing with our agency. We’ve only been around for two, but our clients, some of our clients have been with us this whole time. But the thing that I find interesting too, is that like the demand in the marketplace is becoming more sophisticated.

[00:07:11] So it’s more difficult to get away with the generalist type work and have it still be effective. And the longer you keep doing that, the less effective you’re gonna see it get over time. As the market again, becomes more sophisticated.

[00:07:22] That’s such a good observation, cuz I agree with you. I mean even CEO you know, we usually report to CEOs, so we will replace the CMO or the VP of marketing or the marketing director.

[00:07:32] And even they know about SEO trends, even though they know that Google analytics 4 is coming, they have benchmark data for email open rates. Like I think that average CEO is rather savvy as well in this market. And so it’s just not good enough to have somebody who’s pretty good at several things. You need a fractional team that’s really good at 10 plus skill sets.

[00:07:54] Yeah. And that’s not even the only benefit either a fractional team is generally less expensive.

[00:07:59] Correct.

[00:08:00] And you don’t have to build all the processes in your business to make it function. And it’s almost more like plug and play. Where you can bring someone in and put the whole team sort of in that place without having to build the hiring and the HR and the processes and everything that goes along with that, people think, you know, I can hire one person and they’ll do this stuff, but there’s all the backend things that go into running that team.

[00:08:22] Plus the overhead of that, right? Yeah. The overhead, I mean, we estimate we’re about 40% cheaper, or I shouldn’t say cheaper 40%, less expensive than running an in-house team because they’re not carrying 401k and 401k matching. You’re not carrying health insurance. And then imagine how accountable we are.

[00:08:40] Because as an outsourced firm, as a consulting firm, we’re always driving towards results. We’re trying to keep our jobs all the time in these engagements. We don’t lock clients into a year long agreement. I think that’s sort of gone by the wayside. I think everyone has a parachute at any time. I think that’s just the way business has shifted that you can cancel within 30 days or a short period of time.

[00:09:01] And so we are always fighting to do the best work we can. And I’m not saying there’s complacency in house teams, but I think it’s different. It’s a different energy and dynamic, I think.

[00:09:11] Yeah. Yeah. Because your agency have to fight to earn your business because as difficult as it might be, there’s a bajillion other agencies that claim to do whatever it is that you do. So if you can’t deliver the results that they’re going to go and shop around.

[00:09:26] Exactly, and I like it like that, I have to say, I like pressure. I like the fight. I like the excitement. I like the pace. And I don’t know that I could always say that I was mostly in a corporate role in most of my life.

[00:09:39] And when I made this transition into entrepreneurship I wasn’t sure that I would like that. I also didn’t think that I could sell, but if you’re not selling all the time, you don’t have a business. So I learned that quickly.

[00:09:49] Yeah, that is accurate. I’ve decided selling and having some sort of a recurring service are like your two key.

[00:09:57] Yes. The MRR, the monthly recurring revenue. Well, you know, what’s interesting is sometimes if you hold a client or customer for a long period of time, we love the predictability, things like that. But also you evolve as a business and that customer or client that was ideal five years ago may not be the case now.

[00:10:17] Yeah. You know, you may outgrow some of your client base, but the key is to be able to replace them and be okay with not growing. I mean, we have very aggressive one year, three or five year plans, quarterly plans. I mean, we run our small company, like a big one. We are 17 people currently full time, maybe five freelancers.

[00:10:34] So a total of 22 and, and we’re really aggressive about growth, but sometimes you need to sort of have some client attrition. We think 10 to 15% a year is probably healthy for most businesses.

[00:10:45] Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. We’re not quite to the point where we’re starting to attrition, we’re still on the early side of growth for ours, but yeah, it’s definitely true.

[00:10:52] And I’ve seen that in my last agency that you get to places with customers that you said yes to early on that eventually are not, they’re no longer a good fit either because they’re looking for something smaller or different than what you offer, or they don’t fit with your team anymore.

[00:11:06] Right. Or you may elevate pricing and you may price yourself out. You know, with them, or you may get to the point where you’ve sort of deployed everything that you can do for them. And maybe a fresh set of eyes is not a terrible thing. When you are designed to grow top line revenue, you know, to have another set of eyes of it, they maybe they need things refreshed.

[00:11:28] If you’re still feel like you’re churning out really good ideas, really good product. The rates are what you need them to be. I think you keep going. But I do think it is good when you’re growing a business to say, you know, is there some attrition that we could generate here that would benefit the business and make room for new clients or customers?

[00:11:44] Yep. Absolutely. So I wanna talk a little bit about your origin story, like how you got started with Wild Coffee Marketing. And, you know, we talk on this show, every good hero has a origin story. It’s the thing that made them into the hero they are today. And we wanna hear that story essentially, were you bit by a radioactive spider that made you wanna start a marketing company or did you start in a job and eventually moved to become an entrepreneur? Basically, where did you come from?

[00:12:06] Well, I was a corporate person, so I call myself the accidental entrepreneur. I graduated from chapel hill in college and got a job at 17 magazine in New York City. And it was sort of a process of elimination for me. I really sort of took what I liked from every job as I moved through my career early on.

[00:12:23] So 17, I was in print magazine. I was in print medium and I would look and say, gosh, Subscription rates and readers per copy. How do we really know this is working? How do you measure it? How do we know we’re making a difference for advertisers? And I ended up moving on to Calvin Klein where I did broadcast advertising for fragrances.

[00:12:40] So then you have Nielsen ratings, you have radio ratings. So at least I felt that there was more that was quantifiable. And mind you I’ve been doing this for 30 years, Richard. So then, this is when the internet came about in 1995, 96, and I really wanted to do pure internet play with more data. And I ended up being part of the original group that launched MiTimes.com.

[00:13:03] So it was an entrepreneurial group launching the online version of the New York times where we turned it on at two o’clock in the morning. I remember they’ve written a book about sort of that night now and the leadership then, and it was incredible, but then it was one of the first media properties that required registration.

[00:13:19] So we knew how many people who, and this was early on in that. And so I learned that data was really sort of critical for me. I liked being able to quantify the good that we were doing for advertisers. And then I was in a series of sort of large corporate marketing leadership roles, and I had a lifestyle change.

[00:13:36] So I took three years off of work to be with my young children who are not so young anymore. I have teenage dragons, 15 and 18, and I got divorced and had to start over. And so I had to really look at what I could do, how I could support my family. And my parents invested in a consulting business for me.

[00:13:57] And that was really investing in me, they gave me 12 months and said, see if you can sustain yourself inside of 12 months, I had never started a business. I had never worked for myself. I was used to reporting up into leadership. I did that very well. And I started doing social media strategy and restaurant PR in Miami.

[00:14:17] And slowly gained a following and then rejoined my boss from my last position who has now been my business partner for the last five years.

[00:14:27] That’s quite a storied journey from 17 magazine to launching New York times online to getting investment from your parents. I assume you paid them back and helped either.

[00:14:37] I paid them back.

[00:14:39] That’s a cool thing to have going for you. Why did they offer that to you? Are they entrepreneurs themselves? Like that’s not a typical story. I hear.

[00:14:49] No. In fact, my father worked for Merrill Lynch for 37 years. And my mother was in real estate. So no, they were both sort of corporate people. One thing they said was that I had always exceeded their expectations and that was really kind of them to say, I’m a hard worker. I’ve always had some drive to succeed, but I think it was really about my children. And at that point to be a CMO in a company with 25 years of experience behind me, I would’ve been traveling quite a bit or I would’ve been committing my time to other people.

[00:15:19] And I wanted to commit my time to my children and my clients at the same time and see if I could make that work. And I think so many of us in this gig economy, you know, have gone out there and tried to look what you’re doing and, and people like us and, you know, we have different reasons. Mine was really for these children as their sole parent who was ha spending the most time with them, if not all, you know, what could I build so that I could support them while also having the flexibility to be with them and I saw a hole in the market too.

[00:15:48] You have digital agencies and there are SEO agencies and PPC and creative agencies and people are doing video and like you like podcast, but where does a strategy come from? You know, as a former VP of marketing, who’s setting all of those plans to ensure that you’re on the right track. And that’s where I’ve really saw an opportunity in the market to say, you know what, these CEOs need advisors and they need really solid plans. And then, you know what I know who to hire to help them implement all of the plans that we create.

[00:16:17] Yeah. That’s really cool. I know one of the things that I talk about with our clients in the sales process is generally that what we do with the podcasting portion of it is it’s the back end of a marketing strategy.

[00:16:29] And so I’ll like, if you don’t have several other things in place, we’ll tell you no. And where you should go first.

[00:16:36] Right, right.

[00:16:37] Because I used to run a marketing strategy from like you did, and we just sort of niched down into one portion of it and realized that like, Hey, if you don’t have a whole strategy, like if we’re not plugging what we’re doing into a strategy, you’re not gonna stick around long term anyways. So why?

[00:16:52] It’s directionless. It’s directionless. And you have to build that foundation. It’s almost like being two degrees off on a sailboat and you go for long enough and you’re on the wrong continent.

[00:17:04] Yep. That’s how they discover America.

[00:17:06] Exactly, exactly. By accident. And so I think that port part is really important and to be led by someone who has a lot of experience, who is our whole reason for being is to ramp up in an industry really quickly. So I think that’s different than hiring an in-house team too, but you really have to know like boil it down to the basics.

[00:17:25] Right. Richard, like, who are you talking to? And what are you going to say? What are the five KPIs that you measure for a business? I believe that every leader and every marketing team leader or sales, you need to have five KPIs, not seven, not two, but to really get in there and say like, how am I creating growth? And how am I measuring how I’m doing?

[00:17:45] Yeah, absolutely. And I also really like that you mentioned in your story that you did a lot of it for your children. It resonates with me cuz my wife and I, when we had our first son 13 years ago I remember sitting down around the kitchen table with her and telling her I was like, I have a lot of goals, but like the one that’s most important to me is I wanna be able to be at home for lunch every day with my kids.

[00:18:05] And she was like, why lunch? And I was like, because it’s not a thing that a lot of dads get to do with their kids. And I wanna do that. And she’s like, sometimes they have breakfast. Sometimes I have dinner, but very rarely dads get to be home for lunch. And I am happy to say now my son’s 13 and I’ve missed maybe three or four lunches with him in 13 years.

[00:18:20] Incredible.

[00:18:20] And that’s like my decision making process for my business is, is this going to affect my ability to have lunch with my kids? Yes or no.

[00:18:29] incredible. Incredible. And that, you know, we run a business based on kindness. And it’s very important to me as the driver of the culture within the business that we consider our team members as whole people.

[00:18:43] And not everyone is driven by the same desires, the same needs. So it’s consider what their needs are. And I would consider if you were working with me that you needed to be home for lunch, so how are we gonna make that happen for you? You know, and what really drives that?

[00:18:59] It’s the same thing. I have conversations with my team members is like, you know, I know their kids and when their kids’s birthdays are and those kind of things, cuz like, my employees are not aligned with the business the same way that I am.

[00:19:15] Right. They’re never going to want the same goals they’re here because they might appreciate what we do, but they have their own life and their own ambitions and their own goals that they want to hit. And how does working for our company help them hit those goals. And I think as an employer, especially nowadays, if you don’t consider your employees that way, if you consider them like a cog in your machine, then you’re not gonna keep them for very long.

[00:19:38] And I think the energy throughout the organization shows that I don’t think it’s a culture of innovation. I don’t think it’s a culture of productivity. I think that creates people sort of checking off boxes of getting through their days and, you know, we just flew.

[00:19:52] So we have people, we have a concentration in Southeast Florida in Miami area, and then we have eight or nine employees all around the U.S. So we flew them all in last week, Wednesday through Friday. And we kicked off the meeting saying, what are your needs and expectations out of these three days together?

[00:20:09] And at the end of our three days, let’s touch base and see if we met them. And a lot of them said, I need to have fun with you all. I need to get to know you better. And I think that we can’t downplay the need for human connection in a distributed model of a team. And to watch them laugh, to watch the conversations, to watch them learn, it was incredible last week.

[00:20:31] And I think that’s really important. And I’m so glad that most of them wanted the same thing. Because they can get information on Zoom in meetings or via email. Can they get that connection? That’s so important to them, especially think about it, Richard, like there are people in their twenties.

[00:20:47] How many friends did we make, you know, early in our career when we were working in offices or as I did 30 years ago. Right. They’re still friends of mine today. They don’t have that chance. So I have to fulfill that for them.

[00:20:58] Yeah. One of the things that popped into my head when you said that is, you know, you can get information on the call and it’s like, I tell people all the time, like in cuz we do a storytelling, it’s like a primary purpose of podcasting and that kind of stuff is that your data is like the nails, the stories are what drive the data home. Right. And one of the things that’s so key for human relationships is that we’re story driven people. And if you want to build relationships, you have to build stories together. And that happens by creating experiences, right.

[00:21:28] Doing stuff together, you know, taking your friends out on the yacht or going, you know, one of my favorite memories is with one of my mastermind groups, had nothing to do with business. We just went to the escape room together. Right?

[00:21:39] Yes. And they wanted to do that too. That was some of the feedback that we got at the end. They said, we love this. They were super happy. And they said, we would’ve loved to have done a team building exercise together rather than dinner. So that’s something that we will implement next year. They did ask for monthly happy hours and I thought that was a lot to ask of them. I thought it was sort of a COVID thing that people didn’t want to have a cocktail on Zoom with their colleagues, but they do.

[00:22:01] And I do jeopardy games. I’ve done psych the game that Ellen DeGeneres does. They like to those you can have limited share experiences online. And I was really surprised that they wanted that. I am happy to do that for them.

[00:22:14] Yeah. That’s really cool. Hopefully get to that point eventually where we can afford to fly everyone in for stuff. We’ll get there at some point with growing our agency. But yeah, that’s a very cool thing to do for your team.

[00:22:24] Well, and I think, it was an investment for us, for sure. And they even recognized that, you know, that it was a big investment for us to do that. I’m so glad we did it.

[00:22:34] So if people have the opportunity to create shared experiences with your team members, I urge them to jump at the chance, especially coming out of what we have, that the situation that won’t be named over the last two years, I won’t even say it anymore. Right. I don’t even wanna date it, but I think that being together and that, and the laughter, I just can’t believe how much we all laughed together, which surprised me. Yes. Apparently we’re very funny.

[00:23:00] Yeah. And it probably probably brought your team a lot closer together. I would not be surprised if you see your productivity jump over the next few months, just because coming off of something like that.

[00:23:10] Absolutely. I agree.

[00:23:12] So I wanna shift gears a little bit and talk about your superpowers, right? So every iconic hero has their superpowers, whether that’s a fancy flying suit made by their genius intellect or the ability to call out thunder from the sky. In the real world heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill or a set of skills that you were born with, or you developed over your career that really help you to help your people come out on top of their journeys.

[00:23:33] Right. And the way I like to frame it for my guests is if you look at all the skills that you develop over your career, there’s probably a common thread that ties everything that you’ve built and learned together. And that common thread is probably where your superpower lies. So with that sort of framing, what do you think your superpower is in your business?

[00:23:50] It’s vision and it’s vision when it comes to story. Right? So I can see a company. I can see a brand. I can see a product and I know what it should say, and I know what it should look like. Almost to the point where I will test myself with new ones or take a logo and write the positioning. It just is very clear to me for all these big brands I’ve worked with, startup brands that I’ve worked with and all of our clients that I see a very clear path to establishing the foundation of a brand so I can see it in story.

[00:24:25] I can see it in words, I can see it in visual and in color. And it allows me to guide a client through a path of sort of growth and establishing that foundation of brands.

[00:24:37] Yeah, I had an interesting experience with the guest on this podcast. About a year ago, she comes on, she sells like $500 million with a jewelry every year. Which is insane. And she told me something that really stuck out and she was like, essentially, you have baby businesses that are under six figures, and then you have, you know, basically like children businesses that are like under that 2 million mark. And then you got like teenage businesses from two to 10 million, and then she goes, well from 10 million plus that’s when they’re sort of like adult adult businesses.

[00:25:03] And she was like the differentiating factor between someone who makes it past 10 million as one who gets stuck in sort of like the teenage business category is the ability to build a brand. Right. And she was like a brand is a company that stands for something or stands against something. And she’s like, they don’t sort of get taken up and down by the trends or anything that’s going on.

[00:25:23] They stand for something at all costs. And the example she used was Armani, I believe Armani suit she’s like, Armani has this very particular, like they do this thing and she’s like, they’re fashion company. So they have to sort of like recognize the trends in fashion. But they don’t change their brand ever.

[00:25:39] And she was like, one of the things that really stuck out to her was there was a trend a little while ago in the fashion industry that everything was pink. There was like pink, everything, and Armani doesn’t make pink suits and they never will. But she was like, one of the things they did is they came out with like a pink pocket square that like went in with the suit to like, we acknowledged that there’s pink, but it’s not Armani.

[00:25:58] Absolutely. And the stand for something doesn’t really change because it’s the core of your value of the brand. You know, I had mentioned earlier that we work with Carolina skiff and sea chaser boats, and they’re the largest manufacturer of boats under 30 feet in the U.S.

[00:26:15] And they’re rugged sort of work boats. They’re not fancy sort of cut through water there for people who fish. They do a lot of work on those boats, but they were selling a lot of boats and they were selling boats and we know that that is a function of growth for a company.

[00:26:33] They weren’t selling a lifestyle. You don’t sell the boat, you sell the experience someone has on the water. And what does that entail? That is about family. That is about fun. That is about fishing, right? So we really started to shift them away from look at this model. Let’s sell this boat because yes, yes, yes.

[00:26:54] People will find those. They have ways it’s called the internet and they can search for a dealer. They can look at models, but really give, leave them with a feeling. And what is taken off on social media is a lot of user generated content, you know, join the lifestyle. People tagging us, people fishing, their children building small Carolina skiff boat models and tagging us.

[00:27:14] And it’s incredible when you bring people into the experience for what you stand for, you know, with fun and fishing and family, then that will never waver. You know.

[00:27:25] Reminds me of a Trace Adkins song, a country music where he’s singing about him taking his daughter out fishing. And the line from the song essentially is she thinks we’re just fishing.

[00:27:34] Right. Right.

[00:27:36] Because they’re not fishing. I mean to her, they are, but they’re building a family together. Right. They’re building memories and building stories and you’re bringing that to the marketing, right?

[00:27:45] Yes. I call it getting it in people’s bones, right. That not just understanding and knowing, but being able to like really feel what a company stands for.

[00:27:56] And I’ve done that, you know, with my children in nature and taking them out to the blue Ridge mountains and they’ve done as summer, every single year of their lives up there, it’s in their bones. And that’s, I think with the same with marketing and brands that you gotta get it in people’s bones so that they understand it and it resonates in a positive way with them.

[00:28:14] Yeah. What is it that you’re actually selling? Right. One of my metaphors I use with clients all the time is the this idea of the crocodile infested river. And you have on the one side of the crocodile infested rivers, you have your customers, your clients, and their like awareness of a problem.

[00:28:29] And the crocodile infested river is the river they’re trying to cross. And the other side is the promise land. And I was like, you’re marketing a lot of people, they focus on like their boat or the captain of the boat. Right. Who’s like gonna help ’em get across the river. And they don’t ever focus on what life is like in the promised land, right?

[00:28:45] Life after they’ve solved their problem. What does it look like to own one of these Carolina skiff boats? Like, what is the dinner taste like after you’ve caught the fresh fish and you cook them with your kids and you put it out on the table, that kind of thing. That’s life after you’ve owned the boat.

[00:28:59] Cause you try to sell the boat. You’re selling the wrong. Right.

[00:29:02] Right. You’re selling something that’s commoditized. It’s commoditized to a point, right? They all have different features. We’re not selling hinges and engines. We’re selling that feeling at dinner that you talk about. It’s exactly it.

[00:29:14] Everyone’s still a little salty and you’ve created these memories. And even with that song about the father and daughter fishing, you know, the dad got choked up more than once. During that fishing trip, right.

[00:29:25] I’ve been there.

[00:29:26] Oh my gosh. My son cried when he reached this outlook that we go to every summer. And even after these years that he and I have done a difficult hike up to the top. It’s still at 18 years old. He’s choked up and it’s not just the view. It’s more than that for him.

[00:29:43] He’s starting to recognize there’s more to it than what you’re doing together. That’s actually a really interesting tidbit of parenting that I’m starting to see. Cuz I’ve got three young ones and I’ve got one who’s coming into his teenage years and I don’t exactly know how to phrase it, cuz I’m new to all this, but he’s like, he’s not a kid anymore. He’s like a little adult and he’s starting to pick up on all the things that we’re doing. That there’s more to it than just the stuff we’re doing. If that makes sense.

[00:30:14] Yes. There’s a lot of meaning in the micro interactions we have every day, you know?

[00:30:19] Yeah. And he’s starting to pick up on that and it’s really cool.

[00:30:21] Yes. Oh, it’s amazing. That transition into friendship with our children. I think it needs to be developmentally appropriate. You know, I sense based on the conversation you and I had earlier, he’s an old soul. He is precocious and brilliant. He is interesting and interested. So parenting and relating to a child at 13 in that way, you know, my son came to me recently and said, mom, I saw TikTok and I figured out your parenting style. I said, oh, you did figured, what is my parenting style?

[00:30:52] One 3 second video. And he figured it out. Let’s hear it.

[00:30:55] That’s all it takes now. That’s the instantaneous nature of the learning all these kids are doing with TikTok. He said, you practice free range parenting. And I said, that’s really interesting.

[00:31:05] Tell me more about that. And he said, you give me freedom. And when I can fulfill it appropriately at a certain age, then you give me more and I am free to roam, but I have to earn that. And you are not monitoring me significantly. And I said, no, I’m not. I mean, I haven’t looked at a report card. I don’t.

[00:31:25] They can tell me, I said, this is your journey. Tell me how you do. And just know that the number of choices you have in your life come at the end of this work. Good luck. And that’s where I am, but that’s how I related to life.

[00:31:37] It looked exactly the way that we raise our kids to o and my son, you know, he gets his grades and not whatnot from school, he’s homeschooled, but he’ll get his grades out and we never make a big deal one way or the other out of his grades, like positive or negative, cuz they’re just, they just are what they are.

[00:31:51] And what I’ve found is that the less we focus on his grades, the more he cares about doing a good job for himself.

[00:32:00] Correct. Because they’re not doing it for you, we’re doing some performance management work with my son who is playing soccer at a fairly high level. And I mentioned he lives out of the house to do this, but it’s not focused on outcomes.

[00:32:14] It’s focused on process. Yeah. And that’s the same with us with our work, right. We’re not racing to the end to a result. We’re focused on the process that we use to get there, because then we can scale that. Right. We can use that for other clients. We can use it in other aspect of our business, but it’s not just about the numbers. It’s about the journey and the process that we use to get there.

[00:32:34] Yeah. It’s really interesting. And I say, cuz we do the same thing with like teaching our kids to cook. Right. So like, we generally put a knife in our kids hand at about three years old. Which people think we’re crazy for, but I’m like also, when they’re young, they’re like, I wanna touch the knives in the knife block and you’re like, you can under certain specific like things you can cut the vegetables with mom, right.

[00:32:54] And she’s holding your hand. You learn to cut the vegetables. Now there’s no curiosity about the knife who knows exactly what they’re for and when they’re able to be used. And by the time they’re five, they can cut vegetables on their own. But at the same time, like my son who’s 13. He can cook an entire meal from start to finish, including building the shopping list, going to the grocery store, buying all this stuff.

[00:33:11] He does this thing called this like stuff shells. He makes the ricotta from scratch. Like, I dunno how to make ricotta from scratch, but he does. And part of our process with that is, again, we never focus on the outcome and like, we have a rule in our house if the meal’s gross, we buy pizza.

[00:33:28] Right, but we also don’t say things. I wouldn’t let my kids say disgusting when they were little. Isn’t that funny? It’s just a word that I’m really opposed to. And I feel like it’s so strong and nothing’s disgusting. So let’s just not go there. But isn’t that interesting, cuz it’s all focused on the process.

[00:33:43] What is he putting into that? What are the steps, and then everyone’s sort of behind the process and I love that.

[00:33:52] Yeah. He learns the whole process for it and the outcome doesn’t really matter. Cause if it doesn’t turn out well, it’s not a big deal. We’ll just go do something else for dinner.

[00:33:59] Right. And so it’s like a freedom to fail kind of thing. Yes, because like your family’s nutrition isn’t like on the table kind of thing. Does that make sense? They’re not gonna too starved if you don’t do a good job. But he’s gotten to the point now where he can cook a great meal.

[00:34:14] Exactly.

[00:34:15] And our next one, our eight year old is working on starting some of those things as well. And it’s all again, it’s a focus on process and not on results. And what’s interesting is the better you get at the process. He knows how to do all this Nissan plus and all the other things and everything the results have gotten really good.

[00:34:30] Well, exactly because when you focus on outcome, that’s pressure thinking. That’s pressure working because it’s on the result and you can refine the process over time, same with, you know, freedom to fail dynamic goal setting. That was something else that came out in performance management with my athlete child you know, elite athlete children have different stressors in their lives.

[00:34:52] And we need to acknowledge that, you know, I never wanted this for him. This is him, and what he wants, but to create smart goals, right. That are measurable, achievable to do those, but have them be dynamic cuz they can change over time. I just think it’s a lack of fixed thinking that allows us to be joyful and present in a process and allow us to improve, not go get straight A’s and perform because I will love you.

[00:35:17] And I will value you more as a person. You know, it’s the really being in the mix with your team, your children, your family, during the process and being in that, you know, Brene Brown calls it rumbling, right. Show up in the arena. You know, show up, ready to sort of rumble and be vulnerable and try your best and give your all, and then we will look at the outcome. You know, I love her thinking.

[00:35:39] I like the name you have for you called it, dynamic something. What was the word you used?

[00:35:43] Dynamic goal setting.

[00:35:44] Dynamic goal setting.Because it strikes me as the way that we’ve processed our, like, cuz we’ve travel, been traveling for five years. And one of the things we learned really early on is that it’s very difficult to set concrete goals more than like a week into the future when you’re traveling all the time.

[00:36:01] Because well, to put it bluntly shit happens. All the time. And so like if you book things out three months into the future there’s a hundred percent chance that this’s not going to work out, it’s just guaranteed that you’re gonna have to change things dynamically. And so like my wife and I over the last four and a half years or so we generally don’t know we’re going to be next week.

[00:36:22] Or the week after, maybe it’s a couple of weeks, cuz we’ve stayed. We’re gonna stay here for three weeks or stay there for four, whatever. But it’s like, after that point we don’t really have anything planned other than a general direction. We know where we’re going. We’re gonna go up the coast or we’re gonna go to Florida.

[00:36:35] We’re gonna go see our sister or something like that. But like the steps along the way are generally very fluid because they have to be. And what I’ve noticed is that the more I do the same thing with my business that we have the same kind of like better outcomes. Where you can sort of respond to things as they happen and still push yourself towards a destination.

[00:36:55] Well, that’s why I think that planning is important, but short term planning, medium term planning, and then longer like, remember when we used to do annual plans. Where you haven’t been doing this as long as I have, but we used to plan over a year. I mean, imagine that now or annual performance reviews was how people used to give employee feedback.

[00:37:13] Imagine holding feedback back from someone for a year.

[00:37:17] That’s crazy.

[00:37:18] Now we’re just much more dynamic, flexible in the moment you give feedback immediately, while things are happening, we review the team and they review us every 90 days, we ask them to rate their energy level on a scale of 1 to 10.

[00:37:30] How are we doing? How are you doing if they give me an eight, well, how can we get to 10 what’s happening? And that kind of creates this very casual, constant conversation that helps us understand where somebody is. Dynamic goals are shorter term goals. You know what your longer term is, but what are the shorter term ones that aren’t failure?

[00:37:49] You just maybe focusing on one more than the other, or you may have to shift, but they’re smaller. And I think it’s almost like breaking life up into smaller pieces that makes it more achievable and, who wants to fail and who wants things being fixed, cuz nothing is fixed in life. Right.

[00:38:04] Yeah. Yeah. And I think your ability to be flexible and move and change, especially today and like we haven’t even gotten started on the technology changes that are going to happen as a result of all of the stuff that’s happened over the last couple of years. Not even pandemic stuff, but like the changes in processor capabilities and the changes in battery capability and the changes in data capability.

[00:38:29] Like I said, we’ve been traveling for a long time. You go back a year and a half ago all across the country, internet was a struggle. And then this year we started traveling and internet is not even close to a struggle. We would average in places like maybe getting one or two megabits down to like we’re regularly seeing 500 megabit down connections all over the country, which is not like 10 times better or 20 times better.

[00:38:56] In some cases it’s 50 and a hundred times better than it was a year ago. And again, we’ve been all over the country this last year, just testing that and it’s crazy. And I don’t think people realize the impact that’s going to have. And that’s just like one area over the next couple of years. So if you’re not flexible and ready to change for like what’s coming down the pipes you’re gonna have a hard time with your business and pretty much anything really, I think.

[00:39:16] Yeah. And even who your customers are and what they’re looking for and what their paying points are. You know, people were hiring us for smaller parts of the business before and now I think people are looking at what’s happening with the economy, the interest rates are rising, you know, there are things coming, right?

[00:39:31] Yep.

[00:39:31] And so I think people are thinking a little bit differently than they were six, eight months ago even. Think of the changes that happened from that time that we won’t mention, you know, just about flexibility. You’re in Florida right now. I’m in Florida. Everyone’s here. So, I mean, everyone, it’s just like people flooded 75 and 95 and came on down and, that’s even something to get used to, you know, sort of the temperature my city has changed.

[00:39:58] It’s a different place than it was two years ago. But I think to learn, to be flexible, you know, my son wrote his college essay that the only thing that is constant is change, and what has changed in his life, he had to move several times and with the family changes and how adaptable he became, I think it’s good for our kids to have the change that yours have.

[00:40:15] Right. I think it’ll serve them well as young adults and adults into their career. With this flexibility that we talk about.

[00:40:22] Yeah. Yeah. So I know we sort of went all over the place there talking about superpowers, but vision and flexibility. And a lot of that stuff is really cool. I wanna talk about the flip side of the superpower, which, you know, every Superman has his cryptonite and wonder woman, can’t remove her bracelets of victory without going mad.

[00:40:37] I wanna talk about something that you’ve struggled with in your business. For me, I struggled with a couple of things. I struggled with perfectionism forever which meant that I wouldn’t ship product, cuz I could always tweak a little bit more. And then you can’t get any feedback, you don’t actually ship product.

[00:40:50] I also struggled with lack of self care, which mean I didn’t have good boundaries with my clients and I once tried not sleeping for three days, that’s not good. In case you were wondering, thought I could try just working straight, not a good idea. But I think more important than what is that you struggled with is how he works to overcome it. So our audience might learn a little bit from your experience there.

[00:41:08] Sure. So I had failed more than once, early in my career in sales. And I think when people met me because I am outgoing, they think I would make a fantastic salesperson. The challenge was that I wasn’t comfortable talking about money. And so I would get in situations and sort of freeze, not ask about budgets, not feel comfortable pushing, negotiating.

[00:41:30] I didn’t feel that I had those skills. And then here I am trying to build a business and learning that lesson that if you’re not selling all the time, you don’t have one. So I think that those conversations and negotiations over agreements, scopes of work, sticking to our pricing, which has risen over the years knowing my value.

[00:41:52] And the value that my team brings companies and sticking to that rather than feeling grateful that somebody actually, you know, sort of wants to do business with us, which is how I felt in the beginning. You know, it was me in my living room and I’ve really had to sort of build that muscle of confidence.

[00:42:08] You know, which a lot of women entrepreneurs were the fastest growing segment of business owners in this country. Yet we are the group known to not really come into our stride with confidence until 40. So that’s what studies show. It takes us longer to get there. It took me longer to get there. And so now just sort of knowing the worth that I bring, knowing the value that my company brings and selling and, really what is selling it’s conversation.

[00:42:36] And that’s what I learned too, is that it’s really, this is what I offer and let’s talk about the need and see if it’s a good fit.

[00:42:42] Yeah. Yeah. And selling is such a powerful skill. And I remember it was something that I struggled with for a long time. And I plopped down a large chunk of money earlier on in my career where I was like, I need to hire a sales coach and just really learn this skill.

[00:42:58] Because I was like, I know it’s the thing that’s gonna keep me from being being good. And I remember one of the things he had me do, which to this day, I still think is crazy, but he gave me like a list of 200 names, like names and phone numbers. He was like, I want you to call all of these people.

[00:43:12] And I was like, and do what he’s like, find out what their problems are sell them something. And I was like, I don’t know anything about them. He’s like, exactly.

[00:43:19] Wow. Did you do it?

[00:43:22] I did. I did do that. And he gave me a really simple script where he was like, all you do is just call him up and just say, Hey, my name’s Richard Matthews.

[00:43:31] And you know, Amy, I’ve got your name here on this list. Can you tell me why I have your name? Like why I might have your name on this list? I don’t exactly remember why I’ve got your name on the list and it would just open a conversation. And they’d be like, well, I don’t know where maybe you were at my networking meeting.

[00:43:45] Maybe I was, but what is it that you do? Right. Those kind of things. And he was like, the purpose of the exercise was to get over the fear of rejection and realize that people are people and and you build relationships by learning each other’s stories. Right. And that’s the beginning of any sales is like just learning how to talk to someone else.

[00:44:05] And then realizing that like sales is really about, you have a problem somewhere, do I have a solution that can help you solve that problem? Yes or no.

[00:44:13] Exactly. And if I don’t right, cuz recently we were approached by Israeli tech firm looking for a PR engagement in Southeast Florida. We couldn’t make some things work for them, but I gave them a referral to somebody else who I thought could, and he was taken aback by that.

[00:44:27] He said, wow, I can’t believe you just referred me to somebody else. And you can’t make the business work cuz of budgetary reasons or whatnot. And why wouldn’t we, aren’t we in business to help other people I’m not in the business just to get paid. That’s not it, I’m trying to create the best place to work for people to do what they love and be financially rewarded and support their families.

[00:44:50] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:44:51] So if I can help somebody else, who’s doing the same thing, I’m gonna do that all day long.

[00:44:55] Yeah. And I think that’s one of my favorite things about this show in particular is that I started this podcast to just sort of get the message across that entrepreneurs are heroes as well.

[00:45:08] And culturally, we have this perception that entrepreneurs are evil, right? That they’re always the villains in the stories. Right. You can’t turn on any kid’s TV show without some variation of entrepreneurs poors oil and ducks for money. Right, and one of my best friends and I sort of have an idea of like, why that happens is because it’s in an athema, right.

[00:45:29] It’s not normal, so it makes a better story. So all of our stories are about the bad guys, but the reality is that entrepreneurs are really the ones that are out there trying to make the world a better place. And when you start talking about sales, like you said, being uncomfortable talking about money, cuz we have this sort of like inbuilt belief that profit is bad.

[00:45:50] Right.

[00:45:51] Sales is bad. And we have to overcome that to get to the point where we understand that. Sales is helping someone solve problems and their life is absolutely worse off if you don’t get them a good solution. Right?

[00:46:03] Absolutely.

[00:46:03] So yeah, it’s a mindset shift.

[00:46:06] Absolutely. And, and I think that, you know, things got stripped away during that time period, right. Where you see everyone’s cats on Zoom and companies don’t have, the commercials are low production value because they can’t get people on. And I think that it did create a sense of just sort of realness, I think, between us all. And I hope that we keep that where things are genuine, helpful, and just transparent people don’t wanna be sold.

[00:46:34] You know, they want you to talk to them about the problem that they have and find a solution, whether it’s you or you help them find someone else. I mean, I think that’s an important part of it. Yeah.

[00:46:43] And I was like, we sort of had this perception, I think before all the stuff happened that like people expect some sort of perfection out of other people.

[00:46:50] And you find out afterwards when your naked toddler comes running through your Zoom call that, that actually helps you close a deal.

[00:46:58] Yes. They’re like, oh, human. On the other end of the phone, you know?

[00:47:00] Yeah. There’s a real person over there. Who’s struggling potty training a three year old and keeping them outta the office and that kind of stuff.

[00:47:06] And it’s real life. And you realize that like, Hey, everything in business is real life. Cuz business is real life.

[00:47:12] Well it’s human beings. They are not commodities. They are not employees to me. They’re human beings who I am honored have taken the stop in their career journey to work with. And that was a conversation that we had last Friday when we were all in person.

[00:47:29] And I told them that and I mean it, you know, I started in my living room trying to just keep my family afloat and do what’s right by my boys. And along the way, I’m thinking, wow, you know, I can really create a psychologically safe environment where people can do really cool stuff. And along the way, we help our companies grow and we help create profitability for them, but we own our ideas and we can benefit lots of different companies with just cool ideas and implementation and using our experience.

[00:47:58] And then we’re in it together and we’re having a great time together. So I think that for me is sort of the heroism of entrepreneurship. It’s not creating a product, it’s creating an environment for people to work that didn’t exist before. You know, and being able to shape it in a way that makes people feel good, you know?

[00:48:18] Yeah. That’s one of the things that I love about entrepreneurship is that it’s literally creating from nothing. We create abundance. And I think there’s nothing better that you can do with your time than to create abundance for others.

[00:48:32] Right. And I’m sure you make your clients feel safe, right. You’re recording for them. You’re doing work for them and they know it’s gonna be done. And they know it’s being done with a point of view and an expertise that they can come in and do their thing. And that you are there for them and they don’t ever have to worry. And we have clients who don’t look at any creative for approval.

[00:48:53] It just goes, social media goes, email is going we’re updating websites. Their CEO’s not looking. He said, I know you’ve got it. I know you understand my brand. I know you understand the metrics and they don’t look. And that for me is sort of the ultimate is that when they talk about while coffee’s got it, you know, they talk about our company and they’re like, oh, while coffee’s in it, it’s fine. And then they can focus on other things. Right.

[00:49:18] So I wanna talk about your clients a little bit then, just, you know, I think that’s a good transition. I wanna talk about your common enemy. And every superhero has an arch nemesis, it’s a thing that they constantly have to fight against in their worlds.

[00:49:29] And I like to put this in the context of your clients when you bring them on, and it’s a mindset or a a flaw that you constantly have to sort of fight to overcome when they sign on the dotted line, that you can actually help them get the result that they came to you for. What is the common enemy that you have to fight against regularly in your business?

[00:49:48] Two things. One is strategy before tactics. You know, you don’t want us to begin implementing right away without thinking, without asking, without interviewing five of your ideal clients, without doing a competitive positioning review, without doing a messaging blueprint, a brand guideline so that we are all operating from the same place.

[00:50:09] So it’s very important to do that analysis upfront before we start implementing campaigns and concepts and writing and making web changes and doing social media. And it requires a little bit of patience. This isn’t two months, it’s maybe five weeks, four weeks. So I think that’s important.

[00:50:26] The second is when you build it, they do not just come.

[00:50:31] That is so true.

[00:50:32] And it still happening, Richard, like we started this a long time ago and it’s still happening. They won’t just come. So you can’t build a large eCommerce site and invest $500,000 in product and think it’s going to sell because you’re there. And even if you have media budget there is an iinfinite amount of traffic.

[00:50:53] And addressable market, in some cases, in some cases it’s broader, but those budgets matter that you do need to invest in boosting some paid, some mid funnel, Google, PPC, AdWords activity. They don’t just come no matter how phenomenal you are your product, the awareness piece. There’s so much clutter.

[00:51:13] There’s so much out there you have to break through and it has to be budget plus creative plus product.

[00:51:20] One of the things that I tell all of my clients want from one side or the other, is that like, it doesn’t matter what you sell, just it straight up. It doesn’t matter. You always have to have, your offer has to be put in front of a person.

[00:51:33] Which means you have to have an audience, and there’s only three ways to get an audience. You can either buy that audience. You can borrow that audience, or you can build that audience. Right. And those always cost some combination of money and time.

[00:51:44] Correct.

[00:51:46] So you can buy audience with ads. That’s probably the fastest from a time perspective, but you still have to put in the work, right.

[00:51:51] You have to put in the the strategy and understand who your messaging is and who your people are. So it’s not gonna be like, you know, I hired you today. Tomorrow we turn on ads and the next day sales can happened. Like you have work that has to happen, right? So it’s some combination of money and time.

[00:52:04] And then you have borrowing audience, which is, you know, like what you’re doing here. You get in front of my audience and you can borrow them for a little while. And you know, we’ll talk about how people can find you guys later, right? That’s a form of borrowing audience, or maybe it’s the chiropractor who talks to the massage therapist next door and says, Hey, if I give all of my clients a hundred dollars discount to come get a massage, right.

[00:52:24] Will you refer them back the other direction? Right. So it’s a borrowing someone else’s audience. So we’re building an audience, which is where you build like your YouTube shows or your podcasts, your Facebook lives, or, your email newsletter list, your SMS list, right. It’s an audience that you’ve built that you have sort of their captive attention, which takes again time and sometimes a lot of it.

[00:52:42] So it’s such a Enemy, right? That we all in the marketing world sort of have to, like, I’m not sure why it happens, but like nobody starts off with that understanding. They always come, like I hired you. You’re a marketing person. Sales should be here now.

[00:52:56] Correct. And you know, it’s so funny too, because you can explain it up front. You could try to manage expectations, but then it still happens. And I think people are very attached to what they do. And my feeling that I typically don’t say out loud to clients, well, if it were this easy, everyone would do it, right? If you could build something and buy some traffic and it’s an automatic win, then why wouldn’t more people be doing it?

[00:53:20] It’s much more complex than that. So we typically will work with startups who have raised a series A or B and have failed at marketing. I think it takes that experience because founders are so tied and passionate. They’re so tied to and passionate. Their company, their product, their service, that they won’t see you.

[00:53:39] They won’t hear you in the beginning. We need them to have to stumble a little bit until they say, okay, I know that I need another set of ears, eyes, and expertise to get this going. But if you’re too early stage that those founders are very hard to work with. And I get it. I’m an entrepreneur too. I get it.

[00:53:57] What cracks me up about that is our best clients are not the ones who are starting a new podcast. They’re the ones who’ve gotten their first five to 10 episodes started and realize that it’s a F ton of work.

[00:54:08] That’s exactly right. They’re like, oh, I really thought, or they thought they were doing it well.

[00:54:13] And then they look at some of the work that you do. And they’re like, oh, now I see, you know, and a lot of our growth. Well, all of it just about has been referral. So we haven’t advertised and it’s terrifying to do it that way and also gratifying and cost efficient. You know, and I remind remind the team.

[00:54:29] And I totally get the terrifying part.

[00:54:32] Because your pipeline may dip sometimes just depending on what’s happening out there in the world. And then all of a sudden this week, you know, we have many new business meetings and I tell the team like, this is because of you. I mean, thank goodness that we have such talent in this group that our clients refer us out, but those are clients who have been through some things, right.

[00:54:51] They’ve either been sued through some things before us or that we have had to really, you have to do a good job educating your client base. It’s hard.

[00:55:00] Absolutely. Yeah. That’s that whole managing expectations. And again, it doesn’t seem to matter how much you manage the expectations until they’ve lived the experience themselves until it goes from here to here. Right.

[00:55:10] Right.

[00:55:10] It’s hard to get that message across, but once they sort of see it happen, like in real life, you’re like, oh, I put all these things in place I put in the time, the money and the effort. And now I’m starting to see the rewards for it. It’s very gratifying.

[00:55:21] Yes. And there are jumpers out there, right? There are companies, CEOs, you know, VPs of marketing, who jump firms. They think I didn’t get the results that I wanted in the first 90 days while, and we haven’t had many experiences like that, but I’ll divide it up in between a bunch of freelancers or small agencies, but then you’re managing too much.

[00:55:38] And then things become very disjointed. And so that’s why putting everything under one team, the way we work, you can trust that we’re all talking to each other, it’s all under one strategy and you don’t have to chase around different digital agencies, you know, all the design, all the works coming from one place. So.

[00:55:56] Absolutely. So I want to talk about the flip side then. Right? So if your common enemy is the expectations, the driving force is what you fight for. So just like Spiderman fights to save New York or Batman fight to save Gotham or Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information. What is it you guys fight for at Wild Coffee Marketing.

[00:56:13] Really understanding your customer and being very clear about what you stand for and then making sure everything stems from that strategy. Right? We never skip the strategy. We never skip sort of the visioning positioning and then everything we do ties back to that.

[00:56:28] I also think that really narrowing down KPIs, right? What are the three to five metrics you’re going to track? And we’ll we come to every meeting every week and we tell you where we stand. So that transparency, I think, is really, really important in the work that we do to track to those numbers, those KPIs and let our clients know where they stand at all times.

[00:56:48] What’s your most common important KPI between clients?

[00:56:52] Signups or purchases typically, right? Like that tough number.

[00:56:57] When you say signups like opt-ins, is that what you’re taking about?

[00:57:02] No, well, it could be a number of things it could be opt-ins could be sign up to hear this webinar, download a white paper, could be sign in, you know, so just any sort of lead generating based activity.

[00:57:17] So leads and purchases primarily. Sometimes organic traffic growth is a big one for us. In some cases, when we’re doing business to business marketing through Salesforce people we’re adding to the journeys, the automated email journeys that we’re doing will do that. But I really think, you know, sign up leads and purchases most of the time.

[00:57:36] We work with a formal wear company. Out of Atlanta with 65 stores. So we love multi-location. And for them, imagine that we have leads coming in from so many different ways in retail, and it’s a monster to track. But typically we even look at leads there because then you have to book appointments and then people rent tuxedos.

[00:57:56] So I love the formal wear rental business. Never thought that those words will come outta my mouth, but it’s so fun.

[00:58:02] Yeah. And it’s interesting too. One of the things I’ve noticed with a lot of, I’m not in that space, any of the local business space generally, but it’s such a common thing with friends of mine that own local businesses that they forget that lead gen is still an important part of their business lead gen and follow up, like, but they come into the store.

[00:58:19] I’m like, that’s great. What have you done afterwards? Like, did you do anything that captured your ability to follow up with them.

[00:58:25] Right, right. Cause we have walk-ins, everything’s logged in HubSpot for this client and and it takes a deep amount of process learning development training.

[00:58:36] What you do with each of those leads, the follow up is different from each, but that’s a really important point is customer journey mapping for later stage businesses, where do people find you? Where do they hear about you? What are your touchpoints and what systems and processes have to support that journey along the way you have to look at where they’re accounting in you, they give you their information. How do you follow up things like that?

[00:58:58] Absolutely. So I love that you guys are doing what you’re doing. And just the depth at which you do it is very apparent. So I think you guys are gonna have a huge impact on the world at large, just because of the work you do with your clients.

[00:59:14] So anyways, I appreciate that.

[00:59:15] Thank you.

[00:59:17] I wanna talk of something about just very practical, very quickly. And we call this your hero’s tool belt, right? And it’s just like every superhero has their magical gadgets, like, batarangs or web slingers or their magical hammer they can spin around.

[00:59:28] I wanna talk about top one, maybe two tools you use every day to make your business go around. Could be anything, could be your notepad that you write your ideas in, your calendar, your marketing tools, something you use for product delivery, something you think is essential to running your business today.

[00:59:42] What’s the top one or two that pop into your head?

[00:59:44] Teamwork, which is our project management software platform. A lot of people will use Asana base camp teamwork. I do think, especially with a distributed team, you must have one system of truth. So everyone knows what’s going on at all times. You’re sharing information, you’re putting work through the pipeline.

[01:00:00] So I think that project management system and process is very, very important, kind of boring, right. Not the most exciting thing to have or talk about, but I think it’s really critical to have a single system of truth with process behind it.

[01:00:14] Yeah, absolutely. We use a Click Up for ours. So yeah, I agree. It was one of those things that like, we get our project management system, like really, really tightly in order. And we went from having to have like a weekly status update where everything is to like, now it’s all like, there’s a system of truth for it. That’s amazing. And so, yeah, it’s killer for growing your business is really getting a good project management system in place that actually works and helps you move things along

[01:00:41] Well in our world. If it’s not in teamwork, it didn’t happen. Right. And that’s just critical so that people, we have employees in Seattle, Denver, Dallas, Boston , New Jersey, Virginia Beach, Miami, everyone needs to know, and you have to find ways to share information.

[01:00:56] And I also think that running a small company, like it’s a big one focusing on process early.

[01:01:02] So absolutely. And I spend a lot of time on processes in our company. Cuz I feel like it’s a high level CEO sort of position is figuring out processes and building those for your company.

[01:01:15] Cuz if you can get the processes down, then you can scale.

[01:01:18] Correct, processes, resources, values, right? That’s the Clinton Christensen disruptive sort of technology. And I think those are very important. That’s how you can determine how you can scale. So.

[01:01:30] Absolutely.

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[01:02:58] And now back to the hero show.

[01:03:02] So I only got one more question for you. And that is your guiding principles, right? One of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code, so for instance, Batman never kills his enemies. He only ever puts him in Archam Asylum. So as we wrap up, I wanna talk about the top one, maybe two principles you live your life on your business by maybe something you wish you’d known when you first started out as an entrepreneur five and a half years ago.

[01:03:20] One is do what you say you’re gonna do, right? So with integrity, if you make a promise to a client, you make a promise to your team, follow through. The second is always be moving the needle for your clients, right?

[01:03:32] Always be moving forward. We love forward momentum. Sometimes we talked about perfectionism earlier with you and how you maybe don’t ship, or you keep thinking you can do better. In marketing, it’s very easy to do that. We call them rolling deadlines and it’s just really critical to move forward and get things done and iterate on that.

[01:03:52] So we’re always asking ourselves, how can I move this forward for a client and how I made this commitment and promise in this scope? How can I deliver on that? And having that integrity?

[01:04:01] Yeah. Movement is life and it’s one of those things. It’s a hard lesson to learn that you can’t grow unless you’re moving.

[01:04:09] And one of the things I found really interesting, I said, we’re on episode like 220 or something like that for this show. And probably roughly 90% of my guests have said, integrity is the number one principle they run their business by which always strikes me as such a cool thing.

[01:04:24] Because again, it’s just such a stark contrast to the way entrepreneurs are viewed culturally to the way that they actually are in the real world.

[01:04:30] You’re right. We have no other choice right. To do right by our small teams that are growing right by our clients. And I think there’s something about us that leads us. I think we get here through doing what we say we’re going to do.

[01:04:43] Yeah. That’s the only way you can grow. Right. Well, I think that’s a great place to wrap our interview. But I do finish every interview with a simple challenge that I call the heroes challenge and I do this to help get access to stories I might not otherwise find on my own, cuz not everyone is out doing the podcast tours like you and I might do. So the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life, in your network who you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they? First names are fine. And why do you think they should come share their story on our show?

[01:05:07] First person that comes to mind for you.

[01:05:08] Oh, for sure. Tony Zacario the CEO of Stretch Zone. He’s later in his entrepreneurial journey in the stage that the business is in, but not in his years. He is a dynamic. One of the youngest CEOs I’ve ever met. And one of the most effective at a young age, a lot of times younger CEOs will have vision, but really not be able to implement because they just haven’t been in the business that long.

[01:05:32] And Tony is the opposite of that incredibly effective and visionary. They started working with us at 50 locations. They’re now at 200 drew Brees just bought several locations and took a board seat. They’ve just grown this concept. And the mission is simple for them. It’s really about making mobility and people’s lives better.

[01:05:52] And I think Tony, as a young CEO and entrepreneur has done wonders with it.

[01:05:56] That’s awesome. Well, I’ll see if we can reach out later and get connected and maybe we can get ’em on the show. Maybe we can’t, but when we do, they always turn out to be good stories. So in in comic books, there’s always the crowd of people at the end who are cheering and clapping for the acts of heroism. So our analogous to that here on our show is where can people find you? Where can they light up the bat signal, so to speak and say, Hey, Amy, I’d love to get your help with Wild Coffee Marketing for our company. And I think secondly, and more importantly is who are the right types of people to reach out and actually raise their hands?

[01:06:20] Great. So you can find us at WildCoffeeMarketing.com and I’m at Amy Anderson at Wild Coffee. And I think it’s business leaders who maybe have stumbled a bit with marketing or are ready to enter into a growth trajectory. Maybe they have a small-ish team, and they’re looking to expand on that, but not ready to take the overhead and the responsibility of hiring, managing, and overseeing a marketing team.

[01:06:42] But they’re interested in growing and, and really need a diverse set of skill sets and a fractional team led by, if I don’t say to have myself some pretty experienced marketing professionals in our team.

[01:06:53] Awesome. Thank you so much for that, Amy. I appreciate you coming on today and sharing your story. Do you have any final words of wisdom for my audience before I hit this stop record button?

[01:07:00] Energy is everything. Keep on moving.

[01:07:02] Thank you very much, Amy.

[01:07:03] Thanks for having me.