Episode 216 – Chris Pistorius

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Automated Transcription

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[00:00:00] Chris Pistorius: I think my superpower is the ability to connect consumers with dentists, if that makes sense. So I have a really good knack of when we meet with a new client, understanding who it is specifically, they wanna market to. You heard me talk about this earlier in terms of creating a new patient avatar.

[00:00:18] One of the first things that we do with a campaign. We really dive into with the client, exactly who is it that you want to walk through your door? Right. And you can do this with any local business. Who is your ideal client? If you could pick, what are they? Are they the 25 to 35 year old female with two and a half kids and a golden retriever.

[00:00:39] Is it the 45 to 65 year old that owns, you know, whatever it may be. And we have a really good track record here of being able to come up with those profiles and then putting our clients’ message in front of those exact demographics. And that is really what I think anyway is what makes for a very productive, efficient, and very revenue happy type of marketing.

[00:01:07] Richard Matthews: 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.

[00:01:24] 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 produce. 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.

[00:01:37] 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.

[00:01:52] 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…

[00:02:02] Hello, and welcome back to the Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews. And today I have on the line, Chris Pistorius, glad to have you here, where you’re calling in from?

[00:02:10] Chris Pistorius: We’re just south of Denver, a little town called Castle Rock.

[00:02:15] Richard Matthews: Castle Rock, is castle rock the little town that has that really cool indoor outdoor playground with the gigantic slide?

[00:02:24] Chris Pistorius: Yeah, they do.

[00:02:25] Richard Matthews: We went there with our kids when we drove through Denver a couple years ago.

[00:02:29] Chris Pistorius: Oh, cool, yeah.

[00:02:30] Richard Matthews: I’ve been to Castle Rock.

[00:02:33] Chris Pistorius: Nice small world.

[00:02:35] Richard Matthews: Yeah. Well, my wife and I travel full time, so we’ve been to all 48 states. As of couple months ago, actually.

[00:02:42] Chris Pistorius: Wow. That’s awesome.

[00:02:44] Richard Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. That’s pretty cool. So my audience who’s been following around with our journeys. We are officially back in Florida and stuck here until for the foreseeable future.

[00:02:51] We’re working on buying a sailboat to travel more in the future, but that’s our next sort of goal.

[00:02:56] Chris Pistorius: Wow. How are you gonna do these from a sailboat?

[00:02:59] Richard Matthews: Haven’t figured that out yet. I’m really hoping Starlink will solve all of my problems.

[00:03:03] Chris Pistorius: Starlink. Yeah. We’ve got Starlink and I think I got an email recently that it’s mobile now you can move it around, right?

[00:03:09] Richard Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. You can get an RV version of it, which I’m using a ridiculously fancy commercial router for tour buses that has like multiple SIM card slots on. It’s really cool. So like, I actually don’t need Starlink most of the time, but it would be nice to add to my kit.

[00:03:22] Chris Pistorius: Yeah. For sure.

[00:03:24] Richard Matthews: Yeah, anyways before we get too far into this, I want to give a brief introduction to you. So my audience knows who you are. So I’m gonna read your your bio here, Chris Pistorius is the founder of Kickstart Dental Marketing and you specialize in dental marketing, other medical professionals and marketers, entrepreneurs and businesses can all learn from your digital marketing experience.

[00:03:41] You’ve been in the business for over 15 years. Worked with countless local business owners in all industries, across multiple facets of marketing, consulting and coaching. And you’ve been able to build your local digital marketing agency to one of the top marketing agencies in the country as listed on UpCity, SEO for Growth, DesignRush, Expertise and Agency Vista.

[00:03:58] That’s pretty cool. I’ve actually not heard of that last one, the Rush expertise and the agency Vista. But yeah. So why don’t wait to start this off? Why don’t you tell me a little bit about what it is that you are known for, like what’s your business do and who do you serve? What do you do for them?

[00:04:13] Chris Pistorius: Well, honestly, the, the bottom line is to make sure that our clients are found and chosen when somebody in their market is looking for a new dentist. And really a lot of what I talk about today is gonna apply for not just dentistry, but really any smaller, you know, local, medium sized business. That’s looking to, you know, maybe bring in more new patients or clients or customers or whatever they may call.

[00:04:37] Richard Matthews: Yeah, that makes sense. And so how long have you been working specifically in the dentistry niche?

[00:04:42] Chris Pistorius: Yeah, a little over 13 years. I’m kind of dating myself here, but…

[00:04:47] Richard Matthews: Yeah, I actually, I got into digital marketing. I don’t know, five or six years ago. We did it for about a year and then I didn’t particularly like the space, so I left it, but yeah. Not really the grass is greener on the other type side kind of thing, but more like, I just didn’t enjoy the copywriting and the marketing in the space. So you know, moved on.

[00:05:07] Chris Pistorius: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s important to do something that you’re passionate about. You know.

[00:05:11] Richard Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. But it was definitely interesting cuz the dental space, there was a lot of, I mean, you mentioned, you know, doing coaching and whatnot of coaching and like, Hey, if we bring in leads, what is your sales process?

[00:05:23] I mean, you’re upselling them and doing, you know, actually making the most out of the leads that come through and it’s interesting cuz they learn to be great dentists in dental school, but they do not learn how to be good business owners. Which is, you know, that’s the whole E myth thing, it requires someone like you or myself or other agencies to come in and, teach them that side of running a dental practice.

[00:05:43] Chris Pistorius: Yeah, without question. I mean, even other industries than dentistry, I mean, that’s why most small businesses fail is because they’re good at, you know, fixing cars or being an attorney or whatever it may be, but they don’t really know anything about marketing or running a business in general, HR, payroll, you know, stuff like that. And that’s usually what catches up to them.

[00:06:03] Richard Matthews: Yeah. I’ve been hardcore learning phase for HR and payroll, cuz our agency is growing and I’m like, it’s a whole different skill.

[00:06:12] Chris Pistorius: Yeah, we just hired a I guess you call it a fractional HR admin to take care of new hires and paperwork and any disciplinary actions and stuff like that.

[00:06:23] So I just, I’m not an HR person. I don’t enjoy it and I’m not good at it. So .

[00:06:28] Richard Matthews: Yeah, but you have to learn all those things to get good at it.

[00:06:31] Chris Pistorius: You do, yeah. You gotta learn it before you can hire for it. Right.

[00:06:34] Richard Matthews: I mean, yeah, absolutely.

[00:06:35] Chris Pistorius: Technically that’s how it works.

[00:06:37] Richard Matthews: So that’s what I’m doing. I get my hands dirty in it. So eventually I can take it off my plate and get it to someone else. So I can actually like speak the language.

[00:06:44] Chris Pistorius: Yeah. You know, it’s, you make a list when you start a business of, you know, everything that you do and the things that you don’t like to do are the first things you can hire for, once you get to the appropriate revenue levels, you know.

[00:06:57] Richard Matthews: Yeah. And that’s actually like where I’m at too is like trying to figure out, like, what is the revenue level that’s like, okay, now we can hire for this position or not. Right. Because like, as soon as you hire for that position, it goes from, you know, being revenue that you might be able to put in your profit account to revenue, that’s gonna be going into your payroll account instead.

[00:07:14] Right. And you have to shift that know when it makes sense to do all of that. It’s a learning experience for sure.

[00:07:19] Chris Pistorius: Yeah. It’s you know, we follow the philosophy of hire slow and fire fast. Right. Especially in the agency world, because you know, things it’s like any business, I guess just can be a roller coaster and you don’t wanna hire people if you’re not gonna have enough for them or, you’re gonna have to look, unfortunately, let them go. You know? So you gotta definitely planning is key.

[00:07:38] Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. So what I wanna sort of start the interview off with KickStart is your origin story, every good comic book hero has an origin story. It’s the thing that made them into the hero they are today. We wanna hear that story.

[00:07:50] What made you wanna get into marketing in the agency world? Were you a bit by your radioactive spider that made you want to become a dental marketer or did you start in a job and eventually become an entrepreneur? Essentially, what was the story? How did you get here?

[00:08:01] Chris Pistorius: Yeah, well, I was a journalism major in college and kind of started my advertising career if you will selling ads in the local newspaper.

[00:08:12] So that kind of got me started and I figured out pretty quickly that I didn’t wanna be a journalist. I wanted to make money cause there’s not a lot of money in writing articles and things like that. So I got into advertising that way and you know, got into telecom somehow for a while and bounced out of that and then got back into marketing.

[00:08:31] And I’ve worked for a couple of pretty big marketing companies over the years. AOL, back in the day, if anybody remembers that it’s basically the Google of the world back in, you know, I don’t know how many years ago. Worked for Spot Runner Decks, just a lot of different local marketing type companies as well.

[00:08:48] And what I’d found is, you know, 20 years ago, or whatever, for a small business or a local business, Marketing was really much simpler than it is now. I mean, you could do direct mail, maybe, you know, do an ad in the newspaper, yellow pages, you know, whatever it may be. And it will work pretty well for a business.

[00:09:07] Well then along comes the internet, right. And now there’s, you know, a thousand different places, a local business could spend money in marketing just online. And what I’d found is business owners were completely confused by this and they didn’t know what to do. They knew they needed to be on the internet.

[00:09:25] They knew they needed a website, but they didn’t know where specifically they needed to do anything. And what we’d found is, you know, some companies would just waste a ton of money and it would hurt them. And, you know, even it hurt some businesses to the point of they went out of business.

[00:09:41] And others would just kind of put their head in the sand and do nothing, which is about as bad because then you’re letting your competition, if they do figure it out, get ahead of you and get market share. And we’re seeing that a lot in dentistry is that the older guard, if you will, of dentists.

[00:09:58] You know, have always relied on patient referrals and they haven’t had to do a lot of marketing, but now they’re starting to get passed up by newer practices that are engaging in digital marketing and being more aggressive and, you know, going after that new patient base. And so people are now finding these newer dentists versus the people that have been there for a while.

[00:10:19] Richard Matthews: And your younger audience is definitely gonna. Looking exclusively online.

[00:10:23] Chris Pistorius: You better believe it. Yeah. So what worked for them, you know, 10, 15, 20 years ago, isn’t working now. And they call us, they’re like, Hey, what’s going on? What can we do? And I’m like, well, we’ve gotta get you more involved online. So.

[00:10:37] Richard Matthews: Yeah, I say, if you look generationally too, like, the millennial generation and gen Z, they’re all coming into their money spending years. Right. And so that’s, you know, they’re having their kids and they’re bringing them to the dentist and they’re looking for their first dentist, that’s mom and dad aren’t paying for and all that kind of stuff.

[00:10:51] And they’re not gonna approach it the same way that the previous generation did.

[00:10:55] Chris Pistorius: Yep. You’ve got it. So, you know, kind of circling back, I saw this going on in marketing and, you know, I saw a big need for somebody to come in and kind of untangle the web for them a little bit so that they can figure out, you know, where they need to spend their money and what needs to happen and how do you track it?

[00:11:16] Right? How do you know that you’re making money? Because they were used to, you know, page 762 and the yellow pages is their ad. They could see it, they could feel it, they could pick it up and it was good to go. Well, now you’re in this world of digital advertising where nothing’s tangible, you know, you don’t see your ads all the time, you know? Nothing’s static.

[00:11:34] Richard Matthews: And as like, and if you’re not in the target market of the ads that you’re targeting, you might not be able to see your ads other than just the demos of them.

[00:11:42] Chris Pistorius: That’s right. So, yep. So I decided to start my own 13 or 14 years ago now basically started with a blank piece of paper, no clients, nothing. Left a cushy, you know, nice job and two young kids at the time.

[00:11:55] And my wife going, are you nuts? But I knew that there was a need, you know, and I kind of started as a consultant taking on all niches. Right. I would auto mechanic, lawyer, basically, whoever would pay me. Right. And, you know, I quickly found out yeah. A heartbeat and a credit card is all I needed. And sometimes a heartbeat isn’t even required, but no, just kidding.

[00:12:16] Richard Matthews: It’s like if your credit card still worked, we could do it.

[00:12:18] Chris Pistorius: Yeah, right, just kidding. Just bad joke. But I did that for about a year was kind of serving all niches and we were successful at it. I mean, we brought on clients and started revenue, hired a couple people, but I had this sense that, you know, when we would take on a new industry, like an auto mechanic, for instance, we have to figure out the lingo in the auto industry, we have to understand the pain points that our clients have, who their clients are, you know, who is their patient, who is their customer avatar, right?

[00:12:51] How do we figure out how to get to that avatar? And sometimes when we took on a new industry, by the time we figured it out, it was almost too late. And, you know, that’s when I knew maybe sometimes we weren’t giving justice to our clients. And so that’s when we said, you know what? We need to niche down.

[00:13:08] And I had a mentor of mine at the time, still a mentor of mine called Josh Nelson. And he was a big believer in nicheing down in a marketing agency, become a true expert in whatever you’re doing. And it took some convincing from me. But then that’s when we niche down into dentistry. And the reason we picked dentistry was basically because we had five or six dentists at the time.

[00:13:30] And they were easy to work with and, we got great results for them. They paid their bills, which was always nice. And it just seemed like the sensible thing to do. And so that’s what we did. And we didn’t know what we didn’t know, and we just kind of went into it and, here we are today.

[00:13:49] Richard Matthews: Yeah. Yeah, that’s pretty that’s pretty awesome. I did went through the same thing. That’s why we tried to niche down in there. Actually, we ended up nicheing down differently in our business, we didn’t niche into a specific category, but into a specific type of service.

[00:14:02] That’s why, and when we got into the podcasting agency and we work across industries, but we only do one thing and it’s the one thing we do really well. And it does work really well for that, but it’s certainly easier than when we were trying to do all of the things for different people.

[00:14:20] Then you have one thing that like, Hey, we’ve gotten really good at this thing and we can build all the resources and the templates and the onboarding and the processes around that one area.

[00:14:28] Chris Pistorius: Right.

[00:14:30] Richard Matthews: So, yeah. So you definitely have been in the game for a while. Doing the marketing thing. I know for me, when I first got into got into marketing, there was like a light switch moment where I was like, I realized that if I was going to spend my time and effort getting good at something, I wanted to get good at something that would always be needed. Like no matter what was happening to me, it seemed like marketing was the one thing that businesses would always need help with.

[00:14:55] Like, we’re always gonna have businesses and they were always gonna need to do marketing. And I was like, that’s the place for me. Because it’s never gonna go out of style. It’s gonna change. You have to grow with it. There’s a lot of things that are happening, but fundamentally, everyone needs marketing all the time.

[00:15:10] Chris Pistorius: Yeah. And that’s purposely why we didn’t put, you know, you see some companies out there. Digital marketing, SEO, PPC. I kind of think you pigeonhole yourself sometimes in marketing, if you do that, because we don’t know what’s around the corner. I mean, right now it’s Google and digital marketing, but tomorrow it could be something completely different.

[00:15:28] So we tried to stay away from calling ourselves a specific like SEO or digital or, you know, so that we can change what the market.

[00:15:36] Richard Matthews: That makes a lot of sense. So I wanna talk then a little bit about your superpower that you’ve developed over the course of growing your agency. Right? Every iconic hero has a superpower, whether that’s their fancy flying suit made by their genius intellect, or the ability to call thunder from the sky.

[00:15:51] Your superpower is really what sets you apart in this world and allows you to get wins for your clients or for your customers. And the way I like to frame it for my guests is you probably have a set of skills that you’ve developed over the course of your career. And there’s a common thread that sort of like ties all those skills together.

[00:16:09] And that common thread is probably where your superpower is. So with that framing, what do you think your superpower is in the growth of your digital agency?

[00:16:16] Chris Pistorius: I think my superpower is the ability to connect consumers with dentists, if that makes sense. So I have a really good knack of when we meet with a new client, understanding who it is specifically they wanna market to.

[00:16:31] You heard me talk about this earlier in terms of creating a new patient avatar. It’s one of the first things that we do with a campaign we really dive into with the client, exactly who is it that you wanna walk through your door. Right. And you can do this with any local business. Who is your ideal client?

[00:16:46] If you could pick, what are they? Are they the 25 to 35 year old female with two and a half kids and a golden retriever, you know, is it the 45 to 65 year old that owns, you know, whatever it may be. And we have a really good track record here of being able to come up with those profiles and then putting our clients’ message in front of those exact demographics.

[00:17:11] And that is really what I think anyway is what makes for a very productive, efficient, and very revenue happy type of marketing campaign.

[00:17:22] Richard Matthews: So like really narrowing down on the person that you wanna be speaking to.

[00:17:26] Chris Pistorius: Yeah. I mean, most of my competition, man, I’ll tell you. And I don’t know your experiences with this, but a lot of our competition, they build out a dental marketing campaign, let’s say right.

[00:17:38] And they use that exact same campaign every time they sign on a dentist. Right? Or an auto mechanic, or they have these templates. And the reason they do that is so that they can scale quickly and they can bring on clients very quickly. And so there’s not a whole lot of customization in their marketing campaigns.

[00:17:56] And so what happens is sometimes yeah they work, but a lot of times they don’t right. And so every time we take on a new client, we’re not looking to have a thousand clients here. In fact, we only take on a certain number of new clients every year, and we only work with one client in each market. So we try to stay more of a boutique smaller agency so that we have the time to actually customize each one of our client’s campaigns based on what they do well, and based on who it is they wanna bring into their practice.

[00:18:27] Richard Matthews: So I know one of the things we talk in marketing all the time is the idea of the market message match. Right? And so you’re talking about really nailing down the market. All right. And like who the person is. And then I would imagine the message is like the offer that the agent or sorry that the dentist is putting in front of them.

[00:18:45] Do you do a lot of customization on the offers or do you find that the same type of offers, like just as an example, teeth whitening as a front end campaign or something work in lots of markets or do you have to customize those as well?

[00:18:56] Chris Pistorius: We have to customize them for a couple of different reasons, not just because of what works, but also some of our dentists don’t want to we take on a lot of higher end offices if you will.

[00:19:06] So they want to come across as high quality, the high end cosmetic type dentist. And sometimes if you try to throw an offer out there on that, it kind of lessens the brand a little bit. So we have to be super sensitive. Again to.

[00:19:23] Richard Matthews: About the offers?

[00:19:24] Chris Pistorius: Yeah. Again, I keep bringing up this new patient avatar, but that really tells us the story. I mean, if it’s a smaller practice that takes all kinds of insurances and you know, they’re trying to do volume, absolutely offers are great, but there’s some in our industry that are higher end their fee for service, so they don’t really are in network with any insurances and we have to be sensitive to that.

[00:19:47] So we customize it based on what works, because we’ve got tons of data and we’re running all these campaigns and we know what works and what doesn’t, but sometimes it’s up to the client too, of, you know, what they’re trying to achieve.

[00:19:59] Richard Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. And then, so I would imagine, depending on what the offer is, you’re gonna have a lot of like differences in like how readily they convert into like front end leads.

[00:20:10] Chris Pistorius: Yes.

[00:20:10] Richard Matthews: And I assume, cuz you’ve got a lot of data behind that you can set expectations with your clients accordingly, be like, Hey, this offer is going to, you know, only convert it like maybe 1% versus this other offer that might convert at 10. But I know you don’t wanna be in that space kind of thing.

[00:20:23] Chris Pistorius: Exactly. You know, back in the day, Groupon was supposed to be the next. You know, like, and I even fell into that trap too. I’m like, why didn’t I think of this? This is awesome way for a business to market Groupon offers. Right. And I’m not saying they’re terrible, but it never really took off the way that it intended to.

[00:20:40] And the reason for that is that once somebody signs up for a Groupon, if you guys don’t know how this works, basically a percentage of anything you sell through Groupon goes back to Groupon. That’s how they make money. And then you make the rest. The problem is that by the time you pay Groupon and you’re already giving, you know, whoever it is a special offer, you’re probably gonna lose money on the deal or break even at the best.

[00:21:05] Well, what we found out and what marketers found out is that Groupon did not build very good customer loyalty. So people are just looking for great deals, right? Well, these businesses are banking on them coming in, getting the Groupon deal. And then, a certain percentage of them hopefully a high percentage will stay as long term customers and keep coming back.

[00:21:26] Well, that didn’t happen. And so what’s happen is a you know, a loss lead and these customers don’t come back, cuz they’re just going to the next offer. In my space, it’s free whitening or free x-ray or free cleaning. They’re not loyal, they’re just looking for the next great deal. And so we’ve found that Groupon type offers, you know, whether it’s through Groupon or not, if you try to give the farm away.

[00:21:49] Yeah. You’ll get some response from it, but you better make sure that you’re keeping those customers coming back or it’s gonna cost you in the long run.

[00:21:57] Richard Matthews: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I know, because back in the day we tried some of those campaigns too, and they do work. But the type of people that you attract with a good deal are the kind of people who are looking for a good deal.

[00:22:10] Right. And so you have to learn how do I write and put my marketing, my offers together. So we’re attracting people who are looking for the best service. Which is a different type of customer.

[00:22:20] Chris Pistorius: Yep. You got it.

[00:22:22] Richard Matthews: So, that’s definitely interesting. I think if anyone is, you know, talking about superpowers, I always used to call marketing.

[00:22:29] The superpower of marketing is like being alchemy. Cuz you can turn words into gold. Just like they used to turn whatever, I don’t know, whatever alchemy tried to do. They turned, tried to turn other things into gold, but it’s as your superpower is you can turn words into gold by putting the market and the message together and putting offers together and building them.

[00:22:49] Chris Pistorius: Right. Absolutely.

[00:22:51] Richard Matthews: So curious question on that, because you’re an agency and I imagine you’re trying to grow, how do you transfer that skill to other people on your team? So that you’re not the one who’s always having to come up with offers because that’s the kind of thing that takes a lifetime to learn.

[00:23:05] Chris Pistorius: Yeah. So, for us, it’s all about processes and procedures and documenting everything. Right. So, you know, at the beginning it was me. And I would try to document everything that I did, you know, cuz at the beginning I did everything. And so we document, we try to anyway document every job that’s in our agency.

[00:23:26] So the pay per click person, I mean literally I could bring, you have to know, pay per click. But the goal would be to bring any pay per click person into our agency and they can easily see our process and procedure and know exactly what it is, how we do things and what offers we use. And if it’s this type of client, you use this type of offer and things like that.

[00:23:47] So it’s almost training process procedures, you know, there’s no magic pill. There’s no easy way. Yeah, but that’s how you scale responsibly.

[00:23:57] Richard Matthews: So I’ve discovered. And I don’t know if you found this feature or not, but when it comes to documenting processes, I’ve found it actually the most important part of the process that you’re documenting is not the actual step one, do this step two, do this thing, but it’s the why, why do we take these steps and why do we do them in this order?

[00:24:14] Cause if you take some of the thinking behind the process, then you end up with people who can operate the process at a higher level and see when there’s problems and see when they can make improvements and things like that, as opposed to someone who’s just, you know, checking off the boxes, if that makes sense.

[00:24:29] Chris Pistorius: Yep. Absolutely.

[00:24:31] Richard Matthews: Yeah. Cool. Well, I wanna talk about the flip side then of your superpower. So if your superpower is developing the offers and getting right into the the market, the flip side of that would of course be the fatal flaw, just like, you know, Superman has his kryptonite or wonder woman can’t remove her bracelets of victory without going mad.

[00:24:47] You probably have something that has held you back in the growth of your business, something that you struggled with. For me, I struggled for a long time with perfectionism, which, you know, kept me from like wanting to bring things to market. Cause I could always make it a little bit better before I actually made an offer to a client.

[00:24:58] And then you realize that you’re not actually doing anything. And I also struggled with self care for a long time, which means I had no good boundaries with my clients. I had no good boundaries with my time. I once tried not sleeping for three days to see if I could work all the way through that.

[00:25:09] That doesn’t go well, just FYI. But anyways, I learned a lot from those things and I no longer have, I still struggle a little bit, but I imagine sharing a little bit of what you have learned from your fatal flaw might help our audience learn from your experience.

[00:25:23] Chris Pistorius: I think it’s somewhat similar to what you just described. You know, when I first started out, I just kind of created a job for myself. I didn’t really create a company if that makes sense. So, when you just create a job for yourself, you’re doing all the work in the company, right. And when you build a business, you have a team of people that are actually running the company while you’re working on the company.

[00:25:44] I think that’s an E myth thing. Right? So my biggest thing struggles, I knew I needed to do that, but was kind of letting go and letting trusting other people to take over things like account management, for instance, or pay per click ads or SEO, things like that. It was very hard for me in to let that go and let somebody else just handle it.

[00:26:08] Right. So kind of letting go. And I had to learn what you just brought up, was I don’t know if we created this or where I heard it, but done is better than perfect. Right. And I got caught up in that too. Whereas, you know, I wouldn’t do anything. I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing anything until I felt like it was absolutely perfect.

[00:26:28] And guess what? It’s never absolutely perfect. Right. So, I kept preventing, like launching new products and services, before I thought it was act absolutely perfect. And it just doesn’t work because you can’t get to perfection first of all, but you can’t even get close to perfection until you actually launch something and see how it goes or make it better.

[00:26:46] Yeah, exactly. And that still haunts me a little bit today. I mean, we’re getting ready to launch a, what we call a concierge service where you know, one of the fatal flaws of my clients, unfortunately, while we bring this up is that sometimes their front desk staff It just isn’t trained on how to be good at like scheduling new patients.

[00:27:05] Right. They’re not sales people and it’s not really a sales thing, but it’s a, you know, they’re just not trained in how to actually get patients excited about the practice and schedule with them. Right. And so we lose a lot of leads sometimes from clients, cuz they’re not good at, at selling if you will.

[00:27:21] So we’re gonna launch this concierge service where we can actually be the, we’ll actually follow up with the leads. We’ll answer the phones. We’ll actually get them scheduled with our practices. And I’m still tweaking that. And I’m still kind of like, you know, I shouldn’t launch this yet, cause it is not perfect.

[00:27:37] So I still catch myself doing that every once in a while. But I would say those two things are kind of my biggest flaws.

[00:27:45] Richard Matthews: My light bulb moment actually came from a mastermind member of friend of mine. When we were talking about the struggling with perfection and she said something to me that really struck home.

[00:27:54] She said essentially perfection is the lowest standard you can hold yourself to. And she’s like, because it doesn’t exist. And so you’re holding yourself to a standard that doesn’t exist. So you’re not holding yourself to any standard at all. And that was like a light bulb moment for me.

[00:28:09] And I was like, oh, you’re right. You’re not holding yourself to any standard. Then you’re not actually going to market. And so you have to shift your mindset a little bit into what is the minimum viable product, right? What can I actually bring to market?

[00:28:22] That’s going to work and get the result that I want for my clients and then we can iterate from there.

[00:28:26] Chris Pistorius: Right. Absolutely. Totally agree.

[00:28:30] Richard Matthews: So yeah, it’s interesting how common that struggle comes up in these interviews. Perfectionism in particular seems to be a very common thing for entrepreneurs.

[00:28:37] And I think a lot of it has to go back to something we’ll probably talk about a little bit later. But how important integrity is to entrepreneurs? And we feel like the best way to have integrity is to have perfected products. I’m not sure why we have that sort of like misconnection in our head, but it seems very common,

[00:28:53] Chris Pistorius: Right. Yeah. I don’t know what it is either. I wish there was a pill for it.

[00:28:58] Richard Matthews: Yeah. That we could just solve it. So speaking of things that you might wish you had a pill for, I wanna talk a little bit about your common enemy, right? Every Superhero has an arch nemesis, it’s the thing that they constantly have to fight against in their world.

[00:29:11] And in the world of business, we like to put it in the context of your clients and it’s a mindset, or it’s a flaw that you have to fight to overcome every time they sign on that dotted line, that if you had a magic wand and you could just bop them on the head and not have to deal with that flaw, what is the common enemy in the dental marketing space?

[00:29:27] Chris Pistorius: You know, I have to say it’s probably expectations. What we see sometimes. And we do a much better job of this now than we used to, but we find that no matter what you do during the sales process of trying to tame expect, cuz everybody that does marketing, they want results immediately. Right? I mean, they want instant results.

[00:29:48] And sometimes when you tell them and we’ve turned down a lot of clients for this reason, when you do marketing the right way, it’s not always a sprint. It’s more of a marathon. And things are gonna, I mean, everybody’s in a different state of where their marketing is, so, you know, no matter what we tell people, we’re like, you know, you need 90, 120 days, maybe even 180 days, depending on the client to really feel the full breath of what we’re doing here.

[00:30:14] And they’re like, okay, okay. I understand. I understand. And then 30 days later it’s like, wait, where’s all my new patients. Where’s all my leads. They kind of forget. You know those expectations. And I think there’s a lot of external reasons for that. They’re starting to pay that monthly bill now and they’re like, oh, what am I getting out of this?

[00:30:34] You know, where’s my money going? It’s kind of like buyer’s remorse. And so I think that, you know, if I had a magic wand, I would want to wave it over some clients and just make sure that they have to be patient and that great marketing campaigns don’t happen overnight.

[00:30:50] And then sometimes it takes a few months for it to actually really feel the difference.

[00:30:57] Richard Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. I know it’s a really interesting thing we have to deal with in the podcasting space too, is this idea that like, I’m going to start a podcast today and tomorrow I’m gonna be famous.

[00:31:07] And I have to spend a lot of time at the beginning. I’m like, listen, podcasting and content marketing in general. Cuz that’s we use podcasting as a leverage point to get into all sorts of content marketing. Because you can create long form podcasts like this one and then split it up and use it for all sorts of other content marketing materials, which is really effective, but it’s not really effective tomorrow.

[00:31:27] It’s not really effective six months down the line, but if you do it consistently for two years, you become unignorable in your marketplace.

[00:31:35] Chris Pistorius: Absolutely. You build authority.

[00:31:37] Richard Matthews: Yeah. Everyone, everywhere sees you all the time. Right?

[00:31:40] Chris Pistorius: That’s right, omnipresence, if we like to call that.

[00:31:44] Richard Matthews: Yeah. It’s a long term play. And so like, I try to tell people, like, I’ve got my podcast, this one that you’re on now and people ask me like, so how did yours work? And I’m like, well, the first year we had to fight tooth and nail to get guests.

[00:31:56] And it was a lot of work and it was a lot of effort. And the second year it was a little bit easier, but the third year I’ve got so many people knocking on my door to come get on my show. We don’t even reach out to guests anymore. But it’s a long term play.

[00:32:08] Chris Pistorius: Yeah. I’ve got a question for you kinda off topic really quickly, but do you feel as though with podcasting, you always have to have a guest or can you just do like a topic by yourself sometimes?

[00:32:18] Richard Matthews: So, we actually, most of our clients do topic based shows. I think topic based shows are both easier to do and more effective if you’re trying to build authority in your marketplace. And the only reason I do this show this way is cuz I have a particular message I’m trying to get across, which is that, you know, entrepreneurs are are not villains. They’re actually heroes and change the conversation around that.

[00:32:39] So this is the harder way to do it, just to have an interview show, but I think what’s really effective is to have like say you were doing a weekly show. If you want to do like, three weeks of your month is all content that you’re doing directly. And then maybe the fourth week, if you wanna bring in a guest expert to talk about something else that’s also effective where you can break up the content types a little bit by having guest experts come in and talk about things.

[00:33:04] But as far as like the authority based stuff, I have a friend of mine, not a client of mine, he is a friend of mine who is running a podcast in his local area as a chiropractor. And all the other chiropractors hated him because he was like, he had all of the market share. He didn’t have to do any other marketing because he’d been doing it for so long that anytime someone was like, I need a chiropractor in this city.

[00:33:24] They were like, talk to this guy he’s everywhere all the time. And is always teaching me cool things about, you know, like exercises I can do at home and other things. And when they need a chiropractor, they always call him first. So all of his other marketing, like the stuff that you would do is more effective. Yeah. Because he’s been doing the content marketing.

[00:33:44] Chris Pistorius: Yeah. We’re just, you know, it’s funny because we’re just now starting to incorporate podcasting to our clients. So it’s part of our service. And we’re still trying to figure that out a little bit, but you know, I’ve got a podcast and so we start them off on that, you know, just kind of get them feeling for it and, you know, gives me some easy targets to interview.

[00:34:05] But you know, we’re trying to figure out, how can we get them? Like maybe on a quarterly basis. You know, interviewed by other podcasts in the health realm and then take those podcasts and we’ve got all kinds of content and we can cut them up in social media ads. We can put them onto the website. It builds crazy authority, you know?

[00:34:24] So I think that, you’re right, you know, when you can do podcasting and, you can build authority and it’s that omnipresence of you everywhere, you know, that’s just gold and there’s no magic button. It won’t happen fast, but you know, absolutely. It’s an incredible marketing venue, I think.

[00:34:43] Richard Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. And if you’re interested, I could give you later our like how we build like a year’s worth of content for a client. So they can actually sit down and record all that stuff. Super useful things to help grow that content base. Cause I’ve noticed the hardest things for clients when they get into podcasting is like, I don’t know what to say.

[00:34:59] Right. Like, what do I actually get in and talk about? And then like, when I actually record an episode, what I say on the episode then like, how do I make sure I look nice, right. When I record something. And then like, if you can solve those couple of problems, those are the kind of things that stop people from starting.

[00:35:13] Chris Pistorius: That’s right. You got it. Cool.

[00:35:15] Richard Matthews: And then, like, I always tell people there’s three ways to get your offers in front of people. Like you always have to have an audience, right? You can either buy an audience, you can borrow an audience or you can build an audience. And so like your ads and stuff is buying audience and borrowing audience is like, you coming on my podcast is a form of borrow an audience. You’re borrowing my audience to talk about your business.

[00:35:35] Or like J partnerships, the chiropractor who talks to the massage therapist and says, Hey, will you give a hundred dollars coupon dollar your clients? And I’ll give a hundred dollars coupon dollar, your clients that’s borrowing audience.

[00:35:44] Or building your own, which is building a platform, right? Like building your own podcast and video show and creating all the content that goes into it. And I always tell my client, we have a strategy in all three of those areas. Cause it makes for good 10 pole of actually getting in front of your audience.

[00:35:59] Chris Pistorius: Or buy and borrow in the beginning. And then as you’re building up your own, you know.

[00:36:04] Richard Matthews: Yeah. So I was like, they sort of go like from left to right buy is the fastest. But it’s also the most expensive. And then the build is the slowest, but it’s also the most effective.

[00:36:16] Chris Pistorius: Yep. I know. I hear you. And we try to, you know, our marketing strategies, we try to incorporate things that are faster.

[00:36:24] Right. And to mu business paid advertising is quick, right? Reactivation campaigns are quick. But what’s longer is SEO, building brand awareness, building authority, you know, same kind of. Yeah.

[00:36:38] Richard Matthews: Yeah. And the coolest thing about the content marketing is it makes really, really good content for ads. So you’ve got great content to promote things.

[00:36:47] We teach a a butterfly net strategy that that you can use with content. But anyways, there’s all sorts of cool things you can do with that. But yeah, the first part of that is, you know, the common enemy is the expectations and learning how to set the expectations for the different types of marketing you’re doing.

[00:37:01] Yep. And yeah, it doesn’t really seem to matter. It’s always a rough conversation of like, hey, the expectations. And they’re like, you know, especially when you’re doing something like content marketing, where you’re paying a service to help them do it for you. It’s rough to be like, Hey, this costs me time and money every month.

[00:37:15] But it takes a while to build. Right. And so you have to build those expectations in.

[00:37:20] Chris Pistorius: Absolutely. And we’ve created a roadmap, actually that shows kind of the first 90 days of the campaign and what they can expect in those 90 days. And that seemed to have helped quite a bit. And so every time one of our account managers speaks with the client, they always have that roadmap up and they kind of, you know, check mark things.

[00:37:37] Okay. Here, we’re on track here. We’re on track so that it kind of reinforces. Oh yeah. I remember seeing that in the sales process, right? So that that’s helped quite a bit too.

[00:37:46] Richard Matthews: Makes sense. So I wanna talk about the flip side of your common enemy, right? So if your common enemy is what you fight against, then the flip side of that is your driving force, is what you fight for.

[00:37:55] So, you know, just like Spider-Man fights to save New York or Batman fights to save Gotham or Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information. What is it that you fight for at Kickstart Dental? Your mission, so to speak.

[00:38:05] Chris Pistorius: Yeah. So we fight for our clients. First of all. And what I mean by that is that this industry, as you probably will know, my industry is plagued by scam artists, companies that promise the world for a very small amount of money typically, and people sign up with them.

[00:38:23] And by the time people, our clients figure out that it’s a scam or they’re not really doing much, and they’re not getting anything out of it that they’ve lost, you know, thousands of dollars sometimes. And this online digital marketing agency world is, you know, anybody with a laptop in a Google ads account can say they’re a digital marketer.

[00:38:42] Right? And so, what I fight for is to make sure that people know the truth and they know the difference between fly by night operations are just looking to make a quick buck and quality agencies like mine that are actually trying to help a dentist grow, how to increase the bottom line so that it can help their personal lives.

[00:39:03] They can spend more time with their family. They can go on more vacations. Those are the things that an agency should really be concerned about, not where your credit card go through every month. Right? So I think that’s probably the biggest thing that I try to fight for.

[00:39:16] Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s interesting because like, there’s a lot of people that teach digital marketing as like, Hey, you can start an agency and make money.

[00:39:24] Yeah. And I mean, it’s a cool thing that happens. It gives a lot of competition in the space and there’s a lot of good agencies that have come from that kind of stuff. But it also, you end up with, you know, the 80, 20, 80% of the people who come in and get into the space are not good at it.

[00:39:38] Chris Pistorius: That’s right.

[00:39:39] Richard Matthews: And there’s a certain skill that comes with being able to put together messaging and understanding another person. And being able to put together the type of marketing campaigns that you’re talking about. And there’s this whole, I don’t know what the word might be called.

[00:39:54] Like, you know, the cloak and dagger kind of thing that, you know, digital marketing is not something that everyone understands. Right. Cause a Google ads account is not easy, right. A Facebook ads isn’t easy and writing a message that converts is not easy and it’s not easy to like explain to someone else either.

[00:40:11] So since that is the case, it’s really easy for people who are not good at what they’re doing to hide behind complexity. And instead of standing in front of results, if that makes sense.

[00:40:25] Chris Pistorius: Right. Yeah, totally agree. And you know, I went through some of those programs of these mentors that’ll, you know, start a digital agency and you’ll make money type of thing.

[00:40:36] And I went through some of those. And you’re right. Most of them are like that, but I did find one that was incredible. And that was the seven figure agency with Josh Nelson. Check him out if you want to, but he’s legit. He actually runs a seven figure agency has been for years, he’s in the plumber and HVAC niche.

[00:40:54] And he also now has a training business with his partner that they actually train agencies like myself on not just how to make money. I mean, you know, that’s a business part of it, but like we all get together three times a year on strategies. Like what’s working for clients what’s not, and you know, there’s all kinds of different niches in his group, but you know, we come away like the last time I was there, the biggest takeaway for me was how TikTok is exploding in terms of not just for like teenage people, but, you know, the age.

[00:41:26] Of what people using TikTok now is hockey sticking up like Facebook did over time. TikTok is doing it rapidly. So an older audience now is starting to use more TikTok. And so TikTok ads, you know, we need to start testing that, incorporating that. So strategies, things like that. I think mentors can help a lot too. You gotta find the right one.

[00:41:46] Richard Matthews: TikTok is an interesting game I’ve noticed like right now, cuz it’s still so new. There’s a lot of people that are like, yeah, it’s exploding, but also it’s exploding, but it’s not turning into like high quality leads yet.

[00:41:57] Chris Pistorius: Facebook was like that though here in the beginning, right?

[00:42:00] Richard Matthews: Yeah. So there’s gonna be a whole learning curve to that, that I think growing right back to that expectations talk, if you’re going to bring someone on and say like, Hey, we’ll help you with your TikTok ads at this point is gonna be like, we’re gonna be experimenting with TikTok ads. And if you’re willing to put money into experimentation and consider it research and development, it may or may not work.

[00:42:18] Chris Pistorius: Right. Well, we try things like TikTok and Facebook. We talk more about branding. We talked more about omnipresence, which I talked about before being everywhere all the time and the TikTok ad. We may not see a conversion on it, but I can darn will promise you people are gonna see your name out there.

[00:42:34] Right. And there is a value to that. It’s not tangible. It’s hard to say, Hey, you’ve got this much money out of it, but there is omnipresence is a real thing and the more you can be out there, the most cost effectively, the better.

[00:42:46] Richard Matthews: Yep. Everywhere all the time. That’s why we do the podcasting stuff. And cut on to them. That’s why you have content to feed into those places.

[00:42:52] Chris Pistorius: That’s right.

[00:42:53] Richard Matthews: So, yeah. So I wanna talk a little bit then about some practical things. I call this the hero’s tool belt and just like every superhero has their batarangs or their web slingers or their magical hammers they can fly with.

[00:43:03] I wanna talk about top one or two tools you couldn’t live without to run your business. Could be anything from your marketing to your notepad, to your calendar, to something that you use for product delivery. Something that you think is essential to getting your job done on a day to day basis?

[00:43:15] Chris Pistorius: Yeah. I’ve got a couple, one is called Loom. Are you familiar with loom?

[00:43:19] Richard Matthews: I am familiar with loom. Loom is a video sharing service.

[00:43:21] Chris Pistorius: Yeah. So you can quickly create a little video. You can even, you know, create it with a background or like somebody’s website in the background and you’re over the top of it. It’s great for training.

[00:43:33] We do little short videos to potential clients sometimes saying, Hey, do you know this page on your website isn’t working properly? And then we send that off to them. Loom is a great tool for a lot of different things. ClickUp is a big one for us because that’s what we use for all of our project management.

[00:43:48] So everything that’s task driven goes into ClickUp and it’s our communication tool. HelpScout is another one. That’s how we do all of our client communication. So everybody in the company can see what everybody’s saying to clients. So that if somebody’s out sick or, you know, somebody needs to pick up the ball and run with it, we know where we are with it.

[00:44:07] Geez. There’s so many tools that we use.

[00:44:09] Richard Matthews: Yeah, we actually, we use ClickUp. We just switched all of our project management and to ClickUp, I’ve been blown away by the sheer power of that system and getting all of like your documentation built right into the task processes and whatnot. Super cool.

[00:44:21] Chris Pistorius: It’s a monster though. I mean, it can do a lot of things. We feel like we’ve been using it for years and there’s still a lot of things that we don’t know about it. So, yeah, but I’d say those are probably the top tools.

[00:44:32] Richard Matthews: It’s like, one of the things that we just started doing is you said you’re using HelpScout for client communication.

[00:44:36] We started building ClickUp dashboards for each client that have like a chat thing built in so each client has their own dashboard and they can see like our tasks and stuff that are on the board. They can’t do anything with them unless we let them, but like they can have a chat that they can talk to our staff and who’s on their project and everything.

[00:44:52] It’s been very cool. And it’s amazing cuz like, a tool like that didn’t exist 10 years ago, right?

[00:44:57] Chris Pistorius: Oh, no, not. You can run your spreadsheets.

[00:45:01] Richard Matthews: Yeah. You can run your whole business out of these things now. It’s pretty cool.

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[00:46:33] And now back to the hero show.

[00:46:36] So I wanna talk for a few minutes about maybe some of your own personal heroes. I know you mentioned one already. But you know, every hero has their mentors, Frodo had Gandalf, Luke had Obi-Wan Kenobi. Robert Kiosaki had his Rich Dad even Spiderman had his uncle Ben. I wanna spend a few minutes talking about some of your heroes. Were they real life mentors, peers that were maybe a couple years ahead of you or maybe speakers, authors, how important were they to what you have accomplished so far in your business?

[00:47:00] Chris Pistorius: Yeah, well, definitely Josh Nelson from Seven Figure Agency is a big one in terms of business, for sure.

[00:47:06] You know, I think other than that, I’ve been influenced by weird things, really. What’s the entourage you remember that TV show on HBO? It was a city’s entourage. For some reason that show really inspired me to do this. And you know, if you watch the show, I dunno if you did or not.

[00:47:28] It’s about an actor in his entourage, but his agent runs an agency, a talent agency, really more than anything, public relations, stuff like that. And whatever it was about that show really got me motivated to do this. And I have no idea why it’s kind of embarrassing talking about it now, but I would say little things like that.

[00:47:50] And just, you know, owning an agency, owning any type of business is such a roller coaster. I think in the low moments, you are always looking for something to inspire you, and I think you can find inspiration from a number of different ways. I mean, just sometimes, look at your competition.

[00:48:08] Right. I like to go to my competitor’s website sometime, you know, just see what they’re doing, but just see man, this particular agency might be three times our size and I’m like, man, so it’s possible, right? So I can see competition sometimes being a mentor. Isn’t that crazy.

[00:48:24] But you know, I would say, you know, my family is a big mentor of mine, a big supporter, but you know, Josh Nelson, our competition and the show entourage.

[00:48:34] Richard Matthews: I like the competition thing too. Cause I think a lot of times people negatively look at competition and I’ve always thought very positively about competition. Cause competition is an indicator that you’re in a good space and a good business. And especially if they’re bigger than you, it’s an indication that you have room to grow and the market, that kind of stuff. So I’ve always liked to refer to them instead of competition, as coopetition.

[00:48:58] Chris Pistorius: Yes. I like that. That’s I might steal it.

[00:49:01] Richard Matthews: Yeah. Cause honestly, even if you talk to people who are in your space, competing with you directly, a lot of times, they’re just other entrepreneurs, just like you trying to make a business work and provide value to the marketplace. And you’ll find that, you know, there’s ways that you can work together and make better services for both of your clients.

[00:49:16] Chris Pistorius: Absolutely, I’m friends with a lot of other dental marketing agencies of all different sizes. And we’re always kinda like, you know what, there’s a lot of dentists out there, you know, and what may not be a great fit for us. I mean, we have a pretty, we’ve got our own avatar and what’s not a good fit for us sometimes I refer to our competition who might be looking for that type of a client.

[00:49:36] Richard Matthews: Yeah. I’ve got a few in the podcasting agency space too, that they’re like, Hey, if you’re looking to do this particular type of podcast, we’re not your people, but these guys are.

[00:49:45] Chris Pistorius: Yeah, you got it.

[00:49:47] Richard Matthews: Yeah. So I’m wanna talk then about your guiding principles, right? So one of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code, for instance, Batman never kills his enemies. He only ever puts him in Arkham Asylum. So as we get to the end of the interview here, I want to talk about the top, maybe one, maybe two principles that you run your company by or live your life by maybe something you wish you had known when you first started your own agency 13 years ago.

[00:50:10] Chris Pistorius: You know, I worked for some companies, big companies, marketing companies where it wasn’t all about the client. They said it was about the client, but really what was about is increasing stock price and how you increase stock prices by selling more, right. And to sell more, sometimes you just create new products and you don’t really care if they work or if they don’t work.

[00:50:29] And so when you work for companies like that, sometimes, you know, in the back of your mind, you’re selling a small local business, something that might not work because it hasn’t been tested, but they’re probably gonna buy it because they trust you. And that, you know, it’s new and flashy and, you know, big companies typically have shiny objects where they can make them look great.

[00:50:51] And so I think for me, probably it’s, you know, our motto is leave our clients off better than when we found them. Right, so that no matter what, we can look back and say, look, ABC dental, you know, has twice the amount of web traffic they have their visibility online is amazing. We’ve left them off better than when they started.

[00:51:15] Right. And make all the right decisions. And sometimes the right decisions lose us money, they do, we lose money sometimes on clients because we always try to do the right thing. And I’ve always been a big believer that, and I’m not the only one that’s ever thought of this, but do the right things for your clients and the money will come along.

[00:51:34] Right. And that’s, what’s held us true. And that’s why we stayed small and we didn’t get hugely big and we’ve had opportunities to expand, but we don’t want to do that. Right. We wanna take care of our clients and make sure they’re protected and that we leave them better off than when they started.

[00:51:50] Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. And I agree, we do the same kind of thing and I love, one of my first spiritual mentors, actually, one of the first principles that I remember learning and actually thinking of as a life principal, when I was like 13 or 14 years old was leave it better than you found it.

[00:52:05] And he always talked about that in terms of everything. Like you go into a room and you use it for a meeting, you leave the room better than you found it. And if you find a person on the side of the road, and if you leave them with a smile you’ve lived left and better than you found them kinda of thing.

[00:52:14] And I love that as a principle for your business, leave your clients better than you found them. Cool. Well that I think is a great place to wrap our interview, but I do finish off every interview with something. I call the heroes challenge and I need this to help get access to interviews and stories we might not find on our own.

[00:52:32] Cuz as you know, not everyone is out doing the podcast rounds like you and I are doing. So the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life on 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 with us here on the Hero Show? First person that comes to mind for you.

[00:52:46] Chris Pistorius: Well, the first person you may have trouble getting, but we’ll try Mark Cuban.

[00:52:52] Richard Matthews: Mark Cuban.

[00:52:53] Chris Pistorius: Yeah. Yeah. So for me, the way he built kind of his company is very inspiring to me because he has, you know, it’s hard to explain, but he kind of has this knock the door down, keep trying, don’t give up, sleep in your car if you have to, sleep on the floor of an apartment, whatever it takes to make sure that you’re successful with your business.

[00:53:18] And I think that kind of grit has been lost and maybe some of the younger generations that we’re in. Right. Whereas, you know, when I first started this business, it was just me and I just started walking in the dental practice and saying, Hey, I’m Chris Pistorius.

[00:53:31] I know what I’m doing with marketing. Sign up and I’ll bring you more new patients. You don’t see that much anymore. There’s not any type of that beat cop type marketing. Whereas if you want to be successful, you’ve gotta do whatever it takes legally to make it happen. Right. And he was very much that way.

[00:53:50] And that’s how he built his billions. Right. You know, take Mark Cuban for who he is, or if you’re a Mav’s fan or not, but that type of grit I think, is what it takes to be successful for a small business. And I’m just afraid that we’re losing that right now. So that would be mine.

[00:54:07] Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. Well, if that’s something that you can make an introduction for, that’d be great. If not, we’ll see.

[00:54:10] Chris Pistorius: I’ll do my best .

[00:54:13] Richard Matthews: So in comic books, there’s always the crowd of people at the end, who are cheering and clapping for the acts of heroism. As we close our analogous to that here is where can people find you? Where can they light at the bat signal, so to speak and be like, Hey, Chris, we’d love to hire you for our own digital agency.

[00:54:26] And I think more important than where, is who are the right types of people to reach out and actually ask for your help.

[00:54:31] Chris Pistorius: Well, obviously we’re in the dental space. So anybody in the dental space would be somebody that we would work directly with, but I would be more than happy to give advice for free to any local business or small business out there that might be struggling with a marketing plan.

[00:54:44] Just give you free advice. And I’ve got a lot of friends in the industry that niche and different Industries like auto mechanics, lawyers, things like that, but just go to my website, KickstartDental.com. There’s a free strategy session button right at the top. I do all of those strategy sessions, myself, feel free to go in and schedule something with me, no cost at all.

[00:55:05] I’ll help you out the best I can. And if you need a referral to another type of agency, more than happy to give that intro.

[00:55:12] Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. So we’ll make sure we get the links for that onto our. What do you call them? Into our Show notes for this episode. Yeah, I was like, there’s a word for that. I just forgot.

[00:55:22] Chris Pistorius: Control, delete.

[00:55:24] Richard Matthews: So do you have any final words of wisdom for our audience before I hit this stop record button?

[00:55:29] Chris Pistorius: I think just take action. Just make a plan and, get it done and don’t let any of the naysayers get in your way. And I appreciate you having me on, Richard.

[00:55:38] Richard Matthews: Absolutely. Thanks for being here, Chris.

[00:55:39] Chris Pistorius: Sure.