March 12, 2025 • 43 mins
Sometimes, the best business decision is saying goodbye. In this episode, we tell the story of a client who made work unbearable, why we had to cut ties, and what every business owner should learn about spotting red flags early. To learn more about Integris Design, visit https://integrisdesign.com
Over The Bull is brought to you by IntegrisDesign.com. All rights reserved.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Introduction (00:00):
You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut
through marketing noise.
Here's your host, Ken Carroll.
Ken (00:09):
We fired a client.
That's right.
In our very first episode,we're going to talk about
letting a client go and why wedid it, along with what you can
learn from it.
Hi, my name's Ken, and welcometo the very first episode of
Over the Bull.
Now there's a funny thing aboutagencies.
We want every business to thinkthat we know everything to do
(00:32):
in every situation.
Now the truth is, everybusiness is different and every
situation is different.
And along with it comes growth,learning, making adjustments,
changing, and yes, evensometimes doing things like
firing a client.
So who is this client and whydid we let him go?
Now this particular client,he's a plumber.
(00:55):
He has several people that workwith him, and he has a great
brand.
Now, when I say branding, hislogos, his slogans, his color
usage, everything is brilliant.
Now, we didn't create any ofthis, but we do recognize good
work when it does happen.
And he has some really goodwork.
And we knew that if we couldjust work with the brand a
(01:18):
little bit, we could make greatprogress for the business.
And he needed a lot of help.
When he first came on board andwe started looking at his
business, everything was broken.
Everything from the way hetracked phone calls to the way
he marketed to his website, evendown to the actual web address
that he used, which caused a lotof confusion.
(01:40):
And so we had to start diggingdeep in order to make progress
with this client.
Now, before I go further, youknow, over the last 20 years or
so, we've identified clientsthat are at different phases.
And understanding where thisparticular client's coming from
helps kind of understand wherewe're at.
(02:00):
So typically the first phase ofany business is this kind of
stage of innocence, where wherethey're sold things or worse
yet, they have a punch list, youknow, such as I need a website,
I need a business card, I needdifferent things.
And then they also start havingthese fantasy expectations.
(02:22):
Now, this is no fault of theirown, because a lot of the
services that are offered todayare really are oversimplified
and sensationalistic, such asthe do-it-yourself website
builders or even agencies thatsay they can launch ads and
start promoting.
And then they imply the factthat they're going to get a lot
(02:43):
more out of those ads than theyinitially would and really kind
of minimize the amount of workthat has to go into it.
Now, once someone goes intothis innocent phase, they often
get taken advantage of.
There's really no nice way tosay that.
And oftentimes, thosebusinesses will come out on the
other side, and they may bejaded.
(03:05):
Now, when they're jaded,they're angry or skeptical, and
especially since the fantasydidn't come true.
You know, they figured they'dput a little bit of money in it,
have a website, get an emailaddress.
And when they did a little bitof marketing, the business would
just come flowing in.
And it usually doesn't happen.
And in reality, it usuallydoesn't happen that way.
(03:28):
Then what happens is, is someof those people go into what I
call the Ponce de Leon phase.
Now, Ponce de Leon was the guywho was looking for the fountain
of youth.
Since their perceptions of whatshould happen did not happen,
typically the business may moveinto a situation where they
start experimenting.
(03:48):
by firing, hiring differentpeople, moving around, are
looking for that magic bulletthat maybe somebody else is
using and they're not.
And so now this puts them on ajourney that is basically
directionless, and they becomereally low-hanging fruit for the
clever sales company that comesto them and says they
(04:11):
specialize in a certain marketor offer a certain service that
sounds really good.
Now, one of the big buzzwordstoday, obviously, Now the next
thing that that leads to isinconsistency.
(04:34):
Now, I don't mean they don'tfund it.
I don't mean the business isn'tpaying for stuff.
If a business isn't willing tocommit a consistent budget, then
they're kind of dead in thewater to begin with.
But some of these businessesstill commit a budget, but yet
they still are not getting whatthey want, and so they switch.
Now, when they switch to otherpeople or other services, they
(04:58):
kind of reboot that service.
And when they reboot it, theystart back at square one.
Now, It's obvious sometimes youhave to, you know, there's too
many of these sales pitches andthe terminology is so, you know,
technical and people usesensationalism to get you on
board when in reality they haveno business of doing it.
(05:19):
And so it's a tricky spot tobe, you know, when you're
switching and moving fromservice to service or looking
for that all elusive magicbullet.
Now, this typically leads tothe next phase, and that is
either they go out of business,they run out of money, and the
closer they get to running outof money, the more they need the
(05:42):
expectation met.
And so what I mean by that is,you know, they switch service,
switch service, switch service,and then they're down to their
last credit card, and thenthey're hoping that they can
hire somebody that's going to beable to, you know, pull that
fourth quarter Hail Mary passand keep their business afloat.
The other thing is they give upon internet marketing, they try
(06:03):
other things, and they don'thave high expectations of the
internet.
And some, of course, find agood service.
Now, of course, some find goodservices early on, some find
them later.
But we often find today whensomeone comes to us, we have to
get very grounded and very realwith what the Internet is.
And so when they come to us,it's really one of those
(06:27):
situations where we say, OK,here are the facts when it comes
to the Internet.
And they're ready for that kindof sober approach and that
grounded approach, which in someways makes our life easier
because we sell them reality.
And when you sell reality, itmakes for a more solid
relationship.
Now, this particular client, hecame to us in the jaded phase.
(06:52):
He was angry and skeptical, andhe was also confused, and he
was very scattered in everythingthat he had done.
So like the perfect storm.
But, you know, we face thissometimes.
And it's very normal when westart talking with the business
for them to do things like shareideas and concepts or question
(07:14):
what we do or things like that.
And so we kind of go throughthis phase of orienting a client
to where they can have theproper expectation and we can
start working toward achievingreal goals.
Now, one of the things that wasunique about this particular
customer was he never outgrewthe skeptical phase.
(07:37):
As a matter of fact, when hestarted out with us, there were
some questions that he wouldask, and those questions were
normal.
They were very inquisitive andthings like that, and we'd offer
education.
But for some reason, the morethat we offered the education,
the more he almost took aliberty of being more aggressive
(07:59):
toward us.
Now, what fueled theaggressiveness for this
particular customer was severalitems.
Now, you can learn a lot fromthese items, and I'm sure you've
faced some of these itemsalready.
Now, the first approach, onething that just threw this guy
off was what I would call theGood Samaritan.
(08:20):
Now, the Good Samaritan, whatthat would be is someone who
sends an email.
So he'd get an email in hisinbox.
And in this email, it would saysomething like, Hello, I ran
across your website and I sawsome errors on your website.
And I attached a report thatyou can forward on to your web
(08:42):
person.
Or if you need some help, justlet us know.
Now, this Good Samaritan orLone Ranger approach was
something he would look at, andhe would take a look at that
report, and then he would sendit to us.
And like I said, early on inthe game, we would kind of write
back and say, okay, this iswhat's happening, and this is
why this hasn't happened yet,and those kind of things.
(09:04):
But then later, it just startedgetting more and more
aggressive, for lack of a betterword.
I can't tell you how manytimes, you know, he would
contact me via text or via phonecall.
And he would demand that I jumpinto his Zoom session because
he went to a trade show orreceived one of these email
(09:26):
reports talking about somethingthat we had missed or some
things we had missed.
So, you know, obviously as anagency with a full schedule, we
couldn't just stop.
But usually I would try toprioritize it and get in the
meeting within an hour or so.
So I'd jump into the meetingand he would, you know, proceed
(09:46):
to, you know, be very short.
You know, it would always bevery short text messages or very
short phone calls demandingthat we jump into a Zoom session
and get into it.
And then he would proceed tolike just question us.
But the problem was he wasn'treally technically savvy, and he
was just kind of repeating thesales pitch and then
(10:08):
interpreting the data based uponthe sales pitch, but it was
inaccurate.
And there's a big problem withthis whole report, but there's
actually a lot of problems withthis.
But what it ultimately did wasit just created this cycle.
Now, this cycle is, you know,we have to account for our time.
And eventually we startedlooking at the clock and
(10:30):
realizing, you know, we'respending a lot of time just
going back and forth andprioritizing, which is hurting
our relationship with otherclients or is making us have to
work late.
So we're making some reallytough decisions.
But let's really analyze whatthis report does.
Let's look at the GoodSamaritan.
So actually, this predicates onprobably back as far as Edward
(10:54):
Bernays, which is one of theearliest of the influencers of
modern marketing today.
And then it kind of goes down,and you can see this kind of
approach in the Hare Krishnas atthe airports in different ways.
But basically, the number onething that it does is it's
giving you something, and bynature, you want to respond.
(11:19):
Now, human nature is to respondto certain things like that,
and that's exactly what the HareKrishnas would do.
Give a flower or something likethat, and then ask for a
donation, and the person wouldfeel obligated to give money.
You see, it's this thing thatthey're taking advantage of.
But let's really analyze this.
The first thing that I want topoint out is they're sending an
(11:42):
unsolicited, spammy-style email.
Now, sometimes it'll say R-Ecolon and have a subject, which
would imply that you've alreadywritten them, so you've got a
level of deception.
And then sometimes in the bodyof the copy, they have your
name.
Now, for me, and I get spamstuff all the time, people
(12:03):
wanting to sell us wholesaleservices, white label services,
overseas services, you name it,promising everything.
Now, here's the thing.
When I get an email like that,the first thing that I do is
block it.
The reason I do is becausethey're intruding on my time.
They're kind of sneaking theway in.
(12:24):
They don't respect my time,effort, and energy.
And by not respecting my time,they're costing me time even to
block them.
And I find that offensive.
And so you have to come up withthe idea, do you want to waste
a tenth?
You know, if you spend an houra day or 30 minutes a day, you
work a 10-hour day.
If it's an hour, you've lost atenth of your time you're
(12:46):
putting into these spammy thingsyou're looking through and
reading.
Is it really worth that time,effort, and energy?
But hold on a minute.
They sent that report, and thatreport looks like they put a
lot of time into that.
And it looks very technical,and it looks good.
So what do we do with thatreport?
Now, as an agency, I can tellyou that I can run you a report
(13:12):
on competitor Google ads.
I can run one on search engineoptimization.
I can run one on a lot ofdifferent areas within your
business.
And it only takes me aboutthree minutes.
That's right.
Three minutes.
And that includes putting mylogo, my branding, and even your
logo in it.
Now, agencies, we have theability to use these tools.
(13:35):
I mean, even looking at yourGoogle My Business within a
seven-mile radius, those justtake a few seconds.
So the idea is that report,let's say, for example, let's
say I wanted to try a marketingstrategy.
I could hire somebody thatdoesn't know anything about
marketing.
and I can tell them to push abutton and they could generate a
(13:58):
report.
Then I can give them a cannedscript and then I can tell them
to send that script and attach areport.
They don't know anything.
Now I've lost about threeminutes of that person's time to
have them do that.
So if I have them do thataround the clock, well, there
they go.
And that's my marketingstrategy.
(14:18):
So what does that tell youabout the business?
That tells you that they can'tmarket ethically.
See, this is huge.
This is why you block them.
Because if they can't marketthemselves ethically, how in the
world are they going to marketyou ethically?
They can't.
They're already showing youright out of the gate they don't
(14:40):
have the capability to market.
And if they did, they wouldmarket their own business
ethically.
Now, even at that, thosereports usually are pretty good
if they're running them from theright places.
But they're actually useless.
Now, let me describe this alittle bit to you.
Now, this is assuming you havea good person working with your
(15:04):
company to grow it.
Now, there are a lot, a lot ofused car salesmen in our world.
And there's a lot of them whodon't know what they're doing.
But let's just assume for theminute you've got the right guy
and they give you a report.
You look at the report and yousee all the things that are
wrong.
Now, the reality is that Icould look at any website
(15:28):
virtually on the planet and findsomething wrong with it.
I could probably find a lot ofthings wrong with it.
Now, the right or wrong thingisn't really the issue.
The more important issue iswhat's planned and when is it
planned to be accomplished.
So, you're not paying someonean infinite amount of time with
an infinite amount of resourcesto have your work done.
(15:50):
And if they're taking on a webproject that's already in
disarray, it's going to take awhile to get that thing lined
up.
And so that report, althoughit's accurate, it doesn't take
in consideration how that agencyis going to take care of that
elephant and clean up thatwebsite.
And so the idea is, what's thestrategy to get things cleaned
(16:11):
up?
It's not just the fact thatsomething's broken.
Is it in the works?
Is it going to be worked on?
And when is it going to beworked on?
Now, those reports don't tellyou that.
And here's the thing.
The person who made thatreport, even if they're fully
competent, doesn't know whereyour marketing is at, what's
being worked on, what's beingadjusted.
(16:33):
For example, as I mentioned,this particular plumber, his web
address was horrible.
Absolutely horrible.
It sounded like an IT companyor something.
So those reports would oftenaddress an old web address or an
old something or another thatwe've already handled and we're
in the process of managing.
(16:53):
So you can see those reportsout of context are really no
good.
Now, what happened with thisparticular client with the Good
Samaritan scenario was that, youknow, a long time into the
program.
Now, this is even after we'rerunning paid ads and we're
getting phone calls at such alow rate that his independent
(17:16):
coach would call us up and wantto know more about it because he
didn't believe we wereconverting phone calls at that
low of a rate with the paid ads.
So that's pretty phenomenal,especially in the plumbing
industry.
But he would call us up, orcall me up, or text me and
demand that I jump into ameeting.
And then what happened was it'dbe very short and very
(17:39):
accusatory, and he would come inand demand this, demand that,
ask this question, ask thatquestion.
And he kind of came at us likehe kind of got us in something,
you know, when in reality, therewas perfectly good explanations
for everything.
And as I mentioned, after welost two or three hours of time,
he realized that basically hewas given a sales pitch, right?
(18:04):
Now, what was unfortunate withthis particular person was he
would forget that conversation.
And so the very next report hegot at a trade show or the very
next report he got an email, itwas the exact same thing all
over again.
So you can imagine how manytimes you could lose three hours
just trying to re-explain wherethe project is at and
(18:29):
re-explain the idea that thesereports basically describe Don't
consider any of these othervariables.
Now, here's the thing.
This is not what calls theclient.
Now, it was frustrating.
Now, there's no joke.
When you get a text message oryou get someone who calls up and
they're constantly accusing youof something, you know, it's
(18:52):
tough.
Now, we do get clientsinitially who do have a lot of
questions because they've beenburned.
And that's okay.
We expect that.
But when it continues formonths and months and months and
months, and they're continuallybeing that susceptible to
basically simple sales pitches,it makes it very difficult to
(19:15):
work for that client.
But guess what?
This is not what cost theclient or costed us to have to
make a tough decision of lettingthe client go.
So what else was going on?
Now, there was something thathe was doing good matter of
fact, I would say probablypretty good.
So what that is, is as we startworking on his marketing, his
(19:39):
SEO services, his paidadvertising, his social media,
all those kind of things, he'dbring to the table some new
ideas.
Now, what I mean by that aredifferent ways that plumbers are
marketing in the industry withniche-based services.
So let me give you an idea.
company comes to him and theysay we have a website or we have
(20:04):
a program in which we can helppromote your plumbing business
in your area and what we woulddo is typically look at it once
he brought it to us and make adetermination and we would say
okay This is interesting.
Now, he'd come to us overlyexcited, typically, because,
(20:24):
again, he was very susceptibleto sensationalistic sales
pitches.
And he'd bring it to us, andwhat we would do is typically
look at it.
And in a lot of those cases,especially in modern times, the
businesses didn't check out.
Now, they looked reputable andthey sounded good, but they were
very green businesses thatreally couldn't provide what
(20:46):
they claimed to be able to give.
And so those would be excludedpretty quickly.
Then the next thing would be todetermine if we wanted to test
it, when we would start, when wewould stop, and how we would
track that particular project.
So what we would do is we'dtake a service, for example,
we'd assign a custom trackingphone number to it, custom URLs
(21:11):
to it, things of that nature.
And then we would see how wellthey performed within an
allotment of time.
And then if they proved to begood, then great.
And if they didn't, then wewould disregard them.
Now here's what's funny aboutthe plumbing industry.
I can tell you that 99% of whathe was approached with, even
the stuff that sounded good, didnot check out.
(21:34):
I find that really interestingbecause in today's world,
there's so many people who aretrying to offer marketing or
creative services, and it lookslike they really don't have any
business offering thoseservices.
And so a lot of times it wouldjust be very time consuming to
go in there and set up the testand then stop the test.
(21:55):
But here's the thing.
He did good by this.
I have to give him creditbecause the idea is that, you
know, if we found one, you know,piece of gold and he was
willing to spend someadvertising dollars in order to
allow us to test it, if we couldjust find one and it added and
(22:15):
it was a good conversioncreating service, then we'd want
to put that into the equation.
Now, none of them reallychecked out.
Now, I can even tell you someof the games.
For example, he called me upone time and he was really
excited about signing back upwith an email service he used
years ago.
And they gave him a report andhe said that the emails that
(22:40):
this plumbing-based emailcompany would send out equated
to like, it was a crazy number,like 20 or 30 percent converted
into new sales for his business.
So he called me up and he toldme about that.
And I thought, wow, okay.
I said, that's reallyinteresting.
Now, We work with a lot ofpeople, and we're partners with
(23:02):
Constant Contact and some otherguys, and we've been doing email
marketing for a long time.
And so for someone to tell methat's converting at that high
of a rate, it doesn't.
It usually does not do that.
But I went ahead and I lookedat it, and I recommended that he
go back and look really hard atthe numbers to find out if
these were relationships he hadalready had, and basically these
(23:26):
would have been orders thatwould have happened no matter
what.
He came back about two weekslater, and he said, yeah, he
goes, none of that worked out.
He says it turns out the numberwas less than half of a percent
or something.
So he wasn't going to invest init.
But if he went based upon theirreport, he would have honestly
believed that that email servicewas generating 20% or 30% of
(23:50):
new sales for his business.
You've got to be careful withthese reports and these
services.
So that's the big lesson.
The other big lesson is, yes,if you can afford to test
different services, then it's agreat thing.
Because if they can convert orthey provide another outlet for
you to market and it providesreally good leads, then you'd
(24:14):
want to do it.
You'd want to add it to whatyou're already doing.
So the equation is somethinglike this.
Let's say that you run GoogleAds, and let's say for every
dollar you spend, you make $2.
Well, how many $1 would youinvest?
You know, quite a bit, right?
Well, let's say you've gotanother service that you found,
(24:35):
and let's say this other servicegives you $1.75 for every
dollar you sent.
Well, would you do that too?
Now, you see, at some point,you'd say, well, I want to do
more in Google Ads.
But at some point, you're goingto hit a critical mass.
And so you want to go ahead anddistribute and you want to do
as much as you can where itequals profitability for your
(24:56):
company.
And so that's part of what youdo by kind of diversifying your
advertising.
Now, here's a free tip.
When I worked with this onelarge company back in 2009,
2010, one thing that wedistinguished was the idea of
subscription-based servicesversus newsstand kind of
services.
You know, those services whereyou go into a service station
(25:19):
and get that 75-cent newspaperor whatever.
And what we found out in a lotof cases, subscription-based
advertising has a limited shelflife, meaning we would advertise
three months out of the yearversus newsstand where we had
advertised pretty muchyear-round, minus a few little
points.
And what we would find is thatwe were able to drive the the
(25:44):
sales up, and then we were alsoable to greatly reduce the
amount of sales advertisingexpenses that we had.
And so we were able to reducethat dramatically.
I think we took it from like$22,000 a week to about $13,000
a week.
Now this is a huge company, andmost of the people we work with
do not have those kind ofbudgets.
(26:05):
But we learned a lot throughthat experience back in 2009 and
2010.
So going back to the client.
Now, this is the thing.
Now, this was a good practice.
He had an extra budget that heallocated to special advertising
and test marketing.
This was a good thing.
It was not a bad thing.
(26:26):
And so if you can set aside abudget to test market, but
you're able to qualify it,meaning don't just run ads and,
you know, look for the phonering and then you stop there.
You've got to qualify thatparticular service.
And if you can qualify it andyou can spend the money and
you're paying your agency enoughto be able to investigate it,
(26:46):
it is a great thing.
And so this definitely did notcost the relationship with the
customer.
Now, this guy ran hot.
Now, what I mean by that is Hewould be the kind of guy that,
based upon his mood, he wouldcall up and make these demands
that just simply couldn't bedone.
He would call up and say thathe needs more phone calls.
(27:08):
As though, as an agency, wehave a magic button that can
just magically increase phonecalls if someone calls and is
irate enough or demanding enoughthat somehow we're going to be
able to just magically increasethat.
No one has that button.
No one.
And so when you look atsomething like that, it was
(27:30):
tough because he would do it.
And usually our response afterabout a year of working with him
was we could extrapolate it.
And so what we'd be able to dois say, okay, our average cost
per phone call would be X numberof dollars.
And so if you want to increaseand get 10 more phone calls
based on historic data, you needto increase your budget by this
(27:53):
amount.
So we're able to give him likeanalytical data.
Now, what was unusual aboutthat was he never took us up on
it.
He would always say he wantedto do it, but then he would go
away and never do it, which waskind of odd.
It was almost like he wastrying to project his
frustration or his fear aboutbusiness or something onto us
(28:16):
and thought that maybe if hecalled us up and just complained
enough that somehow we wouldhave some magic answer.
So the big lesson there isthere are no magic answers.
And oftentimes, if you call andkind of overstep your bounds
with your agency, what willhappen a lot of times, because
agencies are also peoplepleasers, is they may knee jerk
(28:40):
and make big moves in yourmarketing.
And that could actually mess upthe algorithm in places like
Google.
Now, if that happens, it'llactually set you back.
But if you create that fearwithin the agency, that's very
possible that they do somethinglike that.
And so the idea is that whenyou do marketing, it's a lot of
(29:04):
methodical movement over aperiod of time.
A lot of times, you know, whenyou talk to Google reps, you
know, a lot of them will call usup or, you know, we'll talk
with them and they'll say, okay,when you make these moves, you
want to wait a little bit oftime, let the algorithm catch up
to it, and let's see whathappens.
Now, this is true with makingbudget adjustments or creative
(29:28):
adjustments or technicaladjustments or campaign
adjustments.
There's a ton of adjustmentsyou could do, but making too
many adjustments at the sametime is the equivalent of making
too many adjustments on a stockcar at the same time you know
when you watch a stock car racethey make these little minor
adjustments let the car run andthen they make another
adjustment now only in crazysituations do they make big
(29:51):
adjustments and when they dothey know they're taking a
chance well it's kind of thesame thing with marketing now
truth be known he was pushing iton the way that he conducted
himself with us Not only withhis irateness, but also what
you'd find is in addition tothis hot, cold, happy, angry
(30:14):
kind of mentality that he had,he was constantly late for
scheduled meetings we had withhim to go over data.
Not only that, but he wouldconstantly stay later.
And there was no easy way tokind of urge him to end the
meeting.
And then he would digress intoother subjects.
And, you know, there were sometimes where we literally
(30:36):
couldn't have forced him out ofthe office with the crowbar.
And that's pretty difficult foran agency too, because we do
want to please a client.
But then having to create thoseboundaries and then have them
ignore those boundaries wasextremely difficult.
Another thing that he tended todo was send late night
emergencies.
(30:56):
So you could imagine getting alate night message saying that
there was something urgent andit was not urgent at all.
It was just something that hewould want to talk about late at
night, you know, when he wastraveling or his wind down time
or whatever.
but he would make it to whereit was an emergency in his own
(31:18):
mind.
And he got worried, didn'treally care about respecting
those boundaries either.
But again, we kept massaging itand with the goal of knowing if
we can just keep educating theclient, keep pushing them.
We knew that 2025 was going tobe a big breakout year for this
person.
And honestly, I started to seehim start to understand
(31:44):
different things that were goingon.
And I started to seeimprovement from him as the
owner of a business.
So let me share some additionalstories with that.
When he first started workingwith us, he was very prone to
quickly make moves.
For example, he switched phonesystems.
And he did it without us.
(32:06):
He basically caught up andsaid, we're switching phone
systems.
Now, he had no consideration orhe didn't think through things
like what happens to thetracking number when I switch
phone systems?
What happens to the phonecalls?
What happens to call routing?
How do these different thingswork?
in conjunction with hisbusiness and it made things a
(32:32):
little bit difficult for usbecause he would call us up
because the tracking numberswouldn't work or there'd be
something wrong with routing andso we would get pulled into
conversations because of thedecisions that he had made.
Now Over time, he started to doa better job of including us,
and then we could kind of say,okay, these are the problems
(32:54):
that we see that may happen ifyou do this.
And he did a much better job ofaccountability the further down
we got, and we started just tosee him start to look like he
was becoming a little more clearin his path and in his vision.
So that was really fun,actually, to watch him grow as
(33:17):
the owner of a business and thenunderstand kind of his limits
and then begin to trust us to beable to help him make good
decisions for his company beforemaking these big movements that
would upset his business andcause a lot of problems and a
lot of things to kind of breakdown.
Another example was he starteddoing some call routing at one
(33:41):
point early, and he didn't thinkabout the loops that it would
create.
And so what happened was wasthat he set it up in a way,
because he had multiple peopleinvolved in his phone system.
And so what would happen issomeone would call in, but he
would have a third party,another company he worked with
(34:02):
do, routing in a way that itwould loop the call and then
break the phone call chain towhere the phone calls wouldn't
go through.
And he would reach out to usbecause he would assume that it
was something wrong with ourtracking numbers, when in
reality, the thing that he didwith this other person caused it
to break.
And at one point, he broke hisphone system, I'm wanting to
(34:26):
say, maybe a month.
And it was with certaintracking numbers.
And we had to go back and thenwe identified that it was a
movement that was made.
Now, what was good was he didtrust us to help him with those
technical decisions and startedconnecting us.
And then being able to be inthose communications really
helped us kind of orchestratethe changes and then make good
(34:49):
recommendations to him.
And then toward the end, beforewe let him go, he was really
doing a good job of starting totrust us a little more with
that.
Now, with all that being said,he did something really good
that we see a lot of customersnot do well.
And that was he was involved.
(35:10):
Now, although the guy wasbipolar in his actions, he was
also one of those guys that waswilling to participate, offer
suggestions, and get on boardwith strategies that helped
improve his business.
Now, this is non-debatable.
Now, the one thing that youwant to know as an owner of a
(35:34):
business is that an agency likeours, for example, full service
boutique style agency, we're notan expert in your field.
Now, we can bring a lot to thetable because we work with a lot
of businesses.
We understand a lot of thingsthat go on in business and
probably one like yours.
But the idea is your businessis unique.
(35:56):
And by you participating inwhat you see with your
customers, what's good aboutyour business, what's bad about
your business, all those thingshelp contribute to building a
plan.
So we've always believed thatthe best marketing strategy
combines your experience withour experience.
(36:17):
Now, a lot of agencies don'twant this.
And I'll tell you why theydon't want it.
It's not because it's noteffective.
It's because it's timeconsuming.
So the idea is that if awebsite is built or a marketing
strategy is created or socialmedia is planned, your
(36:38):
involvement in that every minutethat you take is a minute that
that agency could be doingsomething else.
Now, so there is a push pullhere.
And the idea is that you wantto be able to participate in
your business and be able tooffer information.
So his contributions to themarketing strategy, which drove
(37:01):
the cost of phone calls down,along with his willingness to be
able to fund the marketingstrategies well, contributed to
his success that he had while hewas with us.
And so a lot of times when wework with the business and if
they don't participate or theyjust expect you to magically
(37:22):
know the answers.
Now, we do that and wesometimes have success with
that.
But always, the business thatparticipates more always does
better.
And at our particular agency,we like that.
And the reason we like it isbecause usually the businesses
grow, and then they trust us todo more, and then we grow with
(37:42):
them.
And then that's just a nicesymbiotic relationship.
So if you're working with anagency and you see they're
resistant to your input, that'sactually a bad sign.
And so part of what kept usworking with this client was the
fact that he was hungry to be apart of things.
He was a willing participant,and he did care about his
(38:06):
business.
And so as you can see, with allthe negatives, you know, with
all the hot and cold that thisguy had, his passion, although
sometimes misguided,contributed.
And that meant a lot to us asan agency to see that, and that
kept us hanging on.
So what was it?
(38:26):
Okay, so we're looking at thisand you're probably asking
yourself, okay, you know, thisguy, he didn't cause the
termination because of the hotand cold, the late night, you
know, request for calls, youknow, all these crazy things.
So what was it that ultimatelyended the relationship and
forced us to make a decision?
(38:47):
Well, it came down tonon-payment.
It turns out he got behind onhis payments and he turned us
into a collections agency.
Now, part of what he did, andagain, he was kind of scattered,
so it's hard to tell if thiswas intentional or
(39:08):
unintentional.
But even that, what we foundout was that, and we were
willing to work with him.
I mean, 100% willing to workwith him on payments because we
thought this was a breakoutyear.
And we knew that if we couldhang on and work through it, we
knew that this was going to bethe year.
And he was starting to comearound and trust us.
(39:28):
He wasn't doing the late nightstuff as much.
All that stuff just startedgoing.
And so we didn't want to endbased upon him being behind on
his payments with us.
But where it got tricky was wesaw the same trends in his
ability to try to settle things.
(39:51):
the situation.
Like, for example, one of thethings that he told me
personally when I called him upwas that he said that the
invoices that were smalleramounts made it to his inbox,
but the larger amounts did notmake it to his inbox.
Now, the software we use isvery common software used for
(40:13):
most businesses, and you canactually see if it was delivered
or not.
And so knowing that thoseemails were delivered and
knowing that that was kind ofnonsensical was a flag.
The other thing that he did wasdemanded that we go back and
provide him a report of all of2024.
(40:34):
Now, you can imagine the workthat it would take to do that
accounting for him on his behalfto go back in and build that
just so that he could try tofind some way to not to pay his
debt.
And so by putting us throughthat extra work and by doing
these extra things, it justcreated a sense that there was,
(40:59):
you know, he was trying not topay his bill.
And that ultimately is whatcost us the relationship.
We figured that in culminationwith everything else, it wasn't
worth it.
And we figured that we hadgotten him into a good spot.
Now, if I can conclude thisparticular part, one of the
(41:19):
tough parts was even determiningthe, you know, the termination
agreement.
Because, you know, ultimatelywe said, hey, we just don't
think this is a real good fit.
You know, we don't think we'regoing to be able to help you
moving forward.
And typically, you know, like Isaid, this has probably only
happened to us maybe six orseven times since 2006, right?
(41:41):
When we create a terminationagreement and we talk that over
with the client, we normallysend out to set the proper
expectation.
Because we want the client toleave happy with everything they
want to leave with.
And we want to do somethingthat's reasonable.
And we want to clearly defineit to where we can meet the
expectation.
And even creating.
(42:03):
Now, when we do that...
I can probably tell you thatI've had to create those, like I
said, a handful of times, andnormally it'll go through one
revision.
This particular person put usthrough about 13 hours of
revisions.
And so that kind of solidifiedthe fact that he just was no
(42:25):
longer a good fit for us.
And so we do wish him the best.
We do hope that he's successfulin his ventures and that he
does proceed in the rightdirection and he does learn from
what we're doing.
Now, the unfortunate part isprior to doing the podcast, I
wanted to go look and see ifwhat kind of moves he had made
(42:46):
just by running some analyticaltools.
And unfortunately, he did startmaking some bad decisions.
And we hope that...
you know, he can correct thoseand get moving in the right
direction again.
Because in Asheville, NorthCarolina, there is great
potential for a plumber to takeover a large part of the market,
(43:09):
even when there is brandrecognition and other segments.
So there you go.
Hopefully that helps you out.
And there's the case of theclient that we had to let go.
And next week, we're going toapproach another story that
crosses our agency, andhopefully that'll help you out
too.
Thank you so much for listeningin to the first episode of Over
(43:33):
the Bull.
We hope it's beneficial to you.
We hope you learn from it, andstay away from those unsolicited
spammers.
Introduction (43:41):
Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bull, brought to
you by Integris Design, afull-service design and
marketing agency out ofAsheville, North Carolina.
Until next time.
You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut
through marketing noise.
Here's your host, Ken Carroll.
Ken (00:09):
We fired a client.
That's right.
In our very first episode,we're going to talk about
letting a client go and why wedid it, along with what you can
learn from it.
Hi, my name's Ken, and welcometo the very first episode of
Over the Bull.
Now there's a funny thing aboutagencies.
We want every business to thinkthat we know everything to do
(00:32):
in every situation.
Now the truth is, everybusiness is different and every
situation is different.
And along with it comes growth,learning, making adjustments,
changing, and yes, evensometimes doing things like
firing a client.
So who is this client and whydid we let him go?
Now this particular client,he's a plumber.
(00:55):
He has several people that workwith him, and he has a great
brand.
Now, when I say branding, hislogos, his slogans, his color
usage, everything is brilliant.
Now, we didn't create any ofthis, but we do recognize good
work when it does happen.
And he has some really goodwork.
And we knew that if we couldjust work with the brand a
(01:18):
little bit, we could make greatprogress for the business.
And he needed a lot of help.
When he first came on board andwe started looking at his
business, everything was broken.
Everything from the way hetracked phone calls to the way
he marketed to his website, evendown to the actual web address
that he used, which caused a lotof confusion.
(01:40):
And so we had to start diggingdeep in order to make progress
with this client.
Now, before I go further, youknow, over the last 20 years or
so, we've identified clientsthat are at different phases.
And understanding where thisparticular client's coming from
helps kind of understand wherewe're at.
(02:00):
So typically the first phase ofany business is this kind of
stage of innocence, where wherethey're sold things or worse
yet, they have a punch list, youknow, such as I need a website,
I need a business card, I needdifferent things.
And then they also start havingthese fantasy expectations.
(02:22):
Now, this is no fault of theirown, because a lot of the
services that are offered todayare really are oversimplified
and sensationalistic, such asthe do-it-yourself website
builders or even agencies thatsay they can launch ads and
start promoting.
And then they imply the factthat they're going to get a lot
(02:43):
more out of those ads than theyinitially would and really kind
of minimize the amount of workthat has to go into it.
Now, once someone goes intothis innocent phase, they often
get taken advantage of.
There's really no nice way tosay that.
And oftentimes, thosebusinesses will come out on the
other side, and they may bejaded.
(03:05):
Now, when they're jaded,they're angry or skeptical, and
especially since the fantasydidn't come true.
You know, they figured they'dput a little bit of money in it,
have a website, get an emailaddress.
And when they did a little bitof marketing, the business would
just come flowing in.
And it usually doesn't happen.
And in reality, it usuallydoesn't happen that way.
(03:28):
Then what happens is, is someof those people go into what I
call the Ponce de Leon phase.
Now, Ponce de Leon was the guywho was looking for the fountain
of youth.
Since their perceptions of whatshould happen did not happen,
typically the business may moveinto a situation where they
start experimenting.
(03:48):
by firing, hiring differentpeople, moving around, are
looking for that magic bulletthat maybe somebody else is
using and they're not.
And so now this puts them on ajourney that is basically
directionless, and they becomereally low-hanging fruit for the
clever sales company that comesto them and says they
(04:11):
specialize in a certain marketor offer a certain service that
sounds really good.
Now, one of the big buzzwordstoday, obviously, Now the next
thing that that leads to isinconsistency.
(04:34):
Now, I don't mean they don'tfund it.
I don't mean the business isn'tpaying for stuff.
If a business isn't willing tocommit a consistent budget, then
they're kind of dead in thewater to begin with.
But some of these businessesstill commit a budget, but yet
they still are not getting whatthey want, and so they switch.
Now, when they switch to otherpeople or other services, they
(04:58):
kind of reboot that service.
And when they reboot it, theystart back at square one.
Now, It's obvious sometimes youhave to, you know, there's too
many of these sales pitches andthe terminology is so, you know,
technical and people usesensationalism to get you on
board when in reality they haveno business of doing it.
(05:19):
And so it's a tricky spot tobe, you know, when you're
switching and moving fromservice to service or looking
for that all elusive magicbullet.
Now, this typically leads tothe next phase, and that is
either they go out of business,they run out of money, and the
closer they get to running outof money, the more they need the
(05:42):
expectation met.
And so what I mean by that is,you know, they switch service,
switch service, switch service,and then they're down to their
last credit card, and thenthey're hoping that they can
hire somebody that's going to beable to, you know, pull that
fourth quarter Hail Mary passand keep their business afloat.
The other thing is they give upon internet marketing, they try
(06:03):
other things, and they don'thave high expectations of the
internet.
And some, of course, find agood service.
Now, of course, some find goodservices early on, some find
them later.
But we often find today whensomeone comes to us, we have to
get very grounded and very realwith what the Internet is.
And so when they come to us,it's really one of those
(06:27):
situations where we say, OK,here are the facts when it comes
to the Internet.
And they're ready for that kindof sober approach and that
grounded approach, which in someways makes our life easier
because we sell them reality.
And when you sell reality, itmakes for a more solid
relationship.
Now, this particular client, hecame to us in the jaded phase.
(06:52):
He was angry and skeptical, andhe was also confused, and he
was very scattered in everythingthat he had done.
So like the perfect storm.
But, you know, we face thissometimes.
And it's very normal when westart talking with the business
for them to do things like shareideas and concepts or question
(07:14):
what we do or things like that.
And so we kind of go throughthis phase of orienting a client
to where they can have theproper expectation and we can
start working toward achievingreal goals.
Now, one of the things that wasunique about this particular
customer was he never outgrewthe skeptical phase.
(07:37):
As a matter of fact, when hestarted out with us, there were
some questions that he wouldask, and those questions were
normal.
They were very inquisitive andthings like that, and we'd offer
education.
But for some reason, the morethat we offered the education,
the more he almost took aliberty of being more aggressive
(07:59):
toward us.
Now, what fueled theaggressiveness for this
particular customer was severalitems.
Now, you can learn a lot fromthese items, and I'm sure you've
faced some of these itemsalready.
Now, the first approach, onething that just threw this guy
off was what I would call theGood Samaritan.
(08:20):
Now, the Good Samaritan, whatthat would be is someone who
sends an email.
So he'd get an email in hisinbox.
And in this email, it would saysomething like, Hello, I ran
across your website and I sawsome errors on your website.
And I attached a report thatyou can forward on to your web
(08:42):
person.
Or if you need some help, justlet us know.
Now, this Good Samaritan orLone Ranger approach was
something he would look at, andhe would take a look at that
report, and then he would sendit to us.
And like I said, early on inthe game, we would kind of write
back and say, okay, this iswhat's happening, and this is
why this hasn't happened yet,and those kind of things.
(09:04):
But then later, it just startedgetting more and more
aggressive, for lack of a betterword.
I can't tell you how manytimes, you know, he would
contact me via text or via phonecall.
And he would demand that I jumpinto his Zoom session because
he went to a trade show orreceived one of these email
(09:26):
reports talking about somethingthat we had missed or some
things we had missed.
So, you know, obviously as anagency with a full schedule, we
couldn't just stop.
But usually I would try toprioritize it and get in the
meeting within an hour or so.
So I'd jump into the meetingand he would, you know, proceed
(09:46):
to, you know, be very short.
You know, it would always bevery short text messages or very
short phone calls demandingthat we jump into a Zoom session
and get into it.
And then he would proceed tolike just question us.
But the problem was he wasn'treally technically savvy, and he
was just kind of repeating thesales pitch and then
(10:08):
interpreting the data based uponthe sales pitch, but it was
inaccurate.
And there's a big problem withthis whole report, but there's
actually a lot of problems withthis.
But what it ultimately did wasit just created this cycle.
Now, this cycle is, you know,we have to account for our time.
And eventually we startedlooking at the clock and
(10:30):
realizing, you know, we'respending a lot of time just
going back and forth andprioritizing, which is hurting
our relationship with otherclients or is making us have to
work late.
So we're making some reallytough decisions.
But let's really analyze whatthis report does.
Let's look at the GoodSamaritan.
So actually, this predicates onprobably back as far as Edward
(10:54):
Bernays, which is one of theearliest of the influencers of
modern marketing today.
And then it kind of goes down,and you can see this kind of
approach in the Hare Krishnas atthe airports in different ways.
But basically, the number onething that it does is it's
giving you something, and bynature, you want to respond.
(11:19):
Now, human nature is to respondto certain things like that,
and that's exactly what the HareKrishnas would do.
Give a flower or something likethat, and then ask for a
donation, and the person wouldfeel obligated to give money.
You see, it's this thing thatthey're taking advantage of.
But let's really analyze this.
The first thing that I want topoint out is they're sending an
(11:42):
unsolicited, spammy-style email.
Now, sometimes it'll say R-Ecolon and have a subject, which
would imply that you've alreadywritten them, so you've got a
level of deception.
And then sometimes in the bodyof the copy, they have your
name.
Now, for me, and I get spamstuff all the time, people
(12:03):
wanting to sell us wholesaleservices, white label services,
overseas services, you name it,promising everything.
Now, here's the thing.
When I get an email like that,the first thing that I do is
block it.
The reason I do is becausethey're intruding on my time.
They're kind of sneaking theway in.
(12:24):
They don't respect my time,effort, and energy.
And by not respecting my time,they're costing me time even to
block them.
And I find that offensive.
And so you have to come up withthe idea, do you want to waste
a tenth?
You know, if you spend an houra day or 30 minutes a day, you
work a 10-hour day.
If it's an hour, you've lost atenth of your time you're
(12:46):
putting into these spammy thingsyou're looking through and
reading.
Is it really worth that time,effort, and energy?
But hold on a minute.
They sent that report, and thatreport looks like they put a
lot of time into that.
And it looks very technical,and it looks good.
So what do we do with thatreport?
Now, as an agency, I can tellyou that I can run you a report
(13:12):
on competitor Google ads.
I can run one on search engineoptimization.
I can run one on a lot ofdifferent areas within your
business.
And it only takes me aboutthree minutes.
That's right.
Three minutes.
And that includes putting mylogo, my branding, and even your
logo in it.
Now, agencies, we have theability to use these tools.
(13:35):
I mean, even looking at yourGoogle My Business within a
seven-mile radius, those justtake a few seconds.
So the idea is that report,let's say, for example, let's
say I wanted to try a marketingstrategy.
I could hire somebody thatdoesn't know anything about
marketing.
and I can tell them to push abutton and they could generate a
(13:58):
report.
Then I can give them a cannedscript and then I can tell them
to send that script and attach areport.
They don't know anything.
Now I've lost about threeminutes of that person's time to
have them do that.
So if I have them do thataround the clock, well, there
they go.
And that's my marketingstrategy.
(14:18):
So what does that tell youabout the business?
That tells you that they can'tmarket ethically.
See, this is huge.
This is why you block them.
Because if they can't marketthemselves ethically, how in the
world are they going to marketyou ethically?
They can't.
They're already showing youright out of the gate they don't
(14:40):
have the capability to market.
And if they did, they wouldmarket their own business
ethically.
Now, even at that, thosereports usually are pretty good
if they're running them from theright places.
But they're actually useless.
Now, let me describe this alittle bit to you.
Now, this is assuming you havea good person working with your
(15:04):
company to grow it.
Now, there are a lot, a lot ofused car salesmen in our world.
And there's a lot of them whodon't know what they're doing.
But let's just assume for theminute you've got the right guy
and they give you a report.
You look at the report and yousee all the things that are
wrong.
Now, the reality is that Icould look at any website
(15:28):
virtually on the planet and findsomething wrong with it.
I could probably find a lot ofthings wrong with it.
Now, the right or wrong thingisn't really the issue.
The more important issue iswhat's planned and when is it
planned to be accomplished.
So, you're not paying someonean infinite amount of time with
an infinite amount of resourcesto have your work done.
(15:50):
And if they're taking on a webproject that's already in
disarray, it's going to take awhile to get that thing lined
up.
And so that report, althoughit's accurate, it doesn't take
in consideration how that agencyis going to take care of that
elephant and clean up thatwebsite.
And so the idea is, what's thestrategy to get things cleaned
(16:11):
up?
It's not just the fact thatsomething's broken.
Is it in the works?
Is it going to be worked on?
And when is it going to beworked on?
Now, those reports don't tellyou that.
And here's the thing.
The person who made thatreport, even if they're fully
competent, doesn't know whereyour marketing is at, what's
being worked on, what's beingadjusted.
(16:33):
For example, as I mentioned,this particular plumber, his web
address was horrible.
Absolutely horrible.
It sounded like an IT companyor something.
So those reports would oftenaddress an old web address or an
old something or another thatwe've already handled and we're
in the process of managing.
(16:53):
So you can see those reportsout of context are really no
good.
Now, what happened with thisparticular client with the Good
Samaritan scenario was that, youknow, a long time into the
program.
Now, this is even after we'rerunning paid ads and we're
getting phone calls at such alow rate that his independent
(17:16):
coach would call us up and wantto know more about it because he
didn't believe we wereconverting phone calls at that
low of a rate with the paid ads.
So that's pretty phenomenal,especially in the plumbing
industry.
But he would call us up, orcall me up, or text me and
demand that I jump into ameeting.
And then what happened was it'dbe very short and very
(17:39):
accusatory, and he would come inand demand this, demand that,
ask this question, ask thatquestion.
And he kind of came at us likehe kind of got us in something,
you know, when in reality, therewas perfectly good explanations
for everything.
And as I mentioned, after welost two or three hours of time,
he realized that basically hewas given a sales pitch, right?
(18:04):
Now, what was unfortunate withthis particular person was he
would forget that conversation.
And so the very next report hegot at a trade show or the very
next report he got an email, itwas the exact same thing all
over again.
So you can imagine how manytimes you could lose three hours
just trying to re-explain wherethe project is at and
(18:29):
re-explain the idea that thesereports basically describe Don't
consider any of these othervariables.
Now, here's the thing.
This is not what calls theclient.
Now, it was frustrating.
Now, there's no joke.
When you get a text message oryou get someone who calls up and
they're constantly accusing youof something, you know, it's
(18:52):
tough.
Now, we do get clientsinitially who do have a lot of
questions because they've beenburned.
And that's okay.
We expect that.
But when it continues formonths and months and months and
months, and they're continuallybeing that susceptible to
basically simple sales pitches,it makes it very difficult to
(19:15):
work for that client.
But guess what?
This is not what cost theclient or costed us to have to
make a tough decision of lettingthe client go.
So what else was going on?
Now, there was something thathe was doing good matter of
fact, I would say probablypretty good.
So what that is, is as we startworking on his marketing, his
(19:39):
SEO services, his paidadvertising, his social media,
all those kind of things, he'dbring to the table some new
ideas.
Now, what I mean by that aredifferent ways that plumbers are
marketing in the industry withniche-based services.
So let me give you an idea.
company comes to him and theysay we have a website or we have
(20:04):
a program in which we can helppromote your plumbing business
in your area and what we woulddo is typically look at it once
he brought it to us and make adetermination and we would say
okay This is interesting.
Now, he'd come to us overlyexcited, typically, because,
(20:24):
again, he was very susceptibleto sensationalistic sales
pitches.
And he'd bring it to us, andwhat we would do is typically
look at it.
And in a lot of those cases,especially in modern times, the
businesses didn't check out.
Now, they looked reputable andthey sounded good, but they were
very green businesses thatreally couldn't provide what
(20:46):
they claimed to be able to give.
And so those would be excludedpretty quickly.
Then the next thing would be todetermine if we wanted to test
it, when we would start, when wewould stop, and how we would
track that particular project.
So what we would do is we'dtake a service, for example,
we'd assign a custom trackingphone number to it, custom URLs
(21:11):
to it, things of that nature.
And then we would see how wellthey performed within an
allotment of time.
And then if they proved to begood, then great.
And if they didn't, then wewould disregard them.
Now here's what's funny aboutthe plumbing industry.
I can tell you that 99% of whathe was approached with, even
the stuff that sounded good, didnot check out.
(21:34):
I find that really interestingbecause in today's world,
there's so many people who aretrying to offer marketing or
creative services, and it lookslike they really don't have any
business offering thoseservices.
And so a lot of times it wouldjust be very time consuming to
go in there and set up the testand then stop the test.
(21:55):
But here's the thing.
He did good by this.
I have to give him creditbecause the idea is that, you
know, if we found one, you know,piece of gold and he was
willing to spend someadvertising dollars in order to
allow us to test it, if we couldjust find one and it added and
(22:15):
it was a good conversioncreating service, then we'd want
to put that into the equation.
Now, none of them reallychecked out.
Now, I can even tell you someof the games.
For example, he called me upone time and he was really
excited about signing back upwith an email service he used
years ago.
And they gave him a report andhe said that the emails that
(22:40):
this plumbing-based emailcompany would send out equated
to like, it was a crazy number,like 20 or 30 percent converted
into new sales for his business.
So he called me up and he toldme about that.
And I thought, wow, okay.
I said, that's reallyinteresting.
Now, We work with a lot ofpeople, and we're partners with
(23:02):
Constant Contact and some otherguys, and we've been doing email
marketing for a long time.
And so for someone to tell methat's converting at that high
of a rate, it doesn't.
It usually does not do that.
But I went ahead and I lookedat it, and I recommended that he
go back and look really hard atthe numbers to find out if
these were relationships he hadalready had, and basically these
(23:26):
would have been orders thatwould have happened no matter
what.
He came back about two weekslater, and he said, yeah, he
goes, none of that worked out.
He says it turns out the numberwas less than half of a percent
or something.
So he wasn't going to invest init.
But if he went based upon theirreport, he would have honestly
believed that that email servicewas generating 20% or 30% of
(23:50):
new sales for his business.
You've got to be careful withthese reports and these
services.
So that's the big lesson.
The other big lesson is, yes,if you can afford to test
different services, then it's agreat thing.
Because if they can convert orthey provide another outlet for
you to market and it providesreally good leads, then you'd
(24:14):
want to do it.
You'd want to add it to whatyou're already doing.
So the equation is somethinglike this.
Let's say that you run GoogleAds, and let's say for every
dollar you spend, you make $2.
Well, how many $1 would youinvest?
You know, quite a bit, right?
Well, let's say you've gotanother service that you found,
(24:35):
and let's say this other servicegives you $1.75 for every
dollar you sent.
Well, would you do that too?
Now, you see, at some point,you'd say, well, I want to do
more in Google Ads.
But at some point, you're goingto hit a critical mass.
And so you want to go ahead anddistribute and you want to do
as much as you can where itequals profitability for your
(24:56):
company.
And so that's part of what youdo by kind of diversifying your
advertising.
Now, here's a free tip.
When I worked with this onelarge company back in 2009,
2010, one thing that wedistinguished was the idea of
subscription-based servicesversus newsstand kind of
services.
You know, those services whereyou go into a service station
(25:19):
and get that 75-cent newspaperor whatever.
And what we found out in a lotof cases, subscription-based
advertising has a limited shelflife, meaning we would advertise
three months out of the yearversus newsstand where we had
advertised pretty muchyear-round, minus a few little
points.
And what we would find is thatwe were able to drive the the
(25:44):
sales up, and then we were alsoable to greatly reduce the
amount of sales advertisingexpenses that we had.
And so we were able to reducethat dramatically.
I think we took it from like$22,000 a week to about $13,000
a week.
Now this is a huge company, andmost of the people we work with
do not have those kind ofbudgets.
(26:05):
But we learned a lot throughthat experience back in 2009 and
2010.
So going back to the client.
Now, this is the thing.
Now, this was a good practice.
He had an extra budget that heallocated to special advertising
and test marketing.
This was a good thing.
It was not a bad thing.
(26:26):
And so if you can set aside abudget to test market, but
you're able to qualify it,meaning don't just run ads and,
you know, look for the phonering and then you stop there.
You've got to qualify thatparticular service.
And if you can qualify it andyou can spend the money and
you're paying your agency enoughto be able to investigate it,
(26:46):
it is a great thing.
And so this definitely did notcost the relationship with the
customer.
Now, this guy ran hot.
Now, what I mean by that is Hewould be the kind of guy that,
based upon his mood, he wouldcall up and make these demands
that just simply couldn't bedone.
He would call up and say thathe needs more phone calls.
(27:08):
As though, as an agency, wehave a magic button that can
just magically increase phonecalls if someone calls and is
irate enough or demanding enoughthat somehow we're going to be
able to just magically increasethat.
No one has that button.
No one.
And so when you look atsomething like that, it was
(27:30):
tough because he would do it.
And usually our response afterabout a year of working with him
was we could extrapolate it.
And so what we'd be able to dois say, okay, our average cost
per phone call would be X numberof dollars.
And so if you want to increaseand get 10 more phone calls
based on historic data, you needto increase your budget by this
(27:53):
amount.
So we're able to give him likeanalytical data.
Now, what was unusual aboutthat was he never took us up on
it.
He would always say he wantedto do it, but then he would go
away and never do it, which waskind of odd.
It was almost like he wastrying to project his
frustration or his fear aboutbusiness or something onto us
(28:16):
and thought that maybe if hecalled us up and just complained
enough that somehow we wouldhave some magic answer.
So the big lesson there isthere are no magic answers.
And oftentimes, if you call andkind of overstep your bounds
with your agency, what willhappen a lot of times, because
agencies are also peoplepleasers, is they may knee jerk
(28:40):
and make big moves in yourmarketing.
And that could actually mess upthe algorithm in places like
Google.
Now, if that happens, it'llactually set you back.
But if you create that fearwithin the agency, that's very
possible that they do somethinglike that.
And so the idea is that whenyou do marketing, it's a lot of
(29:04):
methodical movement over aperiod of time.
A lot of times, you know, whenyou talk to Google reps, you
know, a lot of them will call usup or, you know, we'll talk
with them and they'll say, okay,when you make these moves, you
want to wait a little bit oftime, let the algorithm catch up
to it, and let's see whathappens.
Now, this is true with makingbudget adjustments or creative
(29:28):
adjustments or technicaladjustments or campaign
adjustments.
There's a ton of adjustmentsyou could do, but making too
many adjustments at the sametime is the equivalent of making
too many adjustments on a stockcar at the same time you know
when you watch a stock car racethey make these little minor
adjustments let the car run andthen they make another
adjustment now only in crazysituations do they make big
(29:51):
adjustments and when they dothey know they're taking a
chance well it's kind of thesame thing with marketing now
truth be known he was pushing iton the way that he conducted
himself with us Not only withhis irateness, but also what
you'd find is in addition tothis hot, cold, happy, angry
(30:14):
kind of mentality that he had,he was constantly late for
scheduled meetings we had withhim to go over data.
Not only that, but he wouldconstantly stay later.
And there was no easy way tokind of urge him to end the
meeting.
And then he would digress intoother subjects.
And, you know, there were sometimes where we literally
(30:36):
couldn't have forced him out ofthe office with the crowbar.
And that's pretty difficult foran agency too, because we do
want to please a client.
But then having to create thoseboundaries and then have them
ignore those boundaries wasextremely difficult.
Another thing that he tended todo was send late night
emergencies.
(30:56):
So you could imagine getting alate night message saying that
there was something urgent andit was not urgent at all.
It was just something that hewould want to talk about late at
night, you know, when he wastraveling or his wind down time
or whatever.
but he would make it to whereit was an emergency in his own
(31:18):
mind.
And he got worried, didn'treally care about respecting
those boundaries either.
But again, we kept massaging itand with the goal of knowing if
we can just keep educating theclient, keep pushing them.
We knew that 2025 was going tobe a big breakout year for this
person.
And honestly, I started to seehim start to understand
(31:44):
different things that were goingon.
And I started to seeimprovement from him as the
owner of a business.
So let me share some additionalstories with that.
When he first started workingwith us, he was very prone to
quickly make moves.
For example, he switched phonesystems.
And he did it without us.
(32:06):
He basically caught up andsaid, we're switching phone
systems.
Now, he had no consideration orhe didn't think through things
like what happens to thetracking number when I switch
phone systems?
What happens to the phonecalls?
What happens to call routing?
How do these different thingswork?
in conjunction with hisbusiness and it made things a
(32:32):
little bit difficult for usbecause he would call us up
because the tracking numberswouldn't work or there'd be
something wrong with routing andso we would get pulled into
conversations because of thedecisions that he had made.
Now Over time, he started to doa better job of including us,
and then we could kind of say,okay, these are the problems
(32:54):
that we see that may happen ifyou do this.
And he did a much better job ofaccountability the further down
we got, and we started just tosee him start to look like he
was becoming a little more clearin his path and in his vision.
So that was really fun,actually, to watch him grow as
(33:17):
the owner of a business and thenunderstand kind of his limits
and then begin to trust us to beable to help him make good
decisions for his company beforemaking these big movements that
would upset his business andcause a lot of problems and a
lot of things to kind of breakdown.
Another example was he starteddoing some call routing at one
(33:41):
point early, and he didn't thinkabout the loops that it would
create.
And so what happened was wasthat he set it up in a way,
because he had multiple peopleinvolved in his phone system.
And so what would happen issomeone would call in, but he
would have a third party,another company he worked with
(34:02):
do, routing in a way that itwould loop the call and then
break the phone call chain towhere the phone calls wouldn't
go through.
And he would reach out to usbecause he would assume that it
was something wrong with ourtracking numbers, when in
reality, the thing that he didwith this other person caused it
to break.
And at one point, he broke hisphone system, I'm wanting to
(34:26):
say, maybe a month.
And it was with certaintracking numbers.
And we had to go back and thenwe identified that it was a
movement that was made.
Now, what was good was he didtrust us to help him with those
technical decisions and startedconnecting us.
And then being able to be inthose communications really
helped us kind of orchestratethe changes and then make good
(34:49):
recommendations to him.
And then toward the end, beforewe let him go, he was really
doing a good job of starting totrust us a little more with
that.
Now, with all that being said,he did something really good
that we see a lot of customersnot do well.
And that was he was involved.
(35:10):
Now, although the guy wasbipolar in his actions, he was
also one of those guys that waswilling to participate, offer
suggestions, and get on boardwith strategies that helped
improve his business.
Now, this is non-debatable.
Now, the one thing that youwant to know as an owner of a
(35:34):
business is that an agency likeours, for example, full service
boutique style agency, we're notan expert in your field.
Now, we can bring a lot to thetable because we work with a lot
of businesses.
We understand a lot of thingsthat go on in business and
probably one like yours.
But the idea is your businessis unique.
(35:56):
And by you participating inwhat you see with your
customers, what's good aboutyour business, what's bad about
your business, all those thingshelp contribute to building a
plan.
So we've always believed thatthe best marketing strategy
combines your experience withour experience.
(36:17):
Now, a lot of agencies don'twant this.
And I'll tell you why theydon't want it.
It's not because it's noteffective.
It's because it's timeconsuming.
So the idea is that if awebsite is built or a marketing
strategy is created or socialmedia is planned, your
(36:38):
involvement in that every minutethat you take is a minute that
that agency could be doingsomething else.
Now, so there is a push pullhere.
And the idea is that you wantto be able to participate in
your business and be able tooffer information.
So his contributions to themarketing strategy, which drove
(37:01):
the cost of phone calls down,along with his willingness to be
able to fund the marketingstrategies well, contributed to
his success that he had while hewas with us.
And so a lot of times when wework with the business and if
they don't participate or theyjust expect you to magically
(37:22):
know the answers.
Now, we do that and wesometimes have success with
that.
But always, the business thatparticipates more always does
better.
And at our particular agency,we like that.
And the reason we like it isbecause usually the businesses
grow, and then they trust us todo more, and then we grow with
(37:42):
them.
And then that's just a nicesymbiotic relationship.
So if you're working with anagency and you see they're
resistant to your input, that'sactually a bad sign.
And so part of what kept usworking with this client was the
fact that he was hungry to be apart of things.
He was a willing participant,and he did care about his
(38:06):
business.
And so as you can see, with allthe negatives, you know, with
all the hot and cold that thisguy had, his passion, although
sometimes misguided,contributed.
And that meant a lot to us asan agency to see that, and that
kept us hanging on.
So what was it?
(38:26):
Okay, so we're looking at thisand you're probably asking
yourself, okay, you know, thisguy, he didn't cause the
termination because of the hotand cold, the late night, you
know, request for calls, youknow, all these crazy things.
So what was it that ultimatelyended the relationship and
forced us to make a decision?
(38:47):
Well, it came down tonon-payment.
It turns out he got behind onhis payments and he turned us
into a collections agency.
Now, part of what he did, andagain, he was kind of scattered,
so it's hard to tell if thiswas intentional or
(39:08):
unintentional.
But even that, what we foundout was that, and we were
willing to work with him.
I mean, 100% willing to workwith him on payments because we
thought this was a breakoutyear.
And we knew that if we couldhang on and work through it, we
knew that this was going to bethe year.
And he was starting to comearound and trust us.
(39:28):
He wasn't doing the late nightstuff as much.
All that stuff just startedgoing.
And so we didn't want to endbased upon him being behind on
his payments with us.
But where it got tricky was wesaw the same trends in his
ability to try to settle things.
(39:51):
the situation.
Like, for example, one of thethings that he told me
personally when I called him upwas that he said that the
invoices that were smalleramounts made it to his inbox,
but the larger amounts did notmake it to his inbox.
Now, the software we use isvery common software used for
(40:13):
most businesses, and you canactually see if it was delivered
or not.
And so knowing that thoseemails were delivered and
knowing that that was kind ofnonsensical was a flag.
The other thing that he did wasdemanded that we go back and
provide him a report of all of2024.
(40:34):
Now, you can imagine the workthat it would take to do that
accounting for him on his behalfto go back in and build that
just so that he could try tofind some way to not to pay his
debt.
And so by putting us throughthat extra work and by doing
these extra things, it justcreated a sense that there was,
(40:59):
you know, he was trying not topay his bill.
And that ultimately is whatcost us the relationship.
We figured that in culminationwith everything else, it wasn't
worth it.
And we figured that we hadgotten him into a good spot.
Now, if I can conclude thisparticular part, one of the
(41:19):
tough parts was even determiningthe, you know, the termination
agreement.
Because, you know, ultimatelywe said, hey, we just don't
think this is a real good fit.
You know, we don't think we'regoing to be able to help you
moving forward.
And typically, you know, like Isaid, this has probably only
happened to us maybe six orseven times since 2006, right?
(41:41):
When we create a terminationagreement and we talk that over
with the client, we normallysend out to set the proper
expectation.
Because we want the client toleave happy with everything they
want to leave with.
And we want to do somethingthat's reasonable.
And we want to clearly defineit to where we can meet the
expectation.
And even creating.
(42:03):
Now, when we do that...
I can probably tell you thatI've had to create those, like I
said, a handful of times, andnormally it'll go through one
revision.
This particular person put usthrough about 13 hours of
revisions.
And so that kind of solidifiedthe fact that he just was no
(42:25):
longer a good fit for us.
And so we do wish him the best.
We do hope that he's successfulin his ventures and that he
does proceed in the rightdirection and he does learn from
what we're doing.
Now, the unfortunate part isprior to doing the podcast, I
wanted to go look and see ifwhat kind of moves he had made
(42:46):
just by running some analyticaltools.
And unfortunately, he did startmaking some bad decisions.
And we hope that...
you know, he can correct thoseand get moving in the right
direction again.
Because in Asheville, NorthCarolina, there is great
potential for a plumber to takeover a large part of the market,
(43:09):
even when there is brandrecognition and other segments.
So there you go.
Hopefully that helps you out.
And there's the case of theclient that we had to let go.
And next week, we're going toapproach another story that
crosses our agency, andhopefully that'll help you out
too.
Thank you so much for listeningin to the first episode of Over
(43:33):
the Bull.
We hope it's beneficial to you.
We hope you learn from it, andstay away from those unsolicited
spammers.
Introduction (43:41):
Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bull, brought to
you by Integris Design, afull-service design and
marketing agency out ofAsheville, North Carolina.
Until next time.
Popular Podcasts
Cold Case Files: Miami
Joyce Sapp, 76; Bryan Herrera, 16; and Laurance Webb, 32—three Miami residents whose lives were stolen in brutal, unsolved homicides. Cold Case Files: Miami follows award‑winning radio host and City of Miami Police reserve officer Enrique Santos as he partners with the department’s Cold Case Homicide Unit, determined family members, and the advocates who spend their lives fighting for justice for the victims who can no longer fight for themselves.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.