September 19, 2025 • 19 mins
Join us as Drew Donaldson unpacks the strategies that help entrepreneurs break through the $100k revenue mark. This episode is packed with valuable advice for anyone looking to elevate their business to the next level. From group coaching to personalized consulting, discover how you can achieve your financial goals and thrive in a competitive market.
Listen on Podbean:
https://brainworkframework.podbean.com/
Connect with Drew Donaldson:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/grohaus/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gro.haus/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/grohaus/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gro.haus
Company Website: https://www.grohaus.org/
Connect with Chris Troka:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-troka-3a093058/
Website: https://focused-biz.com/
Website: https://christroka.com/ #brainwork #framework #business #entrepreneurs #marketing #consulting #strategies
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Not every marketing strategy worksfor every person or every business.
I could go and buy pay-per-click ads.
We run pay-per-click adsfor clients all the time.
You'd be like, why aren'tyou doing pay-per-click?
Because it's $8 a click for marketers.
Are you kidding me?
It's a lose lose situation there.
I'm not paying $8 a click when I can senda thousand emails a month for 500 bucks
(00:21):
and get way more results out of those.
Then I would be doing pay perClick, and I did pay per click
for the agency for a while.
And it wasn't profitable.
I'm not going down that road.
That said, if you have a local brickand mortar business, if you're a
wedding DJ and you only serve aparticular market, buy some paper click.
It's a gold mine, it's fantastic.
But AI is starting to take awaya lot of that search volume.
(00:44):
It's not gonna be there forever.
You have to keep trying new stuff andjust take the logical step back and
be like, everybody's talking abouthow webinars are great and webinars,
that's where you sell everything.
You are listening to Brainwork Framework,a Business and Marketing podcast,
brought to you by Focused-biz.com.
Welcome back to another episode.
With us today is Drew Donaldson.
(01:05):
He is the CEO of GroHaus.
GroHaus bridges the gap between DIYmarketing and costly inefficient full
service agencies, offering hands-oncoaching, consulting and fractional
services, tailored to meet business needs.
Drew, so excited to have you on today.
How you doing?
Excited to be on Chris.
We were having such a great conversationabout music and marketing and social
media and trends that we experienceboth with politics, with the
(01:29):
economy, everything that's involved.
I'm excited to dive more into it.
Tell us more about your journey.
What were you doing before?
And tell us more about GroHaus.
Before I started GroHaus, I was actuallyconsulting for a number of years in media.
I actually start as I went to film schooland I really thought the big thing I was
gonna be doing is ads and advertisements.
(01:51):
I just really fell inlove with that format.
I'd always really loved advertisingeven as a kid, my parents' party
trick for me was be to have merecite commercials verbatim.
I would memorize these commercialsand then they would be like, do the
commercial for Foot Locker and I wouldknow the whole commercial for Foot
Locker or Keystone Light or whatever.
They got a kick out of it but I alwaysloved when I was a kid, one of my favorite
(02:13):
things to do was watch infomercials.
I was obsessed with advertising.
And I was the kind of kid thathated when people would like fast.
These are pre DVR days when youwould record something on tape and
people had fast forward throughthe commercials, they like, no.
I wanna see the commercials.
When I got out of school, itwas kind of a natural fit.
I saw an opportunity where therewas a lot of business owners at the
(02:36):
time wanted to start putting videoon social media but this is back
in the days where no one did that.
There was no studios,there was no coaches.
Your phone wasn't good enough yet,there were still in the flip phone era,
you still needed a camera and I founda niche helping business owners create
digital media specifically for online.
I did some commercials,I did some music videos.
(02:57):
I did some random projectsand I got myself enmeshed in
the studio system in New York.
And I thought that was the way up.
That was the way I was taught inschool that you intern and then
you become an assistant and thenyou do this and you do that.
And one day I was talking to oneof the guys at the studio and
I asked him how much he made.
And he was a senior guy that hadworked on albums with big artists
(03:20):
and had done big television projectsand he proudly make 25 bucks an hour.
Really satisfied.
And this is like 20 years ago, that'snot as crazy but Costco was hiring at
the time for $25 an hour entry level andI was like, there is no way I am staying
in this industry and running and gettingcoffee for angry artists for the next
(03:41):
five years just to make 25 bucks an houronce I finally achieve that seniority.
I was like, forget that.
I looked at what my skills wereand I was like, all right, how do
I jump and laying on my feet here.
I have this advertising background.
I've been doing these ads for people.
And I did some radiospots and stuff like that.
The easiest pole vault is just takewhat I know here and then I find a
(04:02):
marketing team that I can embed myself in.
And then I learned marketing.
It took me a while but I eventually got ajob with St. John's in New York as their
in-house video guy and they were tryingto insource all their video production
from these big ad agencies in New York.
They need someone who understandsthe complete pipeline and can manage
all these productions and actuallydo them to compete with this work.
(04:26):
We're paying hundreds of thousandsof dollars for each year.
They hired me and I stayed there forthree to five years and during that
time we insourced all the productionand I started producing ads for them
and video promos and that stuff.
It was really cool is we actuallydid two television ad sets.
It was two sets and they both went onto compete because there was a little
(04:47):
overlap between the agency contractending and my contract starting.
There was like six months of overlap.
We produced the same time and my ads beattheir ads at an award show and I was like,
that's awesome.
Wow.
Me as 23, 24 years old, and I'mtaking on this monster ad agency and
I crushed them in the competition.
Now they did get the runner upbehind me, it's like they didn't do
(05:10):
too bad of a job but I was prettyjazzed that I smoked these guys.
I did that for a while and then Igot an offer to go work for an agency
and that's how I discovered I hatedworking for agencies because it was
the worst experience of my life.
Six months.
It was everything you hear that's badabout agency life in the modern day.
I thought I was gonna be hangingout with David Ogilvy type folks.
(05:32):
And it's not that at all.
It's a churn and burn model.
They don't care about the creative, it'sjust how much can you get out the door.
And I was working in the worst ofthe worst industry is pharmaceuticals
which if anyone is consideringa job in pharmaceutical ads?
Run.
You are better off becominga monk in Tibet than you are
working in pharmaceuticals.
I did that for a bit and then I went todo consulting and at this point, I had
(05:56):
enough marketing background that I waslike, okay, now I can kind of shift.
Not do as much of the media productionand focus more on the actual strategy.
My first marketing campaign wasactually a LinkedIn automation
campaign, this is before any ofthese automation tools are out.
There's one tool out there that waswritten by this guy in Pakistan that,
it was like you paid him throughPayPal to get a code to download it.
(06:19):
And then he would provide all the service.
There was no team.
It was just this one guy in Pakistan.
I set up this weird thing and it sentout a bunch of messages, pitching me as
a consultant and it worked gangbusters.
I had meetings booked every singleday and half the meetings were
people asking me how did you do that?
How did you send them out?
'cause four people on our team gotthis all within seconds of each other.
(06:41):
How are you doing this?
And some of it was me justtalking about automation.
And then eventually there was thisconsultant that was leaving a role
and he was looking for someone toreplace him 'cause he was taking
a role at a different company.
I got into this media companyand my whole kind of job was to
do what I had done previously,which was to come in and fix it.
(07:02):
This thing's really ugly and broken.
Come in and fix it.
I did that for five years.
It only took me about sixmonths to fix the issue.
I was like, what else am I gonna do here?
And I realized I started going anddoing webinars and trainings about
data and automations and this is cool.
That's where I really got intoeverything from machine learning
to data analytics to automation.
I taught myself Python and by the time Ihad left that consulting, I had the full
(07:26):
stack experience of the creative down pat.
I got the strategy, I have thedata and analytics and technical
knowledge and it was off to the races.
After I left that, I partnered up with twoguys to launch a version of this agency.
After a year running it withthem, I bought them out and
I've been running it solo since.
We really focus primarily on the leadgeneration side as well as the data
(07:51):
and analytics, automation and AI side.
Those are kind of the two sides of thebusiness and we do the rest of the normal
agency stuff but those are really thetwo things that people seek us out for.
I love that journey.
Taking all that influence andexperience and then helping other
businesses and entrepreneurs basicallyreplicate what you've done already.
That's super incredible.
Are there certain industries or typesof professionals that you generally
(08:13):
work with or just some stories orexamples on how you've helped them
from where they first started?
We define our audienceas knowledge in service.
What we're looking for is people thathave spent a lot of time becoming
very smart about the thing they do andnot a lot of time becoming marketers.
This could be anyone from alawyer or an accountant to
full educational institutions.
(08:34):
And one of our best case studies is we'reworking with a small private school,
boarding school and when we first came in.
They were struggling with lead generationbecause they had never had to do it.
They had a really well honed funnel ofreferrals that had lasted for nearly
a hundred years and all of a sudden
(08:56):
that started to weaken andthey weren't getting as many.
And it wasn't because the school gotworse or that the school changed, it
was simply because the people that weresending them referrals were retiring and
nothing was being done to supplement that.
As these people would retire, the torrent
referrals started becominga dribble of referrals.
(09:17):
We came in and we said, there'sa great story here that we
can tell about the school.
It has life changing effects on thestudents and it has an unbelievable
alumni network of hyper successful people.
We need to tell that story.
And all we did was we crafted one adthat we spoke to the the parents of
these kids and spoke their languageand used the terminology that they're
(09:40):
using and the frustrations thatthey're feeling with their student.
And then we back that up with stories fromthe school, from teachers, from alumni
talking about how game changing theschool is and within the first month,
I think we had done something a hundredleads in the first month and it got
to the point where we were actuallyoverproducing and they couldn't keep up.
(10:02):
The only time in my life I've addedfriction to a funnel intentionally
because we have to separatethe wheat from the shave here.
There's too many people coming inand not all of 'em are qualified.
We need to really focusin on those people.
And every once in a while you add thatpreemptively, like, Hey, I don't want
anyone that can't afford this service,I'm gonna add a check box on the form
(10:22):
that says, yes, I have $1,500 a monthto spend on marketing or whatever.
That's a preemptive friction point.
We kept having to add fieldafter field because people
were still coming in too fast.
If you now go and look at that campaign,that lead form is 10 fields long.
It's ridiculous.
And people still book everysingle day because it's the power
(10:46):
of the story we're telling for themand how this very specific school with
their very specific set of knowledgehas these life-changing impacts.
As long as we can describe thatstory to a parent, then they have
no choice but to click the buttonbecause it's like, would you walk by
someone on the street that's just $300?
No.
It's too good of an offer.
(11:06):
That's the key example of someone whohas a phenomenal amount of wealth and
experience in an area just doesn't havethe marketing chops to be able to put all
the pieces together and tell that story.
Absolutely.
Is there a common trait between theentrepreneurs who are struggling
to get to that next level?
Maybe they have a lot of ambition,they have their own expertise but
(11:27):
they don't know the marketing.
What are they strugglinggenerally that is preventing them
from hitting that next level?
Is it just that perfectly craftedad that funnel that tells the
story or is there somethingdifferent that people are missing?
We call it Seurat syndrome.
George Seurat was a pointless painter.
The most common painting thateverybody has seen is the one that's
in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, wherethey visit the Chicago Museum of Art.
(11:49):
And it's this huge painting ofpeople on the bank of a river.
They're having lunch and I thinkit's called Sunday afternoon
or something like that.
The thing is, when you stickyour nose right up against that
painting, all you see is dots.
You just see individual points.
It's not until you step 30 feet awaythat you see the whole picture and
the reality is, for a lot of people,they are too close to their business.
(12:11):
They can only see the dots.
They can't see the interconnections, theycan't see how the colors blend together.
They can't see the real storythat they're telling and they
can't really connect with.
They can't connect what they'redoing with their audience.
A lot of times it either takessome serious kind of step back and
reflect on who these people are.
Way more than just writing aanother pointless marketing avatar
(12:34):
that's not really gonna get youanywhere because it's the same
stuff you've been writing for years.
It's really taking that step back and whatis the painting I'm trying to create here?
What is this story?
What is the thing that I'mreally providing to these people?
Each of these bullet points on a sheetof paper and I think that's really hard.
And that's where most of our clientscome in when they work with us.
(12:54):
That's exactly what it is.
They're highly successful.
They're great at what they do.
They have no way to say,I do this really well.
How do I tell people about that?
That's the number one.
If there's one commonality,that's what it really comes down.
I appreciate that because for a lot ofentrepreneurs, they do a lot of things
to see them struggling like that andjust spinning their wheels and it can
take so long for them to build thisbusiness together, just wanna prevent
(13:18):
them from having those struggles.
And for those who are interested inlearning more about your consulting
and your services where can theyfind you and connect with you online?
grohaus.org Is our website.
You can see some of our workand read about our philosophy
there and who we serve.
I would say X is probably whereI'm most active, so if you're
trying to get my attention thereor LinkedIn both will work well.
(13:39):
But x, it's GR0HAUS and I do thisshout out frequently if anyone
knows the guy, Greg Roha, who ownsthe GroHaus tag or the username on
Twitter, put me in contact with him.
I've been trying to contactthis guy for years to get that
and I just cannot find the guy.
And then Drew Donaldson on LinkedIn.
And I look like this.
(13:59):
If you see this and then there'sa profile image that looks
like a younger version of this.
That's me.
And we'll have the links availabledown in the show notes and the
descriptions for everybody here.
But Drew, what was the turningpoint and that scaling point
for you as a business owner?
Is it based on the relationshipsand in networking that you're doing?
Are you doing SEO running ads blogging?
(14:21):
Are you doing the fullpicture of everything?
or is there something or someoneshould focus on to level up
their marketing for scaling?
I think beyond all of that,you have to get your offer.
One of the biggest things that changedmy business from being something that
made me feel like I was chasing mytail to something that was actually
growing was decommodizing my services.
Because if you're just going out andsaying, I can build you a website and
(14:44):
that's what the other 10 guys are saying,then it all comes down to price, right?
And then last thing you want is foryour clients to be able to compare
your apples to apples to somebody elseand say, well, he's charging 40% more.
Then this other guy, we'll justgo with this other guy and get the
exact same thing 'cause they'renot getting the exact same thing.
They're gonna get lower quality andthe way you design that offer is
how you determine what quality isthat you're really providing them.
(15:07):
I think that's the most important thing.
In terms of my own marketing strategy, I'mpretty invested in cold email right now.
That's we're reallyseeing the best results.
I've run ads for years.
I run ads for clients.
Ads can be very effective.
They are expensive though.
And it does require you to havea very unique value proposition
and do a lot of audience buildingaround that value proposition.
(15:29):
The days of being able to go out to a coldaudience with an offer isn't as effective.
And I can tell you, I ran anad on TikTok for two years.
Every time I would turn iton, it would fill my pipeline
for clients until it didn't.
It's not because I burnt it out.
It had been off for a good sixmonths from the last time I
turned it on that it worked.
(15:49):
It's just there's so many more advertisersin the marketplace that you really have
to stand out and the best way to standout is to build an audience first.
If you're looking for speed to getout there, cold email's pretty good.
Two week warmup, you write a coupleemails, you download some leads.
You can do it pretty efficientlyfor 500 bucks a month.
You just gotta know how to doit, which is I think what keeps
(16:10):
most people outta the game.
Ads are fantastic but you need tohave a really fantastic ad strategy
and a fantastic offer to bring to thetable, which by the way, shameless
plug, I have a workshop where I willteach you how to do all of that,
exactly how we do in the agency.
If you are interested in that, you cancheck out info.grohaus.com/cascade.
I love all that advice.
It's practical.
(16:30):
It's demonstrating, hey, this is whatyou've done, what has worked well for you?
But don't forget about those reallyimportant foundational pieces
your offer that really is goingto set that foundation for you.
And I think it highlights the importanceof both having a multichannel approach
and your flexibility to pivot.
If TikTok isn't working at thistime, you have to pivot to something
else, test something, see what works.
(16:51):
But your ability to adapt to thesituation that's gonna allow you to
grow further and not be affected bythe external influences that business
owners are kind of affected by.
A hundred percent.
And not every marketing strategy worksfor every person or every business.
I could go and buy pay-per-click ads.
We run pay-per-click adsfor clients all the time.
You'd be like, why aren'tyou doing pay per click?
(17:12):
Because it's $8 a click for marketers.
Are you kidding me?
It's lose lose situation there.
I'm not paying $8 a click.
When I can send a thousandemails a month for 500 bucks
and get way more results out of those,then I would be doing pay per click.
And I did pay per click for the agencyfor a while and it wasn't profitable.
I'm not going down that road.
(17:32):
That said, if you have a local brickand mortar business, if you're a wedding
DJ and you only serve a particularmarket, buy some pay per click.
It's a gold mine.
It's fantastic.
But AI is starting to take awaya lot of that search volume.
It's not gonna be there forever.
You have to keep trying new stuff andjust take the logical step back and
be like, everybody's talking abouthow webinars are great and webinars,
(17:55):
that's where you sell everything.
Does it make sense for a wedding DJ todo a webinar on your perfect playlist?
Probably not.
No, I totally agree.
You have to find the right industry.
It's your offer, youraudience, your messaging.
All of that really plays into it.
It can be the great thing for youbut that doesn't mean it can be copy
pasted into other businesses as well.
(18:16):
Drew, we appreciate you coming on.
I wanted to ask one quick questionunder 60 seconds if you can.
What are you lookingforward to most in 2025?
Launching anything new, doing just thesame amazing stuff you've been doing?
We have a couple of new offers thatI'm working on right now that I don't
want to talk about yet because they'renot quite out of the incubator.
(18:36):
But those are really exciting for me.
And one is a kind of a brandrealignment for us internally.
Another is a strategy that partnershipmodel with some of our clients who
struggle with sales and there'sjust some other opportunities
that have popped up randomly withopportunities come from weird places.
(18:57):
And we've gotten a couple in thelast few weeks that isn't what we
do but we could definitely do this.
We didn't set out to make soupbut we'll eat the soup like no
problem.
I love that.
And no worries at all.
Keeping your cards close to yourchest right now 'cause it's still
something you have to work up.
And that execution piece that you wannamake sure you perfect before you launch.
I totally respect that.
(19:18):
Drew, thank you for coming on,sharing your tips and tricks.
For those of you who areinterested, make sure you reach
out, connect with Drew here.
Appreciate you coming on and sharingyour journey and wisdom with us.
No problem, man.
This was a great conversation.
Thank you so much.
Appreciate it.
Not every marketing strategy worksfor every person or every business.
I could go and buy pay-per-click ads.
We run pay-per-click adsfor clients all the time.
You'd be like, why aren'tyou doing pay-per-click?
Because it's $8 a click for marketers.
Are you kidding me?
It's a lose lose situation there.
I'm not paying $8 a click when I can senda thousand emails a month for 500 bucks
(00:21):
and get way more results out of those.
Then I would be doing pay perClick, and I did pay per click
for the agency for a while.
And it wasn't profitable.
I'm not going down that road.
That said, if you have a local brickand mortar business, if you're a
wedding DJ and you only serve aparticular market, buy some paper click.
It's a gold mine, it's fantastic.
But AI is starting to take awaya lot of that search volume.
(00:44):
It's not gonna be there forever.
You have to keep trying new stuff andjust take the logical step back and
be like, everybody's talking abouthow webinars are great and webinars,
that's where you sell everything.
You are listening to Brainwork Framework,a Business and Marketing podcast,
brought to you by Focused-biz.com.
Welcome back to another episode.
With us today is Drew Donaldson.
(01:05):
He is the CEO of GroHaus.
GroHaus bridges the gap between DIYmarketing and costly inefficient full
service agencies, offering hands-oncoaching, consulting and fractional
services, tailored to meet business needs.
Drew, so excited to have you on today.
How you doing?
Excited to be on Chris.
We were having such a great conversationabout music and marketing and social
media and trends that we experienceboth with politics, with the
(01:29):
economy, everything that's involved.
I'm excited to dive more into it.
Tell us more about your journey.
What were you doing before?
And tell us more about GroHaus.
Before I started GroHaus, I was actuallyconsulting for a number of years in media.
I actually start as I went to film schooland I really thought the big thing I was
gonna be doing is ads and advertisements.
(01:51):
I just really fell inlove with that format.
I'd always really loved advertisingeven as a kid, my parents' party
trick for me was be to have merecite commercials verbatim.
I would memorize these commercialsand then they would be like, do the
commercial for Foot Locker and I wouldknow the whole commercial for Foot
Locker or Keystone Light or whatever.
They got a kick out of it but I alwaysloved when I was a kid, one of my favorite
(02:13):
things to do was watch infomercials.
I was obsessed with advertising.
And I was the kind of kid thathated when people would like fast.
These are pre DVR days when youwould record something on tape and
people had fast forward throughthe commercials, they like, no.
I wanna see the commercials.
When I got out of school, itwas kind of a natural fit.
I saw an opportunity where therewas a lot of business owners at the
(02:36):
time wanted to start putting videoon social media but this is back
in the days where no one did that.
There was no studios,there was no coaches.
Your phone wasn't good enough yet,there were still in the flip phone era,
you still needed a camera and I founda niche helping business owners create
digital media specifically for online.
I did some commercials,I did some music videos.
(02:57):
I did some random projectsand I got myself enmeshed in
the studio system in New York.
And I thought that was the way up.
That was the way I was taught inschool that you intern and then
you become an assistant and thenyou do this and you do that.
And one day I was talking to oneof the guys at the studio and
I asked him how much he made.
And he was a senior guy that hadworked on albums with big artists
(03:20):
and had done big television projectsand he proudly make 25 bucks an hour.
Really satisfied.
And this is like 20 years ago, that'snot as crazy but Costco was hiring at
the time for $25 an hour entry level andI was like, there is no way I am staying
in this industry and running and gettingcoffee for angry artists for the next
(03:41):
five years just to make 25 bucks an houronce I finally achieve that seniority.
I was like, forget that.
I looked at what my skills wereand I was like, all right, how do
I jump and laying on my feet here.
I have this advertising background.
I've been doing these ads for people.
And I did some radiospots and stuff like that.
The easiest pole vault is just takewhat I know here and then I find a
(04:02):
marketing team that I can embed myself in.
And then I learned marketing.
It took me a while but I eventually got ajob with St. John's in New York as their
in-house video guy and they were tryingto insource all their video production
from these big ad agencies in New York.
They need someone who understandsthe complete pipeline and can manage
all these productions and actuallydo them to compete with this work.
(04:26):
We're paying hundreds of thousandsof dollars for each year.
They hired me and I stayed there forthree to five years and during that
time we insourced all the productionand I started producing ads for them
and video promos and that stuff.
It was really cool is we actuallydid two television ad sets.
It was two sets and they both went onto compete because there was a little
(04:47):
overlap between the agency contractending and my contract starting.
There was like six months of overlap.
We produced the same time and my ads beattheir ads at an award show and I was like,
that's awesome.
Wow.
Me as 23, 24 years old, and I'mtaking on this monster ad agency and
I crushed them in the competition.
Now they did get the runner upbehind me, it's like they didn't do
(05:10):
too bad of a job but I was prettyjazzed that I smoked these guys.
I did that for a while and then Igot an offer to go work for an agency
and that's how I discovered I hatedworking for agencies because it was
the worst experience of my life.
Six months.
It was everything you hear that's badabout agency life in the modern day.
I thought I was gonna be hangingout with David Ogilvy type folks.
(05:32):
And it's not that at all.
It's a churn and burn model.
They don't care about the creative, it'sjust how much can you get out the door.
And I was working in the worst ofthe worst industry is pharmaceuticals
which if anyone is consideringa job in pharmaceutical ads?
Run.
You are better off becominga monk in Tibet than you are
working in pharmaceuticals.
I did that for a bit and then I went todo consulting and at this point, I had
(05:56):
enough marketing background that I waslike, okay, now I can kind of shift.
Not do as much of the media productionand focus more on the actual strategy.
My first marketing campaign wasactually a LinkedIn automation
campaign, this is before any ofthese automation tools are out.
There's one tool out there that waswritten by this guy in Pakistan that,
it was like you paid him throughPayPal to get a code to download it.
(06:19):
And then he would provide all the service.
There was no team.
It was just this one guy in Pakistan.
I set up this weird thing and it sentout a bunch of messages, pitching me as
a consultant and it worked gangbusters.
I had meetings booked every singleday and half the meetings were
people asking me how did you do that?
How did you send them out?
'cause four people on our team gotthis all within seconds of each other.
(06:41):
How are you doing this?
And some of it was me justtalking about automation.
And then eventually there was thisconsultant that was leaving a role
and he was looking for someone toreplace him 'cause he was taking
a role at a different company.
I got into this media companyand my whole kind of job was to
do what I had done previously,which was to come in and fix it.
(07:02):
This thing's really ugly and broken.
Come in and fix it.
I did that for five years.
It only took me about sixmonths to fix the issue.
I was like, what else am I gonna do here?
And I realized I started going anddoing webinars and trainings about
data and automations and this is cool.
That's where I really got intoeverything from machine learning
to data analytics to automation.
I taught myself Python and by the time Ihad left that consulting, I had the full
(07:26):
stack experience of the creative down pat.
I got the strategy, I have thedata and analytics and technical
knowledge and it was off to the races.
After I left that, I partnered up with twoguys to launch a version of this agency.
After a year running it withthem, I bought them out and
I've been running it solo since.
We really focus primarily on the leadgeneration side as well as the data
(07:51):
and analytics, automation and AI side.
Those are kind of the two sides of thebusiness and we do the rest of the normal
agency stuff but those are really thetwo things that people seek us out for.
I love that journey.
Taking all that influence andexperience and then helping other
businesses and entrepreneurs basicallyreplicate what you've done already.
That's super incredible.
Are there certain industries or typesof professionals that you generally
(08:13):
work with or just some stories orexamples on how you've helped them
from where they first started?
We define our audienceas knowledge in service.
What we're looking for is people thathave spent a lot of time becoming
very smart about the thing they do andnot a lot of time becoming marketers.
This could be anyone from alawyer or an accountant to
full educational institutions.
(08:34):
And one of our best case studies is we'reworking with a small private school,
boarding school and when we first came in.
They were struggling with lead generationbecause they had never had to do it.
They had a really well honed funnel ofreferrals that had lasted for nearly
a hundred years and all of a sudden
(08:56):
that started to weaken andthey weren't getting as many.
And it wasn't because the school gotworse or that the school changed, it
was simply because the people that weresending them referrals were retiring and
nothing was being done to supplement that.
As these people would retire, the torrent
referrals started becominga dribble of referrals.
(09:17):
We came in and we said, there'sa great story here that we
can tell about the school.
It has life changing effects on thestudents and it has an unbelievable
alumni network of hyper successful people.
We need to tell that story.
And all we did was we crafted one adthat we spoke to the the parents of
these kids and spoke their languageand used the terminology that they're
(09:40):
using and the frustrations thatthey're feeling with their student.
And then we back that up with stories fromthe school, from teachers, from alumni
talking about how game changing theschool is and within the first month,
I think we had done something a hundredleads in the first month and it got
to the point where we were actuallyoverproducing and they couldn't keep up.
(10:02):
The only time in my life I've addedfriction to a funnel intentionally
because we have to separatethe wheat from the shave here.
There's too many people coming inand not all of 'em are qualified.
We need to really focusin on those people.
And every once in a while you add thatpreemptively, like, Hey, I don't want
anyone that can't afford this service,I'm gonna add a check box on the form
(10:22):
that says, yes, I have $1,500 a monthto spend on marketing or whatever.
That's a preemptive friction point.
We kept having to add fieldafter field because people
were still coming in too fast.
If you now go and look at that campaign,that lead form is 10 fields long.
It's ridiculous.
And people still book everysingle day because it's the power
(10:46):
of the story we're telling for themand how this very specific school with
their very specific set of knowledgehas these life-changing impacts.
As long as we can describe thatstory to a parent, then they have
no choice but to click the buttonbecause it's like, would you walk by
someone on the street that's just $300?
No.
It's too good of an offer.
(11:06):
That's the key example of someone whohas a phenomenal amount of wealth and
experience in an area just doesn't havethe marketing chops to be able to put all
the pieces together and tell that story.
Absolutely.
Is there a common trait between theentrepreneurs who are struggling
to get to that next level?
Maybe they have a lot of ambition,they have their own expertise but
(11:27):
they don't know the marketing.
What are they strugglinggenerally that is preventing them
from hitting that next level?
Is it just that perfectly craftedad that funnel that tells the
story or is there somethingdifferent that people are missing?
We call it Seurat syndrome.
George Seurat was a pointless painter.
The most common painting thateverybody has seen is the one that's
in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, wherethey visit the Chicago Museum of Art.
(11:49):
And it's this huge painting ofpeople on the bank of a river.
They're having lunch and I thinkit's called Sunday afternoon
or something like that.
The thing is, when you stickyour nose right up against that
painting, all you see is dots.
You just see individual points.
It's not until you step 30 feet awaythat you see the whole picture and
the reality is, for a lot of people,they are too close to their business.
(12:11):
They can only see the dots.
They can't see the interconnections, theycan't see how the colors blend together.
They can't see the real storythat they're telling and they
can't really connect with.
They can't connect what they'redoing with their audience.
A lot of times it either takessome serious kind of step back and
reflect on who these people are.
Way more than just writing aanother pointless marketing avatar
(12:34):
that's not really gonna get youanywhere because it's the same
stuff you've been writing for years.
It's really taking that step back and whatis the painting I'm trying to create here?
What is this story?
What is the thing that I'mreally providing to these people?
Each of these bullet points on a sheetof paper and I think that's really hard.
And that's where most of our clientscome in when they work with us.
(12:54):
That's exactly what it is.
They're highly successful.
They're great at what they do.
They have no way to say,I do this really well.
How do I tell people about that?
That's the number one.
If there's one commonality,that's what it really comes down.
I appreciate that because for a lot ofentrepreneurs, they do a lot of things
to see them struggling like that andjust spinning their wheels and it can
take so long for them to build thisbusiness together, just wanna prevent
(13:18):
them from having those struggles.
And for those who are interested inlearning more about your consulting
and your services where can theyfind you and connect with you online?
grohaus.org Is our website.
You can see some of our workand read about our philosophy
there and who we serve.
I would say X is probably whereI'm most active, so if you're
trying to get my attention thereor LinkedIn both will work well.
(13:39):
But x, it's GR0HAUS and I do thisshout out frequently if anyone
knows the guy, Greg Roha, who ownsthe GroHaus tag or the username on
Twitter, put me in contact with him.
I've been trying to contactthis guy for years to get that
and I just cannot find the guy.
And then Drew Donaldson on LinkedIn.
And I look like this.
(13:59):
If you see this and then there'sa profile image that looks
like a younger version of this.
That's me.
And we'll have the links availabledown in the show notes and the
descriptions for everybody here.
But Drew, what was the turningpoint and that scaling point
for you as a business owner?
Is it based on the relationshipsand in networking that you're doing?
Are you doing SEO running ads blogging?
(14:21):
Are you doing the fullpicture of everything?
or is there something or someoneshould focus on to level up
their marketing for scaling?
I think beyond all of that,you have to get your offer.
One of the biggest things that changedmy business from being something that
made me feel like I was chasing mytail to something that was actually
growing was decommodizing my services.
Because if you're just going out andsaying, I can build you a website and
(14:44):
that's what the other 10 guys are saying,then it all comes down to price, right?
And then last thing you want is foryour clients to be able to compare
your apples to apples to somebody elseand say, well, he's charging 40% more.
Then this other guy, we'll justgo with this other guy and get the
exact same thing 'cause they'renot getting the exact same thing.
They're gonna get lower quality andthe way you design that offer is
how you determine what quality isthat you're really providing them.
(15:07):
I think that's the most important thing.
In terms of my own marketing strategy, I'mpretty invested in cold email right now.
That's we're reallyseeing the best results.
I've run ads for years.
I run ads for clients.
Ads can be very effective.
They are expensive though.
And it does require you to havea very unique value proposition
and do a lot of audience buildingaround that value proposition.
(15:29):
The days of being able to go out to a coldaudience with an offer isn't as effective.
And I can tell you, I ran anad on TikTok for two years.
Every time I would turn iton, it would fill my pipeline
for clients until it didn't.
It's not because I burnt it out.
It had been off for a good sixmonths from the last time I
turned it on that it worked.
(15:49):
It's just there's so many more advertisersin the marketplace that you really have
to stand out and the best way to standout is to build an audience first.
If you're looking for speed to getout there, cold email's pretty good.
Two week warmup, you write a coupleemails, you download some leads.
You can do it pretty efficientlyfor 500 bucks a month.
You just gotta know how to doit, which is I think what keeps
(16:10):
most people outta the game.
Ads are fantastic but you need tohave a really fantastic ad strategy
and a fantastic offer to bring to thetable, which by the way, shameless
plug, I have a workshop where I willteach you how to do all of that,
exactly how we do in the agency.
If you are interested in that, you cancheck out info.grohaus.com/cascade.
I love all that advice.
It's practical.
(16:30):
It's demonstrating, hey, this is whatyou've done, what has worked well for you?
But don't forget about those reallyimportant foundational pieces
your offer that really is goingto set that foundation for you.
And I think it highlights the importanceof both having a multichannel approach
and your flexibility to pivot.
If TikTok isn't working at thistime, you have to pivot to something
else, test something, see what works.
(16:51):
But your ability to adapt to thesituation that's gonna allow you to
grow further and not be affected bythe external influences that business
owners are kind of affected by.
A hundred percent.
And not every marketing strategy worksfor every person or every business.
I could go and buy pay-per-click ads.
We run pay-per-click adsfor clients all the time.
You'd be like, why aren'tyou doing pay per click?
(17:12):
Because it's $8 a click for marketers.
Are you kidding me?
It's lose lose situation there.
I'm not paying $8 a click.
When I can send a thousandemails a month for 500 bucks
and get way more results out of those,then I would be doing pay per click.
And I did pay per click for the agencyfor a while and it wasn't profitable.
I'm not going down that road.
(17:32):
That said, if you have a local brickand mortar business, if you're a wedding
DJ and you only serve a particularmarket, buy some pay per click.
It's a gold mine.
It's fantastic.
But AI is starting to take awaya lot of that search volume.
It's not gonna be there forever.
You have to keep trying new stuff andjust take the logical step back and
be like, everybody's talking abouthow webinars are great and webinars,
(17:55):
that's where you sell everything.
Does it make sense for a wedding DJ todo a webinar on your perfect playlist?
Probably not.
No, I totally agree.
You have to find the right industry.
It's your offer, youraudience, your messaging.
All of that really plays into it.
It can be the great thing for youbut that doesn't mean it can be copy
pasted into other businesses as well.
(18:16):
Drew, we appreciate you coming on.
I wanted to ask one quick questionunder 60 seconds if you can.
What are you lookingforward to most in 2025?
Launching anything new, doing just thesame amazing stuff you've been doing?
We have a couple of new offers thatI'm working on right now that I don't
want to talk about yet because they'renot quite out of the incubator.
(18:36):
But those are really exciting for me.
And one is a kind of a brandrealignment for us internally.
Another is a strategy that partnershipmodel with some of our clients who
struggle with sales and there'sjust some other opportunities
that have popped up randomly withopportunities come from weird places.
(18:57):
And we've gotten a couple in thelast few weeks that isn't what we
do but we could definitely do this.
We didn't set out to make soupbut we'll eat the soup like no
problem.
I love that.
And no worries at all.
Keeping your cards close to yourchest right now 'cause it's still
something you have to work up.
And that execution piece that you wannamake sure you perfect before you launch.
I totally respect that.
(19:18):
Drew, thank you for coming on,sharing your tips and tricks.
For those of you who areinterested, make sure you reach
out, connect with Drew here.
Appreciate you coming on and sharingyour journey and wisdom with us.
No problem, man.
This was a great conversation.
Thank you so much.
Appreciate it.
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