Create a Frictionless Business with Marketing Wizard Ryan Chute

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
We're trying to build a bond with our customer, or are we

(00:03):
trying to activate a sale? We need to do both,
and we need to do both in protection of the brand's reputation.
And when we do that, holistically as a single
solution, we build a business that goes from
name recognition to a household name.

(00:33):
What if you can eliminate just one obstacle to unlock exponential
growth in your business? Meet Ryan Shute, a strategic marketing
expert at Wizard of Ads who specializes in transforming
small businesses into major brands by removing the
friction that stifles growth. Ryan's upcoming book,
frictionless, encapsulates his journey from a high friction retail

(00:55):
environment to leading an 8 figure creative consulting
agency. Join us as Ryan shares how cutting through common
setbacks can pave the way for smoother,
more profitable business operations. Ryan,
welcome to SeatGo Create. Hey. Thank you so much. I appreciate
it. Glad that you're here, Ryan. We're gonna have a fun conversation. Let's

(01:18):
go big. Let's start off big here. Gonna give you the choice.
Which question do you wanna answer? What do you
do, or who are you? Just go ahead and choose
and start answering. I I rarely get the
chance of, answering the question who I am, so I'll, I'll I'll take the path,
less trodden. And who I am is a is a man of

(01:40):
principle, a person who grew up in a high friction environment.
Mhmm. There's there's past traumas. There's past
challenges that have shaped the person that I am today, and
and in more recent years, have have come to realize that I need
to work on myself, and I need to work on the inner
leadership and the inner leader, for me to be the the

(02:03):
leader, the the tribe leader, and the individual leader, not
only as a boss, as a person who contributes to a
large organization, but as a dad, and as a
husband, and as a person in my communities,
that that I also associate and and appreciate deeply.
You know, when I when I think about what I'm trying to achieve, I'm trying

(02:27):
to achieve something bigger than myself that is going to
give back significantly to this universe. And I've chosen a
tribe of people that I really, really appreciate in the in the services
space. People who are often underappreciated in
what some feel is an ugly duckling business, and,
it's not a sexy thing to sell or or market for.

(02:50):
And I and I really love the challenge of that, and and and I've
gotten very good at cracking that code.
To be able to serve people really well from the top of the funnel
straight down to to the things that matter in our lives that
aren't associated to business. So one of the words you led off
with is the word principles, and I'm

(03:12):
always intrigued. That's one of these big words. I I believe in
the world we're in today, and I know you're we'll we'll be talking about
some techniques, tactics, and things like that in in the area of
ads and marketing that you specialize in as we move along.
But I I think a lot of people I don't wanna say they're lacking
principles. That's not I don't think the thing I want to say,

(03:35):
but I think it takes a certain person to add that into the
their vocabulary. Mhmm. Mhmm.
Have you always had that in your vocabulary of who you
are, or did that arrive at some point along the way?
And if so, when? I've always been
a person of high principle. You know, I see what's just and

(03:58):
unjust in this world and pick a side. So, ultimately,
I have hills that I die on, and usually to my detriment,
because I'm operating off of a fairly high level of
of honesty and integrity. I'm I'm trying
hard not just to serve myself, and it's not that people, lack
principles. It's that they lack conviction of those principles, and

(04:21):
that comes down to a fundamental understanding that I have. Let's
get deep real quick here and and talk about values and
beliefs. You know, Niels Bohr, the the Nobel
Prize winning, physicist, once said that the
opposite of a profound truth can very often be an equally profound truth. And,

(04:50):
Wizard Academy, where I learned the the the
the principles of communication, branding, and and
doing marketing in a different way than I had been used to, which
was deeply transactional. Right?
Effective, profitable, willing to work,
transactional. Ever changing, ever having to adjust and

(05:12):
adapt to the situation. Circling back down to
this last year, the year before last, Roy and
Manley and I, Manley is another partner of ours. He's a pastor at a church
in in New Orleans. And he he said, Ryan,
it's, it's interesting. You know, your your beliefs are
worthless. And I said, Manley, that's a great way to start a conversation. Where are

(05:34):
we going with this? And, you know,
justice and mercy are both profoundly
true truths, But they can't live in the same space.
It depends on which side of the table you're sitting on. The accused
murderer wants to get mercy, and the victim's
family wants to get justice. But what happens when the

(05:56):
victim's family murders the murderer? Now what?
Right? A belief is easily
interchangeable. It's convenient to
change based on the situation. And it's the world that we
live in today is that we change our beliefs to suit ourselves,
but that's not where value lives. Value lives in a

(06:19):
place where you do something inconvenient
for yourself to convenience another person,
to elevate another person in other situations.
And that value is what people value,
and that's why we call it value. Right?

(06:40):
Because it's valuable. You're doing something that's worth something because it
had an actual cost. Right? And when
we have an actual cost, now we have something that we can
do that's better than. That's the thing that can bring us
above what our competition is doing in whatever
perception of competition you are. Sometimes it's yourself.

(07:02):
Sometimes it's it's, you know, that guy who's who's hitting on your wife, and
sometimes it's that that other thing that's pulling your child's
attention or affecting your business in some way, or your
customer base as as to whether they choose to buy from you or not.
The employee who decides to work for you or go work for somebody else. All
of these things fall into the same bucket. What are

(07:23):
you doing that is actually valuable, and
what are you doing that is just serving you conveniently?
And that's why principles and value matters so much in
this world, because we're missing that part of our
life of actually putting ourselves into a position of struggle
or sacrifice. And until we do, are we

(07:47):
really serving at the highest level? Yeah. And I think there's so much
I don't know. Conflict is the right word, but maybe it is
that there's the tension. We're gonna talk about friction in a little while, but there's
that tension between the 2. To me, kind of from
the seat that I'm in, it seems like
people are picking their sides more and more. And and there's still some people that

(08:09):
are waffling between the 2, and I believe it probably
really comes into play when you begin working with some
leaders and owners of businesses and companies because you probably know really
quickly if there are people of principle, value,
what their culture is, all that type stuff. I wanna get into that in just
a little while because what I'd love to do first, you

(08:32):
mentioned a time frame of 2,000 15 seems to be a significant
time for you. And I know from doing a little bit of research, you grew
up. There was family business. You're up in Canada. There's some things
with the way you grew up. And then I'm gonna go back to
the introduction that you had. You said that you are currently
working on becoming the leader, the person,

(08:54):
and things like that. I'm maybe not wording it exactly the way you
did, but maybe just working on yourself. I I guess
I wanted to backtrack a little bit and and give a little bit of
background and maybe find out from
you what did some of the early experiences in your life, how
did it how did it play into what you're doing now? You know, growing up

(09:17):
around a family business, it was a furniture company, different things like that.
And then when did you become aware? Was it 2015?
Was it earlier that you needed to start working on yourself? We've got a lot
of leaders listening in. And these leaders, if they're listening to this
podcast, they're probably already they've crossed over that threshold

(09:37):
of I need to go deeper. I need to think in a different way,
values, and all that. However, I love to hear people's stories in their journey.
So give me some of the high points and low points of, you know, Ryan,
the early years. Yeah. The early
years growing up, we didn't have a lot of money. We were certainly
were low middle lower middle class. My

(10:00):
grandfather was upper middle class in his family, so
we knew that there was kind of this this,
better world that we should be aspiring to and and lived in an
environment, a really, entrepreneurial space. My grandfather,
my grandmother, my both my parents, all entrepreneurs. I
I became an entrepreneur early on. I started in sales, which is an

(10:21):
entrepreneurial journey into itself, and really wanted to go out there and
and help consult people. So I started off as some low level training, and then
evolved from there as I went to university and all those things.
I dropped out of high school, found out this
August of 2024 that I have ADHD, and and
that that's really been something that's affected my life and often affects the

(10:43):
life of entrepreneurs who are typically on a, you
know, a pursuit of the dopamine dragon. And
ultimately, I'd I'd come to
this loggerhead, you know, from 2013 to 15
that I wasn't accelerating and being
where I wanted to be in my life. I was doing things that I wanted

(11:05):
to do. I felt like I was on this path, but it was such a
struggle. It was such a grind. It was such,
a a frustrating part
of my life where I knew that I had more in me that I wasn't
putting out there. So I I went to the Wizard Academy. I had been reading
the Monday morning memo at Monday morning memo.com for the last 15

(11:26):
years thereabout. What I'd read in the rabbit
hole as you click through the pictures, you start to get these other little bits
of information from Roy. And he says, I'm thinking about stepping back and doing a
thing. I said, well, I gotta see this guy in action. He's been kind of
a, a figure in my life for for 15 years. I'd bought his
books, the the New York Times best selling trilogy, Wizard of Ads.

(11:46):
And they formed beliefs that I
resonated with. But I always thought it was almost aspirational, not real.
And there was elements that were pulled from it throughout my life, but
never locked in the big play. So I go to a class.
Magical worlds of the wizard aca of the wizard of ads, and it's it's
it's at the wizard academy, and and in Austin, Texas.

(12:08):
And and we we get transformed over 3 days where
you're you're just buzzing with information and and ideas,
and the laws of the universe, and the impact of
fine art, and third gravitating bodies, and all of these magical
ideas that have you thinking about business in a different way. And I'm
thinking as I'm sitting there as a as a well paid, highly

(12:30):
paid, sales and and, marketing
consultant that I was all I was traveling all around the world doing these things.
And and realized, wow, there is a this is the universe that I've
been aspiring to and then thinking about. So I keep on
taking classes and classes and classes. Roy starts to get to know me,
quite well, and and in 2017, I become a partner after many, many

(12:53):
conversations on the phone and and whatnot. That's the pass into The Wizard
of Oz. There is no resume processed. And?
Ultimately what it boiled down to was there had
to be a better way, and the better way was putting more effort into the
right things than to put all of your eggs into the transactional
bucket of cooks and cajoling people into a business

(13:15):
proposition rather than, inspiring
them. And as that hit me,
I came to realize that's been my whole life. Right? I've been in sales.
I've been in this transactional grind, this retail gulag, this
this this automotive space where I was good. Really,
really good. Operationally good. Sales good. I I knew

(13:38):
how to crush this. But only
on the transactional side. So I had to see this change.
I had to see this change about myself because I knew that there was
more that I was not I was gonna have to do something different than I
was doing right now. And it it all spurred from that
moment where I was feeling like I hadn't made it where I thought I could

(13:59):
make it. And I knew that there was more in me. So these were the
signals that I picked up. As I as I started getting deeper and deeper and
deeper, I realized that all this advertising stuff was all the same information that you'd
say in training stuff. And all this training stuff is really what we'd say in
culture stuff. And my goodness, all of this stuff was the same stuff that you'd
apply to your wife and kids in your house, or or at your church, or

(14:20):
or any of these other places where you're interacting
with, lo and behold, people. Right? That salespeople are
people, and bosses are people, and your wife is a person. Holy cow. Who
would have thought, but it all ends up being the same same
core group of things, and that put me on a path. In 2019,
I really started thinking about this from perspective

(14:43):
that Ray Sager, another one of our partners, had had come up with. I thought
it was one of the most brilliant things. It was really the linchpin of what
we had going down the rabbit hole of I could be a part of Wizard
Vast. And that's that your brand, your culture,
and the experience that you deliver are all intermingled
For all the the the 3 culminating

(15:04):
self referential parts that build a business
and grow a business. Well, I believe today
that your business is your culture. That your
culture is the culmination of communication in
your business that communicates with your employees how you
intend to do business and serve people. And they're picking up the

(15:26):
subconscious and subtle cues, the the things that you're not saying, but are
showing, straight through to the things that you that you do. And that
all reflects in the buying experience. And your employee and buying experience
are what make up the stories that we tell in the advertising of your brand.
And that we can really elevate those brands that do a
wonderful job at serving their people at both the employee and

(15:48):
customer level. Those have the the
the ingredients of a great brand, and those are the people that we
look for when we look to to, partner with a with a client
because we're in it for the long term. And and ultimately, this game
only works when you're playing the long term game. Otherwise, just keep doing
the transactional stuff, but more of it, and you you'll be just

(16:11):
fine. You'll be exhausted, but
you you'll get it done. Right? So I I think
the thing that's really good, I've come to terms with, it seems
to be exhausting is when you're
attempting to do things that
do not appear to fit with who you really are. That's

(16:34):
one of the reasons why I like that question we talked about at the beginning,
and it sounds like that's where you were in your role before
you discovered maybe this, air quotes here, different way of doing
business because and I'll say this, and I'll let
you respond to this. I actually think some of the tactics

(16:54):
will work in a lot of different situations. It's just
a matter of getting cohesive or congruent, whatever the right
word is, with who you really are, that brand, that culture, and
things like that. And I think culture spills out. I I work with leadership
teams, so I see this quite a bit. I go in, and I spend time
with companies' leadership teams. And I could

(17:17):
talk about us building a culture within a
company, but, truthfully, the culture becomes the
leaders and the leadership of the people that are there. I
could come up with all types of things, but really what I
wanna do is I wanna identify kind of that first question I asked. I wanna
identify who Ryan really is so that

(17:39):
I could then we could work that culture. We could we could make sure that
we're in alignment with what we're doing, and it kinda
we can kinda make all that match up. To me, I'll say
it this way, and then I'll pose it as a question. To me, it seems
like what most of us need to do as leaders, people that are running companies
or organizations, we need to identify who we are

(18:01):
so that we could then project that when we spread the nets of our advertising
and marketing and all out into the world.
Question mark. Right. Well, look. You know?
So a lot to unpack there. A a leader, a culture
is is what a leader will tolerate and what a leader
stands for, and those two things

(18:23):
are inextricably intertwined. You can't, disconnect
those those things. But your leader doesn't get to
control the culture. Right? At the end of the day, the leader gets
to, direct and and lead the culture and point people in
the right direction. Think of it this way. We have we have
4 people on the ocean of life. We have surfers. We

(18:45):
have navigators. We have drifters, and we have drowners. The
surfers are are taking the the waves of, of
opportunity as they come. When the waves, isn't as as
delightful as it could have been, they blame the wave. The the drifters are
just bobbing around hoping for somebody to show up and and
do it for them, while the drowners have a problem for every solution.

(19:08):
Now, I'm not talking about the occasional drowning that we've all done,
in our faith, medically, chemically, financially. I'm
talking about the professionals, the ones who are really good at at just
like, oh, you saved me. Oh, I'm dying again. Right? There's always
this ongoing pressure of of failure. Right?

(19:28):
Then there's the navigators, and navigators know one thing
that no one else knows. They know that the north star doesn't move in the
sky. And that north star, because it doesn't move, allows
them to pitch the sails
towards where they want to go. They can follow the winds and
waves of life. That are thrashing at

(19:50):
your hull, but they allow you to continue moving forward.
Let's face it. No. Nobody follows somebody who isn't going anywhere.
So until you have a north star, there is nowhere for
you to go. And that's why having principle
matters so much, because there's no way you can be a leader
without it. It's impossible. And you can't have

(20:13):
followers if you're not a leader, and you can't be a leader if you have
no north star, because you can't navigate. Right? You
have nothing to navigate with. All the other constellations and everything
else, all the distractions that are in our businesses and lives
are these wonderful things that tell us things about the sky and have
us understand things about the universe,

(20:36):
but they don't actually get you anywhere.
And the interesting thing, I mean, we're getting quite
existential here, which I love. We're we're about to we're about to head towards the
practical. It's where we're about to go. The interesting thing is that
self awareness is something that I'm just becoming more and more
aware of that just to to give a

(20:59):
double, nod to the word awareness there.
And I believe that everyone has principles and values.
I just think some people are more aware of what theirs are
versus other people. And
and in just a little while, I'm gonna ask you kind of a process of
what you do when you step into a business and how you begin identifying

(21:22):
that and see if it's a match and then how you start leading and guiding
towards how to do some marketing advertising and all that. But
I've got one I think it's just one. Let's go macro
question in the industry that you're in because I think you've got the expertise to
answer this. This episode, sometimes I don't like putting time stamps, but
this is gonna be releasing in early 2025. We're recording right at the

(21:44):
tail end of 24. And what I would love for you to do, I'd love
your insight on this. What I would love, Ryan, is
give some things that you're observing that are trends,
things that are moving in your industry and what we're
seeing. And I'm gonna go ahead and give you my second part of the question

(22:04):
so you could just go. And then I also want you to share
timeless principles that aren't going anywhere
because I have a there are many people, they wanna just ride trends
and ignore timeless principles. Some people wanna stay with tradition
and never look at trends. And so I think with this question, I

(22:25):
would love for you to hit a little bit of both. Is that okay? What
are some trends you're seeing here in 2025, and then what are some timeless
principles that we do not need to ignore? I think starting off with
with what we should recognize
aren't going to change. The psychology and biology,
particularly the biology and neuroscience of people, is not going to

(22:48):
change. Right now, we understand, that in a
foundational way, but there is a world of of understanding that
we do not have as human beings.
What we do know is that they're often directly
associated with the laws of nature. Right? So we can draw a deep
and real correlation to those laws of natures. Those truths that be

(23:10):
so profoundly true, they could not be not true. And I'm
I'm thinking about this scientifically in the sense of, we should
always be questioning science. That is the point of science. But
equally as much, we can we can, trust
that certain things are going to be a certain way.
For example, in business, customers are going to continue to

(23:33):
want, the best price for their money. Right? And it
their their money, the customer's money has to be worse less than
the value that you delivered. Right? Whatever that is. The the second thing
they want is choice. They want the autonomy of choice. Right?
The the the third thing that they're gonna want, is is convenience.
They're going to absolutely want to be convenience,

(23:57):
regardless of how that looks in your in your business. And there's there's a number
of very, very specific modeling ways to do that.
But those are things that are true that are not going to change.
There's there's communication elements that are not going to change. The
the 10 things that I talk about in in my book coming up in
frictionless is around motivation are not going to

(24:19):
change. There's way more nonsense that you can learn about motivation, but
these first ten things are the 10 things that are going to get you
80% of the way there. Right? And if we can
just get the basics right, we're going to have an awful lot
more success in growing from there after
we've got a good solid foundation. Right?

(24:42):
So those aren't gonna change. That's the psychology. Right? Which
is driven by the biology, like dopamine, like oxytocin,
the things that have us do the things that we do.
Now, the trends that are going to affect us are going to be
things like social media, which has already affected us and will
continue to affect us. The trends are

(25:04):
AI, and the,
ability to either allow AI to replace
our novel thoughts, right, because AI cannot
produce a novel thought, it can only produce a reductionary thought,
or we can use it to augment our iterative

(25:24):
and innovative thoughts as human beings.
Content is going to explode on the
Internet. Most of it is going to be absolute
garbage. Not because it's
generally bad content, but it's reductionary
content. It is content that does not propel us forward.

(25:47):
It only keeps us and satisfies our cognitive biases,
our our not confirms our existing
beliefs, because we can we can literally get
anything to confirm our existing beliefs. When
you start to realize that for every proverb,
there was an equal and opposite proverb, you start to

(26:10):
realize this is not new. The former
babes. Anything that you want to believe, you can believe, and now
you can believe it with the force of AI to
reinforce everything that you want. Right? The
reality is, you have to start thinking for yourself, and you will
have to start standing for something, which is going to come

(26:32):
with compromise. It's going to come with sacrifice. It's going to come
with some level of struggle, and that's where your real
worth lies as a human being. I'm I'm glad you brought up
AI because that's obviously a a hot topic.
And I agree with you that the quantity
of stuff I'm gonna send, the quantity of stuff,

(26:56):
post ads, things like that. I mean, I'm seeing on my feeds
now, You know, I turned my advertising over to AI,
and, you know, I'm just sitting here in Arizona doing
nothing and all of are are you excited about
AI? Concerned? Cautious? What
is your personal, take on what we're seeing

(27:17):
with this technology? I am absolutely
so excited. I am so excited for 2 very
weird reasons. I'm excited because it allows us
to spark a creative
constraint. Right? There's going to
be so many people that are going to use it, and

(27:40):
feel like they're done once they've got it done, that they don't
even have to get involved, that they're going to put out
such pedestrian content that it's going
to be so easy to stand out amongst that crowd.
So easy. They're going to be absolutely tragically
bad that we're going to win the game

(28:04):
by just being distinctive in a different
world. Right? The the second thing is is that
it does spark this this this idea. The content for
those people who take that foundation and then put their
spin, their truths, their values, and their principles,
their beliefs, their true consequence on

(28:26):
it are going to be so much more
potent than the people who are
phoning it in with AI. AI is not gonna take anyone's job,
but somebody using AI is absolutely going to take
your job. So so good.
I'm I'm glad to hear that. I mean, I'm very excited about it too. I

(28:49):
mean, I think it's a valuable tool
and emphasize the word tool because
that's what it's been for me and us. Even with some things that we're doing
with this podcast and things like that, it doesn't replace what we're doing right
here. It doesn't replace it's fascinating what
you said that conviction because I have noticed. I'm actually

(29:11):
preparing to do something kinda weird. It'll be right around our 300th
episode. I'm actually going to interview
chat GPT. I'm I'm gonna do a full on interview. One of the things
I've noticed is that it doesn't have any conviction.
I can sway it with my question to be
agreeable or disagreeable. If I ask it to disagree with me, I can do that

(29:34):
if I ask it to agree. So that conviction is so
important. So here's my question, Ryan. How
can we tell when people have convictions
or not? Because there's a lot of people that are just going with the flow
of whatever this technology, this tool is doing.
So and this is kinda starting to get into how do you know who to

(29:55):
work with. So how can we tell who has
convictions and who does not? We're
going to we're gonna know who has conviction and who doesn't by the
feedback loop that comes from it. And that's the
Google reviews, the Yelp reviews where the people specifically
say, they said they would do this, and they did

(30:17):
it. Right. They said that they were going to inflict this
self imposed pain on themselves, and they did. Right?
It's not about that nobody cares about a 5 star
review in 2025. Everyone cares about
a one star review, and how that company responded to
the the problem when a problem arose, because there's

(30:38):
no infallibility in humans, just like there's no
infallibility in chat g p t. Right?
There's there's flaw in existence. It's how
you handle that and how you respect that that person. How
do you keep it human, and how do you serve at the
highest level? And that's going to come back from

(31:00):
other people because you can't toot your own horn. You can just
you can just do the right things and then a little bit
more. So I believe you work quite a bit in
the home services industry. Tell
tell me and the listener, define that industry,
and then and then tell us kinda what you can learn in

(31:24):
that industry that is applicable to
someone that might be outside of it because I think that's gonna frame the remainder
of our conversation as we talk about some techniques and tactics and strategies.
So Yeah. Home services industry, tell us more about that.
Well and I'll I'll put a little qualifier out there in so much as I
love home services. That's typically where I hang my hat, but I I

(31:46):
serve the services industry that are typically higher
average ticket sales, longer purchase cycles. That's my sweet
spot from a from a a place where I want to work.
The Wizard of Ads now services basically higher ticket
items, longer purchase cycles in any industry, be it b to
b, b to c, direct to consumer, online, offline, all that jazz.

(32:10):
So we have solutions across the board. I love home services,
and I love it because of their fantastic attitudes, their
really, shelter mentalities that they
have, these these servant,
mindsets that that have a desire to do something more
complicated than, the the

(32:32):
basics. Right? It's when you're solving a little bit harder problem,
you very quickly get in the weeds of trying to overeducate
the client, which is a space that I struggled in in the retail world
of of how much do you need to sell here, and how much do
you just need to communicate? There's there's
different paths. So to that end, what does that look

(32:54):
like? The reason why home services is interesting is
because it's it's 2 things. 1, it's externally
triggered. Right? Something outside of the person has happened for
you them to have to call you. Right? Something broke.
Mhmm. The second thing is that it's a grudge purchase. No one's
doing it to fulfill their identity as a human being,

(33:17):
right, for not taking the people out back and saying, hey, come check out my
new air compressor. This thing is amazing. Look at my hot water tank. This
this thing is the, you know, the Bath Splasher 6,000. Everyone's
gotta have one of these things. It doesn't happen. Now I'm trying really hard to
make it happen, but, we I have an idea around a
Toto toilet, the G400. We're gonna rename it to the

(33:39):
Marriage Saver 6,000 for a variety of reasons that we can go on to
another episode. But at the end of the day,
what we're talking about here is finding a space where we
can tell an ugly duckling business story
in a way that has people go, they're my boys. I want those
people in my house. Boys, girls, I'm being, gender neutral

(34:01):
here. What matters is is that they're identified as
their guy in the business. And that's not easy to
do because one, something has to break, 2, no one wants to think about their,
home service stuff, plumbing electric, or
HVAC, or or doors. They don't wanna think about that stuff. They want them to
just exist invisibly, and do the things.

(34:24):
And not only to have a positive
anchor associated to a negative
trigger, but then to be the first people that they call
and trust to do the work when they show up because we have already
established a relationship before the customer showed up at Google.
Mhmm. You heard it here, foe at first, folks, that

(34:47):
Ryan could be disrupting the toilet industry in the not too dis toilets industry. So
we'll be looking forward to that. That'll be exciting. That's probably an industry that
needs addressing, but one of the things I love about home services is that
it is very clear that they solve a problem.
Mhmm. And one of the things I even struggle with with what I
do I mean, I work with leaders and leadership teams. I help

(35:10):
them with strategy. I work with them to, be more
proactive instead of reactive, etcetera, etcetera. But you know what?
I can't help the temperature go from 85 degrees in the
house down to 68 in the middle of summer in
Arizona or or whatever. How important is
it in your industry for a problem to

(35:32):
be solved? Well, this is why I
focus predominantly in the essential services
space. There's more plumbers that have saved lives than
doctors. HVAC, heating,
ventilation, and air conditioning, is no longer a
luxury service. It is absolutely a life

(35:53):
saving service when you're sitting in Arizona in a 109
degrees heat. That's a dry heat, but it's a heat nonetheless.
Right? And then you have electricians. Now if
you don't have electricity to your HVAC system, it's the life support system of your
life support system. Right? There there's electronics
on heat heat pumps nowadays and and water, tanks

(36:16):
and all of these things that service us at the highest level.
Our communication devices need electricity. These are the essential
services of the, of the, certainly of the planet.
Ultimately, what it boils down to is it is absolutely crucial
that these that these companies thrive. I have
strong feelings about how this industry is right now, and industry is right

(36:39):
now, and and I'm concerned about it in a in a lot of ways. But
I'm also serving it where I can at the highest
levels and intend to serve it at the highest levels as well.
My job is to get that particular company that I've chosen to
align myself with or that I have brought in for other
partners to align themselves with as a wizard of ads,

(37:01):
partner, and serve at the highest level so that
they get noticed and stand out above the crowd so that they can run a
profitable, healthy company. When you said
that customers are are looking for, you know, how do I sell this stuff?
Well, they're not just looking for you to solve a problem. They're looking for you
to solve the problem first, empathetically,

(37:23):
second, competently, and third, conveniently.
Those are the 3 building blocks of any service industry,
but fundamentally of the essential services industries. Let's
go ahead and dive in a little bit. Let's just say that
Super Cool Joe's HVAC gives you a call,

(37:45):
and they and they want you to step in. What are some of the
first things that you wanna know about, super cool Joe, which I
just came up with that name, so that might be a clue for you. But,
you got super cool Joe HVAC that's somewhere in
Arizona, which is where I'm parked right now here for the winter, and he
gives you a call. You know, we've talked about principle. We've talked about how

(38:08):
important conviction is, things like that. What are you
wanting to know when you first start interacting
with Joe? Yeah. I I wanna know Joe, you know,
or the the epitome of Joe, you know, who is representing the the,
alter ego of Joe. I I wanna know first what their vision is.
Where are they going with this company? Is this a 3 year play, a 10

(38:29):
year play? Is this a pass to my kids play? Is this what is that
situation? Because that's going to inform how we deliver the creative. The
the second thing I wanna know is is where their purpose
and mission is in life. And I'm not talking about the
pedestrian, knowledge that so many people have have brought
forth about, you know, purpose and and missions these days. I

(38:51):
have a very specific terminology based off of a
lot of research that I believe to be true based off of historical information
and data that we we share. Ultimately, that is
going to tell me what their beliefs are, what their what they believe to
be true, and they're both, you know,
profoundly true things, good and bad, both

(39:13):
dualistic. Right. But what are their values? What are the thing that they're willing to
do? What hills will they die on? What things will they do to
punish themselves? And then what can we do to symbolize
that into what the customer cares about most
in air conditioning in in Phoenix? Mhmm. Right?
When we get the symbolic concept of that right,

(39:36):
then we can put that to market in a much bunch of different ways. Now,
some some ideas are cute and clever. Other ideas
are campaignable. They can last 5, 10, 15 years.
And we're looking for campaignable ideas. We need something with legs.
Otherwise, it just becomes cute and clever, which ultimately turns
into unmemorable. Right? It it it can't hold

(39:59):
their interest. Getting anyone's attention is easy. Keeping it
is really hard. Right. And then embedding it
is the secret sauce. Right. One of the things that I run
across with a lot of business owners is
they're way in deep with tactics, and they're very
short on strategy. That's one of the things I attempt to work with them

(40:21):
on. How did tactics versus strategy relate
to when you step in the door? I think you just addressed some
of that, but let's say someone picks up the phone. Let's say, super
cool Joe calls you and says, listen. I really want
you to come in and run a bunch of Facebook ads for me so we
could get some more revenue coming in. How do you respond

(40:43):
to super cool Joe when he says a
tactical something tactical versus
what you know needs to be more of a campaignable or
strategic is the way I would word it approach?
With with compassion and empathy, Jim, you know, at
the end of the day, they all come to us like that. Without saying, Joe,

(41:05):
you're wrong. Right. Well, and it's because they are
wrong, and it's factually wrong, not opinion wrong.
And that matters, and it's not because I don't
care. It's because I do. Right? Ultimately, when you have a
situation where a person's coming in based on a channel, that is
super normal because people are equating the outcomes

(41:28):
to have results when what they didn't catch was the whole
set up for the magic trick. Right. What did we have to do
to get that elephant to appear on stage and astonish everyone?
Well, David Copperfield has an answer for that. I wish I knew the answer.
I'm sure somebody has ruined that, magic trick for somebody, and I'm not gonna go
looking for it because I wanna be astonished next time.

(41:50):
What it boils down to is we're trying to figure
out the magic trick, and that requires
infinitely more setup strategy, right, than
the ta da moment of the Facebook ads showing up. Great.
Running Facebook ads may be the right solution for
super, cool Joe's HVAC company. But it

(42:13):
also may be a hyper inefficient path
forward that's just going to spend money for the sake of spending money and not
getting any short or long term result. So
to serve Joe at the highest level, I would say, tell me a bit about
what you wanna do. Where do you wanna go with this thing? How long are
you keeping it? What is the game that we're playing?

(42:34):
And what are the rules to that game so that we can play within the
rules and then figure out all the ways that we can step outside to win.
Right. Ethically, morally, legally. You know?
But equally as much in a
distinct way, we're not going to win this game. Can you market your
company and grow your business and make money, doing things that we

(42:56):
don't do? Yep. Will you grow and hit a ceiling
doing it? Yep. That's just pure math. Right? There's only so
many human beings in the population. Only so many of them are going to buy,
and you can either grind them into the into paste to to to buy your
stuff, or you can or you can get more of a
pie. You can also get a bigger pie by going into another market.

(43:19):
But you're still getting your piece of the pie. We're we're
basically taking an extra share of the same pie
because more people want our piece than the other piece, which
gives us the larger piece. Mhmm. That takes time because
people have to have something break in our world. Right?
They have to have had their guy that they already have, the devil they

(43:42):
know, let them down. Right? And then they have to be
willing to know, like, and trust us over the swath of other
2,000 operators in Phoenix, Arizona right
now that would be happy to do it. Half of them that would
be happy to do it for less than any price that you're willing to quote
ever. So we have all of these slogger heads that

(44:03):
we have to figure out to do something that is going to be
valuable to people. This doesn't change whether you're running a church,
or a or an HVAC company, or a restaurant. All
of these things hold true because those principles
don't change. And that's why Facebook
matters at the very end of this conversation. The very first thing

(44:26):
that matters is, what are we trying to achieve?
How are we going to achieve it is the last thing. But why are we
trying to achieve it? And what are we going to do? Right?
Just like Simon Sinek's Golden Circle. It's it's this
why. People buy the why. Mhmm. Let's find the why,
and let's represent symbolically the why in the

(44:48):
in the message that we put out there. And let's leverage things like
entertainment until such time as they need your thing. Right? Because when they
hear your ad, they're not going buy it. Right? If you if you have a
Lululemon ad, sure. They could go, oh, I need to have my ass
look fabulous. Let's put it on. I wanna add and
inspire people to have fabulous keisters, and and and here we

(45:09):
are. We're not doing that. We're we're selling air conditioners.
The air conditioner is like, it's not broke. I'm not fixing something that's not broke.
I want my thing to be invisible, and that's not
that's not going to be a win in this strategy. So, knowing the industry,
understanding the landscape, and then taking the path of least resistance

(45:30):
until such time as they're ready to buy, and then showing up in their
heart for them to make the decision to click on us,
pick up that phone, book that appointment with us over somebody
else. Yeah. One of the things interesting
that I I think I heard it on your advertising in America podcast
episode. I listened to one where y'all were talking about

(45:52):
what has become a little bit more of an old
school advertising, which is radio and TV. And
it was odd when you were just talking. I was thinking about how, you know,
our real estate companies years ago, we used to do door knocking, you know, and
hanging flyers on people's doors and, you know, just put them in their
mailbox, which you're not supposed to do, by the way. And I and it got

(46:13):
me thinking about analog versus digital or or really what it got me
thinking about, Ryan, was all the choices
that Joe has. Right. And which also
means all the choices that you have as someone
who's advising Joe on the best route to take.

(46:33):
And and I I think one of the things I I tell
my wife this all the time. This is probably showing my age. I'm 61 years
old now, and it's like, you know what? I'd like to have 3 choices.
I don't want a 103, but we've got a lot of
choices right now for spreading the nets or getting the word out
about Joe's business. Correct? And just

(46:56):
whatever you wanna respond to with that. I mean, do we have too many choices?
Maybe we have more options. I mean, I guess that's good, but it
also confuses Joe. It it does confuse Joe
because everyone who's selling a channel
is pretending to be a marketer when what they actually are
is a salesperson selling a channel. And it's

(47:17):
it's it's it's excruciating because there is literally
millions of those people to me, and
to my other 80 partners that are that are my equals and peers in this
in this adventure that we're on. And there is certainly other
organizations that stand for the same things that we stand for because
they seem to be these lost fables

(47:39):
of of of marketing, when in fact, they're the first
principles of communication. Right? They are the biology
and psychology, the neuroscience of
communication that we're working from. So
we monitor radio every day of every year.
And at the end of the day, what

(48:02):
we're trying to do we're we're media agnostic for for for starters.
We we love radio because it's efficient, but radio is not
always the solution. Right? We love TV, because
it's it's, provocative, and we can leverage multiple
stimulants of the human brain, at one time.
But it's not always the answer. There's a production cost to that that that

(48:25):
pulls it, the cost. And certainly to a $3,000,000 operation,
we're not selling to Apple here. Apple's not our client.
Ultimately, what it boils down to is
picking the channels like radio, like television, there really is
only a few options. There's written word,
right, where you can read a thing. There is visuals.

(48:48):
Right? Those could be video or static image, or there
could be spoken word. Right? The spoken
word has the most powerful impact from a
retention and recall standpoint. It has a 5 times
longer durability in the brain than a visual
stimulant. A visual and a written, or a spoken together

(49:10):
are going to give you a 6 times, and a written, spoken, and and,
audio combination is going to give you a 7 times combination.
So that's why TV ads can be powerful, because
you now have written words on screen while you're also doing
another thing that you can you can embed, embed, embed.

(49:31):
The trick here is frequency, how
repetitious you show up in the customer's
purview. The impression count matters. And I'm not talking about
the doom scroll impression that you don't actually even get
seen on. I'm talking about the impression from the billboard,
from the truck driving by, from the, from the, radio

(49:52):
ad that you heard, from the television ad that you saw twice that
week. When we get the math right to the neuroscience
that has already been researched for 30 years on how
much it takes to get retention and recall to move from the initial
part of the brain that holds things for about 7 seconds like a ram of
a computer to about 7 days, which is erased

(50:15):
with sleep, like defragging an old PC to clean up that brain a
little bit, Back to the chemical part of the brain
where people sit there and remember your thing 30 years
later. These are the songs that you know 2,000
sets of lyrics to to 2,000 songs that you never wanted to
know the lyrics to. Right? They get in there,

(50:38):
and they stay there. Whether you like it or not, I bet you you know
of cab company's, jingle from 1985
that you can't get rid of, but that cab company is probably not even in
existence anymore. Right? These are the things that we have to
consider when we're actually building
the thing that we're building. That's what's going to inform which channel we

(51:00):
put it on because the channel will dictate what the frequency that they'll see it
at is. It'll dictate how impactful it
needs to be to do the thing. And what duty are we trying to serve?
Are we trying to build a bond with our customer, or are we
trying to activate a sale? We need to do both,
and we need to do both in protection of the brand's reputation.

(51:23):
And when we do that, holistically as a single
solution, we build a business that goes from
name recognition to a household name. Now the difference is
people knowing your name is great. But when they know your
name and care about it, you have a household
name. Is the is the chemistry think of it like

(51:46):
think of it like bricks and mortar. Every impression is a
brick. The emotion is the mortar.
If you want to build a big house, you're going to need mortar.
You know, you you would absolutely have bricks. Right? But
what's more impressive, the pile of bricks sitting on an empty lot or a
McMansion that everyone goes by and looks at, right, and

(52:09):
and and wants to go into.
Right? And when they actually step into that house, the inside of the house
has to be just as nice as the outside of the house because if it's
disappointing on the inside, guess what? They're not coming back.
Doesn't matter how pretty it is on the outside. You have to deliver
on the thing, and even better when you put something that's in that house that

(52:30):
kinda surprises and delights them a little bit and goes, oh, I want a little
bit more of that eyes. Have you seen the thing? That's
delight. Now delight is is a driver of oxytocin, not
dopamine. Dopamine's never going to win this game for you. When you
get people feeling the oxytocin of your brand because they've
been inside of it, now you've got repeat business,

(52:52):
5 star reviews, unsolicited referrals.
You've gotta go see this house. You've gotta go inside and check it out. You've
gotta see what they've got. You're gonna love it. Right?
These are the foundational things that don't
change. The channels are gonna change. AI is gonna mess with
channels, and and YouTubes, and and Chat GbTs,

(53:16):
and search on Chat GbT. All this all this could change.
And that's okay. There's really smart people that we talk to that help change the
change. Right? To get it on and and give you the present. But
there's all this stuff that's not. Door hangers, love them. Right?
Truck grabs, amazing. A a plane that's got
a thing towed behind it, we've done that before. We'll do it again. A guy

(53:39):
in a gorilla suit holding a sign, absolutely in the
right strategy as a whole. So one
of the challenges that most business owners have
is they're fighting for attention. Not their attention,
for getting the attention. There's so much noise, and you said it earlier. AI is
going to add more noise out there. I

(54:01):
may have heard you talk about or may have seen it, but let's let's just
say Joe goes down the gimmick route to cut through the
attention, and he says, I want a
busty woman that's sort of sweating and looking
wet with a low cut shirt on a billboard and
says, hot wife. You know? I've seen that all over. We travel a good bit.

(54:24):
Those are all over, by the way. Mhmm. And
maybe they work. Maybe someone's selling it. Where do gimmicks
fit into this? Because they really kinda bother me,
but is when does something become a gimmick versus
strategy? And then I wanna ask about frictionless before we finish up
here. Right. Well, at the end of the day, you know, there's a

(54:48):
couple questions you gotta ask. Could I take, a a picture of a
beautiful woman and and say, hot wife, keep her cool at
Joe? Could we take Joe's could we take Joe's logo off
of that, put somebody else's on it? So how how
did how did it work? Right? Did Joe get any more business from it, or
did Joe just startle someone? Now the very first time that that was

(55:10):
put out there, it probably got a few phone calls,
and it possibly got a whole bunch of phone calls, and some of
them may have had to do with service and a bunch about,
maybe checking the moral standings of the people making those
decisions. It's hard to say. We don't know.
But what I do know is that gimmicks work until they don't.

(55:33):
Right? Anything that works fast is
certain to not work long. Things that take
longer to work tend to last longer.
This is the difference between a 1 night stand and a marriage. What do
you want from your customer? Well, you know,
that's the question you've gotta ask yourself. And then that's why

(55:55):
we tend to focus on higher ticket, longer average ticket, longer average sale
products, that have a bit of complexity to them because
there is a large buy cycle and a large,
lifetime value of customer there that can justify the endurance
needed to grow this business, and the spend that goes
along with it too in gross stages. So

(56:19):
gimmicks, you know, if we were to pull back from the word gimmick and
just say sales activation as a whole, if sales
activation is all you do, there is a a profoundly important
graph that, exists in the marketing world from Binet and Fields that shows
the sawtooth that hits the natural demand ceiling of any
marketplace, and it's consistent. It'll stay flat

(56:41):
all the way along, and it'll work and then stop, work and stop. And you
just have to keep working. This is the transactional world we're in.
That's the hard part. If we do that in conjunction with
branding, the branding is going to be a set of stairs that eventually
oversteps and supersedes and goes beyond
the sales activation. The sales activation feed the beast.

(57:05):
The branding compounds. This is some cost.
You're not going to get anything more than what you get. The
branding is going to go past that and give you your disproportionate
share of market. It's gonna take 3 to 5 years to do
that. Anybody who tells you that it's gonna happen in 6 months, you're
going to notice it in 6 months of a branding campaign. In the first

(57:27):
6 months, it's going to be torture, and you're gonna spend a bunch of money
and not get anything for it. But though that and that's
why people don't brand very often is because there is this duration that they
have to go through, but the real meat here happens in years 3, 4, and
5. It pays for itself in year 2 and and forward as
a rule depending on, of course, some uncontrollables that nobody

(57:49):
can can can can manage to to effect.
Ultimately, what we're talking about here is what do you want
out of the business? Now, if Joe has a business that he's gonna sell in
3 years, don't bother wasting your money on a brand.
Just dump all of your money as aggressively as you can
into Thales activation, gimmick driven, paying as much as you

(58:10):
can for a paid lead, all of this stuff that you like,
because let me qualify that. You're gonna pay as much as you can. You're
gonna pay as much as you can because these are bidding systems, and people
pay top dollar for that lead and position. Right? If
you hope to get the click, you have to pay the most. Right? Our
strategy is a combination of doing that where you have to,

(58:32):
reducing that as we go, and spending more
or as much up until we hit a diminishing returns threshold
on your brand, and then stop spending. The 2 in conjunction
take a business at $9,000,000 at 12% marketing budget
down to 4% marketing budget at $50,000,000
spending all the money they can spend. Now, 4% of $50,000,000 is

(58:56):
still a whole bunch of money, but it's only 4% of your total advertising
cost, right, of your total revenue. The word frictionless,
I keep seeing that in your stuff. So you've got a
project that is talking about friction within business
and becoming a frictionless business. Tell me a little bit
more about that, and what are you working on there?

(59:21):
Hewlett Packard the David Packard of Hewlett Packard said,
there's nothing more dangerous than leaving marketing to the marketing
department. And and I'm a big believer in that, so much so
that I I started investigating what will help our customers,
our clients grow, disproportionately faster
and more profitably. So I started studying the elements that come along

(59:43):
with that, and there's 12 major things that are all oriented towards
how you're communicating things in your business consciously and subconsciously
to your employees and customers that that determine
whether or not you've got a healthy culture, a thriving culture, or a
survival culture, or a toxic culture,
and a fixed culture versus a growth culture, a creative culture

(01:00:06):
versus a, pedestrian culture. All of the things
that we look at from a thriving and surviving standpoint,
and this the relational and
transactional as well all fit into these worlds. Well, all
of this stuff, when we start to analyze, it goes, hey, if we just make
adjustments along the way in all of these 12 different components

(01:00:29):
affecting your business, marketing sales, curation of product and
pricing, how you help people empower people in your
in your, business, how you help them master their craft, all of
the things that we're talking around motivation of not only the customer, but the
employee, and frankly, yourself. All of these things are the
things that are affecting mindset,

(01:00:51):
efficiency, productivity, growth, and profitability.
What if we just talked about those things, and started
giving our clients a pathway forward
to getting out of their own way, and growing
past the length of their shadow so they can be tall enough to ride the
next ride? And and that's where growth comes from. So many

(01:01:13):
companies get into this $3,000,000, $5,000,000 ceiling, this
$10,000,000 ceiling, and that's it for them. They can't grow because
they haven't realized the the more subliminal,
less obvious things that are actually slowing their growth,
not propelling it forward. And that's been my path for the
last 7 years is if we're going to market well, and if marketing,

(01:01:38):
and branding is the culture, and the culture is going to drive
the buying experience, well, what if we helped our clients improve their
culture and buying experience so that our branding got better?
Now, we're the secret sauce that everyone needs to be
able to propel themselves forward whether we are able to directly service
their account or not. We can be a beacon of virtue and

(01:02:01):
value in the industries that we serve. But it just
it doesn't stop there. Because all those same things that I learned
about advertising that were true to sales and sales training are
equally as true to our family relationships and our and our
community relationships. And that kind of
information just needs to be in the universe in a

(01:02:26):
way. So, I'm trying to distill it down into something where people can
just get the basics right. Go back to the ABCs.
And, and build the foundation from something solid and stable
no matter where you are in your business or or personal journey. So
you're you're obviously putting it in book form. When will the book I
don't know. Do do you have any definitive dates, or are you still

(01:02:49):
still in the creation process? We're we're on chapter
9. We know that there's about 14 chapters. We've already mapped
everything out, and and the path is is consistently moving
forward. We anticipate the end of q one, is is when we're gonna do
it. As to when we officially launch, the book
is is still in question, of course, because publicists and and,

(01:03:12):
all those things have have opinions about best times to do
things. So Alright. You we've talked about a lot of cool things.
If someone wants to connect with you,
either be on a wait list or whatever for the book or reach out
to, you know, the wizard or, you know, whatever, Tell
people where they could find you, and then I've got one more question, and we'll

(01:03:33):
wrap up. You got it. Four places to find me, wizardofads.com,
of course, for the the the main site for Wizard of Ads. The wizard of
ads dot services website is, specifically to
my clients and and how I am handling things within the Wizard of
Ad agency. My personal page is ryan schuett.com.
And finally, on all of my social medias, you can find me

(01:03:56):
pretty much anywhere at, wizard Ryan Schuett.
Ryan, we're seek, go create. Those three words, seek, go
create. I'm going to allow you to choose one of those words or
force you if that's the way you wanna look at it. Choose 1. You know,
it just means more to you. It's like, oh, I like that word better
than the other 2. Seek, go, or create, and why?

(01:04:19):
Golly. Well, I can say that I am a
seeker by nature. I I'm an asker by by
nature. I am
highly adaptable. I believe in Darwin's philosophy around it's
not the strongest or smartest that survive, but those most able to
adapt. So I am I am looking for that

(01:04:41):
innovation and iteration all the time, but I
really have no problem in just, implementation. Right?
I I like to build the plane while I'm I'm, flying
it. And and by
nature, it it is a creative process. It is it is absolutely
not about, accept the

(01:05:03):
norm. Right? That that idea of authentic
creation. So do I have a
good answer for you? It's like, yes. The answer is yes. All 3.
What's 3 absolutely astoundingly fantastic words,
to tickle the fancy. Well, very good. You know, the thing that I love about
it is that, you know, it's not as if we just talked about the tactic.

(01:05:27):
Obviously, you're such a great deep thinker. I mean, some of these
responses have been, like, just had such depth to them,
and I appreciate that. I highly recommend if you've been listening in,
go connect with Ryan. Obviously, his personal side, I'm
guessing, is where his book's going to be mentioned as it's
getting close here. Again, this is probably being listened to in

(01:05:50):
early 2025. Sounds like it's a few months out, but
check that out. He is a wizard of ads. Go check him out
there, and I appreciate I appreciate the
deep and thoughtful answers to what could have
been trivial and tactical type
responses. So go check out Ryan. I appreciate you listening in here at SECO

(01:06:11):
Create. New episodes on YouTube and all the platforms
every Monday. Keep, making those comments and
sharing and doing all the things you do. Keep actually
man, we keep having people giving us tips over at cco
create.comforward/support. I appreciate all of a sudden
getting a message that someone gave us $50 just because

(01:06:34):
they love what we're doing. So thank you for those people that keep doing
that. That is awesome. Until next time. Just thanks for
listening in. Until next time, continue being all that you were
created to be.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Create a Frictionless Business with Marketing Wizard Ryan Chute