Episode 241 – Robb Fahrion

Richard Matthews: [00:00:00] You wanna talk about the top one

or maybe two principles

that you live your life

by you run your business

by that maybe you wish you knew

when you first started

out your company.

Robb Fahrion: Yeah, I wouldn’t say it’s something

that I wish I knew when I started

but it’s just always been a guiding light.

I think it is just honesty.

I grew up playing sports.

I coached high school football

for quite a few years too

prior to starting this business.

And I had a coach and he told me

Hey, no matter how good

or bad you think

something may be it’s never as good

as it may be

and it’s never as bad

as it may be either.

And so I think obviously

when you’re talking about okay

things that don’t go well

it’s tough conversations

that you have to have with clients

but I’ve always found that

hey, be a straight shooter, lay out

here’s what happened

here’s why it happened

own it.

You know, a lot of times

as the face and the leader

of the corporation.

But yeah, just being honest

and transparent.

I think that’s the biggest thing.

And I mean,

that’s one of the things

when we talk about okay

the guiding light of the work

that we do too.

Like, we’re an open book, right?

​

Richard Matthews: [00:01:00] Hello and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name’s Richard Matthews and today I have the pleasure of having on the line Robb Fahrion. Robb, are you there?

Robb Fahrion: I am here, [00:02:00] Richard. Thanks for having me.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. Awesome. Glad to have you here. I know. We’ll get into the introduction very quickly, but where are you calling in from? Where’s home?

Robb Fahrion: I am in Orange County, California. More specifically Costa Mesa, California. So yeah, right in the heart of Orange County, Newport Beach area. So right in there.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. And if I remember correctly, when we connected you actually went to high school in the same town that I did, is that right? You were in Temecula?

Robb Fahrion: I was, yeah, when we were just making acquaintances early on realized. Yeah, I both grew up in the same area or at least had some crossover in Temecula. So yeah, it’s always nice to see another fellow, I don’t even know what they call them, Temeculan, I guess it would be, but yeah small world, huh?

Richard Matthews: Yeah, so I, you know, I went to high school and we’re at a valley high, which is just down the road, which means our schools probably competed at some point for football trophies. So,

Robb Fahrion: No doubt.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, and I’m actually, for those of you who are following my podcast, we’re actually visiting family. We’re in Temecula right now. So, we’re not here often, but when we are. We’re just down the road.

So what I wanna do is [00:03:00] dive into your introduction, just so our guests or not our guests, you’re the guest. Our audience knows who you are. So Robb is the co-founder and a partner of Flying V Group and Award-winning digital marketing and advertising agency.

Located in Orange County, California Robin, his team focused on crafting unique and performance driven marketing and advertising strategies for their clients in order to help scale their business using the power of digital marketing. Robb’s a leader in the digital marketing space and frequently speaks on paid media and SEO strategies.

Flying V Group has served more than 350 clients with their marketing execution, which is anyone who’s run an agency knows that’s a huge number of clients to have served. So with that brief introduction, Robb what I wanna start off with is what are you known for what’s your business like? Who do you serve? What do you do for them?

Robb Fahrion: Yeah, that sounds great. I think at the end of the day, Flying V Group is known for a few things. Customer service being number one. I think at the end of the day, regardless of what business you’re operating having your client’s best interests in mind, being responsive, communicating with them effectively is key to any sort of engagement, right? Whatever we’re [00:04:00] talking about.

And then the next piece would be 100% performance driven. So regardless of what type of engagement we’re embarking on with our clientele, everything we’re doing is being tied to specific KPIs reporting is tied to those KPIs any dollars and sense going out the door where looking to calculate. Okay. What is that return on the investment that our clients are making? And are we hitting certain benchmarks that justify the spend that they are utilizing with us? And obviously the performance that we’re able to generate? So, hyper competitive, I would say is definitely in our nature to where we’re always trying to, okay, we have a certain benchmark where we start, well, every single month or even every single day, right?

We’re further increasing that benchmark. And so I think that’s what our clients come to know is again, just the ability to communicate clearly, effectively so they have a keen sense of understanding of what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, and then obviously us really [00:05:00] putting an emphasis on our team’s performance and holding ourselves accountable in understanding that’s gonna create and nurture and foster long term relationships with clientele.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. That’s really awesome. I love that. And I know, like we’re in the same sort of boat. We also run an agency. Ours is in a different world, so we don’t actually do performance driven stuff ’cause our we do more of a, like a service delivery type thing. So our metrics that we generally run by are like, what’s the quality, the output look like?

And I just had a client this morning who left and tried some other agencies and they came back and they were like, you guys your systems are so good. Your communication is so good. Your customer service is so good. And every time I come back to you guys are working on making like the output better.

So like, what is our that’s what we’re always working on is like, you know, you guys have to or not have to, you guys choose to strive for that performance driven model. And so like our analogous to that in a service delivery model is like, how do we make our service delivery better this week than it was last week?

Right? And so we do things like, we train our staff, like on our video editors this last year, I was like, Hey, if any of you guys have courses that you [00:06:00] wish you could buy and go through, let us know. We’ll pay for them so you can up level your skills. Right.

Robb Fahrion: Love that. Yeah. We actually. Yeah, that was an initiative for us. So yeah, our entire team getting onboarded to Coursera. So yeah, same idea. Constant upskilling, right? Improving just our internal team to be able to, you know, just have better equipped teammates, employees to be able to provide those services and have a more confidence too, right, in terms of what they’re doing, how they’re doing it through education.

But yeah, I think you nailed it. I think a lot of businesses, they do just gloss over some of the most. Basic stuff, right To where that become just a differentiator in terms of, you know, hey, your response times, or just the client knowing that they’re gonna get a response, right? I’m sure both of us have had the situation where, you know, we wanna be working with somebody and it’s like, well.

They must not wanna work with us because the amount of time it takes them to get back to you or you know, maybe you just feel unimportant. Right? And okay, you eventually move on. But yeah, I think just always those simple things. That’s one of [00:07:00] the things my dad he’s been in business, he always taught me.

He is like, Hey, someone calls you, call ’em back. Right? Or if you can’t call ’em immediately text ’em and let them know why? So just taking every single engagement that you possibly can have with your clients as an opportunity to impress them. Right? And sometimes it’s the, or most of the time, I’d say it’s probably some of the littlest things that mean the most to your clientele.

We just recently did some client video testimonials, right? For use on the website and YouTube and whatnot. And yeah, that’s exactly what one of them said I had issue at 11 o’clock at night. I texted you, Robb and I happened to be awake and boom, we got right on it. It was fixed, ready to go by the next morning, you know, so again, not something that’s really anything crazy or unique or a product differentiator, but just, you know, being on top. And think in a good customer. you know, treating every client as if it was your own.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. So what I wanna talk about then is your origin story, which is, you know, every good comic book hero has an [00:08:00] origin story. It’s a thing that made them into the hero they are today, and we don’t hear that story. Were you born a hero or were you know, bit by a radioactive spider that made you want to get into building your own marketing agency?

Where’d you start in a job and eventually moved to become an entrepreneur? Basically, how did you get here from where you started?

Robb Fahrion: Yeah, I would say, I guess my superhero would be a very indecisive one and one without a real clear plan or a roadmap. So kind of stumbled upon I think the opportunity for the agency build. So I was actually working in another job and my past. Jobs have been in marketing. I’m director of marketing at a couple different companies.

Always knew I wanted to start my own business in some regard, but, you know, one year after the next, just never really found okay, what it would be, why I would be doing it. Right. Trying to obviously tie it into what I like and skill set. And I actually a mentor of mine and he’s an attorney.

He called me out of the blue one day and I wasn’t even working in marketing at the time. I was actually working for a finance company. And he said, Hey Robb, you are the [00:09:00] only guy I knew to call. Because I have a very big predicament that I need your support with. And basically what happened was his website got hacked.

His emails got blacklisted to where he wasn’t even able to send emails out. It was all getting flagged, you know, it didn’t have proper security protocol in place, whatever it may have been. And so I said, yeah, let me, lemme see what I can do. Let me help you out. So I kind of came in, I was able to get, we built out a new website very quickly.

Just, you know, real dirty, but just something new. ’cause we had to get everything off of that old, it was malware infested the whole nine yards. We set up new email accounts on a different email platform. Did the submissions to get those back whitelisted, the whole nine yards there. More or less got his business back up and running, you know, in a couple days, I think it was like three to five days, somewhere in that period.

And kind of just do it on the side as a favor to somebody that I really admire and respect. And got done with that and he came and said, Hey send me an invoice. Lemme know what [00:10:00] I owe you. And I didn’t even, I didn’t even think about like what I would charge him, how I would charge him and Bill, and so fired over an invoice that I thought, Hey, that’s reasonable.

You know, based on what we did, how we did, or what I did, how I did it. And boom, invoice paid within, you know, a matter of minutes. I don’t know, might’ve been an hour, right? But it was very quick. I was like, oh, that was cool. And so I thought about his name was Mark. I thought about his kind of archetype, right?

As a customer persona. And, you know, Mark’s one of the most successful guys I know, his law firm. It has been around for decades. Well renowned, you know, someone that you would consider, hey, this guy’s done really well in business for himself. Started his own company, right? Was a partner. And yet when something like this happened, he had absolutely nobody other than me to call, right?

Or to help support him through. And, you know, when it came to talking about the website, the emails, even some of the marketing stuff, just really clueless because, you know, he is an attorney, right? He [00:11:00] knows that’s his lane and that’s what he stays in. And so that’s kind of where the idea of Flying V Group started to culminate and talked with my brother who’s my co-founder.

And I said, Hey, I think there’s, I think there’s a real big opportunity in what we were calling like the professional services space. So right outta the gate, you know, and a lot of networking, but with attorneys insurance companies real estate, medical we kind of focused on those businesses that do what they do and they do it really well. But when it comes to the actual marketing and advertising and all that goes into the digital realm not a lot of support there. Right? Or maybe they put it on one person’s desk, Hey, you’re gonna do the marketing, and they’re just overwhelmed. They don’t have the expertise.

And so still to this day, I mean, we serve a much wider spectrum of type of clientele. But that professional service niche has just been an absolute killer for us. Finance is another one in there, right? Financial advisory, RIAs. And so, yeah, it’s kind of a serendipitous, I guess you [00:12:00] could say, right?

Interaction with Mark and I tell him the story whenever I see him or remind him of it. But yeah, it wasn’t a master plan. You know, business plan wasn’t really much in place. It was more, Hey, I think there’s something here. Let’s strike while the iron’s hot and right place, right time. I was frustrated just in my regular nine to five.

My brother could say the same. And so we said let’s go for it. And we did. So that would’ve been, that was September of 2015 and then we formally organized January of 2016 to start the company.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. That’s really awesome. I have my, my story is not exactly the same ’cause I, I went. I was a director of marketing but I, I had started my agency before that and ran it from like 2007 to 2012 or so. And I got out of college and I was doing that. I was helping do like basic marketing things for people.

Like, you know, I was in the, you have to get a website up, that’s where, you know, where business, where they were like, wait, we have to outta the Yellow Pages and onto a website. So I was like, we were helping people build websites and build multiple websites because that was, you know, [00:13:00] the start of the real internet, so to speak.

And that’s when we were doing, and I did that for five or six years and realized that I was really bad at business. Like I was good at marketing and I was good at like the tech stuff that went along with it, but I was bad at like. Everything else. And because of that, did the whole feast famine thing for a lot of years where it’s like, you know, you’d work to get clients and then you’d work those clients and then forget to work for new clients and you know, just not a good business owner.

And so I shut down my agency 2012 to go take a director of marketing position so I didn’t have to worry about the business side and I could just do the marketing 10 x that company over the course of several years. Their lead flow and whatnot, which was which was super cool. So I said we 10 x their lead flow over the course of 18 months.

And I was like, and I got to because I was on a c-level position, I got to what’d you call it? Uh, Mentor with the president and the CEO and the board of directors and whatnot on a weekly basis. And so I spent that whole time basically like getting paid to learn how to run the business side. And then started my agency. I gave them like a [00:14:00] three-month notice and I was like, Hey, I’m going to, I’m gonna start my agency back up again. So let’s, you know, let’s hire and train someone to replace me here. And that’s how I got my agency, like feet under me and actually got started. And you know, we, I started off doing a whole wide number of things and we really narrowed in onto the podcasting stuff by 2019 or so. That’s how we got here. So.

Robb Fahrion: Yeah. It’s you don’t know until, you know, right when you’re in it. All that goes on that are completely outside of, Okay, just the day-to-day business deliverables. Right. So, yeah, there’s definitely been a lot of that learning, understanding, you know, stuff you don’t even think about. Like, okay, I am gonna start this business and I’m just gonna get to focus on marketing and advertising and all the things I know.

And in reality it’s like, okay, I gotta figure out how to set up payroll. We have employees in other states, it’s like, I gotta figure out how to register with the different unemployment departments. Right? And obviously early on we didn’t have an HR team and then, you know, anything legal related. Right?

Or corporate entities and structure. And so, yeah, actually this year [00:15:00] we’re you know, and I’m, still learning right. And evolving and leveraging other. Successful people in business across, you know, a variety of different verticals, doesn’t even have to be marketing and advertising. Yeah.

Actually, it’s funny you say that. Just this morning we’re building a advisory board for the company, right? So basically just a group of seven or eight, we’re probably gonna end up right around there. Just individuals that all walks of life, all different types of business practice. But guys that, guys and gals that, you know, we can leverage and call upon, hey, when I’m running into an issue that I’ve never experienced before, that has nothing to do with marketing, but just business related.

So I think that’s key. Like you were talking about, you know, having those mentors or people that you can lean on when necessary. Because it’s not a matter of if, right? It’s a matter of when something comes along that there’s no playbook for there’s no way to deal with it. That’s just, oh, here’s the step-by-step instructions, right?

So I think, yeah, the more people you can surround yourself with that have been in your shoes at some point the better. So yeah, definitely resonate [00:16:00] with that.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, I know. I’m in that plot. We just hired employee number 16 like yesterday, and I have found out recently that that apparently once you hit 15 employees, there’s HR rules that start to kick in. And I was like, oh, I didn’t know there were HR rules that start to kick in even if like most of those employees are international, but still they’re under our we’re officially on the radar of HR stuff.

And so we have to have like, I didn’t even know this, but like there’s a legal requirement to have an employee handbook in each state that you operate in. And and the same for each country that you have staff in. And so I was like I’ve gotta have an employee handbook that covers things like, I don’t know, their hours and their paid time rules and like their, how the salary and stuff works and PTO and all that.

Like, it’s supposed to be documented and it’s not documented. There’s like legal repercussions for that. And I was like, who knew? Right? Like business stuff, you got to know until you’re big size.

Robb Fahrion: Alright, it’s so true. Yeah. I mean, there’s a million, yeah. The more, the bigger, you get more problems. Right. Like, the classic [00:17:00] saying. And so Yeah. And then there’s stuff that you don’t even think about to your point. Right. And it starts to come up and then it’s like, okay, how do I manage effectively client work plus all obviously operating and building the business too, right?

And so I think that’s been the biggest thing for me as the business has evolved, right? Is it’s, I’m doing less and less every year of what I started doing right. In terms of the company. So I think any founder, CEO whatever that title may be can relate with that.

Richard Matthews: Are you familiar with Robert Kiyosaki’s? Cast? Flow? Quadrant.

Robb Fahrion: Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

Richard Matthews: Like the SBI, right? And it’s like a lot of us start our business in that s quadrant where we’ve built a job. And then the job as you scale is how do you turn it, turn the job that you do, because that’s what you’re selling, right? You’re selling the job to the end client.

How do you turn the job into a business? The B quadrant, that’s where you have to start building all of this stuff that goes around the job, which is like the people who are doing the deliverables and your staff and your HR and your legal, and your marketing and your sales. And like you have to build all these things to turn it from a [00:18:00] job that you own into a business that runs itself.

Robb Fahrion: No doubt. Yeah. And I think that’s the tough part too in the agency world, right, is okay, success is, yeah, hey, you’re bringing on new clientele, right? Adding new logos, et cetera. But I always tell our staff and our partners. The client that we treat the worst is ourselves, right? So it’s like we’re doing all these incredible things for our clients and we put together all these marketing strategies, initiatives, designs, right?

Whatever it may be. And then you go and you look back at, oh, poor Flying V group. Like, if we spent as much time as we did, you know, for others building up those businesses as we do on our, on ourselves, I think we’d be in a lot better position. So yeah, that was definitely a moment, probably right around 2020, right?

Where we said, okay, it’s great. We’ve built all this out that is out there and hey, that’s the reality of the business, but the perception of what we’ve done. It doesn’t match what we’ve actually done, right? So that’s where we went back and said, alright, let’s spend some more time [00:19:00] on our business, right?

Let’s market ourselves let’s take that beautiful funnel we went and built for whoever else, and drop it right into what we’re doing too to make sure, you know, we’re continuing to support the growth of the business. So yeah, that’s where I find myself now spending, you know, more time is not on the client side, but really being able to have the agency as my number one primary client.

So that’s been a lot of fun, right? Is incorporating a lot of the different things we do for clients that are successful to generate new leads, new business and really implementing that within our own structure processes, getting our team to obviously spend time on building up our own brand and our own culture and new deal flow,

Richard Matthews: Yeah it’s wonderful too. ’cause like I, I feel I have exactly the same problem, right? I call it the Cobbler-Sunn syndrome, right? The Cobbler-Sunn has no shoes and or has shoes. And I was like, I feel like we’re there because, you know, we’re, we run a podcasting agency, we help people build and run podcasts, and we have this podcast, right? The Hero Show, which is my own personal one and just my own personal like mission in the world, but like, push button podcasts [00:20:00] didn’t have its own podcast. And so like I, we, put podcast page on our website, but it was blank.

Robb Fahrion: Right.

Richard Matthews: And I I was like, we do like 300 episodes a week for other people and we don’t have our own. And so I was like, we recorded the first 20 episodes finally, and like it’s going through our own stuff. And I’m like, we gotta put ourselves down as our own client.

So I actually did that. Like, I started the onboarding and I was like, ran through and I put our own company name and our on onboarding checklist and I had to put our own post-production checklist on. And I’m like, no, listen, we are just our own client and we just need to do our work for us.

Robb Fahrion: Right. Yeah, it’s so true. And that’s definitely, I’d say, you know, as you, this is the first business I’ve built, right? So obviously made a lot of mistakes over the years, but I’d say that’s the one looking back, right? Is like, okay, if I would’ve put a little bit more emphasis, time and energy into our own business, right?

Versus, and I get it. You’re starting out, you’re chasing crumbs, right? Anything you can get anywhere, get some cash flow into the bank. Obviously you need to pay yourself just to, to live at that point. But [00:21:00] yeah, I think if we would’ve, you know, had more of an emphasis, okay, yeah, we’re gonna do all this, but we’re also gonna make this a priority.

I think, you know, if I were to start a new business, right, that’d be priority number one, right? Is hey, let’s take care of also what’s at home for ourselves before worrying about okay, what’s outside the home. But I think it’s typical, right? And it’s tough. And you gotta be in a position where, okay, I can take, pull back a little bit from the client work knowing that, all right, you know, you might not grow as quick initially, but I, the long dividends that are paid, you know, when spend. Yeah, we spent, like, we spent almost a whole year, I’d say to where, all right, we needed to catch up from those years, lost early days to where, all right, let’s, this whole year, you know, flying V group is gonna be a huge focus and emphasis, again, not that we’re neglecting anything else that’s going on but just let’s talk about it, right?

Let’s, like you said, let’s put a plan of action in place. Let’s hold ourselves accountable to ourselves. I think that’s the biggest one, right? Is the accountability. It’s easy to be accountable to a [00:22:00] client because, hey, at the end of the day, if you’re not accountable to them, they’re not gonna they’re gonna leave or whatever, churn, whatever it may be, versus, okay, if you don’t do whatever you say you do for yourselves, it’s like, well, oh, well, right?

There’s no one to hold you accountable in that regard. So, I think if you can just, yeah, stay straight and narrow, make it a priority. I highly recommend that right out of the gate as quickly as you can, building up your own presence for whatever it is you may be doing.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. And you know, it’s funny ’cause my previous business was, you know, marketing, consulting and helping people do all of the marketing things. And I have a four step, four step thing that I always tell people about is buy, borrow, build, blitz, right? So you should have a strategy, at least one in each of those categories, right?

You buy audience to put your offer in front of, that’s ads and stuff. That’s like one of the things that you guys do is performance driven, like ads, and then borrow audience, you know, doing things like speaking on other people’s podcasts. That’s what you’re doing right now. Borrowing my audience or speaking on stage when you borrow someone stage to get in front of them.

And then build, that’s what we do at Push Button Podcast. We help you build your own content marketing strategy and build an audience [00:23:00] there. And then Blitz is the last one, which is like cold outreach, so like cold email outreach and cold LinkedIn outreach and other things like that.

And having a strategy that is Designs to drive leads into your business going on for each of those. And that was like our big focus this last year was like, okay, we’ve got our operations nailed and we have our team nailed and we have all this stuff. And I was like, so what we need to do as a company is we need to focus on, we need to have a strategy at least, if not more than one in each of those categories going. And so that’s what we did last year. And it dramatically in increased the the growth of the company that year because we ourselves.

Robb Fahrion: Right. Yeah. No, I love those four B’s that’s good stuff. And yeah, you have, you’re right. The operation, we were in the same boat too, right? Looking back, okay, we have the operations, we have the team, we have the processes in place, all those, and then it’s like, all right, well we’re, where’s the lead flow?

Right? Or now we need to feed the machine. Or even whatever we were feeding it, we weren’t feeding it fast enough, right? Where it’s like, we’re not getting the, we’re not getting the most out. This thing that we just took all our time, energy, and effort to build. [00:24:00] So, yeah. That’s good. I’m gonna take, that’s really good.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. Feel free. Steal the buy, borrow, build bullets. You can tell your clients too. I’m trying to turn it into a thing because I think more people understand, so it’s like, Hey, these are your categories, and.

Robb Fahrion: Easy to remember too, what’s your strategy?

Richard Matthews: My favorite is the borrow category ’cause that’s where like, you can get a lot of cool stuff in there. So it’s like, you know, the podcast guesting, speaking out stages, building referral, like strategic partners. That’s like one of the reasons why you and I connected is ’cause we’re actively trying to attract strategic partners.

And so like, there’s a lot of really smart ways that you can borrow someone else’s audience to help grow your company and build lead flow. And it’s like, it just wasn’t something we were focusing on ourselves. And as soon as we started focusing on it, it shifts everything. So, you know, wherever you’re at in your business, if you’re listening to this, that’s a good thing.

Robb Fahrion: Yeah, I think the borrows huge, right? Like, I don’t know if it’s the, I like the borrow term much better. We’ve always used like audience hijacking, right? Which I like borrow. I think I’m better, I think I’m gonna adjust my terminology. They’re a little lighter. But yeah, I mean, anytime you can, you know, use somebody else’s platform, obviously there’s mutually beneficial [00:25:00] reasons going both ways, but that’s definitely an accelerant, right?

As quickly as you can for us too. It’s even with our clientele, it’s like supporting our clientele in what we do too, right? Like commenting on their pages, resharing their content and information, right? That highlights okay. The people we’re working with, the cool brands. Obviously we wanna be supportive of who our clients are.

I find just tremendous growth on social media channels just by, hey, sharing the successes of the people we’re working with, right? They obviously love it because then hey, they feel you’re really. Bought in and invested into their success too. So going back to what we talked about earlier with performance, and I think, yeah, that’s a big differentiator for us is that, you know, we’re boutique white glove or smaller agency, but we want to stay in that particular size because, you know, we can be more hands-on, right?

We can make a better impact by understanding okay, the inner workings and then we’re emotionally bought in too. You know, a lot of now have just become [00:26:00] an extremely strong network right across a variety of industries that I can pick up the phone and call. You know, I find myself in conversation, Hey, does anybody know somebody that does X, Y, and Z?

I’m like. Oh, yeah I know someone, or what about this? Oh yeah, I know someone there too. Right? So it’s just always kind of, how can we support one another? Right? That’s what I always find is at the end of the day, the people that you want to be working with, they will help you. They wanna help you.

They want mutual success. Just human nature, right? Being successful as a team. So I think the more you can lean into that the faster you’ll see things start to accelerate in terms of growth, success, right? Whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing I love about that whole thing too is like, you know, you, once you sort of figure out like what your categories of lead flow are, then you’ll start also to see like which categories have the there’s a difference in like their close timeframe, right?

So like your leads that come through from the borrow category generally have a much shorter close time because they’re coming generally as a referral of some sort, right? You know, [00:27:00] because they heard you on a podcast or they heard you on stage, or they got referred to you directly from a strategic partner.

Versus like our cold email outreach that’s generally got like a 3 months, like close time on it. And it was so like, but it’s like all of those are good. You just, it allows you to know what they are and how you can scale them and what they look like. So yeah I’m a huge fan of making sure we’re doing all that.

But what I wanna do is shift gears a little bit and talk about your superpowers, right? So every iconic hero has a superpower, whether that’s fancy flying suit made by their genius intellect, or the ability to call down thunder from the sky or maybe super strength like Superman, right? In the real world, heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill that you were born with or a set of skills that you develop over the course of time that really energize all the rest of your skills.

And the superpowers, let’s set you apart, allows you to help your people slay their villains, come on top of their own journeys. And the way I like to frame it for my guests is if you look at the skills you’ve developed over the course of your career, there’s probably a common thread that ties all those together. And so with that sort of framing, what do you think your superpower is that you were either born with or developed as you built this business?

Robb Fahrion: The one thing that [00:28:00] comes to the top of mind immediately is what I would call a cross-channel strategy, right? So as we’ve developed the firm, there’s been more and more reliance on our ability to work cross-channel with our clientele, right? So early on in the business it was, hey, focus on one particular thing, focus there, build an expertise.

Great. You’re now have a niche, you’re specified. You have an expertise, whatever particular lane. As we’ve evolved as an agency, you know, we’ve found that there’s more reliance on us, okay? Not only needing to have a keen understanding from a search engine optimization standpoint, but also pairing that with a paid media strategy to drive overall blended row as lead flow.

Again, whatever those top-level KPI’s might be that we’re trying to accomplish. So I think that’s where my strategy in terms of okay, being able to fit in this piece as an overall [00:29:00] strategy that’s going to work to X output is really where we’ve kind of mastered that building out of marketing strategy systems processes.

Richard Matthews: Yeah.

Robb Fahrion: Not being a one-trick pony. The flip side of that was always, well, jack-of-all-trades masters of none. My rebuttal there is that well, we’re masters of generating return, right? Generating lead flow. And as we’ve moved forward and as just the industry’s evolved as well, truly believe that you need to have a robust kind of omni-channel approach, right?

To really get the output or the outputs that you’re looking for that would deem, you know, marketing and advertising success. So, and not only that, but you’re also okay understanding to your point, right? Like, what types of leads are the best for our company? Where are they being generated, right?

Where do we want to lean in and invest more from an investment standpoint into whatever particular channel it may [00:30:00] be based on okay, testing across a lot of different variables, a lot of different channels and so forth. So yeah, we really put a strong emphasis on that holistic marketing advertising strategy and knowing that, okay, what we do on one channel supports success and growth on another channel that gets us closer to, again, that output.

And, you know, you talked about funnels a couple times, but you know, you have that top of the funnel, mid funnel, bottom of the funnel and really being able to intersect, engage with your potential customer wherever they may be on their sales cycle, life journey, customer life journey.

Because you know you’re gonna have those people to your point, hey, they’re ready to buy immediately because they have an extreme pain point and they need a solution. But you also have that individual that, hey, they’re just dipping their toe in the water. Starting to get an understanding and okay, they may have exposure to you there.

We wanna make sure that we have that through and through to where okay, when they do get to that buying decision you know, we’ve been following them or whatever the process might have [00:31:00] been. So yeah, going back to the original answer, it’d say cross channel strategy for sure. And I only think that’s gonna accelerate as well.

Just in terms of yeah, if you are doing a podcast, okay, great. There’s a million different ways you can also leverage that podcast, right? If it is paid media, like you’re talking about, you know, repurposing content for different social channels. So I think it’s gonna be really hard to just say, Hey, I’m gonna silo my marketing approach to one particular channel and be as successful as needed be or want to be.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, that’s it’s one of the things that we’ve, that’s really helped our company grow is helping people understand that particular thing is that cross channel is huge and right to your point, jack of all trades, master of one or master of none. Is actually, when you look at the phrase, it’s jack of all trades, master of one.

Right? And so you guys have growth as the one thing that you’re looking at, and then also jack of all trades, right? So like it actually can fit in with that sort of understanding. And it’s a reference to people who are polymaths actually. And so for Poly is the idea [00:32:00] that you have the master of one is you’ve mastered the art of learning things and so you can be a jack of all trades and master all sorts of other things as well. So that’s where like the original reference comes from.

Robb Fahrion: Very cool. Okay. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, that makes my argument ’cause yeah, early on it was like, okay, you need a niche, right? You need to only work with these clients and you need to only work with this type of clientele, right? And if you are that jack of all trades, you’re not gonna be good at any of ’em, or you’re not gonna be an expert at any of ’em.

But I mean, the way we structured the business too, so obviously with an agency, a lot of moving parts, I would say that, you know, we do have those inner departments, right? Like we don’t have somebody that okay, is working web design and then they’re also running paid media campaigns too. So that’s where, yeah, okay.

We’ve had that inner department within the organization. And then at the top level, myself, our operations president of ops, Robert Eddie’s, VP of performance, right? Those are the guys that are kind of bringing all those teams together, right. To then have okay. A [00:33:00] consistent theme strategy throughout all the areas we’re touching as a part of the marketing campaigns.

Richard Matthews: So this I think would be useful for both you and then our audience who’s listening to us have this conversation. The way that we talk about the cross channel stuff ’cause that’s what we do with podcasting stuff, is the podcast allows you to create a single input source to create all of your cross channel assets that you need. Right? So like, you know, you wanna have video stuff going on YouTube, and you want to have written stuff going on your blog, and you wanna have audio stuff going into audio podcast platforms, and you have short video that’s going on to TikTok and Instagram reels, right? You have all these content pieces and your podcast can be like the single source of like, getting into all those channels, right?

That’s what the repurposing and stuff comes in. And so the way that we’ve started talking about this with our clients is how cross channel fits into their business. And maybe this is helpful for you, maybe it’s not, you might describe it the same way, or maybe you could give us how you describe it to your customers afterwards, and maybe our audience can learn a little bit from that.

But we talked about the buyer’s journey, right? So the buyer’s journey is, you know, Eugene, Schwartz is famous for the buyer’s journey. And that’s I mean, you know, people who are unaware of the problem, [00:34:00] people who have just become aware of their problem. People are looking for solutions. People are looking at products and people are ready to buy, right?

It’s at five stages of the buyer’s journey. And for the most part, businesses are looking to generate leads. They’re going to default to direct response marketing. And direct response marketing as we go back to the buy, borrow, build is generally in that buy category. And you’re putting up ads or doing something similar to generate a lead.

And that lead, the direct response marketing is almost always targeting the people who are in that ready to buy phase or just before the ready to buy phase, where they’re looking at products and stuff like that. And so either interests or their keyword searches or something is happening that’s indicated they’re in, that they’re close to the, you know, the end of that buyer’s journey where they’re gonna make a purchasing decision.

And that’s all well and good. And you can build massive businesses just focusing on that, especially depending on your niche and your space and what you’re doing. You know, a lot of businesses do. The problem is that piece the direct response marketing, that last part of the buyer’s journey, the smallest part of your addressable market at any given time is in that ready to buy stage.

And at the same time, that smallest [00:35:00] piece of your total addressable market that’s ready to buy, is getting advertised to by everyone who offers solutions in that space. Right. So it’s the most competitive place to be in. And so what we talk about is when you start putting together a content marketing strategy, or the term you used was a, you know, a cross promotional strategy that you have that you’re talking to people further back in their buyer’s journey, right?

You’re creating your podcast content and your video content, and your short content and your written content. All the stuff that’s getting put out is talking to people that are unaware of their problem, helping ’em become aware. It’s talking to people about their solutions and why, you know, the problem they have and the why they might do it, right?

So at each stage of the buyer’s journey, you’re creating content that helps talk to those people. And so whether that buyer’s journey is three weeks long or six months long, right? You know, average house buying buyer’s journey is like two years, right? So like, whatever that journey looks like.

The person is seeing you in their feet all the time, even if they’re not particularly paying attention yet. So they get closer and closer to that buyer’s journey. You know, at the end of that buyer’s journey, now they’re seeing, you know, they go to click on a, you know, okay, now my tooth officially hurts. Look up for a dentist in my area.

And there’s Robb. I’ve seen him [00:36:00] every single week talking about his dental practice. Even if I never paid attention to him, I know his face, I know his name, I know what his offer is. I’ve seen his customer testimonial videos that he puts out on stuff all the time, just ’cause he’s putting ’em out in targeting to me.

And now that makes, to your point, that money that you’re gonna spend on those direct response ads significantly more effective, right? And so we’ve seen things like on Google Ads for instance, you know, like you pay different price points for like spot number one, number two, number three, that if you have good content marketing strategy, you can bid for spot three and get better click-through rates than spot one.

So you’re paying less and getting more because you did the other work, because you’re doing the cross channel stuff. So you’re, I think the term you used was blended ROI. Your blended ROAS ends up being better because you’re focusing on those things. Anyways, that’s how we talk about it. How do you guys talk about it?

Robb Fahrion: I think you nailed it. Yeah, I think you absolutely nailed it. My favorite, I had a client and, well, they became a client. Obviously they were a prospect initially, and they said, yeah, you know, I was in need of marketing, advertising, and for whatever reason, your name popped to the top of my [00:37:00] head.

Right. I think it may have even been someone that I knew, or, you know, maybe second, third degree type of deal. And I thought, I sat back, obviously I didn’t say anything but it’s everything you just described, you know, psychologically they’re seeing that content, whether they interact or not. They see the brand, they hear what we’re talking about, and then it’s like, okay, you have that need.

Who’s the first person I think of? Oh it’s Robb, right? Or Flying V Group because of that consistency, and I mean, and even if you boil it down to like, let’s say you’re just operating within a paid channel, right? It’s same thing there too. You know, you’re gonna run, let’s say, okay, different type of content, or a lot of times we like to use video content at the top of the funnel. Why? Because we get more, much more reach, right? Much reach a lot cheaper. We’re able to define the audience to where, okay, early on, you definitely have a wider audience to where, all right, let’s get as much of that content information out there at lower cheaper rates.

Identify, okay, who are those people that are watching the entire video? Right? Who [00:38:00] are those people that are watching everything through and then clicking, okay, let’s now take that segment, move them into that second phase, right? To where it does get be more of the direct response to where you’re maximizing that dollar there because you’ve already carved out.

Versus, okay, we’re just gonna run direct response ads immediately to an extremely wide audience. It’s like, well, they don’t, who are you? Right? Like, why I haven’t, I’m, I have zero familiarity with you at all. definitely see performance improvements when do have cross one cross channel and if you’re not doing cross channel, then okay.

At least some sort of segmenting, sequencing, right? In terms of what that buyer journey looks like. And that’s going back my second superpower, if I had a second one, would be. Search engine optimization. Right? I mean, that’s really bread and butter.

That’s where I kind of founded the company where my background is too, and the reason why we love those leads is because a lot of times they’re, even if they don’t know who we are, [00:39:00] they’ve researched, right? They’ve put in the energy, they’re going to blogs, reading content, they’re then traveling to another spot.

They’re then coming back to your site. A lot of times, like the content that we create is based around more high intent keywords to where, okay, the person that’s asking this, they’ve already looked up what is marketing six months ago? Right now, they’re looking for, okay, how do I pick an agency for X, Y, and Z, whatever it may be, and then, okay, by the time they actually reach out, they already know.

Or are familiar who you are, they’ve done research, they reached out because something that you said caught their eye that they, they resonated with, right? Or that hey, they agree with your process system. And then we obviously see a lot shorter sales cycles too, which as a business owner, that’s what you want as well.

Richard Matthews: Be careful.

Robb Fahrion: Like, yeah, it’s okay to generate a lead. But like on the paid, like for us, honestly, like paid Google search has always been lowest return. And I think really what boils down to is people that are clicking those first couple ads, if they don’t have [00:40:00] familiarity with who you are, it’s a lot of shopping and then they don’t know who you are, right?

It’s just that, oh, you showed up at the top of the result and boom, I clicked it. They probably clicked on the other 3, 4, 2. And again, I’m using just one small example. There’s a lot of variables in that. But you know, that’s where, again, that consistent content creation, nurturing, being available, right?

As many crossroads as you can with them on that buyer journey is just gonna lead to more and more success.

Richard Matthews: I said I couldn’t agree more, and I knew there’s a reason we were chatting initially, but I was like essentially what you just described for the content marketing. I was like that’s what we recommend people do, is like we do help them create the content that can get advertised that way.

And I’m always like, I’m always looking for agencies that understand that part of the strategy, which is, it’s a hard thing for, ’cause a lot of agencies are just so focused on the direct response part that then I’m like, listen, content can help you reduce your blended ROAS if you understand how to use it.

And so we have some playbooks that we give our clients and I’m like, take this playbook and give it to your agency. And like the one that you described, we call it butterfly net [00:41:00] strategy. And so the butterfly net strategy is a three stage a ad thing. And again, I’m just gonna share this ’cause I think the audience might enjoy it, but the first stage is, you know, you’re creating new content every week.

That’s what the podcast is for. You got content coming out all the time, and so you run a, we call it a dollar a day strategy. And so the first campaign is a dollar a day strategy. Each piece of content that comes out, you say, Hey, run this for a dollar a day for seven days. Right? So every day it’s another $7 being added.

So it’s not like a dollar a day it act, but it’s just a dollar a day. Each piece of content.

Robb Fahrion: Sure.

Richard Matthews: You’re just targeting that to your existing audience, right? The people who like your page, people who visit your website, like just your existing audience. And the only thing you’re doing is you’re using your audience to pre-vet your content.

And so you’re looking for an engagement ratio. And so we put it on engagement only and it was like, that’s what we tell the agencies to do. Run it on engagement only. And just look for, you know, likes, comment shares, right? It gets a hundred impressions. How many likes, comment shares? Did it get, if it got one, like one comment, one share, it’s three, three out of a hundred, right?

If it got, you know, six comments and two shares, it’s eight, right? That’s just the number. And so you take each piece of content at the end of like six weeks or [00:42:00] so, and you look for your outliers, right? Which one’s got a 10, a 15, maybe you got a 20, right? Whatever, that, you know that high. And now you’ve got a piece of content, you know, okay, my audience, the one I want to attract more of likes this content.

And so you take that to what you call that first campaign, which is you run it into the the ads and you just run, you know, you run it wide open and you’re looking to just build. An audience of people who will actually engage and that builds your viewership and builds your other things like that.

And you can, you know, the budget for that is whatever the client’s appetite is, right? For an audience. And then whoever engages with that goes to stage three, which is your direct response ads. And when you put those together, now you’ve got it’s inexpensive to pre-vet your content. And now that you’ve got pre-vetted content, it works really well in that secondary campaign to actually find more people who you wanna do direct response ads to.

And your blended ROI for the whole thing can just crush straight direct response.

Robb Fahrion: Yeah, no you’re spot on. And like anything, you know, there’s the data analysis side, right? And so like what you’re describing, you can easily get data analysis [00:43:00] that then Okay. Validates. Whatever our assumptions might have been, and then okay. At that point, all right, scale more aggressively with ad spend, whatever it may be.

We actually, I, this is anecdotal, but I really believe it in my heart of hearts. We had a client, right? And we were running Facebook ads, meta ads alongside of Google paid ads and very hyper targeted a specific. Area. It was actually a local client here in Orange County and we turned off, I don’t remember exactly why, but we turned off our Facebook meta ads, which those were like, to your point, right?

They were getting the content out there wide reach, high impression numbers, low CPMs is what we were looking for, building awareness, right? What we found was that piece of the funnel, and it was probably only five to 10% of the overall strategy because they do a lot of direct. But what we saw when we turned off that meta advertising was that the demand on the search side, [00:44:00] which is where they would generally, you know, generate the lead close, the lead started to decrease just in overall volume of clicks. So I really think we were actually like making a market. Their product was pretty unique, right? Financial product, but yet, yeah, you were, but with those Facebook ads, right?

You were showing people like, oh, I didn’t even know that was something that was offered or in the market, that I might not even qualify for.

Richard Matthews: I know for you it’s anecdotal, but for us that’s like, that’s our life ’cause that’s what do is we essentially the that buyer’s journey. The idea of putting content that helps people in that buyer’s journey is demand generation. And so what demand generation is moving people from this part of the funnel into this part of the funnel, right into from unaware of the problem to aware of the problem from, you know, aware of the problem to understanding their problem, right?

That’s what content marketing does. And so when you do that well, you actually increase the number of people, or you speed up the amount of time that it takes them to go through their own buyer’s journey. So you actually increase your the amount of people that are in that ready to buy stage which is really cool.

So it’s, that’s how that works. And so we we like to reinforce that. [00:45:00] One of the other campaigns that we always tell our clients that you should, you know, have your agency do this is do a we call this one centrifuge funnel, but the idea is Google search. Is a buyer intent place, right?

That’s where the people at the end of the end of their buyer’s journey are gonna go and they’re going to say, Hey, I want to buy, you know, my tooth hurts. I’m gonna hire a dentist, dentist in Orange County, right? And so they put that in there and so your ads that are on there, they run to a landing page.

The goal of that landing page is of course, to generate a lead but a great landing page for a local service business maybe converts at 10%, maybe it’s 20%, but either way, right? That’s, you know, 80 to 90% of the people who actually went to Google, typed in your words.

Robb Fahrion: Speak to my language.

Richard Matthews: Leave, right? Like those people are targets that you can follow up with. So if you take that and you run them straight back into your content marketing, and now they like, they, you know, now you just retarget them with all of the content marketing that you’re creating now, you’ve pretty much guaranteed that they will become a lead when the painting that’s big enough for them to buy, right? because you’ll run them through that [00:46:00] way. And so that, that’s where, like, to your point, I really think content marketing and direct response marketing should be done together. Which is. You know, that’s why we’re talking.

Robb Fahrion: Could not agree more. And I use that same thing, right? I tell it’s like, Hey, we’re gonna run this paid media strategy, right? And guess what? If we convert at 10 to 15%, we’re gonna be like, Hey we’re doing really well. I said, but guess what? Going back to, hey. Being competitive, performant.

I go, that’s still 85, 80, eighty-five percent, maybe 90% of individuals that we know in some way, shape or form are interested to some regard, yeah, you’re gonna have a percentage of that, maybe five to 10%, let’s say that. All right? Did pick someone else, went there, checked out, whatever it may have been, right?

But we’re building audiences right at the end of the day, and that’s where your Meta, your Google ads, Programatics, whatever it may be, it’s all leveraging these big data sets, audience pools, right? And so the more we can generate. The more content we can produce to get out there, obviously creates more engagement [00:47:00] opportunities.

And then, okay, you’re starting to refine that audience. That’s our job, right? Is the optimization of okay, traffic in who is it? What does the audience look like? What’s getting them to take whatever specific action? And then, right, fine tuning, making some tweaks and making sure that we’re doing more of whatever that particular action might be.

So yeah, I use that exact same discussion, right, of, okay, yeah, 10% great. Right? We’ll all be pretty happy, I’d say with 10% conversion rate, but let’s keep on those other 90% because they’ve qualified themselves to your point. And yeah, it makes it quite.

Richard Matthews: They raised their hand, said.

Robb Fahrion: Yeah, shooting fish barrel.

Richard Matthews: Yep exactly. I had a client a long time ago now, but we ran that strategy for them, or actually I just gave them the strategy. They’d run this for yourselves ’cause they didn’t, they weren’t at a point where they could hire us, but they they were a personal trainer business and they were just getting it off the ground.

And they went from getting it started to being the number one personal trainer in their city in nine months. Which and they just, they were just soaking up all the leads because nobody else was doing the content follow up. Right. And they’re just doing, you know, a lot of businesses try to survive on that 10%, which [00:48:00] you can do, but if one of your competitors comes and is like, let’s talk to the whole group of people, they will crash you.

Yep. Yeah no doubt.

Robb Fahrion: Yeah. And so that’s where too, like the cross channel argument, I guess. I mean, for us it’s not really an argument. It’s kind of like the way, but you diversify. Right? And so with that, a little less risk too, we find just in the sense that, you know, you don’t have all your eggs in one basket.

You’re able to rely and get data from other sources and then, you know, as a business owner, you know, right. The more insights that are proven, defined that I can then take and make decisions off of, you know, now I have more accurate placement, or now I know where to spend my dollar next month. Right? So that’s where, yeah, we’re it’s a process to get them in that mindset.

Right? But once they do, then that understanding of like, oh look, I have all these answers now, right? Like, we have all these answers. I know and can validate that this works well for whatever particular reason, and this works well for this particular reason. And that just creates, you know, so much more strength across the [00:49:00] board.

So like we’ve definitely speaking the same language.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, I know we’ve been talking about that. Like these couple strategies, they’re all in that buy category. And like we’re supporting them with stuff that’s in the build category, right? We build your audience with your podcast and whatnot. And what you realize is like as you grow, like those categories support each other, right?

So if you are doing your content marketing helps support your ads, right? And if you’re doing your content marketing, you get up on stage. When you borrow borrowing audiences they’re sitting in their audience. They look you up. All the content’s gonna show up there, right?

And so like, they support each other that way too. And it’s the same kind of thing if you are speaking on stage all the time, right? You’re in the borrow category and you’re speaking on other people’s podcasts and someone sees your ad. What do people do nowadays? They research you. And so when they see you and they’re like, oh, this guy has been on four different stages this year that he got invited to speak on, and he got on 40 different podcasts that he borrowed all their, you know, borrowed just use our own terminology, borrowed all their audiences that says something about who you are in your business.

And so, like these categories also support each other, and they make it, they make your business work better if you’re, you have strategies going in each one of them.[00:50:00]

Robb Fahrion: Yeah. And I think trust and authority, right? I think that’s the other component is people are able to hear you speak, they understand what your approach might be. So, yeah, earlier when we were talking, I was gonna bring up this story, I think bring it up now, but we had a lead in from LinkedIn and I spent a lot of time, you know, LinkedIn content distribution building network there said he knew one of our clients we had, we didn’t know who he was, got in, jumped on a call. We didn’t even have a set proposal, but we just, he’s like, Hey, can you at least show us like kind of process methodology? Pulled up a template that we use within our proposal. He is like, Hey, this looks great.

What’s general pricing range? Here it is. Hey, great. Can you add that on? The proposal, fired it. We from lead into deal close twenty-one minutes. So we’re trying to break that record. But it was pretty remarkable. But the, and obviously that’s more of an outlier. I wish everyone was like that.

Right? But I think it goes to our point that we’re talking about is he already came to the table ready to go. He probably had experience he was working with [00:51:00] another agency prior. It didn’t go well, right? All it was, hey, I know these guys. I know who they are. Everything checked out in that initial quick conversation, the pricing looked good based on what he was willing to pay and signed on dotted line.

Right. So, but yeah, I know for a fact that it goes back to all that attribution, building up that awareness, having that understanding of who we are to where he is coming to the table, you know, ready to go more or less outside of just checking a few boxes.

Richard Matthews: So what’s interesting to me is having that discussion with clients because there’s always a question of, people think of marketing as just direct response marketing and direct response marketing is really easy to measure, particularly for what’s known in the industry as last touch attribution, right?

And so you can measure ROI on last touch attribution real well, but what’s really difficult to measure is how does all the other stuff play in, right. You know, when you go speak on a stage, right? You know, you can look at the stage and be like, here’s how much it costs me to speak there and to travel there and, you know, do all those things and here’s the number of [00:52:00] leads we got from it, and you have a direct ROI there but how do you measure the ROI for all the, you know, when you post that content up everywhere.

And when you get onto 40 different podcasts and the time and effort that you put into that, and you’ve got all this content stuff going up and you’re running these different strategies we talked about in your ad category, and you know, you have someone who’s seen you, you know, for six months out of the year and, you know, you see all these things happen and then they become a lead and buy immediately.

The last touch attribution is gonna be that LinkedIn ad you were talking about, right? And that’s where all the ROI is gonna be attributed there. And that it doesn’t get attributed to all the other things that helped build up to that. And so it’s really interesting, like when you actually look at a cross-channel, omni-channel approach your ROI for these things is more difficult to measure and that’s hard to stomach for people to think like, okay, I’m going to invest in this other strategy and I don’t know how to say I spent this dollars and this made this dollars ’cause that’s just not the way it works when you start going cross-channel and you start going Omni-channel.

Robb Fahrion: Yeah. It is a lot tougher. You know, we do look at like, okay, we’ll take, obviously, yeah we’re tracking SEO [00:53:00] organic search, Facebook leads, Google ad leads, right? We are working on like, okay, a blended calculation on all of them, right? To where okay, we blend everything together from a return there.

But then we’re looking for correlation too, right? So like, SEO can be a tough one outside of Okay, yeah. lead flow and from a organic search into a contact form sure but also we’ll look at, okay, what happens when we do see an increase in just organic traffic, right? All right. If we’re getting an improvement of 10% organic traffic, did that lead to X, Y, and Z across the board from a blended standpoint?

So yeah, there’s still a lot of work there though. You know, a lot of mining the data and the information as time progresses too, time helps. I always tell people, that is well like, Hey, the futher we get out from initial conception. The better we’re gonna perform because we get a clearer picture, right? We’re filling in the gaps that we have right out of the gate with time, with data with results.

But yeah definitely challenges there. And, you know, that’s what all of our [00:54:00] clients want though, right? Is, Hey, how can I take, all right, this was generated, roll it all the way back to where it started and pinpoint that to get an exact calculation. But I think you can do enough with, you know, corollary data and information, or at least, you know, some, you’re gonna have to use some assumptions in some places.

But yeah, I think we’ve both agree that, okay the comprehensive effort is gonna really float or it should be, if you’re doing it properly, float all those different channels.

Richard Matthews: The sum of the parts or the total is greater than the sum of the parts is really what that comes down to is like, if you actually do the comprehensive approach, you can measure all the things individually. I mean, hopefully they’re all positive ROI, but the reality is like, you know, if you get all those positive ROI numbers, when you put ’em all together, it’s actually bigger together than it would be if you did them all individually or like you took them apart.

Robb Fahrion: And that was that client I was talking about with the meta ads and the Google ads, right? It was like, Hey, turn off the Facebook ads, because I don’t have a direct correlation of what that dollar did and my argument was always like, Hey I totally hear you and this was, [00:55:00] I’m, they’re a client of mine.

They’ve been for five years now we are finally getting them into a CRM. So very old school and I told the principal, I said, Hey, I understand what you’re saying. But also like right now, we don’t have the proper tracking mechanisms, you know, to even be able to say that and then we turned this off and look at what happened to just the volume of lead flow on the other side. Right? So he understood that right when we turned that piece of it off, even though okay, he wasn’t able to specifically explicitly define that return, that it was like, oh, well that just affected everything else we were doing here.

So that worked. But that goes back to tracking, right? Like nowadays you get, you know, you need to have good tracking in place, you need to have good reporting, you need to leverage technology. In certain instances, it’s actually pretty impressive we’ve been running like a CRM, they would just run it within Google Sheets and track and manage everything there so you can get the data out.

The problem is how long it takes to get the data out. ’cause you’re basically running it on pivot tables versus having a CRM just, hey, populate all the leads that are flowing through [00:56:00] here have at least first touch attribution of some sort. Right? But yeah, that was a fun, unique case that they love the Facebook ads now they love the meta ads Now as a part of the overall campaign.

Richard Matthews: I know that was a long discussion on like superpowers and just getting it across channel. I wanna flip gears and talk about the other side of your superpower, which is the fatal flaw, right? And just like every Superman has this kryptonite or wonder woman can’t remove their bracelets of victory without going mad, you probably have a flaw that tells you back something that you struggled with in your business.

For me, it was perfectionism. For a long time I struggled with not, you know, I wanted to get like the perfect thing in the marketplace, which led me to like, not put anything in the marketplace ’cause perfectionism isn’t real or, you know, one of the other ones I struggled with was not having good boundaries with like my time or with my clients and not really knowing how to build those up.

So it was like a self-care thing, I overworked myself and those kind of things. But I think more important than with the flaw is how do we worked to overcome it so that you can continue to grow in your organization.

Robb Fahrion: Yeah, I think it’s, for me, I in the most basic sense of the term, I’d say it’s was a, is a control issue. And I’m definitely, I know people say, oh, if you say you’re not like [00:57:00] micromanagement, I don’t know micromanagement for me but I think when I say control, it was at least okay being involved in every conversation that was going on within the business just to ensure like, hey, if I’m ever needed, right, or as like the partner of the company, I can come in and smooth things out.

So really that had to unwind that with trust. And so the minute I was able to, okay, put more trust into everyone from the top down that, hey, we are gonna get our job done we are gonna do it effectively, we’ve effectively communicated our values, our core values throughout the organization of why we do what we do, how we do it how we hold our clients in the regard that we do.

That allowed me to one continue to operate the business at a sustainable level because as we started to grow and scale, it was impossible for me to, you know, be copied on every single email or be added to every single calendar invite, right? So I think that number one, and then [00:58:00] number two, like I said, just the trust, you know?

So putting trust in the people that you’ve made a conscious decision to bring into the fold for a specific reason. Trusting your gut that, hey, you hired these people, you brought these people on because they stood out to you. Whatever those reasons may be. So the sooner I was able to start to relinquish, okay, my involvement, and again, I know it, I’m probably sounding like a micromanager, but I’m like the furthest thing from it.

I’m like, Hey, what do you think? You tell me right about this. And, you know, just had a call with our VP of Ops earlier. I was like, Hey, do I need to be now I’m like doing the opposite, right? Like, unless I’ve absolutely needed on something like. I trust you. You guys take it, you run with it. Yeah. If something goes sideways and haywire and there’s a fire that needs to be put out, sure I’ll come in, take that at that point.

But I think that’s allowed me to not feel overworked and burnt out for sure. It’s given me more confidence in the business and the processes and the structures that we’ve built to where [00:59:00] like, okay, if I do, I got married last October, right? And so got married, honeymoon, that whole thing. What I was able to remove myself, you know, and the business ran and it operated and not everything blew up like I thought it might in my head, right?

So, yeah, I think that control piece early on was tough and you know, it’s more just that passion. I’m sure you know, right? You want everything to run smoothly. You want your clients to be happy you want to be there. You don’t wanna make it look like, hey, you’re running and hiding from something when it is a tough conversation or whatever it may be.

But yeah, being able to relinquish that and put trust and faith in our team and our processes. And you know what, and that’s a part of testing the business too, right? If I don’t remove myself, I’m not gonna know where we might have some flaws, right? Or where we might need to make some improvements.

Because I was always trying to be the one to, you know, plug that hole and then plug this one, but then another one popped open because I was trying to plug too many at once, right? So I think that’s been very critical is just relinquishing that control and putting trust and faith. But [01:00:00] it’s hard right? It’s your baby, it’s your business. But I’d say like being able to do that now and not, getting anxious about it has just been, it’s been night and day my own performance. Right.? Personal life, not feeling always tied to everything. And then, you know, giving that autonomy and that power to empowerment to employees too that, Hey, we trust you. We know you’re gonna do a great job and if you do need us, we’re always here. Right. We’re all you need to do is come and ask. So yeah, I’d say that’s been the biggest one and then still a work in progress for sure.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. I’m in that same boat. I know I just recently got to the point where I was like same thing like getting CC’d on all the emails between like onboarding and CC’d and all this stuff for post-production and now we’ve got enough clients and I’m like, I can’t be CC’d on everything ’cause it makes my turn, makes my inbox useful, right?

Like I’ve got too many things that you can’t keep track of and realizing that I need to get pulled outta those, even though I wasn’t like paying attention to ’em at this point anymore. And so like getting pulled out of a lot of those things, and I realized, I remember it was [01:01:00] maybe three or four months ago, like there was an issue that cropped up and it was kind of issue that like, the reason why I wanted to be on the things so I could deal with issues like that.

And I remember thinking to myself, I was like, they all know how to do this stuff. I’m just going to, like, I saw the issue crop up and I was like, I could step in and fix it, but I don’t think I need to.

Robb Fahrion: Right.

Richard Matthews: And I just watched my, ’cause I was still CC it on everything and I just watched them take care of all of it and like solve the problem and I was like, I don’t need to be a part of this anymore.

Robb Fahrion: Yeah, that’s, you’re probably like, that was cool. I know. That would’ve been my reaction, right? Like, oh, wow. It actually did work the way we planned it to work, right?

Richard Matthews: I was like, oh, this thing we’re putting together is actually working. And so like to your point, for me that was like just a confirmation of trust. But like that’s where, you know, the sooner you get there, the better it is for your business to be able to build the team and build the communication structures and the SOPs and right.

So they just knew how to handle it and they handled it. And that allows you as the owner to step out and start focusing on [01:02:00] more things, right? Focusing on your own company, right. Do the things you know you need to do. And like to your point, right, you’re here on this interview because nobody else in your company can be your face, right? Or your voice.

Robb Fahrion: Right.

Richard Matthews: So that’s a thing that only you can do and so like, one of the things that, like I always tell myself, I tell my clients, I tell all of our staff is do only that, which only you can do. And that it’s been a useful rule for thinking about our SOPs, thinking about our company, thinking about where your time should be, is like, Hey, what are the things that you’re uniquely qualified to do?

Do those things, everything else, delegate, outsource, build automations. You know, figure out how to get an assistant to help you with it, right? And then get it to the point where it’s like, okay, you’re working at your highest and best use for any times that you show up.

Robb Fahrion: Yep. Yeah. And same thing with me, right? Like emails in my inbox, you know, I’d have these emails and they weren’t difficult tasks, right? They were just stuff that I’ve always done from kind of day one, and I’ve kept ’em on my plate. And next thing I know, it’s like, okay, I got this email that I, there’s action that needs to get done, [01:03:00] and I’m becoming the bottleneck, right?

Because for whatever reason, it’s, you know, it’s not something that I can immediately get to, or my time’s better spent now as the business has evolved somewhere else. And so I have to constantly remind myself like, Hey, you have people in place that, guess what? When that email comes in, if you just take the time to tell them what the expectation is, show them how to do it, maybe create an SOP about it for it to get done, and, you know, later on down the road or if someone else comes in.

Then boom, that’s something that you can immediately move off your plate. And you’re giving someone else an opportunity, right? To show what they can do and to build and improve themselves. So, yeah, no, that, well. So, yeah I like that.

Richard Matthews: I always like to think in terms of the I think of our revenue in terms of the number of like people that are eating dinner tonight because of the revenue our company generates, right? And so that’s like, that’s, those are all of our employees and their families and their kids and their wives and their husbands and whatever.

And so like in my head, the thing that I’ve had to start thinking to myself is not like, [01:04:00] can I do this? But, you know, who can I delegate this to so that it puts, you know, more food on their table kind of thing. Right. And so, like, to your point, it’s that whole opportunity thing and it’s just a very real like feeling for me.

And I was like, Hey, if I put this onto their plate, that means they’re earning more, right? They have more opportunity to show up and use their skills and do those things. And like that means, you know, our revenue is helping more people live their lives, right? And, you know, achieve their dreams and build their families and contribute to their communities.

And like that’s just, it’s a different thought for me ’cause I know when I first started it was always like, if I’m gonna hire someone out to do it, that means I’m not getting that revenue right? And you know, because it’s not to pay payroll expenses and it’s like, it’s cheaper if I do it, it’s faster if I do it and then you realize that like neither of those things are A true, and B, it’s not actually helpful to growing your company.

Robb Fahrion: No doubt. Yeah, you’re stuck in one spot and opportunity costs, right? Everyone in business loves that buzzword. But it’s true. And it’s, but yeah, I think that’s where founders and especially, you know, agency’s interesting too, [01:05:00] right? Because I feel like the agency progression is always like, I call it like, you’re kind of like a glorified freelancer early on, right?

Because at the end of the day, you’re doing a majority of the work, right? And so it’s tough to get out of that mindset because that’s what got you to where, okay, you eventually do get to a point where you can hire somebody, but then, you know, you’re evolving, right? You’re evolving into, okay, the next phase of your professional career and journey.

And so it’s just, yeah, constantly being open to learning, testing new ideas, and, you know, mentors, like we talked about earlier, having people that okay, been through these things that can tell you, Hey, dummy stop doing that y’all be okay, I promise you. And so that always helps too.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. So for our audience who listens regularly, they’re gonna notice I’m gonna skip a few of our regular questions ’cause we’ve, we spent a good long time talking about a few of those. So I wanna get into.

Robb Fahrion: Yeah, absolutely.

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And now back to the Hero show.

Richard Matthews: I wanna talk about your guiding principles, right? So one of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code, for instance, never kills his enemies.

So, as we wrap up the interview, you wanna talk about the top one or maybe two principles that you live your life by you run your business by that maybe you wish you knew when you first started out your company.

Robb Fahrion: Yeah, I wouldn’t say it’s something that I wish I knew when I started, but it’s just always been a guiding light. I think it is just honesty. I grew up playing sports. I coached high school football for quite a few years too, prior to starting this business. And I had a coach and he told me, Hey, no matter how good or bad you think something may be it’s never as good as it may be.

And it’s never as bad as it may be either. [01:08:00] And so I think obviously when you’re talking about okay, things that don’t go well, it, it’s tough conversations that you have to have with clients, but I’ve always found that, hey. Be a straight shooter, you know, lay out, here’s what happened, here’s why it happened.

Own it, you know, a lot of times as, you know, the face and the leader of the corporation. But yeah, just being honest and transparent. I think that’s the biggest thing. And I mean, that’s one of the things when we talk about, okay, the guiding light of the work that we do too. Like, we’re an open book, right?

If our client wants to see how we do it, who’s doing it, what they’re doing, why they’re, you know, we’re wide open even to the point where like certain clients add directly to our Slack channel and the reports that they get out probably get more than they even actually consume. But, you know, it’s one of those things we wanna make sure that, you know.

You’re getting what you’re paying for. You can trust our team. We have the best interests of you as a client at the forefront. So, yeah, and I think that’s all built on that trust and honesty. And same thing with our employees. It’s like, I, if you [01:09:00] can’t do something or you’re struggling to do something, or you’re running out of time, like, I wanna know that, like, I’m not gonna be mad.

You know, that’s part of, we, I want to either teach you, I wanna get you more help if you need it, right? But the worst thing is if, okay, I ask you how things are going and you sweep it under the rug and you know, these problems are not brought to light, right? So I think through and through with an organization, you know, just the feeling that, hey, I can say what I think, what I feel whether right or wrong, you know, being honest about what it is you’re thinking, feeling, I think that’s absolutely key to be successful.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. I agree. And you’ll probably appreciate this, we’re, you know, 250 episodes or so into this podcast, and one of the most regular answers to that question for me is some variation on honesty, integrity as being a core value to run a company. I always love that because I think it’s it’s central to our message at the hero show, right?

That entrepreneurs are heroes, right? And they’re working to provide their value to the world. And so I’m a huge fan of that as a guiding principle, but also like to, just to your [01:10:00] point, like, we’re the same way, right? We’re an open book with our clients. And I tell people, I was like, we don’t do anything secret.

Nothing we do is secretive we don’t have, you know, secret special sauce. If you wanna see our processes, you wanna see our checklists, you wanna see the people who are working on stuff, just ask, right? And I was like the reality is like, you know. You could steal and copy everything that we’re doing and you couldn’t build our business ’cause it would be, it’s like a whole, it’s a whole new business.

Um, And people don’t wanna do that. It’s just not, it’s not relevant to them. They have their own company they wanna run. And so when we show them our stuff and we show them our things, they’re like, oh, that’s why we hire you because you actually have all of these processes in every single little aspect of it and we’re like, yeah. And then like we had to, we actually had to dial back our communication with our customers ’cause apparently I had a thought process on like how much people wanted to be communicated with.

And we were wrong ’cause we were way over communicated. And, but that’s where.

Robb Fahrion: I feel that.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, you have to uh, the ask at the beginning of the relationship is a lot of times because if they’ve worked with other agencies before, I just want to be communicated with.[01:11:00]

Robb Fahrion: Yep, right. And so we were like the wrong direction.

Richard Matthews: And so when they start realizing like, oh, a company that can actually keep track of and communicate with everything, they’re like, okay, that’s too much. Let’s dial it little bit.

Robb Fahrion: Yeah, no doubt. Like we see that with just like monthly cadence meetings, right? Like, okay. Out of the box, like we know more or less, like we’re gonna have communication in between, right? Like whether it’s emails again, if there’s it’s slack, whatever. And then, okay, end of the month, right?

We wanna have enough data and information to report of, go through, get feedback on. But you know, a lot of times clients early on, they’re like, Hey, can we meet more frequently? Right. Like bi-weekly. Sure. But yeah, I’d say 9 times outta 10, it’s like, okay, after three, four months, they’re like, Hey, yeah, we can move to monthly.

Right? Because we get on that like, intermediate call and, all right. Yeah. We’re all dialed in and yeah the video testimonial that’s actually bringing a lot of this to light one of ’em said, yeah, you know, we get on our monthly calls, but the communication with Flying V Group in between, you know, day 1 and day [01:12:00] 31 is so good that we get on our monthly call.

And yeah, there’s certain stuff to talk about, but it’s really just, you know, hey, cross some T’s dot, some I’s, you know, details, if anything. And on our way just because, you know, we are having that consistent communication, or if anything’s needed, they can call or email and they’re gonna get a quick response.

But yeah, no I hear you. There’s that fine line too, right. And figuring that out. But I think you’re definitely. Better off you know, on the communicative standpoint.

Richard Matthews: Our biggest problem now is actually the reverse, is how do we get our clients to communicate back to us when we need them to respond to us? So, like, I’m Oh, that’s the problem I want to have. I would refer that problem rather than our clients hold of you.

Robb Fahrion: Yeah. Website design projects. How long is this gonna take? Well, if we’re driving the boat and you get back to us immediately, it’s gonna take 8 weeks. But we don’t wanna blame our clients. Depending on the client though, it can take 12 weeks. Right? Whatever the number may be based on, you know, the their response rate, right.

And whatnot.

Richard Matthews: We do the same thing for our onboarding. And so like, we laugh about it and we laugh about it with [01:13:00] our clients too. It was like, you know, our onboarding takes on average of three weeks, but we actually put on the books four to six weeks and that’s what we’ll tell you is we’ll put a due date on here, four to six weeks.

And I was like, and the reason for that is because we’re gonna send you stuff and you’re not gonna have time to respond to it immediately. Right? And so we need to build that into our process. And so that they understand it and they’re like, oh, okay, that makes sense. And I’m like, so if you want it done in three weeks, just respond to everything we send you immediately. Right?

Robb Fahrion: Yeah. We’ll be on top of it.

Richard Matthews: We will be on top of it, but I know that’s not reality. So here’s what our actual date is.

Robb Fahrion: Right.

Richard Matthews: And a lot of them, when you actually approach it that way, we get that same sort of response. We’re like, yeah, you’re probably right. I probably won’t immediately respond to everything you send me. And we’re like, yeah, we know.

And that’s why, you know, as long as you agree to this timeframe, we should be good. And so it’s just building in time for them to communicate back and forth. So, that’s a great place to I think wrap our interview just on, you know, the idea of integrity as being a guiding principle for your company.

But I do finish every interview with a simple challenge I call the heroes challenge. And heroes challenge is something I do to help get access to [01:14:00] stories might not find otherwise. Right. So the question is simple. Do you or someone in your network have a cool entrepreneurial story that you think should come share their story with us here on The Hero S how. Who are they? First names are fine. And why do you think they should come share their story with us?

Robb Fahrion: Yeah, I do. His name, actually two of ’em, Troy and Winston. So, they’ve actually started a pasta sauce company called SAUZ S-A-U-Z. I work pretty closely with ’em. I know them very well. Young guys too. 20, I think they’re both 23 or 24. But yeah, they’re absolutely killing it.

They’re trying to disrupt a very old antiquated, archaic kind of same players for a long time. But I mean, they’re having great success rolling out in regional markets. Some big things coming from them too. But yeah their journey and experience is always super interesting. And who doesn’t love pasta sauce.

Right? So it’s a fun brand. They’re doing really cool things in the space, so I think those guys would be great.

Richard Matthews: That’d be awesome. We’ll reach out later and see if we can get an introduction. They don’t always say yes, but when they do, we get some good cool stories out of those. And then just personally, [01:15:00] my wife and I have been talking about starting a salad dressing company, so that might be a really.

Robb Fahrion: Oh, there we go they would be the perfect guys to ask. Yeah. Anything CPG related. I’m learning more and more ’cause yeah, we work pretty closely with them, but yeah, it’s been a lot of fun to watch their progression and yeah, just the first couple weeks of 2024 too. it’s gonna be a fast pace year for sure. So excited.

Richard Matthews: That’s awesome. Cool. Well, in comic books there’s always the crowd at the end who’s cheering and clapping for the acts of heroism. So our analysis that as we close here is where can people find you if they want to work with you? And, you know, where can they light up the bat signal, so to speak and say, Hey Robb, we need your help to drive leads.

I know they gotta hear a lot of your philosophies today, and hopefully, you know, if they resonated for that. So the first question is, where can they find you? And the second question, I think the more important one is, who are the right types of people to raise their hand and reach out?

Robb Fahrion: Yeah, great question. Websites really a hub of everything We do FlyingVGroup.com, and then I’m pretty active on social media channels, so Instagram, LinkedIn, X, Twitter as well. So my [01:16:00] handles are always just my name, just two. B’s, R-O-B-B-F-A-H-R-I-O-N. Those would definitely be the best spots.

And then the, ah, second question, remind me, just slipped my mind.

Richard Matthews: Is who are the right types of businesses to reach out?

Robb Fahrion: There we go. Thank you. Yeah. So yeah, right. Types of individuals. So, chief marketing officers, owner operators right, as well. And I’d say those businesses, they either lack marketing and advertising resources. They don’t have any marketing or advertising resources or they really need, you know, someone to come in and flip everything upside down or take a real deep analysis of what they are doing from an expertise standpoint to get them suited in the right direction.

But yeah, I’d say our clientele, more often than not, we’re kind plugging in as a digital marketing and advertising department when lack resources are able to be found internally from a headcount perspective.

Richard Matthews: Makes a lot of sense. Thank you so much for coming on our show today, Robb. I really appreciate it getting to hear your story and just hear your [01:17:00] philosophies on how you approach marketing. I think it’s really smart. So again, thank you for coming on sharing your story today. Do you have any final words of wisdom for our audience before we hit this stop record button?

Robb Fahrion: Yeah, I think it’s just one foot in front of the other, right? I mean, I know it sounds cliche, but just finding one thing to improve upon, whether you’re with yourself, your business helping somebody else improve on a daily basis. And those things start to compound and add up over time. And, yeah. Last thing I just wanna say, you know, rich, thank you for putting this show together. You’ve done a great job and. uh.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. Thank you for being here.

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