E277: Most Marketing Teams Get Axed After a Sale - Here's How to Make Yours Unkillable - How2Exit: Buy, Don't Build - M&A of Small Businesses

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
And the way that we do that is by implementing
these in our marketing strategy, these long term nurture pieces
where we're we're nurturing them and then at different points
that makes sense for them, we're sending them offers that
make sense to them and just inviting them to purchase
and inviting them to purchase again.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
I don't know really why, because a lot of.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
These small operations they're not they're not looking at their
marketing scorecard. They're not they're not maybe so tight on
their on their you know, on their systems and watching
the budget and all those things that oftentimes the big
question is sort of like, okay, we need to reverse engineer,
like really understanding what's going on and what's working what's
not working, because oftentimes they then business becomes attractive for

(00:44):
the sale because there's like this one person that's really
you know the eighty twenty rule, right, that one person
eighty of the stuff at eighty percent of the results.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
And I can tell you that your brand is not
just your color and logo.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
You know, your logo and your colors, and even it's
not even just your mission and vision and value. I
think it's incredibly important to go through that exercise and
if you're a person that that.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
Feels not like a process you can do on your own.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
Getting someone to start being a sounding forward, someone more experience,
really valuable and that doesn't have to cause glenty.

Speaker 3 (01:23):
Hello and welcome to the How to ACCEP Podcasts where
we introduce you to a world of small to medium
business acquisitions and mergers. We interview business owners, industry leaders, authors,
mentors and other influencers with the sole intent to share
with you what it looks like to buy or sell
a business.

Speaker 4 (01:41):
Let's get rolling.

Speaker 3 (01:48):
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(02:09):
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(02:33):
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(02:53):
entrepreneurs wheretherver they are in the journey. And I want
you to visit acquisition Afficionado dot com today. Hello, and
welcome to the House Exit podcast here and today I'm
here with Victoria jar And she is the CEO founder
of Ugly Ventures. And of all the things we usually
talk about buying and selling companies, we're gonna spend some

(03:14):
time to day on marketing. What do you do when
you buy it? You know, how do you grow it
that type of stuff? How do you how do you
create that marketing system that will be good for the
next buyer?

Speaker 4 (03:25):
Those type of things. Thank you for being here today.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
Thank you for having me. I'm really excited. You know,
we're going to geek out on some marketing. We've got
two marketers here, so I think this is going to
be a really good conversation.

Speaker 3 (03:36):
For those of you guys that haven't picked it up yet.
You listen to the show all this time. I'm always
talking about buying and selling companies. My background my MBA
is in marketing. I was a coach for Jay Conrad
Livingston for a little while in his Griller marketing system.
And you know, I did a lot of marketing for
all of our businesses I've ever owned. So you know
this is something I'll be able to geek you out
on and have fun with. So those of you guys are,

(03:57):
I think, what is this you know, tech nerd slash
computer guy doing? You're talking in real estate guy talking
about marketing as funny as I got burned out on
tech and I went to get my MBA and tech
management and halfway through it, I switched it to marketing.
So that's how I got started because that's where all
the pretty girls were. But the uh, it's funny as
I didn't meet my wife while I was in that program.

(04:18):
I met at a different place during that program. But uh, yeah,
so I love marketing. I love this concept. You've been
doing it for quite a while. And on don't you
give everybody your kind of ordered the story? How did
you get into the space and you're a little bit
of your background before.

Speaker 2 (04:32):
We get on it.

Speaker 1 (04:33):
Yeah, well, you know, I didn't. I mean I didn't
go to school for marketing. I kind of fell into it.
I you know, went to school in New York and
and sort of had this come to Jesus moment. I
grew up in the Tri State area, where you know,
I was working for corporate. I was actually working for
the A and E, which is the History channel and
the biography channel. That was kind of like my pat

(04:54):
worked for Dog the Bounty Hunter.

Speaker 2 (04:56):
Do you remember that show? Yeah, yeah, that was a trend.

Speaker 1 (04:59):
So I worked there for a couple of years and
kind of was had that cubicle moment, which I think
you can obviously relate to, you know, knowing a little
bit about your life, where I kind of was sitting
there and I was like get out of here, and
I sort of fled the country.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
I moved. I ended up moving to China, it keeps English.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
Actually, but when I first what I learned very quickly
is that I really was not a teacher of English.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
I didn't love it.

Speaker 1 (05:26):
And I kind of sell backwards into you know, working
with uh real estate developers, so this is kind of
a place where we UH cross over a bit. So
I you know, worked with some hospitality developers and in China,
and that was my first exposure to you know, real

(05:47):
entrepreneurs and you know investors in that whole world. And
I remember when I first met them, I was so impressed,
you know that they had raised you know, X amount
of you know, millions of dollars to do their projects.

Speaker 2 (05:58):
And I had never really I never really known that
was a thing.

Speaker 1 (06:02):
Right, I was just out of college and I was
like wowing, So someone just gave you all this money
to do this, and it was wild.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
So through them, you know, they that was my you
know education into this thing called entrepreneurship.

Speaker 1 (06:12):
And they, you remember, they would sneak me into their
EO meetings and I, you know, I can just devoured
you know, the Scaling Up Book and and all of
that good stuff, and that really I fell in love
with with entrepreneurship.

Speaker 2 (06:24):
Them and for them.

Speaker 1 (06:25):
I started working in marketing, but I was you know,
I didn't know much, so I you know, they were
really good marketers themselves, so I I learned from them
and I worked out from marketing assistant to marketing manager
and by the time I was done working with them,
about six or so years later, I was, you know,
running that working director for several of their properties.

Speaker 2 (06:44):
We developed brand.

Speaker 1 (06:44):
It was really cool, but that you know, that taste
sort of made me really hungry for just finding higher
and higher profile founders to work with. So subsequently, you know,
I was just always having my eye out for you know,
exited founders that I could work with, or founders that
have built unicorn status companies. And that's what I did

(07:06):
for the past you know, ten years afterwards, was just
sharpening my skills as a marketer, or I would call
it like a trial by fire kind of education because
I was always wearing these high profile situations with you
know a lot of times being accountable to the stakeholders
and investors, and I had to learn, you know, how
to how to interpret the data, how to present the data,

(07:28):
you know, get really quick and good with my numbers,
develop the creative side, learn how to manage teams, learn how.

Speaker 2 (07:34):
To grow marketing departments.

Speaker 1 (07:36):
So that's been really my specialty, you know, different than
just marketing consultants. My especially is really how do you
how do you build a profitable marketing program? And that
includes much more than just the strategy, right about the
team that you get on board, how you manage the
team and how you lead them, and how you grow
the team to kind of grow with the business.

Speaker 2 (07:56):
So that's that's sort of where where my where I'm.

Speaker 1 (08:00):
Starting from, and since then have just been a wild ride.
I've gotten to get inside of a lot of people's businesses.

Speaker 3 (08:07):
Have you ever rode the ride through the uh, the
transition process, you know, through an exit where you were
working with a founder they sold a company and you
got to go through that process.

Speaker 1 (08:16):
At all or we Unfortunately I have not been through
an exit yet, but I have been on the other
side of acquisition. So you know, some clients that I've
worked with, even clients that I work with now who
have been recently acquired. And so that sort of merging
process is a really interesting one because you have different

(08:40):
teams coming together on different ideas, different processes, different systems,
different softwares and it's a time of great uncertainty. So
we can talk more about that if you'd like to.
You know, some of the you know, acquisition marketing is
a really interesting it's just a really interesting situation, which
is I think kind of very different from when you're

(09:02):
getting prepared to sell, right that build up. Oftentimes, when
you get into that acquisition, you know, your marketing department,
it turns into there's a huge mess for a while.

Speaker 3 (09:12):
Yeah, and there's one of the departments that's really usually
scared because anybody acquiring you already has a marketing department, right,
the upper brand has one, so you're you're an overlap
right where an engineering problem, you know, the engineering department
is engineering something totally different. They feel a lot more
secure in their job. Uh, you know, the HR and
the marketing guys are careerly concerned because there's an HR

(09:35):
and a marketing department before. What most people don't get
in a lot of CEOs don't get is there's unique
skills and learn behaviors inside of that marketing department that
is as technical and critical as that engineering department.

Speaker 4 (09:50):
All Right, they know what.

Speaker 3 (09:51):
Works for this brand, and your marketing department as the
as the acquirer, maybe excellent, maybe one of the best
in the world. It's because they know what works for
your current brand, maybe not so much for the company
you're about to buy.

Speaker 2 (10:05):
No, absolutely, And in the situation of the the situations
that I.

Speaker 1 (10:09):
Have been in, you know, our company has been the
acquired and so we're going into the smaller markets because
the acquisitions have been sort of the regional light right
to get into the regions. And there is that that
I think from the high level perspective of the stakeholder's perspectives,
you see sort of the smaller, the smaller, you know,

(10:30):
assets you're acquiring as perhaps right, they may have backward systems,
they may not have the right software. They may have
but they know their clients, right, They know their clients
and they know their market, and so how do you
capture a lot.

Speaker 2 (10:46):
Of that stuff?

Speaker 1 (10:46):
And usually in these situations, you're acquiring these smaller companies, right,
and they don't have the resources, they don't have the
on board like, they don't have things sop, they don't
have things on you know, their onboarding process or maybe
not as clean. And so it's really you go into
the sort of forensic situation, where as the head of
all of your department heads probably have to go in

(11:07):
sort of in this forensic situation and figure out, you know,
what do.

Speaker 2 (11:10):
We take and what do we need right?

Speaker 1 (11:12):
What is the valuable stuff here, what pieces of this
puzzle are working, and how can we distemy the how
call we organize it so we can execute it from
an HQ.

Speaker 3 (11:23):
For example, in my personal experience and having an interviewed
over three hundred people, if you're the acquirer out there
and you're listening, really take note of this. Don't change
anything at all for the first sixty to ninety days,
just to watch.

Speaker 4 (11:39):
What's going on.

Speaker 3 (11:41):
So many times I've heard of people who hurt themselves
because they you know, we bought a company. They only
had one guy doing marketing and we have a whole
department of thirteen.

Speaker 4 (11:52):
That guy didn't want to do things our way, so
we let him go. And then next thing, you know, like,
well cool, how did the revenue go?

Speaker 2 (11:58):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (11:58):
Yeah, we're not companies doing half what it used to do, right,
And that's because, like I said, that person has figured
out what's working and what works to get them there.
In this particular case, what they did is the new
company didn't want anything to do with marketing and traditional
sources to local TV and newspapers. They bought a group,

(12:23):
a small group of four or five rest homes in
a community that's an older school community in the Tulsa
County area where I was from, and they bought you
know these That's how I knew them. And anyway, people
still read the newspaper and watch the local news there,
you know, anywhere you have like Tordato Valley, you get,

(12:44):
you still kind of take atention to local news because
that tells you when to take cover.

Speaker 4 (12:48):
Right, So where a lot of the bigger cities they've probably.

Speaker 3 (12:50):
Been in, nobody has a reason to you know, still
tune in the local news channel. And that town it did.
So they were, you know, trying to do mailers and
trying to do all the stuff they do in their
other places, and it just wasn't working as well, you know,
after talking to the guys like well, you just cut
off the two main things that that company was using
that successfully for years, right, I mean I don't even

(13:11):
watch that much TV, and I remember seeing their ads
every single time there was a storm, right exactly, because
you think about you you're you're getting older, you're living alone.
That's why, explained to the guys. So you're getting older,
you're living alone. Here comes the storm, there's nobody, your
kids aren't in the house anywhere to help you get
into the basement. There's like you know, now, that's when
those times you think I probably should get somewhere I

(13:31):
can meet you know, your little help. Right, So that
on would pop the commercials.

Speaker 1 (13:36):
But you bring up a good a good point because
I think like in my in my experience, and again
I work in a lot of like you know, in
professional services, right, Like these sort of acquisitions that that
I've been a part of that are kind of that national,
right regional play is you know, oftentimes these smaller guys
are getting bought up.

Speaker 2 (13:56):
They've got like maybe one sort.

Speaker 1 (13:57):
Of rain maker right salesperson or one kind of a
rain maker marketing person that are.

Speaker 2 (14:02):
Just killing it.

Speaker 1 (14:04):
But you know, oftentimes it's even they I don't know
really why because a lot of these small operations they're
not they're not looking at their marketing scorecard. They're not
they're not maybe so tight on their on their you know,
on their systems and watching the budget and all those
things that oftentimes the big question is sort of like, okay,
we need to reverse engineer, like really understanding what's going

(14:28):
on and what's working what's not working, because oftentimes they
then business becomes attracted for the sale because there's like
this one person that's really you know the eighty twenty rule, right,
that one person eighty of the stuff at eighty percent
of the results and right.

Speaker 2 (14:42):
And you sit down with them and they can't even
really tell you, right.

Speaker 4 (14:45):
Yeah, I've seen it.

Speaker 3 (14:46):
When I had my real estate and firm, one of
the things we did for a long time we did
what's called canvassing. We'd have teams that people go knock
on doors, right, and we bought houses that were either
bank owned or foreclosure in some sort. So somebody's starting
to get little trouble. Our team would you know some
younger people that were willing to go knock the door
to door and say, hey, you know, we understand that
this house is in trouble. We'd love to help you out.

(15:08):
Here's what we can do. We can if you if
you want to keep the house, we can do X,
Y and z h. It's a free service. And if
you decide that you want to sell it, we have
investors they'll buy it. And I'll tell you there were
probably two dozen people that tried out for that job,
and two or three of them just killed it. And
I could never figure out why I kept trying to
mirror it. It was a young lady, a fairly attractive

(15:30):
young lady and her older older brother, like he was
fifteen years older than her, and they they people and
answered the door for him. They are very personable. I
tried to mirror that. I brought in probably two dozen
people that I thought would match that kind of you know,
that mentality, and those two would still bring in six
times the number.

Speaker 4 (15:49):
They don't know.

Speaker 3 (15:49):
They would do the work too. Now you're finding somebody
that's tough work going. Here's a list of one hundred addresses.
Try to visit them all but all this week if
you can. You know, if nobody answers, leave the leave
this note on the door. Ye right, that was That
was the job. And that canvassine. I even went to,
I mean we because I love the canvassine type of thing.

Speaker 4 (16:09):
It was working.

Speaker 3 (16:10):
I went out and found we rented some of our
houses to canvasers. People like a whole team that work
for like Calomcast or one of the things. And that's
what they did for the area. And I would recruit
their best guys from like, hey, I know they're paying
you like fifty, you know, fifty dollars or whatever per close,
and you can close ten of those a week. I'll
pay you a thousand dollars for house I buy. You'll
go if you want to visit the after you're done,

(16:31):
go visit these, you know, go visit these. And those
guys could not that little team of a brother, brother
and younger sister. A younger sister was like nineteen twenty,
yeah he was probably he was probably close to thirty
five or something. But anyway, they just they killed it, right,
and you can't you can't figure it out sometimes sometimes
it's just like there's a certain vibe people have. We

(16:53):
I've seen tech companies where we bring in a sales
guy and he killed it the last job, right, he
just like he was the top sales guy.

Speaker 4 (17:00):
I double their revenue.

Speaker 3 (17:01):
Stuff gets there and you can't sell you can't sell
himself out of a wet paper bag.

Speaker 2 (17:04):
Yeah right, well that I mean, and again, there's a
lot of factors there, right.

Speaker 1 (17:08):
It could be like, you know, what's your belief in
the product, like how connected you feel to the product? Right,
how you know, how connected you feel to the culture,
and all these things are so they're nuanced things, but
they really do effect the overall right outcome.

Speaker 3 (17:25):
Yeah, I used to tell people I was a marketing
coach for a long time, kind of a little bit
different from what you did are doing. But my saying
used to be is, you know, the brand is the
story that people say when you're not around, right, It's
what they what they it's what they envision when they
close your eyes, the colors they see, the logo. But
it's also the customer experience, the you know overall, like

(17:48):
if you weren't in the room, what would they tell
another company about, you know what a person if they
if they did business with you a dozen times, what
would they tell them? And that's kind of the brand
you built. It's the story that other people tell. It's
so hard not to disrupt that an emerging an acquisition
deal because now you have a new operator, they're not
going to do the same saying the same way.

Speaker 4 (18:09):
And you're you're you know, you're always.

Speaker 3 (18:12):
Hoping you're improving right when you buy something, Yeah, but
it may not necessarily be so not in the eyes
of all the customers. These customers are human beings, and
human beings are resistant to change.

Speaker 2 (18:24):
One hundred percent.

Speaker 1 (18:25):
But again, and when you're the acquired, what are you
looking for? You need to find efficiencies, right, You need
to find efficiencies because you're looking to get You're usually
looking to crank up the heat and whatever, right you're acquiring,
but you also.

Speaker 2 (18:40):
Want to improve and grow.

Speaker 1 (18:42):
And in order for that to be like applicable across
different you know, different offices and just simply from a
software perspective, right, it's like not to get everyone on
the same system and from a communication perspective, but yeah,
I mean I think that's.

Speaker 2 (18:57):
Where I feel like that CEO having really.

Speaker 1 (19:00):
Strong transition team, especially for sales and marketing is imperative
because of how different those strategies can be market to market,
like as you mentioned right with Tornado Alley. You know,
if they stick me into Tornado Alli and G from Jersey,
like I I wouldn't know, I would have no insights there. Right,

(19:23):
So that's where I think, you know, really appreciating even
like these non conventional ways of doing business and these
different in these different places, like to really pay attention
right and don't disregard things because, as you said, people
will come in and say, well, we need the TV spots,
or we need the we need the mailers or whatever,
because that's what worked in these other places, and we

(19:43):
just want to think of what we know work. But
that could also be you know, could could kill. They
could kill the success of that effort, you know, that
strategy in that market.

Speaker 3 (19:55):
What parts of marketing do you think drives value in
it company? Like if if if you were to if
I came to you and said, hey, I'm going to
sell this company in a year or two, let's get
things situated to where my marketing department is attractive to
a buyer or my companies marketing in the image of
my company and everything that everything within your realm. What

(20:18):
would you think would be the most important things to address.

Speaker 1 (20:23):
Well, okay, so obviously there's like there's two layers. The
first layer, which is probably the most obvious. It doesn't
matter which department, it is right to make sure that
you have your systems right, you're organized, you're systemized. I
think one of the biggest fears for buyers, like I
work a lot with one of my partners is Flippa,

(20:44):
which I'm sure.

Speaker 4 (20:45):
You were right, so right, absolutely, I.

Speaker 1 (20:47):
Work a lot with them and just providing content and guidance,
and so you know, one of the things that they
work with the sellers and the buyer. So one of the
things on the buyer side, right, that's instilled a lot
of fear is the idea that you know, things will
break if the team gets changed out, if you kind
of disrupt what's going on.

Speaker 2 (21:07):
And the only way that you can really.

Speaker 1 (21:09):
Assure that buyer that that's not going to happen is
by having your you know, your shit organized, I don't
pick and curse, right, organized systemized, and that you can
really show the correlation between the strategy you have running
and this results right, and that those strategy results formula

(21:30):
is systimized, you know. And and from an operational standpoint,
you know, you can kind of switch out people.

Speaker 2 (21:36):
You want to be in a position as a.

Speaker 1 (21:38):
Buyer where you're not there's no golden handcuffs, right, It's
not like you have to be connected to one particular
person that holds the key to the palace. So I
would say that, but I guess the next question becomes,
you know, how do you get to that point where
you have everything organized and systemized and you're saying, you
know what drives value? I think there's there's two. There's

(22:00):
two primary points that drive value in the marketing department.
The first is of course the brand, right. The you know,
oftentimes a in a sale or acquisition, you're looking for
the brand, the brand equity, right. You want to make
sure that the brand has value in the marketplace, right,

(22:21):
not only do they have the plethora of leads and
contacts right in the database, but that those leads in
contacts have a relationship to that brand, That there is trust,
that there's community, because when you are acquiring a company
that has like a built in not just lead less right,
And I think a lot of people get extremely you know,

(22:44):
enchanted by just these large databases, which I mean next
to nothing unless you have some kind of relationship with
those folks and that they have some certain kind of
feeling about your brand, right, that you've worked to create
a solid brand with the out like with the solid foundation,
and that you've really worked to nurture and build a

(23:04):
relationship with that with those folks. And there's of course
there's we could talk about the frameworks that our used
to do that, which are'm sure one that you'll be
very familiar with. But we also can you know, we
can measure that brand of sinity, we can measure that
community and that that trust, right. And depending on the
type of business, there's different tools that exist, but that's

(23:26):
the number that's a really really important piece of the
puzzle when you're buying a business to decide whether that
brand does.

Speaker 2 (23:33):
Actually have value or not. And it doesn't.

Speaker 1 (23:35):
And and today's world that could say, hey, you could
have bajillions of followers on social media and folks may
be looking at that as an asset.

Speaker 2 (23:43):
But again, there's a lot of ways to.

Speaker 1 (23:45):
Acquire followers that did not involve genuine connections or genuine community, right,
So we need to measure those things.

Speaker 3 (23:53):
I want to clearly address the term brand because I
think I'm very biased in this and this is one
of my own cognitive biases. I honestly think that way
too many marketing agencies sell bad marketing without any results
in the name space of branding. Yeah, and I honestly

(24:17):
think if you're doing less than say, five million dollars
of revenue a year, less than a half a million
in Ubada you should never be doing anything for the
sake of branding in the terms of spending money on
marketing agencies and that type of stuff they're branding. Don't
get me wrong, I'm not saying you shouldn't do branding.
I'm saying, if you're gonna pay for advertising and stuff

(24:38):
like that, you want driven results. I want to put
a dollar in and I want to know what I'm
getting a dollar quarter.

Speaker 4 (24:42):
Out or a dollar five out Right.

Speaker 3 (24:45):
Branding in my mind is I've got a uniform set
of colors. I've got my logo, and my it looks
the same no matter where it's at. My website matches,
my newsletters, masteres the t shirts that people see. When
there's there's a correlation that people see when they see things,
the customer experience is steadying the same.

Speaker 4 (25:03):
It's not variable. Right.

Speaker 3 (25:05):
That stuff builds a brand. You can do it without
spending tens of thousand or hundreds of thousands your entire
brand you're marketing, dumping it off on what they're calling
advertising for the sake of we're just building your brand.
Everybody will know what your logo looks like. I can
promise you I've seen it. I've even tried it. I've
bought every bench in this entire city, like a bus bench,
and yeah, put my real estate logo on it, stuff

(25:28):
like that. It didn't change the number of calls than
the ones where I had strategically placed. Right, I've done.
I've done that stuff in the sake of let's just
give it a shot, is right. And it's detrimental to
a lot of these companies that are bootstrapped. They don't
have outside funding and they're raising capital from friends and
family and from revenue, you know, from sales. To go

(25:51):
out and spend that kind of money and not know
if you're going to get a result.

Speaker 2 (25:54):
Oh yeah, well I'm coming from the perspective. And again,
across my career, I've been a part of zero cost
branding projects.

Speaker 1 (26:02):
I've been a part of one hundred thousand dollary brands right,
and I can tell you that your brand is not
just your color and logo. You know, your logo and
your colors, and even it's not even just your mission
and vision and value. I think it's incredibly important to
go through that exercise.

Speaker 2 (26:22):
And if you're a person that that.

Speaker 1 (26:23):
Feels not like a process you can do on your
own getting someone to sort of being a sounding forward
someone more experience really valuable.

Speaker 2 (26:30):
And that doesn't have to cause lent money.

Speaker 1 (26:32):
But what I believe in connecting to what you just
said previously, the most important thing about your brand, right,
is your brand communication strategy. Are you saying the right
thing to the right people at the right time, right,
because your brand is like a personification of your business, right,
that's like a living piece of your business, and you

(26:53):
need to make sure that that that entity is showing up,
you know, at the right time to the right person,
saying the right thing. And that's often where the ROI
comes into brand Right, Can we show and the way
that we measure that as conversion rates?

Speaker 2 (27:09):
Right, is our brand communication strategy.

Speaker 1 (27:13):
So the way we're showing up right, how we physically
look right, how the website looks, how the logo looks,
how the copy reads, the way we're physically showing up
in the world digitally to our prospects or whatever, even physically,
you know, is that driving conversion? And if it is not,
it is often you know, not the product or services

(27:33):
that's that is flawed. It's the way that we're talking
about the partuct service, and that's Actually, the thing that
most people don't get right because it doesn't like the
marketing strategy is like, what are the actual physical tactics
that we're running, you know, as each stage of the
client journey right? And and we'll get to that in
a second. But none of that stuff's gonna work unless

(27:55):
you get the brand right. And in that it's like,
you know, what is is your company? How does it
physically show up? And do we have that communication strategy
that that's function right.

Speaker 4 (28:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (28:08):
I've learned lessons throughout my career that I hold true
and dear now. But in the process of learning them
cost me some good deals. I'll give you an example
of one. I won't say the business name because I
don't have their permission, but uh I interviewed, uh not
interviewed for the podcast, but I talked to business owners
in the eye that they were thinking about selling and

(28:30):
I was thinking about buying, right, and got down to
it and they, you know, we start talking about their marketing.
What are they doing for marketing, what's working, what's not?
And he's like, oh, we run some Facebook ads, we
do this. None of it really works all the time.

Speaker 4 (28:42):
It's just hit or miss.

Speaker 3 (28:43):
We just you know, we got good months and bad months.
And he says, you know, I think the problem I
have right now is I want to go do X.
Y Z had a new shiny object. He didn't think
he had the proper product market fit, yeah, for the
for the service that he was trying to sell, And
he said, I don't know how to fix that. So

(29:04):
what I did is I just went out started reading
all the two star and three star reviews and figuring
out what people were upset about. And then some of
them had decent social media. So I just reached out
and said, hey, would you give me five minutes?

Speaker 4 (29:17):
I did.

Speaker 3 (29:17):
I reached out to fifty or sixty of them. I'd said,
would you give me five minutes? I kind of like
to know about your experience? And what I learned was
is he was trying to sell his software in his
tools for X, and the people that were actually using
and leaving good reviews were using it for something totally different.

Speaker 2 (29:35):
Yes, and this goes back to brand right. It goes
back to the six.

Speaker 1 (29:39):
Of who was your target client, who's your have to
merge right?

Speaker 2 (29:44):
And what problem are you solving?

Speaker 1 (29:46):
And when you have a problem with product market fit,
it's that question. And I think that the reason why
that's so insidious, right is I feel like most business owners,
it seems it's very simple, right, and it seemed like
something that you can, you know, figure out like in
a you know, in thirty minutes you can kind of
think about who, you know, what problem I solving whatever.

Speaker 2 (30:07):
The reason why it's such an.

Speaker 1 (30:09):
Abhidious issue for business owners is that it's a simple concept, right,
but it's not easy to hit the mark on and
most folk winks a tremendous amount of marketing dollars i e.
Ads that don't that are missing the mark because actually
they are not really clear on who they're selling to

(30:31):
and what problem they're solving for them. And that's where
sort of building out a system, a client journey in
a systematic way that you can measure, right, the results
at each of these levels is going to give you
that feedback you.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
Need to iterate and improve, right, and how smart you are.

Speaker 1 (30:50):
But not everyone thinks about this, Right, Let's listen to
the customer feedback and really be able to interpret what
they're saying and how that and how and how that mean,
like how that relates to our product, the service, and
how we're talking about it, right and so mentioned before
about the customer service. I think that marketing is a
tremendous part of customer service. It's not just who's picking

(31:13):
up the phone and what are they saying, what are
their scuares. Customer service is everything about, you know, the
onboarding experience, even like how they're interacting with the product,
or you know, the billing experience, or you know what
happens if the payment gets right or you know, invoicing.
All of the stuff that is is part of the
communication strategy, and we often miss that piece because we're

(31:37):
just thinking about the physical person that's answering the phone
and what they're saying.

Speaker 2 (31:42):
But marketing can affect that much a lot.

Speaker 1 (31:44):
So in the way that I work with with clients
and the way that I think about marketing and building
the marketing department that I think is really useful for
folks on either side of the coin. You know, if
you're if you're someone that's looking to sell, you know,
what do you need to get to gather inside your
marketing department to get to that organized, systemized place that's
going to not only build confidence with the buyer whoever

(32:09):
is looking to buy, but also to have a system
in place so you can actually clearly measure our OI, right,
because that's again a lot of folks that when they
think of selling, they they're looking at these things like, oh,
this is the size of my database, and this is
my follower count or this is our you know, pipeline deals.

Speaker 3 (32:29):
Right.

Speaker 2 (32:30):
But when we structure things in a way that's systemized, organized,
and we you know, we build a marketing sportcard against
a system, we actually can showcase quite.

Speaker 1 (32:40):
Easily, right, the channel performance and the and the ROI
of each channel. We can actually see very clearly our
efforts and what it garners for us in terms of
all the things that we do in marketing. And I
just think quite I think quite simply folks a lot
of business, especially small businesses, they just like don't have

(33:01):
like the They know that that's important, but maybe they
don't know exactly how to do it. And so that's
you know, this is what I help clients with. But
the overarching theme here is how do we organize in systemaid.
I look at the marketing department in four different kind
of areas. First is all about the brand. So do
you have that that idea of you know, not just

(33:25):
the colors and the logo, but who you're serving.

Speaker 2 (33:27):
Who is your target client? You know, how are you
reaching them? What are the problem that you're solving? You know,
do you have a you know, a comprehensive competitive analysis.
Do you know what's going on in the market?

Speaker 1 (33:37):
You know, do you have sort of your your again
messaging matrix tied together that's proven, right, so you know,
you know, you know, here's the pain point, here's how
we solve it. This is the methoding that works. Do
you have all of that together in a way that
is documented that you can actually train other people on.
That's one thing I would ask everyone that's listening to

(33:59):
sync about out because oftentimes something maybe you did in
the beginning when you first started your business and you
never worked it again, and that has changed a ton
as we start working and things they are changing. Make
sure sure you have that tied together and check in
with that yearly. The next piece is, you know, have
you built a just stimized marketing growth strategy?

Speaker 2 (34:20):
And that's you know, you can.

Speaker 1 (34:21):
Call whatever you want, but I called the twenty four
x seven marketing flywheel, and it's a version of the
client journey.

Speaker 4 (34:28):
Right.

Speaker 1 (34:28):
These six stages of sort of turning someone into you know,
a profect into not knowing about ing your business and
what you do all the way into you know, building
that relationship, nurturing them, building that sense of community, converting
them into paying customers. You know, do you have that
mapped out and then do you have a system for

(34:49):
measuring the success of that strategy? You have that in place?
And the answer is no, I would, I would definitely
take a look at building that out because again, a
lot lot of folks think of marketing strategy is just
like running ads, right, but actually, when you look at
building out a full journey, it goes from these kind

(35:09):
of disparate tactics that you're running in marketing where honestly,
a lot of especially the men that I work with,
sorry to say, you know, they just focus on the
top of the funnel. It's just like, we just got
to get more people into the sales funnel, more people
on the sales funnel.

Speaker 2 (35:24):
But they're they're.

Speaker 1 (35:25):
Actually and then once those people kind of like leave
that initial funnel, it's kind of they kind of forget.

Speaker 2 (35:30):
About them and they just are focused on just more
and more and more and more more and missing.

Speaker 1 (35:35):
A huge opportunity of folks that you know, have had
that one or two touches with their business. You know,
how do we build that relationship and build out that
community peek like I said, or that brand loyalty that
relates into revenue that translates into higher LTV like lifetime
value of that client or that customer. So looking at

(35:57):
that comprehensively, and then once you've built out that system,
really looking at your team and saying, if I want
to get to any milestone or any revenue goal, if
you look at that strategy you have in place and
really have to ask yourself, do I have the right
people on the bus to execute the strategy? And if
you don't know right how to measure that, building out

(36:18):
a scorecard is going to help you because if you say, hey,
on the marketing scorecard, you know we're just not getting
you know, enough lead, or your churn rates really high,
or you know, we're getting a ton of bad reviews, whatever,
that's going to point you in the right direction of
where your team may be, you know, deficient.

Speaker 3 (36:36):
We had one marketing roll up where I was a
part of. We talked over two hundred plus marketing agencies
since then, I probably at least talked to over two
hundred plus small businesses, and I can tell you, and
I probably count on a single hand, how many of
those businesses had a marketing system so attractive that I
wanted to acquire the business because of what they did

(36:58):
in the marketing.

Speaker 4 (36:59):
It's a very possible.

Speaker 3 (37:00):
The one that really sticks on mind, even like the
two hundred and something marketing agencies. When COVID hit, it
destroyed most of those guys because they their typical way
of marketing was to go to trade shows, bump elbows
with people, take them out to fancy dinners, and land
new clients.

Speaker 4 (37:16):
Right.

Speaker 3 (37:17):
You know, we're stealing from the go to social events
and still it from the other agencies. They was all
elbow to elbow. Didn't work so good during COVID. They
were having a hard time. I'll tell you one of
the best ones. Here's a good one. This one of
the best ones I ever seen. And I evaluated this
industry for about four months, maybe six months afterwards, yeah,
and determined it was kind of like blood diamonds. I

(37:38):
didn't want to get into. It's a coffee industry. Coffee
industry is pretty dirty if you really dig into imports
and exports and how their farmers are treated and stuff
like that.

Speaker 4 (37:45):
It's a shady it's a shady industry.

Speaker 3 (37:48):
And I didn't want to get in a business where
I have to travel all the time to make sure
my whole supply chain is taken care of. But what
got me into it was a young guy up in
like Oregon, Seattle, that area on this coast. He had
seven small kiosk plus you know, or kios or bigger
coffee shops. That's what he started with. You know, he

(38:10):
started with one and moved around, so someone were kios
As and someone were bigger than Starbucks. And his marketing
strategy was so thorough that the brand was uniform across
all that he was selling the seven coffee shops. I
wanted the roasting company. That's where the real money was.
So he had a he had seven independent shops at
a warehouse somewhere where he roasted all the beans for everything.

(38:32):
But he built a subscription based model based off of
all of his All the logos matched, all the stuff matched,
and he he had a little declarative on his brand,
it's love I think Love the Sip or something like that.

Speaker 4 (38:43):
Instead of having a question mark. He had an exclamation mark.

Speaker 3 (38:45):
So he's telling him love the sip and you know,
and then he says underneath it and this is even
on the sleeves his coffee.

Speaker 4 (38:51):
What more.

Speaker 3 (38:52):
And he had a little barcovere people could order subscription
and get the beans delivered, you know, beans, their ground
beads delivered to their house. Then what he would do
is he would he would ask them questions, you know,
through a survey type of thing, when they would log
into the website to the order, find out their birthday,
find out different things, maybe their wedding anniversary. He just
randomly get good questions. And every time there was something

(39:14):
coming up where that person would have guests at their house,
you might figure out figure out through like he would
hunt down stuff. He had it two people on his team.
Their whole job was on every subscription to go fill
out the CRM for that that user, look at their social,
look at everything. He'd figure out their anniversary anytime they
would he thought somebody would have guests coming over to
their house. He'd even track users who regularly through house

(39:37):
part like he could see on social they through house
like you know events where they're always hosting stuff he
would he would track all that, like who's my social
who's my social people, and who will have people over,
and then you would send them sample packages with barcodes
on it, so in a in a letter and it
just simply said, if your guests love the coffee, send
them home with a few samples of their own. And

(39:59):
he he was growing like mad, and he's like, I
just wanted the company for you know, the whole subscription model.
He's six or almost. He was six million one year,
seven million another and he was doing close to.

Speaker 4 (40:10):
Doing eight or nine in the year.

Speaker 3 (40:11):
I was talking to him in subscription coffee grinds of beans,
roasted beans, And I thought that system of just kind
of knowing your customers so well that they're going to
know when somebody's birthdays coming up, or when somebody these
anniversary is gonna come up, and you just they're gonna
send them the regular subscription, but in that you're gonna
throw in a nice little letter and some sample packages

(40:33):
for their guests.

Speaker 2 (40:34):
That's rue.

Speaker 1 (40:35):
And then and these things I think, like, these things
are not it's not like rocket science to to sit
down and think about this sort of stuff.

Speaker 2 (40:45):
The difference is that no one does.

Speaker 1 (40:48):
I think that's you know, and that's like because many
against the smaller businesses you know that that I consult
for that don't have dedicated marketing folks. Right, there's so
many people out there. Is one of my soapbop things
I wark about. No, when you're a business that just
outsources everything to an agency, right, you have no one

(41:09):
that is owning the marketing strategy inside your business.

Speaker 2 (41:13):
And listen, if you're small, a small guy out there and.

Speaker 1 (41:16):
You can't afford you know whatever, hundreds of whatever k
a year salary for a director level. This could be
a marketing manager. This could be literally just someone that
is growth minded, someone that is going to own the numbers, right,
but someone that's inside your business. And too often we
kind of acquiesce the strategy to outside consultants and outside folks.

(41:39):
I'm such a proponent of building your team when it
comes to the marketing because again, like and it doesn't
have to be full time employes. They could be contractors
or consultants, but treating them like team, it's going to
get into these nuance things that are going to enhance
that customer experience and get built that loyalty and that

(42:01):
lifetime value. And if you're looking at a company and
you're saying, how are we going to double the revenue
this year?

Speaker 2 (42:06):
You know, oftentimes there's like two choices.

Speaker 1 (42:08):
We can either you know, get like a shit ten
more people in the front door, right, or we can
just sell a lot more to people that already know
like and trust us.

Speaker 2 (42:19):
And that selling more to the people that know like
and trust us is a piece that people like.

Speaker 1 (42:24):
Often they don't think much about, but it's I mean
the statistics, you know, like how much easier it is.
You know, it's something like twenty or fifty times a
year to sell someone that is an existing customer then
to convert someone that's new. And the way that we
do that is by implementing these in our marketing strategy,
these long term nurture pieces where we're nurturing them and

(42:47):
then at different points that makes sense for them, we're
sending them offers that make sense to them and just
inviting them to purchase it and inviting them to purchase again.
And again, it's not rocket sciences, but I have to
take the time to think about it right and put
and to put the systems in plate to make it
possible and it's often not difficult, like to track people's

(43:09):
birthdays and to be saying them personalized promotions is just
like a plug in in a CRM.

Speaker 2 (43:15):
It's not it's not complicated.

Speaker 1 (43:17):
You know.

Speaker 3 (43:18):
I think people are leaning on it a little too
much right now without I think you and I need
to give people guidance on how it's a brilliant tool, right.
Don't get me wrong, I think AI right now on
some of these tools set around if they had their
human IQ. I think they set around one sixty one
seventy somewhere in that range, and most of us are
not right.

Speaker 4 (43:38):
Yeah, So if.

Speaker 3 (43:40):
You ever sit in a room where you know that
everybody is about forty points higher in IQ than you,
you would understand that it's a strategic advantage to have it.

Speaker 4 (43:48):
Now.

Speaker 3 (43:48):
The real quick is is most people high IQs are
also very awkward socially, right, So understanding how to ask
them the right question and how to get value out
of their knowledge base isn't acquired skill. And I think
the same thing plays with AI. One of my favorite
books out there is by Dan Solomon called Who Not
How Well? Right?

Speaker 2 (44:08):
I love it?

Speaker 3 (44:09):
Yeah, I love it, and it's changed the way I
do things. I outsourced all kinds of stuff. Now, I joke,
Aly said, outsourced press in my teeth. I can get
somebody to show up at the right time twice a day.
That said, there's something to be said about having a
BS meter. When you're messing with shack cupt or any
of these tools. There's so much better than they were
six months ago. They still hallucinate and even worse, they drift. Right,

(44:29):
So what I mean by drift is you and I
were talking about before the show about training it, giving
it images, giving it, like the difference between a pre
trained experience on one of these tools like chacktupt and
one that just you're just trusting the prompt. Even if
you pre train it, there's a thing that it likes
to drift away from it over time. So if you
haven't right seales letters and after the third or fourth one,

(44:50):
you'll realize it's losing the voice. You have to sometimes
tell it no, no, no, go back to all the
stuff I gave you and stick to stick to the plan. Yeah, right,
it wants to get too creative. It's like it's kind
of like having a toddler or an eight or nine
year old who's really super creative has an IQ of
one seventy.

Speaker 1 (45:10):
Yes, right, yeah, well, well one of the things that
I just want to tie this back where we're talking
about with the coffee guy, because one thing that I
think is imperative that everyone pays.

Speaker 2 (45:22):
Attention to when it comes to marketing and the future
of marketing.

Speaker 1 (45:26):
In general, is that what AI is doing is, you know,
we are now in directing with these tools, and they're
they're going to feel hyper personalized. And there's a lot
of the software companies that we use, like our CRMs
and the marketing world, like you know, even if we're
generating copy or we're doing lead, you know, we're pulling

(45:48):
leaves and we're doing cold outbounds. Like, the amount of
personalization that is possible with AI is something that is
going to, I think, in the very near future be
an absolute like given for prospects, Like they're going to
expect that any marketing or sales messaging messages to them

(46:09):
table legs is it's going to have to have context
about who they are, you know, no, you know, and
this this idea of like you know insert here, right,
and as as the human need to like put in
the personalization now there's tools that can that can look
at people's LinkedIn profiles, for example, and see what their
latest post was, or look at their Instagram prowths and

(46:30):
see like you said, or do they host bold parties
or not. And so we as business owners need to
be able to harness this for our businesses because if not,
we'll get left behind. So whether that means tools that
we need to purchase, or training that we need our
team to get on, or whatever.

Speaker 2 (46:47):
But again, our marketing.

Speaker 1 (46:49):
Our marketing, sales messaging, and our communication is going to
have to feel that personalized to the individual because that's
what our that's the.

Speaker 2 (46:58):
Market can expect that.

Speaker 1 (47:00):
Now, I think the question is is that how do
we do that and how do we leverage these tools
effectively in our businesses and particularly in marketing. Right, the
obvious use case is you know copy, but I mean
we can do so much more than just writing copy.

Speaker 2 (47:18):
But to your point.

Speaker 1 (47:19):
About training, right, we need to make sure that if
we're utilizing this technology that it's trained properly.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
Actually, I let's I'm ask you a question. You know
what what would it?

Speaker 1 (47:31):
Because you have more experience in this than I do
in the back end, Right, So what is the difference
from a back end perspective, from that someone is just
wilding themselves, that toddler or that nine or ten year
old versus something that's consciously crafted that's going to give
you the best output.

Speaker 3 (47:49):
So in my personal experience, I don't think it's possible
for us as humans to build anything without impairing it
somewhat with our own cognitive biases. So the engineer that
have trained these different chat bots are I'll notice, and
they're trying to fix some of it now. They tend
to lean towards the political affiliations and the and the
ideology of the engineers that built it. Grock is trying

(48:13):
to avoid that all together, but it's still a little
bit sassy on the you know, the Republican side, where
you know chat TP is a little bit leaning the
other way. I don't think that's healthy in any sense
for anybody's brand. I think that in order brand, in
some expense spence, your brand is a cognitive bias in

(48:34):
its own way. It's a way you want. You're trying
to instill people to think a certain way about your product,
about your service, and about that type of stuff. And
if you don't give the chat a voice on that
and say, here's here's my avatar, here's here's fifteen different
uses of my logo. Here's you know, and give it

(48:56):
you know. Here is the last two PR releases we do.
Here's you know, the last fifteen advertisements we did?

Speaker 4 (49:04):
You know?

Speaker 3 (49:05):
Stick to this brand voice, stick to this narrative the
same way to be treating a new I onboard my
chat GPT like I would a new employe. As matter
of fact, every time I prompted, I prompt it like
I would a task in an employee. Your job is
to do X, right, I expect you know Z is
the result. Here's the here's the result I'm looking for.

(49:25):
You're hired on to do you know? And give it
a job description, and then I want you know these features?

Speaker 4 (49:32):
I want you know.

Speaker 3 (49:32):
I give it as detail of the output as I can,
and then I say, do you have any questions that
will help you perform this task? And I promise you
it asked me ten or fifteen questions every time, and
sometimes if I don't think it gets it yet, I'll
say do you I'll answer all those questions. I'll say, well,
did that bring up any more questions? I act like
it's an employee or are you ready to do this task?
And it'll ask me one or two questions, right, and

(49:54):
then I answer them, and then it does a pretty
good job. And then sometimes you still got to go
back and kind of like, wait, okay, this you know
this is this looks great, but I want you to
change this portion over here, and and you have to.
I still think I haven't seen one yet where it
doesn't help to have a decent BS meter. Right, I'm
a trained copywriter. I trained under Dan Kennedy. I have

(50:16):
a master's degree in marketing. I'll tell you right now
that check TP out of the box untrained probably writes
the equivalent of what you would have to pay a
ten or fifteen thousand dollars copywriter to write. But if
you wanted to do a fifty to one hundred thousand
dollars you know copywriter job, which is more realistic on
a really great piece of copy. You're talking you know,

(50:37):
Dan Kennedy, you would charge one hundred thousand dollars to
walk in the room and talk to you about your project.

Speaker 4 (50:41):
So he's one of the best on the planet.

Speaker 3 (50:42):
But you know, on average, the good guys you're looking
at you know big numbers, you know, five to six
figures to get something done. If you want it to
spit out something like that, you need to train it
on your brand. You had to train it on previous language.
That worked, right, you train it on your avatar. You
just can't just go and say, hey, write me a
sales letter to sell making mouse stuffed dolls. Right that said,

(51:05):
I honestly see great results with it, Right, I use
it on a regular basis. I was telling you beforehand,
I actually programmed a complete app using AI. I used
AI to write an app that actually uses AI to
help people.

Speaker 2 (51:20):
Right, So yeah, so meta.

Speaker 1 (51:23):
Well, the thing is is that I feel like what
I have seen in my line of work is that
what is most helpful that the average person. So the
reason why I think the average person can't like one
entrepreneur that wants to do every function in their business
just to use in chat. Let's look at that use case,

(51:45):
which I think we can get pretty close to that happening, right,
because we keep hearing these like bets of you know,
the the you know, the oligarchs for the tech world
saying you know, pretty soon they'll be the first billion
dollar company with less than ten employees or something like that, right,
and that that's coming, But I feel like for us
to be able to utilize like team members now in

(52:05):
our own businesses to do these functions that I can
speak to the marketing piece is that what the reason
why I can implement this into teams that I founders
that I work with and build kind of a combination
of the bots and honestly the humans, because you need
a human to own the process, right, You just need
to need someone to be held accountable. That's a human

(52:26):
being that can also kind of project manage all of
this stuff and hold the quality and there you can't
get rid of that, but you can certainly cut the
cost of your department incredible by incredible bounce by utilizing
team members, right that are at now. The difference here
is that you know, when I work with clients, we're
building out a whole playbook. And the playbook has a

(52:47):
lot of these elements that you mentioned, right, has the
brand piece has the marketing growth strategy, has the voice
and tone it has and so being able to utilize
experts to understand the frameworks to understand what are the
pieces of the puzzle. And yes, you could ask Ai
to tell you those things and you could kind of

(53:08):
get to a peak that feels productive. But I think
that the shortcut is really hiring the experts to be
able to understand what success looks like for a particular
tactic or a particular you know, a department or particular
pet the business and getting kind of those guardrails on

(53:29):
how things should get done. You know, if you're working
and training bots against proven framework, I think you're gonna
have a lot more success, absolutely, And that's sort of
I think the danger here.

Speaker 2 (53:42):
I see a lot of people really.

Speaker 1 (53:44):
Confident in using II, but because they don't have this
set of frameworks and this kind of like roadmap to
follow that it could actually just get you into more
of a shiny object chasing and a little bit more
lost than you already are.

Speaker 2 (54:00):
So that's the wheyre.

Speaker 1 (54:00):
I think leveraging experts to help with with that piece
is really really useful. Or I mean again, you can
hire consultants and hire folks like us to help them
oil things or even be reading books and be able
to apply principles from different teachers that have you know,
to do it yourself, but you have to do it
from a place of proven framework.

Speaker 2 (54:23):
And a proven strategy.

Speaker 3 (54:25):
I find sometimes that it'll spit out so much stuff
and you're like, like you said, you get that little
bit of overwhelm. One of the things I treat it
like an employer or an advisor. I was like, man,
I just sell it. Man, that's a lot. Can we
put that into a project timeline or prioritize all the
stuff you gave me in order of the greatest impact
on what I'm working on and give me, you know,
a timeline on what to implement. And you know, I

(54:49):
would promise you I don't do all this stuffs all
the time, but if it prior if you gives me
a list of ten or fifteen things to do on
a pic particular topic and I tell it to prioritize,
I'll try the first few and see how it goes.
That that said, it can be overwhelming, and you can
you can sit down, you know, at a prompt there
and spend all your day asking questions and watching it

(55:10):
spit out, you know, huge reports and stuff and not
do anything.

Speaker 1 (55:14):
So that's where I like, I think one danger a
lot of especially small business found owners have with that
our bootstrap that are kind on budget, you know, just
like I said, you know, it's dangerous to acquiesce like
all of your marketing strategy and your execution out to
an agency that really, you know, they don't have like

(55:35):
a huge.

Speaker 2 (55:36):
Stake in what you're doing in your and the results
because they know.

Speaker 1 (55:39):
That if they're not performing, you know, maybe they waste
three months of your time or six months or years
of your.

Speaker 2 (55:43):
Time, they can just move on to the next client, right.

Speaker 1 (55:46):
Whereas if you have someone that is a team member,
someone that's maybe they're tied to performance their compensation. You know,
accountability is so so so important, especially when it comes
I mean, it comes to all of it, right, but
sales and marketing, right, are we is you know, did
the campaign yet? Chatter PT can build out the campaign right,

(56:07):
but did it go out to go out?

Speaker 2 (56:09):
You know it? You know, is the emails being replied?

Speaker 1 (56:12):
You know? Is the social strategy working? Are people converting
on that? Who's so showing up on the sales calls?
We need someone to be taking ownership over these pieces
of our business and make sure, yes we can use
these different tools, but we need to make sure that
things are rolling right. The qualitative data, like is the
quality where it needs to be and then the quantit
data data like is that is this stuff working? And

(56:33):
if not, who's going to be the one that implements
those changes. It has to be someone that I believe
will take responsibility.

Speaker 2 (56:42):
And I see that there's this idea that maybe.

Speaker 1 (56:46):
Yeah, you could just have you know, a whole company
of just AI book and maybe one day that will
be the case. But where we are now, I think
we still need we need humans to take ownership over
the process.

Speaker 3 (56:58):
I've got a little project I've been playing went I
can't get quite working yet. But what I've done is
I've taken and trained for now different AI coaches, like
one in total, you know, marketing, copywriting. I've put a
lot of PDF books into this thing of great writers
and stuff. The other one is you know, a great
leader type of you know scenario put a lot of

(57:20):
their books inside of there. And my goal was to
have like a chat room that acts like a board
meeting or a mastermind through an idea out and each
one of these ais you know, respond and they see
each other's response, right, and they you know, they just
like sitting in the like a real mastermind. But you know,
you built, you're the only human in the room. I
have not got it working.

Speaker 4 (57:38):
Quite yet, but that's one of the toys I've been.

Speaker 1 (57:41):
Playing with is to kind of have these chats one
space as individual.

Speaker 3 (57:47):
Yeah, I was feeding them all through because you can
put you can put those things in the WhatsApp. So
I was trying to feed them all into WhatsApp and
then have them have the boughts listening to each other.
And it just keeps getting quirked up a little bit.

Speaker 2 (57:56):
That's a really cool idea.

Speaker 3 (57:58):
Yeah, I just I like, I'm bored, I'm you know,
some I retired, I do this and like I told you,
I created a mental health support a class launching that
I'll hope to bring a little team on. It'll take
care and run it. But after, you know, after it's
up and launched, and then I'll go on to doing
something else that's interesting to me.

Speaker 4 (58:17):
So how do people get a hold of you and
work with you.

Speaker 3 (58:19):
We're at the top of the hour and I want
to respect your time, so reful.

Speaker 2 (58:25):
Well, this has been super fun. I love I love
this conversation. So again, definitely, I love. I spend a
lot of my time on LinkedIn.

Speaker 1 (58:34):
That's my preferred platform of choice. So I'm Victoria hr
A J J j A R. And you can send
me a d M if you have, of course, anything
that we chat about today. But also my company is
called Ugly Ventures, so it's ugly with an I because
business can be ugly sometimes, especially when it comes to
sales and marketing. So I've really made it my mission
to help founders to create organized, systemized strategize their marketing

(58:58):
to build when I call it, scalable marketing machine. And
this idea of building these scalable marketing entities in your
business is getting even.

Speaker 2 (59:06):
More exciting with what AI can do. But again it's.

Speaker 1 (59:09):
About having the systems and framework to be able to
kind of get that department moving in a way that
everyone's you know, steering the ship in the right direction.

Speaker 3 (59:19):
AI will impress me when I can give it my
Google Analytics log in, my ads sense log in, my
Facebook ads log in, and my LinkedIn ads log in,
and just tell it look at all the analytics. You know,
you have a budget of fifty dollars running out on
one of them. Okay, Now the budget's one hundred and
fifty dollars. You know, run performance tune this. Okay, Now

(59:39):
the budget's one thousand dollars. Yeah, you know, and it
just does it. That'll impress me. It's I think, hands down,
the technology is already there. They can look at the statistics,
look at human psychology, look at all the different stuff
and do it. The scare tactic right now is none
of these tools will allow you to give it access to.

Speaker 4 (59:59):
Stuff like that.

Speaker 3 (01:00:00):
Yeah, they're concerned with financials and the AI running amuck.

Speaker 1 (01:00:05):
Unless we build your own platform that aggregates all of
that stuff and then you're in business.

Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
Very cool. Well, thank you so much for inviting me on.
This has been really fun.

Speaker 4 (01:00:14):
No, so hang out for a few minutes. We'll call
that a show, and thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:00:17):
Perfect.

Speaker 3 (01:00:18):
This episode of How to Exit is brought to you
by Final Assent, the Batique m and a firm helping
lower middle market business owners achieve their ultimate exit. At
Final Assent, they know selling your business is one of
the business decisions you'll ever make, and they've been in
your shoes. Their team isn't just madei of advisors. They
experienced business owners who have successfully navigated their own exits.

(01:00:39):
Final Assent specializes in preparing businesses for sale, building value,
and connecting with a national network of qualified buyers who
will compete for your business. They don't take on a
client unless they're confident they can sell your business at
the current market maximum value, whether you're ready to sell
now or planning for the future. They'll craft a roadmap
tailor to your ni net goals so that you can

(01:01:01):
walk away with maximum value and a peace of mind.
Start your journey today at Final Ascent. That's www dot
final ascent dot com because your next chapter starts with
a successful exit

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E277: Most Marketing Teams Get Axed After a Sale - Here's How to Make Yours Unkillable

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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;}E277: Most Marketing Teams Get Axed After a Sale - Here's How to Make Yours Unkillable