Ep 257 - From Guitar Strings to Marketing Kings: Alex Hobcraft on Building Businesses - DiscoPosse Podcast

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
My name is Alex Hopkrap, and I am the founder of AWH Marketing,
and you're listening to the Disco Posse Podcast.
Music.

(00:22):
You're listening to the Disco Posse Podcast.
So this is a funny irony that you and I did the first Disco Posse podcast.
2009 or 2000? Yeah, so they're a few years apart.

(00:43):
And it was like, I really think it was before its time in what we were doing.
The irony was that today I do what we wanted to do, not quite in the length of form.
But the idea of like casual conversational
i think the first we recorded one it's still
out there in the world somewhere and it's like if you look up disco posse

(01:06):
podcast there's two and i have this old one sitting
there and it was probably two and a half hours that
we just kind of like it was long we went deep into music
like deep deep yeah yeah which
of course the guitars in the background for folks that are watching instead of
listening it'll be rather obvious why we dove into guitars yeah
but before we jump into the fact that i see my

(01:26):
friend and it's been a long time and we've had a lot of exciting stuff
happen yeah if you want to introduce yourself to all the folks that would be
new to you yeah so i started a business in 2009 it was a music school it was
very subtle humble music school we started with 13 students because i'd lost
my job at the the end of the economic crash of 2008.

(01:50):
So I had 13 students and over the next three or four years, I think I, we grew to around 200 and.
You know, I learned all my marketing through doing stuff.
And like I wrote the other day on LinkedIn, you made my first website, which was amazing.
It was a slider website, which was now commonplace. But now it's back then it was hard to do a slider.

(02:15):
So it was good. It was a wicked website.
And I just started a marketing journey back then. And then around 2016 or 17,
we did another podcast about my journey moving to Hamilton.
We were from Toronto, but you lost the audio on it or something.

(02:37):
Yeah, we had a recording flub. We like we had it was like we had bandwidth problems
and then it stopped recording at one point.
And I was like, oh, it was like it was telling us, just wait, your time will come.
And that's the thing, like a lot of people don't realize like what's now commonplace
was really hard to do even that long ago,

(02:59):
like how much things have changed and how much it's changed marketing and how
you can look at things and, and like doing the podcast with a microphone and
no video to now just logging in. Yeah, that's right.
Like remarkable. So, yeah, so I grew that. And then we opened a school in Hamilton.
So we had the two locations going.

(03:21):
Timing was terrible because it was 2019.
We were on par to grow like we did in Toronto. And then 2020 happened.
And I don't want to talk about anything else because. Yes.
The years that don't exist. They're like Voldemort.
So, yeah. Yeah. And then during COVID, though, I worked with Digital Main Street,

(03:45):
which is a non-profit, Ontario non-profit, which would, they would go out to Toronto.
I worked in the Toronto location, but they're all over Ontario.
And I went and helped small businesses with their digital marketing.
So a lot of small businesses out there still have a really hard time with it.
I think they find it challenging.
There's a lot of information to know. And for me, it's always been interesting.

(04:10):
It's I've fallen asleep to YouTube shows and audio books and reading books.
And so I helped out hundreds of businesses and, say, half a dozen different industries.
And then I worked for OBIA, which is the Ontario Business Improvement Area.

(04:30):
I switched over part-time because running the school, running your own business,
and then working full-time was getting challenging.
And the 16, 17-hour days were starting to take a bit of a toll.
So I had to totally slow down.
And then I worked for OBIA. But now all of that's gone, unfortunately,
because the Ontario government has ceased funding to help small businesses.

(04:54):
And it was crushing, like the amount of feedback that I got from all the businesses
that I helped. They're like, what? It's just stopping?
Because we helped a lot, a lot of businesses.
So I decided to go out on my own. And that's where we are kind of today.
And so using LinkedIn and trying to help businesses in Hamilton,
I think my expertise works a little bit better for brick and mortar type businesses.

(05:18):
But, you know, I've helped lots of different industries.
So yeah, that's pretty much where we are now.

(05:52):
But ultimately the goal is proximity audience. audience. So how did you find
the tools that you were using or the tools that are out there in the information
that's out there in how it doesn't work for a true,
you know, SMB local marketing,
even though the content is the same,
the tools are the same, but the practices and the targeting methods are fundamentally different.

(06:20):
So, I mean, it depends on your industry. And this is something that I had a
real problem with is that a lot of marketing is just, you know,
bent out there. It's a one size fit fit all.
And I noticed that in Toronto and Hamilton, you think that they would be the
same type of customer and they're not.
So that's one thing that's a lot different. In Hamilton, there are huge amounts

(06:44):
of suburbs where people will travel to your location.
In toronto not so much because it's
so congested now if you're in a big massive city
i used to have people who would call me from the
annex we were at young and egmonton now as the
crow flies yeah it would probably be a 15 minute drive but
as the toronto winters and construction and

(07:06):
just how poorly i think traffic is
is handled in there you're looking at a
45 minute and then you add snow you add anything else
and I have parents just missing lessons and
so I never wanted to advertise to
the people who were there I wanted to advertise people
who were core five block radius of where our studio was and that's hyperlocal

(07:31):
and the thing is is that back then nothing did that Google Ads you couldn't
now you can do it by postal code but back there you had to think of of other
ways because no one would allow me to, and everyone,
I would get advice from marketers. It's like just advertise to everyone in Toronto.
And I'm like, no, you're not listening. Like I have a very specific business.

(07:53):
I just said this to someone the other day. If I tell someone to come to my studio
and they have a hard time getting there,
you have this weird gray area where it's not that they don't like you,
and it's not that they don't want to be with you. It's just not working with their situation.
And so it's still a negative kind of thought of your studio.

(08:17):
And I had one woman, she called me and I found out where she was living.
I'm like, you're too far away.
And I said, this is a good studio for you. And funnily enough,
she then referred someone who did live close to me.
So sometimes giving the best advice to who your customer is,
is the best way to do things.
And instead of trying to get everyone to come in, I always thought of the long

(08:40):
game And I think it really helped because our retention was 70% for the music
studios. A lot of music studio owners don't believe that I have that kind of retention.
And they stay for like two years.
That's my life cycle, my client. And that's because I just thought locally.

(09:00):
Like I advertised in the local schools.
I didn't do any print advertising because that takes a lot of commitment.
Although I did try it in Hamilton and it failed. it was not
successful so i would just
do i would get in front of where my client
was and my client was a mom who
works and has is married and earns

(09:22):
a certain amount of income in toronto it was family income was like 1.8 million
they lived in a home they spent their summers at the cottage like i knew everything
about my customer because i a my kids were going to school and b i just looked
at everything from their perspective.
So that was a long-winded answer to your question of how to go hyper-local.

(09:45):
I find sometimes you've got to do what works for your industry and not listen to the experts.
You know many of who give you misinformation in
my opinion and also there's there's a neat thing that
you discovered that i would
happen upon later on in in the industry

(10:08):
too which is the difference between the consumer of the service and the buyer
of the service so on the marketing side we uh we talk about you know in in the
nerd world of where i live in market it is the the champion So we call them
the technical champion and so we call them the TDM,
the technical decision maker and then the BDM or the business decision maker,

(10:32):
which is, we also call them the EB, the economic buyer.
So I'm selling to the SVP of a platform division, but the person who has to
care a lot about our product because they use it day to day is way further down the org chart.
So looking at how you market this whole thing, your students are children,

(10:54):
but your economic buyer is very different in what they are, how they're marketed to.
So how did you, what did you put in place in, you know, sort of learning that
process and, and how did you find things both, you know, hard and, and hard way and, and,
you know, by reference or reference from other folks of like,

(11:17):
this is how, you know, marketing is not quite what you think it is.
It doesn't just mean like telling this kid, tell your mom that you got to come back next Thursday.
Yeah, that is a great question, because that was something that was a bit of
a struggle at first. And if you remember, a lot of websites were.
I looked at all the competition and they would have things like backwards letters to make it like kids.

(11:40):
And they were, it was like, they were focusing their things to kids.
And we took a different approach. We're like, no, these are adults,
well-educated university graduate adults who are smart.
Let's not treat them like idiots. And, and let's not treat them like we're baby coddling.
There's a professionalism that's here, right? Now we didn't go as hardcore as

(12:03):
maybe the rural conservatory, which is, you know,
a different kind of market of what i wanted we didn't
we didn't want the rural conservatory student per se we
wanted someone who would love music for the rest of their life and it would
be a part of their life whether they went to their grade eight rcm or whether
they just wanted to jam with friends that was our focus but our messaging was

(12:25):
to the parents it's like what were you going to get well you're going to get
kids who are confident you're going to get kids
who are going to excel a little bit better in school.
I played that angle for a little bit, but I always spoke to the parents.
But really, it was just how I always worked on just any friction to get started.
And that was the one angle that I took for a long time because I didn't want

(12:52):
people to waste their time and wonder if it was the right choice.
And that's what a lot of consumers do now, right? They look at a number of websites
and they choose which one is going to be best.
And many times you can come up and all the websites look exactly the same and
you don't really know what to do.
So that was with that.
And then that in conjunction with we would donate a lot to schools.

(13:16):
That was another track. And a lot of music schools in the neighborhood or solo
teachers, they would give a lesson or four lessons.
And I noticed that we would just get put into a basket with other activities in the area.
So one year I was like, I'm going to give 20 lessons.
And it really worked because they were like, wow, 20 lessons.

(13:39):
That's so generous. It was like a $600 value.
Now, it doesn't cost me $600. I just paid a teacher, right? Right. So my cost is way lower.
But the gift, if you will, or the gesture was so welcomed by the parents of
the – because it's the Parents Association that's doing all of the fundraising.

(14:00):
So I'm speaking directly to them. and nine
times out of ten what would happen is the person would take their lessons then
they would continue so i'd make make back the
cost of the of the donation and then they would bring siblings and then they'd
recommend people and it was like and then i would be called in september it's

(14:21):
like hey can you do your donation again we really like having you here so i
use those two avenues to, to grow mostly.
So still kind of hyper-local because I would reach out to the schools and not
every school was cooperative.
You know, there was one school that was like, I'll just send your stuff out
in a, in a email newsletter.
We used to give postcards that would go home with the kids, simple,

(14:45):
simple way of doing that.
So those are the, so those are the things I w I really did focus on. What is, who is my buyer?
You know, I did the whole, I did the The whole like persona thing.
It's funny because this is how nerdy I get because I love this stuff.
I looked at all of our, I think this was probably about year five that we were,

(15:09):
and I looked at everyone who had taken lessons with us.
And I was like, what's the top male name and the top female name?
And Ben was the number one male name.
That's the name of your son. And Sophie, or a variation. Sophia was the girl's name.
So that I used as my avatar for parents.

(15:32):
Ben has X amount of kids and he's like this and Sophie's has this.
And I really used it to strategize as much as I can, as much as I could.
But then a lot of people don't remember or forget that your service has to be amazing.
Right. Somewhere along the way, you got to actually deliver.
There's an execution angle that we forget about.

(15:55):
Exactly. And that itself is marketing. And you should be looking at your service
or product. I just do services, so I don't know products, but you should be
looking at that, that that experience is positive.
And, and I would interview parents and a lot of feedback was just like,
I would give, you know, say $50 off just to, and one parent was like, $50 isn't, isn't a lot.

(16:20):
We're not, we're not here because of the money. We're here because you make
this as easy and as fun as possible.
So my marketing is also who I hired. You know, we hired a specific type of teacher
that had a specific type of personality that would, we found PhD students did not fit our profile.

(16:40):
They were mostly a little bit stuffier. No offense to any PhD students out there.
But our experience was that they were very, very dantic and very,
you know, old school in the way that they taught.
Taught and and we we so
we hired people who were laid back and fun but still wanted results there's

(17:02):
there's a there's a babysitting element that we didn't want which can happen
so yeah we you know we had a pretty great success rate and we used to do things
like bring our kids to the interview and if.
Interviewee didn't look at our child we wouldn't hire them because if
you're not going to engage with a kid and you're

(17:22):
teaching kids yeah if you're like what's that thing over there like that's it's
called a student yeah oh i remember one i remember one interviewee she like
literally pulled back and like made a hideous face when we brought our son there
and we're just like okay hey,
you're not for us. So that is wild.

(17:45):
So a thing that jumped out, it was funny that even in your distribution,
I guess, and the way that you're going to market, you highlighted a third piece of the puzzle.
So you've obviously got direct marketing where you're targeting, you've got inbound.
So you've got outbound, which is you reaching out. You've got inbound,

(18:06):
which is you built the website, you're pulling people in so they can find you.
And used all the, SEO wasn't even a thing back then.
So, you know, SEO was just, we did SEO by accident because we were writing and
it just so happened that it worked out.
Exactly. But the school is what we would call channel or like partner angle.
So that effectively you're using a third party provider who offers a service

(18:31):
to the same cohort that you're trying to reach,
but by engaging with them and then pairing with them, They get the advantage
of the value of your service and the happiness of their cohort,
you know, representation of a client.
And then you also get.
An advancement in your network size because you can

(18:51):
meet one principal one music teacher and
all of a sudden you have 120 new prospects that
year and it's such a an untapped piece of the market that people don't understand
even in hyper local even over the things like so i i say this like i've got
a coffee company which you know i only quiesced because i just ran out of cycles

(19:12):
to maintain it even though it was low lift it was more than zero and so i had
to put it aside but But what I did was I just,
I had it for fun, but just, I'm like, let me just see if this works.
And then what happened by accident was I accidentally discovered a market where
that I was sponsoring podcasts.
And then those podcasts, the people that listen to podcasts are likely to be coffee drinkers.

(19:33):
Like there happened to be a cohort representation that there was this persona, right?
And this is lipalikes. works.
Like, so there, if I look back on all the stuff that you and I have done by
accident over the years, I'll say it's by accident with purpose.
Like we were experimenting, but not realizing because there was no reference
guide. There was no like, how do you do this?

(19:54):
We're like, literally we hand painted the logo in the thing,
you know, in the lobby, right?
There's stuff like that where it's like little things that no one will notice,
but it makes all the difference in the world.
And that's the thing with most of the marketing and most of the stuff is people
don't realize that the thing that gets remembered is wrapped in 98% of the work

(20:17):
that no one will know or understand. Totally.
Yeah it's not it's not a it's not observed it's just
of course that's there right they're they're not they're not looking for things
but when things are not there they they're so glaring yeah you know if you have
if you have a staff member who is always late that's glaring when they're on time.

(20:43):
It's just that's what it's supposed to be and you're right i just it's funny
you say that because I was just talking about that to someone the other day.
And the partnerships were good and they were hard.
Like sometimes you'd get a principal who didn't care and didn't want to do anything
with you or give more than you wanted to, but I still wanted to be a part of the community.

(21:06):
It was about being – it's more than just I wanted sales. I wanted to be part of the community.
Music was important to me. As you know, you and I have played music for many,
many years, and it came at a time, like music at a time in my life that I was so anxious and so low,

(21:27):
and it was the only thing that saved me,
and that's what I wanted to give people.
That was the driving force of why I chose that particular business.
I've gone off on a little tangent here, but- No, no, but this is the funny thing
is that, again, why I raised this is that SEO became SEO, but it used to be called blog writing.

(21:54):
And good web copy marketing and hyper-local marketing is now just,
it's no one thinks about it. You just say the term and it makes sense.
Cloud computing, you know, every, all of this stuff, which is no longer new.
It's just like, oh, it's just almost expected behavior.
But when these things were first developed, like this is the idea that understanding

(22:16):
how to market to parents, not to kids, understanding the difference between those personas,
naming the personas again this it seems like
a small thing but every marketing team i work with
now they already already have it or i help them to do it and
we have like network nancy and cio kathy
and we give them names and we give them like what are
they likely to do what do they enjoy what are their hobbies like

(22:39):
we we want to understand the person and the
reason is because we don't just want a sale
as you said we want to be an involved
active participant in their
success and their outcomes right which is
you know i i sort of joked about
this idea of everybody wants to be the trusted advisor no

(23:02):
one trusts somebody who says they're a trusted advisor it's like if someone
says i have a lot of empathy no no you see that the problem is that i'm the
one that tells you that you can't tell me that you're you're empathetic in fact
it's actually reversing it's
actually the opposite you're you're only self-aggrandizing by saying it.

(23:22):
It's kind of bizarre so the stuff that again is like you didn't realize that
what you were doing was actually profound fundamentals of a successful practice
that now that you can go back and look over where the wins were and stuff like
how it weighs against costs.
And the partner marketing thing is a real challenge. I help a ton of our clients do this.

(23:46):
I tell them like, you can find 20 new partners and they'll be your services
partners. They'll take the meeting. They'll take the donuts. They'll be happy.
They'll do the big thing. You'll do the press release. You'll do a blog.
You'll do all this stuff.
And then nothing, nothing will ever happen because the moment you walk out of
that situation, you're not their full-time job.
Their full-time job is their clients and their experience and tons of other things.

(24:09):
So it's really hard to become important to them so that they can believe that
you're are important for their clients.
And that's why going to market as inbound, outbound, and channel are three completely different cadences.
They behaved completely differently.
They require different personalities for people that manage the account experience.

(24:33):
It's like hard lessons. I'm glad we learned it, but I didn't realize at the
time what we were doing and that it would, 20 years later, I'd be going like,
oh yeah, no, this totally makes sense.
Like I could go back to literally the days of helping you doing stuff and learning
from you and how you were being successful with the school and taking that to

(24:56):
like, I was working in, you know, in tech and I was helping financial advisors.
I'm like, you should do, you should try this.
And just testing that stuff out and constantly testing and not realizing that
this passion for what we were doing.
Would become like why I care so hard about doing it now and why I can do it
for 16 hours a day sometimes and, and not completely dread going back in the next day to do it.

(25:20):
Yeah. I mean, in the last time we spoke, I did go through a really hard time.
I went through like crazy burnout about year eight of our business to the point
that if I heard, let it go one more time I was going to kill someone.
I was constantly playing. I had to be in the car with no music at all.

(25:40):
And I really resented music because sometimes you can allow things to go against
your values of what it is.
And I think that part of the success was
I was there as a helper and I was there to serve and like there were there were

(26:02):
competitors who who chose to take a different tack and and there's this temptation
to copy them because they were being successful and you're just like oh that's successful but.
I didn't want to be about making someone a star.
I wanted to make someone just a musician to play. And it was different types of marketing.

(26:25):
So I would get a little drowned in the marketing.
This is probably in the mid-2010s, like 2015, 2016.
It started to become harder because so
much of marketing that we had done was becoming expected
but also it kind of started
to become almost spammy in in like

(26:48):
people would regurgitate the same thing but i don't think they actually
lived it and that was something like we lived
through a lot of changes like seo is
seo perplexes me right now because to
me it should just be you should just give the best service to whoever and in
my last presentation that i just I talk about SEO and how technical it is and

(27:12):
how I understand how the small business owner can just feel overwhelmed with
that stuff because you have to have your metal-tied tags,
you have to have your proper keyword research done, and how do you write that
so it doesn't sound robotic, and then you have AI coming.
I mean, like you have all these things. I can see how people are overwhelmed.

(27:33):
And I remember feeling completely overwhelmed and then just trying to refocus
and like, okay, what are my values?
What is it that I'm, why am I doing this? And what is it? And so that's where,
yeah, again, I love going on tangents. There's another tangent for you.
Well, I think it's, but I think it really does tell the story of how do you make creativity.

(27:58):
Of business yeah and not lose the creativity but while mapping it against business practice,
it's it's it's really tough like i i literally write every day every day i write
i yeah and like i we pulled off we acquired a a new client sort of out of the

(28:19):
blue and they're like hey,
super cool love what you're doing i need help with an ebook i'm like awesome
big fan of ebooks so we can pull this off?
Like, no problem. You know, how long does it usually take? I'm like, well, it depends.
Generally anywhere from eight to 12 weeks, depending on how far along you are,
what the design side is, whatever. And they're like, oh, okay,
we need it in four weeks. I'm like, awesome.
Yeah, let's talk about what the content is.

(28:42):
It was in my wheelhouse. It was right in my backyard. I'm like,
I could literally write this.
I could start right now in the meeting and I could probably be done the first
five pages by the time we're finished.
So I knew I could nail it and I could get that experience thing.
But it's so funny that I could never market that thing.
But once I reached engagement with them and I understand what the problem was.

(29:02):
And then we had this real internal challenge of like, okay, now as a business, if I deliver this.
It's risky because what I've done is I've told them it takes 12 weeks to do
something and I'm going to pull it off in four.
I actually did it in three because it took us a week to go through negotiations for PO process.

(29:22):
Also something they don't tell you about when you're like, hey,
you know, I want to just do this really fun, creative thing.
And everybody's like, oh, this is awesome. I can't wait to do it.
And then the lawyers and the accountants get involved and then it's a whole scene.
So i had this combinatorial problem of like do i applaud the fact that we delivered this unreal.

(29:43):
Delivery and then have to like pull them back from the ledge going that was that was abnormal,
but i thought like how do i do it while also celebrating that we were so bloody
excited that we could do this and they were so supportive of us in the process
that they trusted us to move fast
and to cut down the review cycles and they jumped
through hoops and it was a neat sort of

(30:05):
dodge thrust parry you know sort of back
and forth that we had of like okay i'm done our part but i need this back in
48 hours 24 hours they'd be like okay we're done and like awesome we were all
just like working so hard towards this goal but then when it came back to we
were complete they said said, okay, well, given that you're way ahead of schedule,

(30:26):
let's really plan out the next piece.
And so they kind of slowed back to the traditional schedule.
And, but at the same time, it was like, we could exercise that creative muscle,
understand the business outcome that we were generating, and then really show
how much we could interact with them as a true, like involved,

(30:47):
active, like we want to act as your employee.
I should care as much about the outcome and that's part of the problem with
agency is that in general, you don't have skin in the game.
The only skin in the game you have is your invoice. Yeah.
So if it goes badly, you just don't get the next invoice.
Boo-hoo. But the person that you had a negative experience with,

(31:12):
that could be their prospects and their clients that had a problem.
And now they're going to suffer much larger than you will because you get to
just sort of say, hey, not my circus, not my monkeys.
Yeah. No. No, I mean, and you probably learned a better way to do what you do
by having that crunch time in short amount of thing.

(31:36):
It probably changed. Oh, hey, this is how we should do.
Maybe we should systematize this in a better way, in a more efficient way.
And sometimes those challenges are what's amazing, even though going through
it can be painful, but really you need to go through a little bit of pain to grow.
And and so yeah
that's interesting that that you were able to achieve that

(32:00):
in such a short amount of time because that's one of the things with creativity
is you find it hard to what's possible like what can we do and a lot of people
look at industry standards of what you're doing and everyone's doing it the
same way but i got this from my dad he he always looked at things from
you know you know a critical angle

(32:22):
like how can why is this like this and i've
always questioned and i've always wanted to take shortcuts but not shortcuts
to avoid work shortcuts to make the work better for me and like you learned
in that in in delivering for that client you can figure out some shortcuts and
i always wanted to to do that because when you're You're one person, right?

(32:44):
Because I ran it. Well, Rachel and I ran the business, but I did all of the marketing stuff.
And you're one person, right? Just straight out of the gate.
You can only go so far with being a one person. And that's...
You know, it just comes back to, as you said, caring for your customer.

(33:06):
I just also have a really weird memory, which really helped for me.
And this is something that a lot of people don't realize as well.
Sometimes people have a superpower that nobody else has.
I had a great memory. I could remember, this is when we had probably 130 students, 140 students.
I could remember everyone's schedule. schedule i could

(33:28):
remember when you know when ben could
not and i could remember what days
worked for them so when they emailed me
and said what works i'd be like on the top of my head oh
this would work or if i saw them in person or i used
to joke that the playground was my office because i would literally have parents
come up handing me money to pay for lessons or how many to cancel a lesson it's

(33:52):
like oh i needed to talk to you about the recital so i used to joke about that
but i I could have my whole business in my head until we got to about 200 students.
And then I started to lose that skill.
And that's one thing that I just wish I could bottle and package and sell.

(34:13):
Well, and so that's the next issue is scaling.
Yeah. And part of why, when you talked about before, I like to be lazy in the best way.
Lazy in that i want to eliminate unnecessary steps yeah
but not to eliminate quality right i want to
be able to get to the creative stuff and you know

(34:33):
like i said just it would be like saying that every time
you want to play guitar you have to restring your guitar and do a neck setup
right no one would do it right so how do we optimize when that stuff occurs
even just tuning some people it's like it's three minutes that they don't want
to spend being especially early on and.

(34:55):
When you're going through new experiences, especially in those cases where you've
got new people, and this is the same as you going to a new client who has no
clients, and you're getting them to ground zero. Like, you're just getting them to open the doors.
So they have no prior experience. They have no prior expectations other than, I need to make this work.

(35:15):
Yeah. And so for you to come in creatively, give them ideas,
execute those ideas, but then measure the results differently than they do.
So they obviously have a direct measurement, but you have to like narrow what
are the actual KPIs that matter.

(35:35):
And this is why, you know, all the time when people say like,
what kind of stats do you get on your podcast?
And like, I, I can tell you that I had 50,000 downloads last month. Yeah.
And they like, so what does that translate into conversions?
I said, approximately zero, somewhere between zero and 50,000,
but it's probably closer to zero.

(35:56):
And like, there's no way to actually track that.
So the vanity metric could be really easy. I tell people like I had a million
downloads and 55,000 downloads last month.
It's hilarious because it doesn't matter. Like it doesn't change.
What did affect it though is I just talked to somebody a few hours ago and he said.

(36:19):
He says he was going for an investment round for his company and they said,
hey, we heard you on the podcast and we were very interested in how you described this thing.
So not only did they, so it was like they listened and they actually listened hard.
They cared about that. So the irony was that I was just doing what we do,

(36:39):
which is like finding interesting things about a person for myself that I happen
to have a cohort representation of an audience experience that has now enjoyed it.
But then to get that anecdotal information, like no stat, no pod bean stats
will tell me that that actually worked.

(37:00):
But when you hear those, it's like, oh, okay, this is actually inspiring.
And it does tell me, okay, this is maybe a thread I should pull for future. Yeah.
Yeah. No, I mean, wow, you talked on so many things that I could- Yeah.
Sorry, I went in a lot of directions on that one. The first thing is, is the music.
Okay. So, I mean, I've always played music for myself.

(37:22):
And as you know, I'm pretty technical on the instrument because I needed to solve the instrument.
When you look at music and you learn music, though, you can learn the notes.
And there's lots of people who can learn the notes and make music.
Okay. But then there are people who understand the notes, and it's not that
their music's better, it's just that their music has a strategy.

(37:46):
The notes are the tactics and the scales and the chords and all of that stuff,
and the breaking of the rules.
Becomes part of your strategy. And that has always been how I've looked at business.
And it's amazing how many businesses don't have strategy.
They just have a series of tactics. And you talked about vanity metrics.

(38:11):
I've always said, and this was before the 1,000 true fans by the guy whose name escapes me.
But it's like, I would rather have 200 devoted parents who are constantly talking about me.
Than 10,000 people who don't even come and use my service.

(38:32):
Like, I remember when we opened our Facebook and a guy from India gave us three out of five stars.
And I'm like, thank you very much for the review.
One day, we would love to give you a lesson. Yeah, exactly.
And I mean, Facebook took it off because I complained about it.
But it's like anyone can like something.

(38:54):
Thing and they're just looking for they're looking
for just their like but back to
your story is like you can't you can't gauge
sometimes i mean i i
know that everyone calls it branding but it's
it's it's just your personality on your
thing and you're and and not everything

(39:16):
has to get an roi and i used to chase the roi
all the time that was just always trying to
chase the but sometimes there's goodwill
and i find that that doesn't get talked about
a lot in business just doing goodwill and
just doing and those are the businesses that i truly want
to work with yeah people who want to want to

(39:38):
help instead of just take so well
and what ends up happening is when you combine those
things which again is like it's execution it's like i can sell it's it's it's
easy to get people to try it but it's not easy to get them to keep trying and
to keep riding through that stuff and especially in a creative element where

(40:01):
you and i work is that it's very.
Nuanced you could have you know i i've had it so many times where i feel like
i was on a call we had two co-founders and then two you know founding engineers
and four stories about what the company and he does, came out of that call.
And so what I do is I take them and I aggregate the results and create a sort of combined voice.

(40:24):
But even when, so when I go to them as a group and say, hey, here's a video that I did.
Three will be like awesome one's gonna be like nope
you know and one will be like meh
it they'll it it's but maybe they
don't care maybe they don't watch videos i do video training i hate
video training i've never watched video training in my life it's brutal

(40:47):
because i just like to find out exactly what i need
right now and i'm out and video is
not easy to do that kind of searching with and
so ironic that i did long form and i
never consume it if i have to watch something i
i'm double speed yeah video because i
gotta get through it so yeah sorry to interrupt but yeah no that's that's what's

(41:09):
painful when you when you go to listen to somebody like i listened to like a
sam harris podcast on on a regular speed and it sounded like he like i was ill i was like Like,
I kept checking and like, did I go like minus one?
Like, how is this guy talking so slow?
You bring up a very interesting point because I find, just from my observation,

(41:34):
I find people do writing on their website incorrectly.
I'm not a proponent of doing things in paragraphs.
And I think that you should be writing more like highlighting important things.
Because I've recorded people in Hotjar who go to my website.

(41:55):
Nobody's reading everything.
Right, yeah. They're scrolling up and down. They're going back and forth.
And I've watched them for 20 minutes, watching what's happening.
And nobody will go like this through your website.
Yeah, incrementally cranking through an article. Nobody does that.
And I think that that needs to change into highlight unless you're doing like

(42:18):
a specific SEO keyword piece that's just, you know, trying to rank,
which I don't think is a good, you know, white hat thing.
But I know that you have to kind of do that in this day and age for SEO.
But it's just interesting how I think that how you present your things and giving

(42:39):
your information in the best possible way so that it's guiding your customer.
I think a lot of people just want sale, sale, sale, sale. But it's just like,
no, you invest time into your customer.
And sometimes, I know people don't agree with this, but sometimes your perfect
customer is a reflection of who you are.

(42:59):
And so if you are an impatient person and you know that you have people who
have a lot of responsibilities, we move really fast.
Well, why not try to deliver the information to them in that way?
And that reminds me of how I used to do pricing. I broke, really,
no one did pricing the way that I did.

(43:20):
Most people in kids' activities, they do things by season.
So there'll be a fall, a winter, and a spring season and a summer season.
And I was like, that's stupid.
Because you give the opportunity for someone to stop.
I used to do six-month terms because a school year is 40 weeks.

(43:41):
So I would go September to January, which seems weird, but it covered my costs over December.
Whereas other people were struggling because people, they would stop their lessons
in December. They would lose that client for January.
Right. Because they're going to go away for holidays. They go skiing and it's
like, oh shoot, we forgot. We didn't sign up for lessons.

(44:02):
Oh, well, we'll do it in the summer. Yeah. So I would give people the option.
I would give people the option to go monthly or they could pay for a term at
a little discounted rate like anything else.
You buy anything in volume, you get a little bit of discounted rate.
And it really, really worked. And then for some reason, I started listening
to a lot of other music school owners who were like, die hard,

(44:23):
you should do things monthly.
And I switched it over and I regret it to this day because it made sense.
I had 80% of my clients paying me upfront, which was amazing because I had a
bigger chunk of money upfront, which allowed me to do better marketing because
I actually had capital to now work through.

(44:43):
And cover spots. And it gave clients something that they wanted to do.
So sometimes like something as simple as just your pricing and changing how
people look at it can make your business better.
And I never had a low plug period until the summertime when everyone would go away.
And so those are definitely ways that you can serve your customer in a very,

(45:10):
again, Again, it's not going to be something that you could truly track,
but you could start to see some, you know, a pickup in engagement if you're
trying to deliver your content in the way that your audience wants to digest it.
And I think that probably the way I would describe it is looking for patterns

(45:31):
of signals rather than signals.
And it's very easy to just latch onto the signal and then say like,
hey, and I get called out.
But classic thing, we're in a sales meeting earlier, like just reviewing active
clients and what's in the pipeline, which I even feel dirty saying that stuff
because I used to always just dread saying these things.
I'm like, you know, they're not called prospects. They're called humans.

(45:53):
They're called potential clients. So don't say the word prospect.
I had a guy come to, you actually walked out to a booth.
It's like a bunch of nerds. And like, we're card carrying nerds.
We are introverts by nature.
We only come out when it's dark or when there's free food.
And so here is this guy and he's like
and he says yeah i was just talking to another prospect earlier who had
the same problem you have and i was like dude you just like that guy he glazed

(46:16):
over the moment he heard the word prospect and
i was like and i told the this fellow who was there as on the sales rep side
and i said just a tip what i find is don't say prospect because immediately
you labeled them and then they feel a transactional i said but say we were talking
to somebody else from our customer community or are from the tech community or from the community.

(46:40):
And immediately it's just like, ah, okay, there's someone who's similar to me.
And that's, then they feel familiar, not put in a box and labeled.
And it was really tricky to kind of do that stuff. But anyway,
so here I am like going through this thing, talking about this potential client that's coming.
And my signals were like, yep, all good, all good.

(47:02):
And then I get an email literally right before the meeting saying,
we actually don't have any short-term need for what you're doing,
but hey, let's keep in touch throughout the year, which is fine.
But then it told me i'm like oh how could i have had this in like high likely conversion,
and it went to this so then i realized oh i was looking at signals not patterns

(47:26):
of signals when i look at the pattern it was like the conversations were getting
were breaking further apart there was more meetings being skipped and it was
like oh okay even though Oh, I was like, totally interested.
Can't make today's meeting, but let's hop on next week. I should have heard.
All I hear as the hopeful salesperson is totally interested.

(47:49):
Didn't hear the, hey, but let's deprioritize because my time is worth more elsewhere than with you.
That's effectively what was being said in the kindest way. Right, right.
Which is like, oh, okay, hard lesson.
Yeah, definitely a hard lesson. There is, and you said the word earlier,
there is a cadence to business.

(48:09):
And I think that is crucial to understand.
My flow of business cycle is the school year.
And to think anything else is, in my opinion, just silly.
You need to look at the fact that you need to get all of your messaging working

(48:29):
as if parents are looking at
a calendar of the school year because that's what they're doing at home.
We mostly called our clients families. That gave them a more humanistic perspective.
It's like how Starbucks has partners, right? Instead of employees.
It's like, that's actually, it seems tiny, but it actually does matter.

(48:53):
It totally matters. And it changes how you're going to talk to someone.
People also want to do business with people, right? And a lot of people don't
realize that, especially with their website.
They make their website look corporate and the language is very corporate.
And I think that not a lot of people do kind of differentiate.

(49:14):
They do what everybody else is doing in a lot of different industries.
And your website should be what it's like to experience your service or what your product is about.
Granted, Amazon's a little bit different, but you feel Amazon culture when you work with Amazon.
And they do things in the best possible way. Love or hate Amazon,

(49:37):
they are a key study. Just looking at any interaction.
You have a problem. problem, you are treated kindly and with respect.
And and I always tried to do that.
I would go a little too far. Sometimes Rachel was like, you are going too far for this customer.
But I think that it is important to look at, we're all working together.

(50:02):
And I'm here to serve you. And that never bothered me.
And that's why I've never really liked calling myself like a CEO or anything.
I'm just a business owner who's trying to make me want to be a musician.
And I simplify as much as I can what it is.
You know, there's a recent, I just recently heard this, and I've done marketing forever,

(50:25):
which is the jobs to be done the job to be done kind of
philosophy and that's really
how you really want what is the job of music lessons
it's in to enhance people's lives it's to
fulfill aspirations it's to you
know make someone have more confidence it
allows you to be creative it it gives

(50:47):
you all of these things and and and
you need to look at that's the job that needs to to be done it's
to those those are the things and so that's the driving
force of of how i
did everything and i i never knew that it was actually a
thing it's been around for a long time mcdonald look
at the the classic book right dale carnegie how to win friends and influence

(51:09):
people what's the publishing date on like 1927 or something like it's this is
not this is like the same as the behavioral you know heuristics that we look
at around you know how to do marketing and engagement,
it's behavioral psychology fundamentals that we've now dubbed behavioral economics.
And we've learned about some of this stuff, but it's, these are things that

(51:33):
we've known about for centuries, if not at least decades.
And we've just simply honed it down where now we can sort of map it out.
Yeah. But I think that people do still miss the humanity of things.
I know a lot of businesses who won't have pictures of themselves on the internet,
but their story is important to be telling.

(51:53):
And someone wants to be like, oh, if you met someone at a party and like,
oh, I'd love to do business with them. I like who they are.
But if someone goes to a party and just says, I make all sorts of Italian food.
I make pasta. I make meatballs.
And they just go through everything. No one's going to want to work with them

(52:14):
because all they're talking about is, you know, it's our personalities that
need to come out in our copywriting and our photos.
And a lot of small businesses don't want to take that risk. They don't want to add to humanity.
I find that the behavioral economics makes it more clinical and it puts a divide
between your customer, which I think needs to be thrown out.

(52:39):
Yeah. And it's very true. And that's why I loved, if you read like Thinking
Fast and Slow, and I'd studied Kahneman and Tversky for a long time.
And it was interesting to see that some of the heuristics, my favorite of all
the heuristics is stuff that breaks the math, where you realize that there are

(52:59):
behaviors that will occur.
Her, the hard part that I always find is that I love this stuff so much.
And I'll tell, like I said, I left my partner.
I told her, I'm like, hey, when I first met her, we just hang out the first
time. And she's like, oh, what do you do? I'm like, well, I do this. I work in tech.
But the reason why I do it well is because I've studied behavior psychology.
So my background is understanding humanism and behavior and then engagement

(53:24):
and then mastering engagement and being able to read people particularly well.
And of course, the first thing that happens, she's like, are you like psychoanalyzing me now?
Like, well, I will be in a moment because you've kind of coaxed me into doing
it. But I'm like, no, that's not what that's like.
The person that says, yeah, I love Italian food. We make pasta,
we make meatballs. Like, it's really tough to sort of like dump out your talents. Yeah.

(53:48):
But not start with, hey, so what do you folks do, right?
What kind of food do you like? And they're like, oh, I like Italian. Awesome.
Where have you eaten? You're like, oh, you know? And then eventually they go,
huh. So, oh, curious why you're asking.
What's your background? Oh, I actually have an Italian restaurant.
And oh, okay. Yeah, what kind of food do you do?

(54:10):
Oh, we do pasta. We do meatballs. Okay, now there's a context to
you giving this tactical layout out of how you can
deliver an experience for them but just by coming
in going like we don't do it when we
meet somebody for the first time like hey really like you great kisser gonna
go out for dinner where you can go to movies love these kind of movies long
wish like it's like no no you don't just like trauma dump the things you can

(54:33):
do and have done with other people you'd be like what would you like to do what
makes you excited about going out like let's make a great fun night
together exactly okay how do we do that oh awesome
yeah like it's amazing how
many restaurants on their social field will not have a picture of their actual
dining room yeah that's the whole that's why i would want to go to a restaurant

(54:56):
i can i can just looking at food it's like yeah you have to be good at the food
i'm paying not for food i'm paying for the experience of being in your restaurant? What's that like?
And whether it's I'm in a hurry, right?
Like, nobody talks about the speed at which they move their food.
Some are slow on purpose, because it's a very elegant, long experience.

(55:20):
And that's what somebody wants.
Or maybe somebody just needs quick, healthy food. That's great.
We have a Thai place that we love here in Hamilton. We go there because it's
consistent and they're fun.
They make fun of, they make little jokes on their blackboard.
Like it's very personable experience, but they're there to serve you to get

(55:41):
in and out because they, you know, it's high turnover because that's their business.
And I find, you know, a lot of people don't want to talk about that type of
thing or think that that's important.
They, they don't think, they think that everybody just wants to see the food.
I think you need to break it up food and story.

(56:03):
It's like, here's a couple and this guy hosted her, right? That's an amazing story.
Why did they choose this restaurant, you know, or feeling honored that they
chose your restaurant because you're the, you're the business owner.
Yeah. And would you have a, would
this, would the photo to go with your story be a picture of a ring or.
Or a picture of food? Or would it be a picture of a guy on his knee beside a table?

(56:28):
Right. Like, the experience has to come through in the way you describe it,
both visually and textually.
Yeah. And that's why customer stories are so important, because not that you're
saying this customer says we're amazing.
What you're saying is this is the partnership we went into and generated an

(56:52):
outcome for our client who is so happy with it.
They're willing to share their story with our clients.
Yeah, exactly. Just that context change.
But I see this all the time. Sales folks will be like, hey, they'll see some
person at a company event or just a group event.
Tell them how we were the only way you could do something.

(57:14):
And it's like, you just immediately evacuated people's caring from that room.
Because now you are talking about yourself and your company and your product,
and you're asking someone else to support you.
It's like, this is why the trusted advisor thing is such a broken myth that
you can't have a trusted advisor if that person is paid by the person you're

(57:37):
supposed to be trusted by.
Yeah. No, exactly. I mean, I used to go to parties and people would say,
what do you do? And I would say, I make musicians.
And it was a great way to break break things because it wasn't it wasn't about
me. It was again, it was about the people I served.
Yeah. And always it always brought out a story from from the person,

(57:59):
which whether it was, oh, my God, I did piano lessons and I was terrible at
it or I did piano lessons and I got to grade eight and I should have gone further
and it would just be an icebreaker.
But it was a way to talk about myself without talking about myself.
It was conscious because I wanted those stories.
As you said, I'm an introvert, too. I don't really want to talk to myself.

(58:23):
I'd rather be with people who talk than do all the talking.
And it was a great way to kind of pitch it back in a non-unprofessional or salesy,
rather, kind of way, which I can be.
I can be very salesy as well. yeah but my

(58:43):
sales comes from again serving not from money yeah
it's connection it is really like how do you create a
connection create engagement talk about outcomes you know like just the fact
you say like i i create musicians my i my thing i i like when people ask me
like i'll try to figure out how to describe it i say i give emotion to technical
content and it's like it's such a weird thing because from there,

(59:09):
then people go like, huh, well, how do you do that? Okay.
Now I can expound upon it versus, oh, I do technical writing as an agency for various clients.
We white label our content, but we do it in a way that's high engagement.
We make pasta, we make meatballs, we make... No.

(59:30):
Don't go through the menu. Don't go through the ingredients list.
Just show them a picture of the bloody food and people enjoying it. Yeah.
That's it. Or the chef making. Right. And that's one thing.
It's just like, you know, I don't understand why I don't see a lot of restaurants
doing that. It's just like little tips.

(59:50):
Like you could just do a little thing of just like, you know,
I throw a little bit of salt on my cake because it pops the flavor.
Something that you do differently that you could share.
It's like, oh, that's different. Now you're talking about, what am I going to
experience from you cooking?
And it just, it changes the, like, the common way of looking at marketing in

(01:00:12):
general, which, in my opinion, is about serving and not about taking.
Taking and that's that's how i am i mean in order to know how to serve you have
to know who you're serving as as everyone says you have to know your client
and not everyone is going to be your client,
i'm not creating prodigies in my school it's just not something that i want

(01:00:35):
to do it's something that i find when prodigies get older they start to feel
a little empty from the ones that i've spoken to because they can just play
anything but they don't really.
Say let's just jam in a one four five chord progression they're like oh
how do you do that you know what i mean it's a different yeah that that i don't

(01:00:57):
for me just didn't want to create i wanted to create music for love of the instrument
i'm learning i say instrument because i'm at a piano right here so yeah well
and i guess that i'll say the message from there is,
it's not just about marketing it's about anti-marketing like you have to
identify and allow people to self-identify quickly when they get to your website,

(01:01:22):
to your story, to your party, to whatever, they should immediately be able to
qualify themselves in or qualify themselves out.
And you should make it as obvious as possible who you don't serve by describing
who you do serve and what outcomes they're after.
Because like you said, if you are going after this thing and then you,
you know, you describe your school or a business that you're You're helping.

(01:01:45):
And they say, this is great. Like, you know, my sister does creative stuff.
She makes these, these little stuffed animals.
She calls them critters. They're her critters. So she makes these critters and
she's like, well, how do I sell them?
I said, well, go to a coffee place that has a bunch of really cool,
like kitschy stuff from local artists.
And that is a likely cohort of the type of people who will love a handmade item,

(01:02:08):
but But you won't go to Zeller's, or the Bay, or any of these.
These are all dead companies. But, you know, some.
Jesus. Oh. Boy, oh, boy.
We've outlived a lot of brands, haven't we? In Canada. Yeah.

(01:02:29):
So, but she immediately. So, like, rather than you advertising to a bunch of
people that are not your target market, The same as hyperlocal marketing is
like, let's go to your core market,
get them to self-qualify and self-identify, and then learn from them by listening and serving.

(01:02:49):
Yeah, no, totally agreed.
I mean, there's that story also, like what solution are you providing,
right? There's the, when you go to the hardware store, you're not buying a hammer,
you're buying the nail, and then you're buying the hole that the nail creates.
And then you're, well, that's creating the picture. And Seth Godin goes through

(01:03:10):
the whole thing all the way to
now I have a shelf, which hangs all of my trophies that I can show people.
Well, if you take that story, like when I took that story to my client,
it was, what is it that my client is really trying to do?
Well, yeah, they want music lessons, but really it's that on an unconscious
level, they want to be considered a good parent, meaning they are giving their child the experience.

(01:03:37):
And I know about my customers, their kids are in lots of activities.
They want to give their kids the best. So the driving force is a certain amount
of guilt in terms of, can I give them everything in this world?
I want them to be prepared for the world. And music is a part of that.

(01:03:58):
And I mean, I don't use that in a manipulative way, which you could.
But I use it in a guiding force of empathy in terms of, you know,
how hard I, you know, our terms of service is basically, this is what we're responsible for.
And this is what you're responsible for. And this is how we're going to do business together.

(01:04:21):
And it's more like a shared accountability model versus a terms of service.
Exactly. Because I was just, I was tired of those terms of services that were
so technical. And I knew that my customer, my ideal clients did not want to
have the time to read that crap unless they were a lawyer or someone who enjoyed that.
But I just wanted to be like, let's just be totally transparent.

(01:04:44):
And like, we're going to make sure that we have a clean room.
We have a teacher every week. We're going to provide this service.
And you're going to show up. You're going to pay for the lessons that you don't show up for regardless.
And then I gave them what their responsibility was. was
and it does make it a partnership and teamwork and I've
done that from almost the beginning because I didn't I didn't want

(01:05:05):
that whole technical things now certain things
you have to have on your website now and this is where marketing's
changed too it's like I recently am doing
text texting marketing and I have to have because of the company that I'm using
I have to have this on this very technical terms of service on my page but that's

(01:05:27):
again And another relationship with one of my suppliers that I need to adhere to.
So, you know, it's all about the balance of making everything work together.
But in the end, I think really the story that people should come away with is
that you need to continue to be a student of this as much as you're a teacher.

(01:05:48):
Even when we think that we've got it right, I'm going to learn something in
an hour that I won't have known about marketing or engagement.
And it's funny, the only difference is between they say like, why hire an expert?
It's like simple because we've done this a lot. And so we've learned efficiencies
that allow you to get there faster.

(01:06:09):
And that's effectively the services mindset of like, you could do this.
Oh boy, you could do every house that I've lived in.
I decided to save money by doing my own baseboards because I knew how to do them.
And every single house that I lived in, do you know what I did one week before
I sold the house? I put in baseboards.
Those baseboards sat in the basement, never painted, never cut, never touched.

(01:06:31):
Finished no baseboards in the house until i sold the house the only
time that house looked great was when i sold it because then i was creating
an experience for the next consumer and it was wild because that's what it was
like i was not thinking to me it didn't matter as much on the day-to-day but
now i go and i say before i do something i say like what's the thing that i
can do that i know that i can complete and where do i need help and then as

(01:06:55):
i get to those stuck points.
Then i know how do i mitigate this well i've got an
agency i can call i've got a friend i can call i've i've
or sometimes you just like you just gotta knuckle down and go for it and
it's there's sometimes like with writing like you
can't make it faster i i can't you can't make music come out faster sure you
hear these heroic tales of you know you know they were sitting in their bathroom

(01:07:19):
and the brand new acoustic and they decided to write a song which was recorded
on a phone that became the number one hit. Yes.
True statement. But if you said, you know what I'm going to do,
I'm or I just ordered my new acoustic, really cool phone on the way.
Bathroom sounds great. I totally know what I'm going to do. Like,
no, no, no. That can happen by accident.

(01:07:39):
Happy accidents as, as Bob Ross would say.
But what you need to do is you need to do stuff that you know you can do with purpose and intent.
And then where you cannot affect that, or
you can get bogged down by it look for somebody else that that is
their purpose and that is their intent yeah i mean
you know again back to music because that's

(01:08:02):
funny i play scales because i enjoy them okay i don't play scales just to get
better at scales i i enjoy the feel under my fingers i enjoy figuring out what
the purpose of that scale is in relationship to something else,
I'm always playing scale. I played the G major scale.

(01:08:23):
Hundreds of thousands of times. It's the same with marketing.
I am always wanting to learn something new, something that's cool.
Sometimes I might use the tool or the technique or the skill,
and sometimes I might not, but I enjoy going down the path.
And I thought of a post of doing on LinkedIn is like, how would I do things

(01:08:44):
differently starting where we started back then?
It's like, there's no answer. Things were different.
Things are way different now. I would do things way differently.
I wouldn't do them the same way, but I also wouldn't go back and change anything
because that also taught me what I need to know now.
And, and so practice.

(01:09:05):
And I've like most of the books that I've read aren't even business books.
I would say the top books that I love are Icarus Deception by Seth Godin,
which is not even really that business oriented rework by Jason Freed or fried
and, and, and Meyer Hansen.
Yeah. Yeah. D H H is the easier way.

(01:09:27):
And power of vulnerability by Brene Brown. Those are my top three books.
And they, yeah, they just taught me more about how, instead of what,
and it, it just allows me to practice.
I just think about practicing as if I do a musical instrument.

(01:09:48):
So, you know, AdWords is not the same five years ago as it is now.
It's totally different.
What kind of ad copywriting you're going to do. SEO, totally different now than it was in 2010.
You've got to keep up to date with those things. You can either follow people
or learn it on your own, but it is constantly practicing.

(01:10:11):
And that's why I like paralleling it with music is because I enjoy the practice
and going through the motions as much as the end result,
whether it be a song, a solo, or some contribution.
And yeah, I think that that's really, you're 100% right. You can't stop.

(01:10:33):
That's what I love about it. I will never know.
Right? And I'm always wanting to learn. Yeah.
Idea that like people always say you
know it's like you can do a job you love and you'll never
work a day in your life like true because you'll probably never
sell what you're doing but it's more like if you can find joy in what you do

(01:10:54):
because you've got a passion the worst thing to tell somebody is turn your passion
into a job like that's pretty fundamentally backwards find a job where your
passion is applicable is really the way i would describe it or find an opportunity
where your passion can come through.
The fact that I became good at marketing wasn't because I went to school for marketing.

(01:11:14):
I was a landscaper, a shoe repair brand. I played guitar in bands and I did a bunch of weird things.
So for me to arrive at technical marketing and public speaking,
there's no path that gets me there, none of it.
But it just was a confluence of events and persistence in doing so that then

(01:11:37):
mapping backwards and looking back over time,
that's the big difference is that, can I go back and learn from what I've done
more than just to repeat,
you know, or just sort of muddle through and stuff again, as a new founder for,
you know, folks that are looking to you for marketing help, they shouldn't be
concentrated on marketing.
They should be concentrating on executing the best business and customer experience

(01:12:00):
they can, and then trust an expert, a trusted advisor,
one might say, and be able to leverage the best of that capability and make
it part of their overall portfolio.
Oh, yeah. The expert is also going to be able to, and this is something that
a lot of people have a hard time with, but they can see things that you can't see.

(01:12:21):
And it's just from an outside perspective.
It's like kind of self-help books, right? They get you so far,
but you really need a therapist to actually work through stuff that you're struggling with.
Somebody is an expert with an outside opinion and seeing how things could be
different or better or how you're, and those are things that I look at when

(01:12:43):
I'm with a client, I'm like.
It's not just marketing. It's just like, have you looked at your analytics?
Do you even know what is happening right now?
Because that will tell you how to take the next path. And it's amazing how many
people, they don't like it and it's boring.
But when you show them the value of Google Analytics, like I helped a chiropractor

(01:13:05):
and she was getting a lot of hits from Virginia.
And we're like, why is this? And we found out that it was an Amazon call center
constantly going to a website.
And taking order of her analytics. So we muted that in it.
And now she had a more realistic way of understanding where people were coming
from. Like just simple things like that.

(01:13:26):
These don't have to be complicated things. But it's just taking your analytics
and using that to generate creative ideas of how you're going to move forward.
Yeah. And using, I'll say, tricks but not to be tricky.
Right. And it's so funny. like i said i always say
this i'm constantly juggling cards in

(01:13:48):
my hand and messing around with them but i'm
the worst magician ever because the first thing i do when i i show somebody
trick is i i show them exactly how i do the trick like but that's the fun of
it it's like you can do this thing you're like oh my god like how do you do
this like oh i can hide the card you're like ah you know like that's kind of
the fun for me it's like it's a trick but i'm not going to make it a trick.

(01:14:10):
I'm not trying to trick you. I'm going to show you how this trick works and
SEO hijacks and all these things that are out there.
If you don't approach it with the idea of making it a valuable thing to create
a conversion and ultimately drive pipeline in business, if you're just using
it for trickery, what you're going to get is trickery in the results.

(01:14:33):
And I did it. You you have to do those things sometimes though.
So in year one for my company's website, I put up an events page and it was just a plugin.
And I found all like hundreds of tech events that are going on around the world.
And I created an event page for each one on my website, totally automated.
Just go in. I got somebody to help me do, you know, I got a VA that was helping

(01:14:57):
me do stuff. I'm like, here, find these a hundred events, fill in all this stuff.
And then And all of a sudden I'm like outranking these people that are hosting
events because I'm getting all of this inbound. Right.
So if I look at it like, oh, great, I'm getting, you know, five,
six, 700 views a month where I should be getting four.

(01:15:17):
This is great. Ah, but wait. Right.
None of them are converting, right? Okay, so is it actually a good metric to chase?
So what I did was that allowed me to do things and then change the way the event pages are.
And then I don't do that anymore. I actually just, because it's now interfering.
With my actual conversions because people will get there and they aren't good

(01:15:37):
cohorts for me. So I don't need to do that anymore.
So I've changed because I've got enough organic inbounds now that it's not necessary.
But doing that first layer was necessary and it's a great starter,
harder, but it's like kindling for the fire. Right.
Yeah. Yeah. No, that's good. That's really interesting that you've discovered
that because that's the thing is the first thing is that, you know,

(01:16:00):
I'm getting lots of, lots of hits. I see this with ads.
People do this with ads all the time. They make the big mistake of they'll put
up an ad and then they'll send them to their homepage. It's like, what are you doing?
I have no way to identify what just happened. You just lose the heck out of your customer.
It's like, they're looking for back pain relief leaf and you send them to your

(01:16:20):
homepage where you offer chiropractic services and reflexology and,
and, and all these other things, it's like, now you've just lost them.
So if you have 500 people who are confused, that's not numbers to,
to be, to, to know why they've, why they've been there.
And yeah, I, it's, it's, it's interesting how you.

(01:16:43):
Back to the vanity metrics people you know you could 40 000
people in in your who like who follow
you aren't buying anything there's something
wrong with your with who you're attracting and i think i used to always joke
and i would say like when people say like oh i have like you know i got 5 000
friends on facebook i'm like you think so ask each of them for five bucks and

(01:17:05):
you'll find out how many friends you really got but that's almost how i would
treat it treat your metrics tricks that way.
If you, and this is actually a good entrepreneurial thing.
My co-founder Irfan taught me this. He's like, everyone loves what you do.
Everyone loves your idea.
Everyone loves the outcomes they can get. They love, they'll tell you all about
how great your platform is until you ask them for money.

(01:17:26):
At that point, they actually have to commit that they're not just talking you
up, but they actually have to commit a financial transaction.
And it's like, oh, okay. Okay. And it is funny that he learned that early on
with his previous company where they were doing lots of testing with practitioners.

(01:17:47):
And all these practitioners were like, we love this. This is what I would like to see.
But what ended up happening was they created a bunch of, it was like the Homer.
It was a car that was for one person that wanted 17 weird things.
Things, but then when they would go to all of these people who were in their
preview group, they'd be like, okay, awesome.

(01:18:07):
So it's going to be like, you know, $4,000 a month for the service or whatever it was going to be.
And they're like, oh, now we're good, but I appreciate you letting me help you
build this. You know, it was very helpful.
Can I just stay in the community edition then? And you're like,
the whole idea was we were supposed to get them in the community edition and
find out how to trigger them to pay, not how to load up my paid features and

(01:18:28):
then move all these features down in the community edition. Yeah.
Just to try and get people on board. So yeah, it's, it's a set of lessons for sure.
But, you know, so what's your looking ahead? You've got 2024.
We're hopefully pandemic free. It's an election year in a lot of places.
There's a lot of weirdness going on.
What, what's the next few months look like for you and, and AWH marketing?

(01:18:53):
So I'm doing a lot of presentations.
I'm reaching out to a lot of BIAs and doing a lot of talks.
I do one specific talk on five ways of strengthening your digital assets and what to look at.
That because i find a lot of people overlook some
very simple basic simple basic concepts

(01:19:15):
like white space like they want
to flood their their website with as much
information as possible whether it's the menu navigation have 17 different options
or they just want to have like here get this free ebook and then over here this
free something else and so i go through this presentation And I talk about the

(01:19:35):
five things that I think are important, which is the website is number one.
And second is your Google business profile.
Amazing how many people don't have that, especially with a brick and mortar.
It's like considering Google owns 60% of the traffic out there. That's right.
You need to be on a Google business profile. Email marketing,

(01:19:56):
which I think is still crazy and underutilized and gives you complete control
over how you message your clients.
And again, I think that's totally underutilized. Analytics is the fourth thing,
which we mentioned before.
And then to a lesser degree, it's social media. I think social media is important.
Done properly. And I don't think that it should be to try and get as many followers.

(01:20:20):
Most people who have higher followings find that engagement is much more challenging
when you start to get over 10,000 people.
And if you're not engaging with social media, then there's really no point in the social media.
You're just out there for vanity metrics, which is fine too.
If that's That's what you want and you enjoy it.

(01:20:41):
Go for it. But if you're looking for it as a tool to help either convert or
to create a community, I think that that's more important.
Like having a Facebook group is better than having an Instagram page that has
people who will never buy your service.
Right. And it's talk about irony that people say like, I want to get a good

(01:21:05):
amount of stuff from TikTok or Instagram. Like, do you understand how difficult
it is to convert anybody on that?
Even if they want to, it's a gosh darn maze to get to where you are.
Like link in bio, my arse.
How is it that we're this far into the evolution of Instagram and we're still at link in bio?

(01:21:26):
Like there should be way more ways to interact with that system.
It's really weird. It's because what the big thing that I've noticed,
enormous thing that I've noticed with social media in general is if you post
anything in your first post that takes you off the page, you will be deranked.

(01:21:46):
You will not get the leverage that you need.
And so it's often told, you tell people what you need to do is put that link
in the first comment and it subverts that.
Algorithm to, to de-rank you. And it's too bad because, and,
and it's ironic because that's what they kind of espouse is just freedom of

(01:22:12):
speech and, and, and being able to, you know, social, it's social interaction,
but they don't want you to go to someone else's party, right?
They don't, Instagram doesn't want you to go to TikTok.
TikTok does not want you to go over to LinkedIn. LinkedIn doesn't want,
and they'll do it with their algorithm.
That's not great. Someone the other day said like, I don't, I,

(01:22:32):
sorry, I'm an adult. I don't watch TikTok.
I wait until they come to Instagram on reels two weeks later.
Like that's, so there's a funny, you know, cohort representation of like who your personas are.
But as you said, that is really why, why is Instagram probably not an effective
marketing and conversion channel is because the people that are likely to use

(01:22:57):
that use it for a very specific and distinct purpose.
And it's not to find a brand that I want to click a link for.
My girl and I do this all the time. We're like, we'll like find some restaurant.
And it's like, the first thing you do is like, where do, where is this place?
Like you, you have to bust open the comments and hope that somebody else,
like I said, this is the best meal ever.
And you're like, Like, where is it? Where's the meal?

(01:23:22):
10 comments down. All you see is people saying, where, where?
No, I mean, yeah, social media is just a beast.
That's just totally, totally different and evolved in a very weird way.
But the biggest danger that I have, like, I think it should be one of your pillars
for sure in terms of your marketing channels. but the biggest concern that I have is just,

(01:23:47):
how little control you have over your content and and
i remember i went and saw dan mangan who's an amazing
canadian musician and he got up on stage and he's like here just follow my email
list and he's like listen as a musician like we check all our analytics and
one post will be like be released to three people and the next day it will be

(01:24:09):
30 000 people and you have no control.
Of when that is going to happen you know all the you know metrical and hootsuite
and all of those and later they'll all tell you when the best possible time
is but it's still not truly.
Learning how to how to optimize it
and at the very worst end i've seen many businesses lose their accounts not

(01:24:33):
being told why they've lost their account and i've seen restaurants who got
all their sales from their Instagram and then their Instagram's gone for whatever
reason and now they've lost 100% income.
And that's a horrible statistic to have.
You don't want that in your analytics for sure.
So you have to use it in an effective way that's in conjunction with everything else.

(01:24:59):
And I think you truly have to, like I've always followed Jay Abraham as,
in my opinion, one of the smartest men out there, smartest people out there.
And he's just like, you need to lead your customer.
And so that's what everything that you do should be doing is to lead them for what's best for them,
you know, and being an advisor in a best possible way, the same way that I will

(01:25:24):
tell a customer not to come to my school because they're too far away in Toronto.
And I know that it's not going to work out for them.
So you need to use that. And so you use social media as a tool to entertain,
to do all those things, to have the followers.
But, you know, if your follower is in China and your service is in can't get
to them, that's not really a customer that you want.

(01:25:48):
Big in belgium so is it from the movie singles we're
sitting in the middle of a diner in seattle like
but we're really huge in belgium yeah my everyone's
well i get that i get a podcast ranking notification and be like oh you just
you you hit number one in lithuania i'm like there's like four podcasts in lithuania

(01:26:10):
it's not hard to be number one i'll get deranged three days later term like
oh it was a good run lithuania i'll be back how did i lose that market.
So well this is awesome alex if for folks that do
want to reach you what's the best way they can do that and we'll make
sure we put show notes and and ways for them to to get connected

(01:26:32):
with you as well yeah the best way is probably you can
contact me on linkedin it's just alex hop alex
underscore or hopcraft at the end of the as the
slug in linkedin i'm on
twitter but not so much anymore i kind of lost my my drive on that one since
elon musk and all the craziness that happened there but you can you can go to

(01:26:54):
my website alexhopcraft.com and those are probably the best ways email me at But, you know, yeah,
ahobcrop at gmail.com.
Well, the good thing is you have a very, not seemingly unique,
and yet somehow very unique name. I know.
It is the, like, I watched a documentary the other day about me.

(01:27:16):
It's called The Life of Easy E.
Which is, like, why I have to
be Disco Posse, because I'll never be Eric Wright anywhere in the world.
Because you Google Eric Wright, and all you're going to get is Easy E with two
nines across his chest. Like it's just, I cannot win on SEO for my own bloody name.
So I ended up going with Disco Posse.

(01:27:37):
No, I remember, I remember. Yeah. You've been Disco Posse since I've known you for sure.
Yeah. It's, it became a weird thing, but it's, you know, so luckily you've got
more than just a distinct name, but a distinct capability that's very valuable and very unique.
And I'm, I'm humbled that, you know, I've been lucky
enough to learn from you over the the years and your friendship

(01:27:59):
and mentorship has been incredibly valuable it's
something that's really really cool so
it goes both ways your creativity and how you're always trying stuff that's
i love i've learned a lot about that and just throw past at the wall and see
what sticks i love that way that you that's the way the best way is to test

(01:28:20):
test test and you've always done that too.
So I appreciate the kind words. Thank you. And right back at you.
You go coming soon to a podcast again near you i'm sure
so we'll have lots of more stuff to talk about so folks who do check
it out alex hobcraft will have all of the links down below
or if you're just listening and not watching hey and if you want music lessons

(01:28:41):
and you're based in lithuania alex is great so he'll happily hyper local market
some some in-person lessons to you it's eight thousand dollars a lesson because
it comes with plane tickets,

(01:29:03):
well thank you for letting me test this by i can officially say the first stream
yards a version of the podcast i did as well which is kind of cool so a lot
has changed over the time so this has been awesome so thank you very much yeah cool awesome.
Music.

All Episodes

Ep 257 - From Guitar Strings to Marketing Kings: Alex Hobcraft on Building Businesses

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ep 257 - From Guitar Strings to Marketing Kings: Alex Hobcraft on Building Businesses