Podcasts about reachlocal

Brian Hansen is the Founder and President of Rocket Pilots, a boutique digital marketing agency specializing in law firm marketing. With a background in large agencies, Brian established Rocket Pilots to provide transparent and effective digital marketing solutions for attorneys. Under his leadership, the company focuses on enhancing law firms' online presence through tailored SEO and Google Ads campaigns. In this episode… Law firms face intense competition in the digital space, yet many struggle with ineffective marketing strategies that fail to generate consistent leads. Traditional agencies often lack transparency, overcharge for services, and fail to deliver results, leaving attorneys frustrated and unsure how to grow their practice. So, with ever-changing regulations, evolving digital trends, and the rise of AI, how can firms rethink their marketing approach to stay ahead? With experience at large agencies like ReachLocal and Zocdoc, Brian Hansen saw firsthand the common pitfalls of digital marketing. He highlights how law firms often overlook key aspects of client acquisition, such as intake processes and market positioning. Brian also shares a case study of a law firm forced to pivot overnight when regulations banned their primary marketing method, highlighting the importance of diversifying lead generation strategies. Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Brian Hansen, Founder and President of Rocket Pilots, about the evolving landscape of law firm marketing. They discuss the impact of AI on SEO, how law firms can expand into new markets, and the future of lead generation. Brian also shares insights on the power of specialization, the risks of relying on a single marketing channel, and how law firms can maximize their digital presence.

The Power of Habits and a Positive Mindset: How Tony Humberstone Built a Thriving Business Being rejected hurts — and even if it happens again and again, it doesn't get any easier. The pain of getting doors slammed to your face, receiving rejection emails to your job applications, or being ignored scars a person.  But that doesn't have to be the end of your story. In this episode of The Mindset Mentor Meets, Angela Cox meets with Vooba Founder and CEO Tony Humberstone to talk about his journey from being a humble door-to-door salesman to building a successful digital marketing agency, all the while maintaining a close relationship with his family. Having braved multiple rejections and even falling into a health slump, Humberstone shares how he overcame all the obstacles in his life through a positive mindset and building good habits. It might sound cheesy, but this episode details how he applied that in his life and how that changed everything for him. Change starts from that one positive thought. Passion fuels it, and discipline allows it to go on. Let's dive into Tony Humberstone's story and learn all about his journey toward success. Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Learn how a positive mindset can influence your actions and drive you to do better. Understand how combining hard work, discipline, and a positive mindset makes all the difference. Discover how balancing your work with your health and family relationships makes life worth living. Resources Contact Tony Humberstone on LinkedIn Visit Vooba  Coaching with Angela Cox Listen to The Mindset Mentor Meets Episode Highlights [03:19] Tony's First Proudest Moment: His Sales Journey Tony started as a service engineer obsessed with sports, but he admits he didn't have a career mindset. He landed a job at BT Phonebooks through a friend in his squash club and began his career in sales. He didn't get good responses at first, but he kept going until he chanced upon Mortgage Search UK and got his first big sale. He eventually moved to London and got a job at a Google Adwords agency called REACH Local, but his passion called him to start his own business. He began PPC Stars, which eventually evolved into Vooba over the decades [13:56] Tony's Second Proudest Moment: His Journey of Shaping Up His busy London lifestyle made it difficult to stay in shape. He wasn't sleeping enough and felt burned out. Tony wanted to change, so he challenged himself by entering a half Ironman: a triathlon event involving swimming, biking and a marathon. He loved the event and continued doing them, relishing in his proud moment of crossing the finish line each time. Being physically active helped him in his business as well. Tony is thinking of what he can do to challenge himself even more. [18:59] Tony's Third Proudest Moment: His Daughter Tony's proudest achievement is his daughter. He and his wife love seeing her develop into a fine young lady. He maintains a close relationship with her, and they communicate often. Still, Tony hopes to travel more once his daughter leaves the nest. [22:50] Tony's Ultimate Secret to Success Build up good habits through discipline Keep an open and positive mindset regarding rejection. Don't fear it. This mindset helps run a business when many variables are outside your control. 5 Powerful Quotes [02:13] 'I'm always glass half full and not a glass half empty. I'm a big believer in positive mindset.' [10:57] ‘We all want to make money, but I still, to this day, get a buzz out of bringing a client on board and then helping them grow. And ultimately: if they grow, we grow, so that drives me to this day.' [15:54] 'I ended up doing five [triathlons], but the first one I did, I mean, literally, I was crawling over the finish line. It wasn't a particularly amazing time, but it then inspired me to obviously get better at it and work a bit harder.' [23:37] ‘Just going back to the story about knocking on doors: a lot of people hated it, because you would knock on a lot of doors and get a lot of rejection. But I'd always keep going, thinking this next door might be that golden ticket.' [25:19] ‘You've just got to be positive all the time.' About the Guest Tony Humberstone is the Founder and CEO of Vooba, a digital marketing agency based in rural West Sussex in the UK. Serving for more than 20 years in the advertising industry since the Yellow Pages days, he had extensive experience in sales as a Field Sales Consultant and area Sales Manager, eventually climbing up the ranks to a Business Development Manager. He founded PPC Stars, which specialized in Google Ads. He grew that company into a team of 40 people with over 300 clients and later rebranded as Vooba. Learn more about Tony and her work on the Vooba website and connect with him on LinkedIn. Enjoy this Podcast? Having the right attitude and habits changes everything. It can give you the strength and courage to move forward despite rejection and other obstacles. If you learned something new from today's The Mindset Mentor Meets episode, hit subscribe and share it with your friends! Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning into this podcast episode, share your thoughts with us online. You can also share it to help your family and friends. Have any questions? You can contact me through LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook. Thanks for listening!  For more updates and episodes, visit my website. You can also tune in to Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or PodBean.  To meeting inspiration, Angela  

Shellee and Josh discuss: - Is the SAT/ACT really necessary? - Importance of AP classes - Setting your student up for success by knowing how much they can handle About Josh: As the leader behind Lemonade Education, an AP and academic tutoring company, Josh brings a wealth of experience in innovation and general management for education and technology businesses. Lemonade Education was founded on a simple belief that the quality of teaching, above all else, is instrumental in helping students achieve success. Josh's career includes leadership roles at Gannett/USA Today, ReachLocal, and Yahoo Inc. He has consistently led teams to business growth by providing new value to customers. His education background includes a B.S. in Business from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and an M.A. in Education from San Diego State University. Throughout his career, businesses under Josh's leadership have earned recognition from industry leaders, including Google (winning their Innovation Award), AdExchanger, and Gartner. With a commitment to excellence, Josh Siegel continues to shape the future of education and technology, with the goal of positively impacting the lives of customers. Connect with Josh: - Website: https://www.lemonadeeducation.com/ - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lemonade.education/?view_public_for=105964284740363 - LinkedIn- https://www.linkedin.com/in/mjoshsiegel/ - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lemonade.education Connect with Shellee: Website: https://collegereadyplan.com/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr_WodPHDfSWEbiPdsRDbyQ Twitter: https://twitter.com/gocollegeready Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/collegereadyplan/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CollegeReadyPlan/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/college-ready/ Email: shellee@collegereadyplan.com

 My Total Life Freedom local friends and local networking friend Eric Laylon intersect for a second episode. In "Don't Fight Google or Facebook, Fight for Lunch", my friend Eric Laylon from ReachLocal shared great marketing tips and stats on the digital giants. I followed this with a story of who paid for lunch. In this episode, I am copying the format!  Last week in my local MCBA meeting, Eric ran the business education segment and taught on the benefits of using Alignable for marketing. I've personally avoided it, but Eric gives some great points and tips that may have persuaded me to look into it more. Thus, I wanted to share it with you. LinkedIn is a business platform for business owners and professionals (employees). Alignable is for small business owners locally (not nationally like LinkedIn). The platform is already niched to local and small business owners, which makes it a natural marketing companion to in-person local networking. Alignable has niche groups that you can join of "like interest". Eric says he has gotten so much more business through Alignable vs LinkedIn because of the platform's ability to hyper-niche. Eric explained that you can set up your profile with "who you'd like to connect with". Then, Alignable takes your preferences and puts you in front of those people. Eric uses the premium $30/mo version because the free version limits you to the # of people you can connect with. I thought Eric did a great job presenting Alignable and it really intrigued me. What do you think? Do you use this platform? I'd love to hear about it if you do.​A few leads came in this week. The first one was military-like. My friend James Hardy of the Carpet Guys was in an online group and saw a request for a house cleaner. He was in the process of typing in my name and website when something else caught his attention. The owner of a local cafe gave my name first. He recommended me and then texted me. "Ken, do you clean for the cafe?" I said no, but I do clean the owner's home. Then he told me about the recommendation to Steven Hunsberger. I thanked him and shared that Steven is the president of my chamber and we're friends. Then I contacted Steven and he felt so embarrassed that his friend Ken and the only cleaner of 400 members in his chamber didn't come to mind when he was looking for a house cleaner. There are multiple takeaways here. First, I am so thankful that I was triangulated by multiple friends to recommend me and they all knew each other! Another is that I have done a poor job in communicating that I clean houses to Steven in all of our interactions including our recent breakfast! Steven knew that I cleaned offices, but had no idea that I did houses too. We talked on the phone and I answered all of his questions in hopes of educating him on the various options he had for hiring a house cleaning service.Read the rest of this article at the Smart Cleaning School website

 In this episode, I have an important lesson to share from a new friend of mine in the digital marketing space on the power of Facebook and Google. Eric Laylon is a consultant with ReachLocal. He understands the online landscape more than almost anyone that I know. He's a new member of the MCBA networking group and had a chance to share a presentation on his work. I asked many questions as I wanted to understand a little more of the trends he's seeing in 2021.Google drives 85% of all online traffic and still dominates the online search landscape. Bing is #2 because Comcast uses them as a default, but they use Google ad platforms. Google will continue to dominate. If you're not visible on Google, you're not visible.Google My Business is a free way to create SEO for your business through images, reviews, articles, and deals. Ads are an excellent paid option to generate leads.Eric says you should be investing 3-5% of revenue into marketing for average returns. 8% is aggressive and 3% is slow growth. Invest 60-70% of this marketing budget on digital. This is what the large companies are doing in 2021!Facebook is similar to google. They have 223 million users in the United States alone out of 331 million people. That's 67% of the US is on Facebook. A business page is free and allows you to create interest for your product or service for free. Ads (like Google) are an excellent paid option as well.Thank you Eric for teaching and sharing the trends and stats for 2021! My takeaway is simple. If you ever want to be found in your cleaning business, you have to be on Facebook and Google as they represent 67% of the country and 85% of all online searches. And you can access both for free through a Facebook business page, personal page, Google my business profile.That was quick and to the point! Let's dive more into my own solo cleaning business. I have used digital marketing to grow my solo cleaning company in 2020. I tried everything, but focused on Facebook and Google My Business digitally while attending local networking to round out my marketing strategy. I didn't use any paid advertising and grew my company by $60,000 in revenue in 2020. Going forward, I plan to continue. I did get an idea this past week that I had originally planned in 2019 and never did it. I am the only cleaner in a 300 - 400 member chamber of commerce. Many members know who I am now since I've been helpful in leading webinars for the chamber, but I figured that the majority do not know me. I could cold call them and try to fleece them for business. I don't operate like that. Here's what I'm going to do. I'll make a list of the members that have an office that is a good fit for my office cleaning company. These are buildings under 5,000 - 6,000 square feet that need cleaning weekly or less. Once I have the list completed, I'll send emails with personal videos to the owners or contacts through the chamber to say hi and introduce myself. From there, I'll see who has any interest in connecting more with me. I'll schedule Zoom calls or breakfast meetings with the ones who want to know me. Then I'll add these new friends to my twice-monthly newsletter. I am guessing that 150 of the members fit into my demographic out of 400. Out of the 150, I wouldn't be surprised if I can connect and add 30 to my newsletter. Who knows from there. Those 30 could be 10 clients at $500 - $800/month in the future, which is over $60,000 of annual revenue! Either way, I make new friends. Win-win.Read the rest of this article at the Smart Cleaning School website

Joe Karlsson, Data Engineer at Tinybird, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss what it's like working in the world of data right now and how he manages the overlap between his social media presence and career. Corey and Joe chat about the rise of AI and whether or not we're truly seeing advancements in that realm or just trendy marketing plays, and Joe shares why he feels data is getting a lot more attention these days and what it's like to work in data at this time. Joe also shares insights into how his mental health has been impacted by having a career and social media presence that overlaps, and what steps he's taken to mitigate the negative impact. About JoeJoe Karlsson (He/They) is a Software Engineer turned Developer Advocate at Tinybird. He empowers developers to think creatively when building data intensive applications through demos, blogs, videos, or whatever else developers need.Joe's career has taken him from building out database best practices and demos for MongoDB, architecting and building one of the largest eCommerce websites in North America at Best Buy, and teaching at one of the most highly-rated software development boot camps on Earth. Joe is also a TEDx Speaker, film buff, and avid TikToker and Tweeter.Links Referenced: Tinybird: https://www.tinybird.co/ Personal website: https://joekarlsson.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Are you navigating the complex web of API management, microservices, and Kubernetes in your organization? Solo.io is here to be your guide to connectivity in the cloud-native universe!Solo.io, the powerhouse behind Istio, is revolutionizing cloud-native application networking. They brought you Gloo Gateway, the lightweight and ultra-fast gateway built for modern API management, and Gloo Mesh Core, a necessary step to secure, support, and operate your Istio environment.Why struggle with the nuts and bolts of infrastructure when you can focus on what truly matters - your application. Solo.io's got your back with networking for applications, not infrastructure. Embrace zero trust security, GitOps automation, and seamless multi-cloud networking, all with Solo.io.And here's the real game-changer: a common interface for every connection, in every direction, all with one API. It's the future of connectivity, and it's called Gloo by Solo.io.DevOps and Platform Engineers, your journey to a seamless cloud-native experience starts here. Visit solo.io/screaminginthecloud today and level up your networking game.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn and I am joined today by someone from well, we'll call it the other side of the tracks, if I can—Joe: [laugh].Corey: —be blunt and disrespectful. Joe Karlsson is a data engineer at Tinybird, but I really got to know who he is by consistently seeing his content injected almost against my will over on the TikToks. Joe, how are you?Joe: I'm doing so well and I'm so sorry for anything I've forced down your throat online. Thanks for having me, though.Corey: Oh, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. No, the problem I've got with it is that when I'm in TikTok mode, I don't want to think about computers anymore. I want to find inane content that I can just swipe six hours away without realizing it because that's how I roll.Joe: TikTok is too smart, though. I think it knows that you are doing a lot of stuff with computers and even if you keep swiping away, it's going to keep serving it up to you.Corey: For a long time, it had me pinned as a lesbian, which was interesting. Which I suppose—Joe: [laugh]. It happened to me, too.Corey: Makes sense because I follow a lot of women who are creators in comics and the rest, but I'm not interested in the thirst trap approach. So, it's like, “Mmm, this codes as lesbian.” Then they started showing me ads for ADHD, which I thought was really weird until I'm—oh right. I'm on TikTok. And then they started recommending people that I'm surprised was able to disambiguate until I realized these people have been at my house and using TikTok from my IP address, which probably is going to get someone murdered someday, but it's probably easy to wind up doing an IP address match.Joe: I feel like I have to, like, separate what is me and what is TikTok, like, trying to serve it up because I've been on lesbian TikTok, too, ADHD, autism, like TikTok. And, like, is this who I am? I don't know. [unintelligible 00:02:08] bring it to my therapist.Corey: You're learning so much about yourself based upon an algorithm. Kind of wild, isn't it?Joe: [laugh]. Yeah, I think we may be a little, like, neuro-spicy, but I think it might be a little overblown with what TikTok is trying to diagnose us with. So, it's always good to just keep it in check, you know?Corey: Oh, yes. So, let's see, what's been going on lately? We had Google Next, which I think the industry largely is taking not seriously enough. For years, it felt like a try-hard, me too version of re:Invent. And this year, it really feels like it's coming to its own. It is defining itself as something other than oh, us too.Joe: I totally agree. And that's where you and I ran into recently, too. I feel like post-Covid I'm still, like, running into people I met on the internet in real life, and yeah, I feel like, yeah, re:Invent and Google Next are, like, the big ones.I totally agree. It feels like—I mean, it's definitely, like, heavily inspired by it. And it still feels like it's a little sibling in some ways, but I do feel like it's one of the best conferences I've been to since, like, a pre-Covid 2019 AWS re:Invent, just in terms of, like… who was there. The energy, the vibes, I feel like people were, like, having fun. Yeah, I don't know, it was a great conference this year.Corey: Usually, I would go to Next in previous years because it was a great place to go to hang out with AWS customers. These days, it feels like it's significantly more than that. It's, everyone is using everything at large scale. I think that is something that is not fully understood. You talk to companies that are, like, Netflix, famously all in on AWS. Yeah, they have Google stuff, too.Everyone does. I have Google stuff. I have a few things in Azure, for God's sake. It's one of those areas where everything starts to diffuse throughout a company as soon as you hire employee number two. And that is, I think, the natural order of things. The challenge, of course, is the narrative people try and build around it.Joe: Yep. Oh, totally. Multi-cloud's been huge for you know, like, starting to move up. And it's impossible not to. It was interesting seeing, like, Google trying to differentiate itself from Azure and AWS. And, Corey, I feel like you'd probably agree with this, too, AI was like, definitely the big buzzword that kept trying to, like—Corey: Oh, God. Spare me. And I say that, as someone who likes AI, I think that there's a lot of neat stuff lurking around and value hiding within generative AI, but the sheer amount of hype around it—and frankly—some of the crypto bros have gone crashing into the space, make me want to distance myself from it as far as humanly possible, just because otherwise, I feel like I get lumped in with that set. And I don't want that.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree. I know it feels like it's hard right now to, like, remain ungrifty, but, like, still, like—trying—I mean, everyone's trying to just, like, hammer in an AI perspective into every product they have. And I feel like a lot of companies, like, still don't really have a good use case for it. You're still trying to, like, figure that out. We're seeing some cool stuff.Honestly, the hard part for me was trying to differentiate between people just, like, bragging about OpenAI API addition they added to the core product or, like, an actual thing that's, like, AI is at the center of what it actually does, you know what I mean? Everything felt like it's kind of like tacked on some sort of AI perspective to it.Corey: One of the things that really is getting to me is that you have these big companies—Google and Amazon most notably—talk about how oh, well, we've actually been working with AI for decades. At this point, they keep trying to push out how long it's been. It's like, “Okay, then not for nothing, then why does”—in Amazon's case—“why does Alexa suck? If you've been working on it for this long, why is it so bad at all the rest?” It feels like they're trying to sprint out with a bunch of services that very clearly were not conceptualized until Chat-Gippity's breakthrough.And now it's oh, yeah, we're there, too. Us, too. And they're pivoting all the marketing around something that, frankly, they haven't demonstrated excellence with. And I feel like they're leaving a lot of their existing value proposition completely in the dust. It's, your customers are not using you because of the speculative future, forward-looking AI things; it's because you are able to solve business problems today in ways that are not highly speculative and are well understood. That's not nothing and there needs to be more attention paid to that. And I feel like there's this collective marketing tripping over itself to wrap itself in hype that does them no services.Joe: I totally agree. I feel like honestly, just, like, a marketing perspective, I feel like it's distracting in a lot of ways. And I know it's hot and it's cool, but it's like, I think it's harder right now to, like, stay focused to what you're actually doing well, as opposed to, like, trying to tack on some AI thing. And maybe that's great. I don't know.Maybe that's—honestly, maybe you're seeing some traction there. I don't know. But I totally agree. I feel like everyone right now is, like, selling a future that we don't quite have yet. I don't know. I'm worried that what's going to happen again, is what happened back in the IBM Watson days where everyone starts making bold—over-promising too much with AI until we see another AI winter again.Corey: Oh, the subtext is always, we can't wait to fire our entire customer service department. That one—Joe: Yeah.Corey: Just thrills me.Joe: [laugh].Corey: It's like, no, we're just going to get rid of junior engineers and just have senior engineers. Yeah, where do you think those people come from, by the way? We aren't—they aren't just emerging fully formed from the forehead of some god somewhere. And we're also seeing this wild divergence from reality. Remember, I fix AWS bills for a living. I see very large companies, very large AWS spend.The majority of spend remains on EC2 across the board. So, we don't see a lot of attention paid to that at re:Invent, even though it's the lion's share of everything. When we do contract negotiations, we talk about generative AI plan and strategy, but no one's saying, oh, yeah, we're spending 100 million a year right now on AWS but we should commit 250 because of all this generative AI stuff we're getting into. It's all small-scale experimentation and seeing if there's value there. But that's a far cry from being the clear winner what everyone is doing.I'd further like to point out that I can tell that there's a hype cycle in place and I'm trying to be—and someone's trying to scam me. As soon as there's a sense of you have to get on this new emerging technology now, now, now, now, now. I didn't get heavily into cloud till 2016 or so and I seem to have done all right with that. Whenever someone is pushing you to get into an emerging thing where it hasn't settled down enough to build a curriculum yet, I feel like there's time to be cautious and see what the actual truth is. Someone's selling something; if you can't spot the sucker, chances are, it's you.Joe: [laugh]. Corey, have you thought about making an AI large language model that will help people with their cloud bills? Maybe just feed it, like, your invoices [laugh].Corey: That has been an example, I've used a number of times with a variety of different folks where if AI really is all it's cracked up to be, then the AWS billing system is very much a bounded problem space. There's a lot of nuance and intricacy to it, but it is a finite set of things. Sure, [unintelligible 00:08:56] space is big. So, training something within those constraints and within those confines feels like it would be a terrific proof-of-concept for a lot of these things. Except that when I've experimented a little bit and companies have raised rounds to throw into this, it never quite works out because there's always human context involved. The, oh yeah, we're going to wind up turning off all those idle instances, except they're in idle—by whatever metric you're using—for a reason. And the first time you take production down, you're not allowed to save money anymore.Joe: Nope. That's such a good point. I agree. I don't know about you, Corey. I've been fretting about my job and, like, what I'm doing. I write a lot, I do a lot of videos, I'm programming a lot, and I think… obviously, we've been hearing a lot about, you know, if it's going to replace us or not. I honestly have been feeling a lot better recently about my job stability here. I don't know. I totally agree with you. There's always that, like, human component that needs to get added to it. But who knows, maybe it's going to get better. Maybe there'll be an AI-automated billing management tool, but it'll never be as good as you, Corey. Maybe it will. I don't know. [laugh].Corey: It knows who I am. When I tell it to write in the style of me and give it a blog post topic and some points I want to make, almost everything it says is wrong. But what I'll do is I'll copy that into a text editor, mansplain-correct the robot for ten minutes, and suddenly I've got the bones of a decent rough draft because. And yeah, I'll wind up plagiarizing three or four words in a row at most, but that's okay. I'm plagiarizing the thing that's plagiarizing from me and there's a beautiful symmetry to that. What I don't understand is some of the outreach emails and other nonsensical stuff I'll see where people are letting unsupervised AI just write things under their name and sending it out to people. That is anathema to me.Joe: I totally agree. And it might work today, it might work tomorrow, but, like, it's just a matter of time before something blows up. Corey, I'm curious. Like, personally, how do you feel about being in the ChatGPT, like, brain? I don't know, is that flattering? Does that make you nervous at all?Corey: Not really because it doesn't get it in a bunch of ways. And that's okay. I found the same problem with people. In my time on Twitter, when I started live-tweet shitposting about things—as I tend to do as my first love language—people will often try and do exactly that. The problem that I run into is that, “The failure mode of ‘clever' is ‘asshole,'” as John Scalzi famously said, and as a direct result of that, people wind up being mean and getting it wrong in that direction.It's not that I'm better than they are. It's, I had a small enough following, and no one knew who I was in my mean years, and I realized I didn't feel great making people sad. So okay, you've got to continue to correct the nosedive. But it is perilous and it is difficult to understand the nuance. I think occasionally when I prompt it correctly, it comes up with some amazing connections between things that I wouldn't have seen, but that's not the same thing as letting it write something completely unfettered.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree. The nuance definitely gets lost. It may be able to get, like, the tone, but I think it misses a lot of details. That's interesting.Corey: And other people are defending it when that hallucinates. Like, yeah, I understand there are people that do the same thing, too. Yeah, the difference is, in many cases, lying to me and passing it off otherwise is a firing offense in a lot of places. Because if you're going to be 19 out of 20 times, you're correct, but 5% wrong, you're going to bluff, I can't trust anything you tell me.Joe: Yeah. It definitely, like, brings your, like—the whole model into question.Corey: Also, remember that my medium for artistic creation is often writing. And I think that, on some level, these AI models are doing the same things that we do. There are still turns of phrase that I use that I picked up floating around Usenet in the mid-90s. And I don't remember who said it or the exact context, but these words and phrases have entered my lexicon and I'll use them and I don't necessarily give credit to where the first person who said that joke 30 years ago. But it's a—that is how humans operate. We are influenced by different styles of writing and learn from the rest.Joe: True.Corey: That's a bit different than training something on someone's artistic back catalog from a painting perspective and then emulating it, including their signature in the corner. Okay, that's a bit much.Joe: [laugh]. I totally agree.Corey: So, we wind up looking right now at the rush that is going on for companies trying to internalize their use of enterprise AI, which is kind of terrifying, and it all seems to come back to data.Joe: Yes.Corey: You work in the data space. How are you seeing that unfold?Joe: Yeah, I do. I've been, like, making speculations about the future of AI and data forever. I've had dreams of tools I've wanted forever, and I… don't have them yet. I don't think they're quite ready yet. I don't know, we're seeing things like—tha—I think people are working on a lot of problems.For example, like, I want AI to auto-optimize my database. I want it to, like, make indexes for me. I want it to help me with queries or optimizing queries. We're seeing some of that. I'm not seeing anyone doing particularly well yet. I think it's up in the air.I feel like it could be coming though soon, but that's the thing, though, too, like, I mean, if you mess up a query, or, like, a… large language model hallucinates a really shitty query for you, that could break your whole system really quickly. I feel like there still needs to be, like, a human being in the middle of it to, like, kind of help.Corey: I saw a blog post recently that AWS put out gave an example that just hard-coded a credential into it. And they said, “Don't do this, but for demonstration purposes, this is how it works.” Well, that nuance gets lost when you use that for AI training and that's, I think, in part, where you start seeing a whole bunch of the insecure crap these things spit out.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree. Well, I thought the big thing I've seen, too, is, like, large language models typically don't have a secure option and you're—the answer is, like, help train the model itself later on. I don't know, I'm sure, like, a lot of teams don't want to have their most secret data end up public on a large language model at some point in the future. Which is, like, a huge issue right now.Corey: I think that what we're seeing is that you still need someone with expertise in a given area to review what this thing spits out. It's great at solving a lot of the busy work stuff, but you still need someone who's conversant with the concepts to look at it. And that is, I think, something that turns into a large-scale code review, where everyone else just tends to go, “Oh, okay. We're—do this with code review.” “Oh, how big is the diff?” “50,000 lines.” “Looks good to me.” Whereas, “Three lines.” “I'm going to criticize that thing with four pages of text.” People don't want to do the deep-dive stuff, and—when there's a huge giant project that hits. So, they won't. And it'll be fine, right up until it isn't.Joe: Corey, you and I know people and developers, do you think it's irresponsible to put out there an example of how to do something like that, even with, like, an asterisk? I feel like someone's going to still go out and try to do that and probably push that to production.Corey: Of course they are.Joe: [laugh].Corey: I've seen this with some of my own code. I had something on Docker Hub years ago with a container that was called ‘Terrible Ideas.' And I'm sure being used in, like—it was basically the environment I use for a talk I gave around Git, which makes sense. And because I don't want to reset all the repositories back to the way they came from with a bunch of old commands, I just want a constrained environment that will be the same every time I give the talk. Awesome.I'm sure it's probably being run in production at a bank somewhere because why wouldn't it be? That's people. That's life. You're not supposed to just copy and paste from Chat-Gippity. You're supposed to do that from Stack Overflow like the rest of us. Where do you think your existing code's coming from in a lot of these shops?Joe: Yep. No, I totally agree. Yeah, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see how this shakes out with, like, people going to doing this stuff, or how honest they're going to be about it, too. I'm sure it's happening. I'm sure people are tripping over themselves right now, [adding 00:16:12].Corey: Oh, yeah. But I think, on some level, you're going to see a lot more grift coming out of this stuff. When you start having things that look a little more personalized, you can use it for spam purposes, you can use it for, I'm just going to basically copy and paste what this says and wind up getting a job on Upwork or something that is way more than I could handle myself, but using this thing, I'm going to wind up coasting through. Caveat emptor is always the case on that.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree.Corey: I mean, it's easy for me to sit here and talk about ethics. I believe strongly in doing the right thing. But I'm also not worried about whether I'm able to make rent this month or put food on the table. That's a luxury. At some point, like, a lot of that strips away and you do what you have to do to survive. I don't necessarily begrudge people doing these things until it gets to a certain point of okay, now you're not doing this to stay alive anymore. You're doing this to basically seek rent.Joe: Yeah, I agree. Or just, like, capitalize on it. I do think this is less—like, the space is less grifty than the crypto space, but as we've seen over and over and over and over again, in tech, there's a such a fine line between, like, a genuinely great idea, and somebody taking advantage of it—and other people—with that idea.Corey: I think that's one of those sad areas where you're not going to be able to fix human nature, regardless of the technology stack you bring to bear.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree.Corey: So, what else are you seeing these days that interesting? What excites you? What do you see that isn't getting enough attention in the space?Joe: I don't know, I guess I'm in the data space, I'm… the thing I think I do see a lot of is huge interest in data. Data right now is the thing that's come up. Like, I don't—that's the thing that's training these models and everyone trying to figure out what to do with these data, all these massive databases, data lakes, whatever. I feel like everyone's, kind of like, taking a second look at all of this data they've been collecting for years and haven't really known what to do with it and trying to figure out either, like, if you can make a model out of that, if you try to, like… level it up, whatever. Corey, you and I were joking around recently—you've had a lot of data people on here recently, too—I feel like us data folks are just getting extra loud right now. Or maybe there's just the data spaces, that's where the action's at right now.I don't know, the markets are really weird. Who knows? But um, I feel like data right now is super valuable and more so than ever. And even still, like, I mean, we're seeing, like, companies freaking out, like, Twitter and Reddit freaking out about accessing their data and who's using it and how. I don't know, I feel like there's a lot of action going on there right now.Corey: I think that there's a significant push from the data folks where, for a long time data folks were DBAs—Joe: Yeah.Corey: —let's be direct. And that role has continued to evolve in a whole bunch of different ways. It's never been an area I've been particularly strong in. I am not great at algorithmic complexity, it turns out, you can saturate some beefy instances with just a little bit of data if your queries are all terrible. And if you're unlucky—as I tend to be—and have an aura of destroying things, great, you probably don't want to go and make that what you do.Joe: [laugh]. It's a really good point. I mean, I don't know about, like, if you blow up data at a company, you're probably going to be in big trouble. And especially the scale we're talking about with most companies these days, it's super easy to either take down a server or generate an insane bill off of some shitty query.Corey: Oh, when I was at Reach Local years and years ago—my first Linux admin job—when I broke the web server farm, it was amusing; when I broke part of the data warehouse, nobody was laughing.Joe: [laugh]. I wonder why.Corey: It was a good faith mistake and that's fair. It was a convoluted series of things that set up and honestly, the way the company and my boss responded to me at the time set the course of the rest of my career. But it was definitely something that got my attention. It scares me. I'm a big believer in backups as a direct result.Joe: Yeah. Here's the other thing, too. Actually, our company, Tinybird, is working on versioning with your data sources right now and treating your data sources like Git, but I feel like even still today, most companies are just run by some DBA. There's, like, Mike down the hall is the one responsible keeping their SQL servers online, keeping them rebooted, and like, they're manually updating any changes on there.And I feel like, generally speaking across the industry, we're not taking data seriously. Which is funny because I'm with you on there. Like, I get terrified touching production databases because I don't want anything bad to happen to them. But if we could, like, make it easier to rollback or, like, handle that stuff, that would be so much easier for me and make it, like, less scary to deal with it. I feel like databases and, like, treating it as, like, a serious DevOps practice is not really—I'm not seeing enough of it. It's definitely, people are definitely doing it. Just, I want more.Corey: It seems like with data, there's a lack of iterative approaches to it. A line that someone came up with when I was working with them a decade and change ago was that you can talk about agile all you want, but when it comes to payments, everyone's doing waterfall. And it feels like, on some level, data's kind of the same.Joe: Yeah. And I don't know, like, how to fix it. I think everyone's just too scared of it to really touch it. Migrating over to a different version control, trying to make it not as manual, trying to iterate on it better, I think it's just—I don't blame them. It's hard, it really takes a long time, making sure everything, like, doesn't blow up while you're doing a migration is a pain in the ass. But I feel like that would make everyone's lives so much easier if, like, you could, like, treat it—understand your data and be able to rollback easier with it.Corey: When you take a look across the ecosystem now, are you finding that things have improved since the last time I was in the space, where the state of the art was, “Oh, we need some developer data. We either have this sanitized data somewhere or it's a copy of production that we move around, but only a small bit.” Because otherwise, we always found that oh, that's an extra petabyte of storage was going on someone's developer environment they messed up on three years ago, they haven't been here for two, and oops.Joe: I don't. I have not seen it. Again, that's so tricky, too. I think… yeah, the last time I, like, worked doing that was—usually you just have a really crappy version of production data on staging or development environments and it's hard to copy those over. I think databases are getting better for that.I've been working on, like, the real-time data space for a long time now, so copying data over and kind of streaming that over is a lot easier. I do think seeing, like, separating storage and compute can make it easier, too. But it depends on your data stack. Everyone's using everything all the time and it's super complicated to do that. I don't know about you, Corey, too. I'm sure you've seen, like, services people running, but I feel like we've made a switch as an industry from, like, monoliths to microservices.Now, we're kind of back in the monolith era, but I'm not seeing that happen in the database space. We're seeing, like, data meshing and lots of different databases. I see people who, like, see the value of data monoliths, but I don't see any actual progress in moving back to a single source of [truth of the data 00:23:02]. And I feel like the cat's kind of out of the bag on all the data existing everywhere, all the time, and trying to wrangle that up.Corey: This stuff is hard and there's no easy solution here. There just isn't.Joe: Yeah, there's no way. And embracing that chaos, I think, is going to be huge. I think you have to do it right now. Or trying to find some tool that can, like, wrangle up a bunch of things together and help work with them all at once. Products need to meet people where they're at, too. And, like, data is all over the place and I feel like we kind of have to, like, find tooling that can kind of help work with what you have.Corey: It's a constant challenge, but also a joy, so we'll give it that.Joe: [laugh].Corey: So, I have to ask. Your day job has you doing developer advocacy at Tinybird—Joe: Yes.Corey: But I had to dig in to find that out. It wasn't obvious based upon the TikToks and the Twitter nonsense and the rest. How do you draw the line between day job and you as a person shitposting on the internet about technology?Joe: Corey, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this, too. I don't know. I feel like I've been in different places where, like, my job is my life. You know what I mean? There's a very thin line there. Personally, I've been trying to take a step back from that, just from a mental health perspective. Having my professional life be so closely tied to, like, my personal value and who I am has been really bad for my brain.And trying to make that clear at my company is, like, what is mine and what I can help with has been really huge. I feel like the boundaries between myself and my job has gotten too thin. And for a while, I thought that was a great idea; it turns out that was not a great idea for my brain. It's so hard. So, I've been a software engineer and I've done full-time developer advocacy, and I felt like I had a lot more freedom to say what I wanted as, like, a full-time software engineer as opposed to being a developer advocate and kind of representing the company.Because the thing is, I'm always representing the company [online 00:24:56], but I'm not always working, which is kind of like—that—it's kind of a hard line. I feel like there's been, like, ways to get around it though with, like, less private shitposting about things that could piss off a CEO or infringe on an NDA or, you know, whatever, you know what I mean? Yeah, trying to, like, find that balance or trying to, like, use tools to try to separate that has been big. But I don't know, I've been—personally, I've been trying to step—like, start trying to make more of a boundary for that.Corey: Yeah. I don't have much of one, but I also own the company, so my approach doesn't necessarily work for other people. I don't advertise in public that I fix AWS bills very often. That's not the undercurrent to most of my jokes and the rest. Because the people who have that painful problem aren't generally in the audience directly and they certainly don't talk about it extensively.It's word of mouth. It's being fun and engaging so people stick around. And when I periodically do mention it that sort of sticks with them. And in the fullness of time, it works as a way of, “Oh, yeah, everyone knows what you're into. And yeah, when we have this problem, reaching out to you is our first thought.” But I don't know that it's possible to measure its effectiveness. I just know that works.Joe: Yeah. For me, it's like, don't be an asshole and teach don't sell are like, the two biggest things that I'm trying to do all the time. And the goal is not to, like, trick people into, like, thinking I'm not working for a company. I think I try to be transparent, or if, like, I happen to be talking about a product that I'm working for, I try to disclose that. But yeah, I don't know. For me, it's just, like, trying to build up a community of people who, like, understand what I'm trying to put out there. You know what I mean?Corey: Yeah, it's about what you want to be known for, on some level. Part of the problem that I've had for a long time is that I've been pulled in so many directions. [They're 00:26:34] like, “Oh, you're great. Where do I go to learn more?” It's like, “Well, I have this podcast, I have the newsletter, I have the other podcast that I do in the AWS Morning Brief. I have the duckbillgroup.com. I have lastweekinaws.com. I have a Twitter account. I had a YouTube thing for a while.”It's like, there's so many different ways to send people. It's like, what is the top-of-funnel? And for me, my answer has been, sign up for the newsletter at lastweekinaws.com. That keeps you apprised of everything else and you can dial it into taste. It's also, frankly, one of those things that doesn't require algorithmic blessing to continue to show up in people's inboxes. So far at least, we haven't seen algorithms have a significant impact on that, except when they spam-bin something. And it turns out when you write content people like, the providers get yelled at by their customers of, “Hey, I'm trying to read this. What's going on?” I had a couple of reach out to me asking what the hell happened. It's kind of fun.Joe: I love that. And, Corey, I think that's so smart, too. It's definitely been a lesson, I think, for me and a lot of people on—that are terminally online that, like, we don't own our social following on other platforms. With, like, the downfall of Twitter, like, I'm still posting on there, but we still have a bunch of stuff on there, but my… that following is locked in. I can't take that home. But, like, you still have your email newsletter. And I even feel it for tech companies who might be listening to this, too. I feel like owning your email list is, like, not the coolest thing, but I feel like it's criminally underrated, as, like, a way of talking to people.Corey: It doesn't matter what platforms change, what my personal situation changes, I am—like, whatever it is that I wind up doing next, whenever next happens, I'll need a platform to tell people about, and that's what I've been building. I value newsletter subscribers in a metric sense far more highly and weight them more heavily than I do Twitter followers. Anyone can click a follow and then never check Twitter again. Easy enough. Newsletters? Well, that winds up requiring a little bit extra work because we do confirmed opt-ins, for obvious reasons.And we never sell the list. We never—you can't transfer permission for, like that, and we obviously respect it when people say I don't want to hear from your nonsense anymore. Great. Cool. I don't want to send this to people that don't care. Get out of here.Joe: [laugh]. No, I think that's so smart.Corey: Podcasts are impossible on the other end, but I also—you know, I control the domain and that's important to me.Joe: Yeah.Corey: Why don't you build this on top of Substack? Because as soon as Substack pivots, I'm screwed.Joe: Yeah, yeah. Which we've—I think we've seen that they've tried to do, even with the Twitter clone that tried to build last couple years. I've been burned by so many other publishing platforms over and over and over again through the years. Like, Medium, yeah, I criminally don't trust any sort of tech publishing platform anymore that I don't own. [laugh]. But I also don't want to maintain it. It's such a fine line. I just want to, like, maintain something without having to, like, maintain all the infrastructure all the time, and I don't think that exists and I don't really trust anything to help me with that.Corey: You can on some level, I mean, I wind up parking in the newsletter stuff over at ConvertKit. But I can—I have moved it twice already. I could move it again if I needed to. It's about controlling the domain. I have something that fires off once or twice a day that backs up the entire subscriber list somewhere.I don't want to build my own system, but I can also get that in an export form wherever I need it to go. Frankly, I view it as the most valuable asset that I have here because I can always find a way to turn relationships and an audience into money. I can't necessarily find a way to go the opposite direction of, well have money. Time to buy an audience. Doesn't work that way.Joe: [laugh]. No, I totally agree. You know what I do like, though, is Threads, which has kind of fallen off, but I do love the idea of their federated following [and be almost 00:30:02] like, unlock that a little bit. I do think that that's probably going to be the future. And I have to say, I just care as someone who, like, makes shit online. I don't think 98% of people don't really care about that future, but I do. Just getting burned so often on social media platforms, it helps to then have a little bit of flexibility there.Corey: Oh, yeah. And I wish it were different. I feel like, at some level, Elon being Elon has definitely caused a bit of a diaspora of social media and I think that's a good thing.Joe: Yeah. Yeah. I hope it settles down a little bit, but it definitely got things moving again.Corey: Oh, yes. I really want to thank you for taking the time to go through how you view these things. Where's the best place for people to go to follow you learn more, et cetera? Just sign up for TikTok and you'll be all over them, apparently.Joe: Go to the website that I own joekarlsson.com. It's got the links to everything on there. Opt in or out of whatever you find you want. Otherwise, I'm just going to quick plug for the company I work for: tinybird.co. If you're trying to make APIs on top of data, definitely want to check out Tinybird. We work with Kafka, BigQuery, S3, all the data sources could pull it in. [unintelligible 00:31:10] on it and publishes it as an API. It's super easy. Or you could just ignore me. That's fine, too. You could—that's highly encouraged as well.Corey: Always a good decision.Joe: [laugh]. Yeah, I agree. I'm biased, but I agree.Corey: Thanks, Joe. I appreciate your taking the time to speak with me and we'll, of course, put links to all that in the [show notes 00:31:26]. And please come back soon and regale us with more stories.Joe: I will. Thanks, Corey.Corey: Joe Karlsson, data engineer at Tinybird. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an insulting comment that I'll never read because they're going to have a disk problem and they haven't learned the lesson of backups yet.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started. Tinybird: https://www.tinybird.co/ Personal website: https://joekarlsson.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn and I am joined today by someone from well, we'll call it the other side of the tracks, if I can—Joe: [laugh].Corey: —be blunt and disrespectful. Joe Karlsson is a data engineer at Tinybird, but I really got to know who he is by consistently seeing his content injected almost against my will over on the TikToks. Joe, how are you?Joe: I'm doing so well and I'm so sorry for anything I've forced down your throat online. Thanks for having me, though.Corey: Oh, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. No, the problem I've got with it is that when I'm in TikTok mode, I don't want to think about computers anymore. I want to find inane content that I can just swipe six hours away without realizing it because that's how I roll.Joe: TikTok is too smart, though. I think it knows that you are doing a lot of stuff with computers and even if you keep swiping away, it's going to keep serving it up to you.Corey: For a long time, it had me pinned as a lesbian, which was interesting. Which I suppose—Joe: [laugh]. It happened to me, too.Corey: Makes sense because I follow a lot of women who are creators in comics and the rest, but I'm not interested in the thirst trap approach. So, it's like, “Mmm, this codes as lesbian.” Then they started showing me ads for ADHD, which I thought was really weird until I'm—oh right. I'm on TikTok. And then they started recommending people that I'm surprised was able to disambiguate until I realized these people have been at my house and using TikTok from my IP address, which probably is going to get someone murdered someday, but it's probably easy to wind up doing an IP address match.Joe: I feel like I have to, like, separate what is me and what is TikTok, like, trying to serve it up because I've been on lesbian TikTok, too, ADHD, autism, like TikTok. And, like, is this who I am? I don't know. [unintelligible 00:02:08] bring it to my therapist.Corey: You're learning so much about yourself based upon an algorithm. Kind of wild, isn't it?Joe: [laugh]. Yeah, I think we may be a little, like, neuro-spicy, but I think it might be a little overblown with what TikTok is trying to diagnose us with. So, it's always good to just keep it in check, you know?Corey: Oh, yes. So, let's see, what's been going on lately? We had Google Next, which I think the industry largely is taking not seriously enough. For years, it felt like a try-hard, me too version of re:Invent. And this year, it really feels like it's coming to its own. It is defining itself as something other than oh, us too.Joe: I totally agree. And that's where you and I ran into recently, too. I feel like post-Covid I'm still, like, running into people I met on the internet in real life, and yeah, I feel like, yeah, re:Invent and Google Next are, like, the big ones.I totally agree. It feels like—I mean, it's definitely, like, heavily inspired by it. And it still feels like it's a little sibling in some ways, but I do feel like it's one of the best conferences I've been to since, like, a pre-Covid 2019 AWS re:Invent, just in terms of, like… who was there. The energy, the vibes, I feel like people were, like, having fun. Yeah, I don't know, it was a great conference this year.Corey: Usually, I would go to Next in previous years because it was a great place to go to hang out with AWS customers. These days, it feels like it's significantly more than that. It's, everyone is using everything at large scale. I think that is something that is not fully understood. You talk to companies that are, like, Netflix, famously all in on AWS. Yeah, they have Google stuff, too.Everyone does. I have Google stuff. I have a few things in Azure, for God's sake. It's one of those areas where everything starts to diffuse throughout a company as soon as you hire employee number two. And that is, I think, the natural order of things. The challenge, of course, is the narrative people try and build around it.Joe: Yep. Oh, totally. Multi-cloud's been huge for you know, like, starting to move up. And it's impossible not to. It was interesting seeing, like, Google trying to differentiate itself from Azure and AWS. And, Corey, I feel like you'd probably agree with this, too, AI was like, definitely the big buzzword that kept trying to, like—Corey: Oh, God. Spare me. And I say that, as someone who likes AI, I think that there's a lot of neat stuff lurking around and value hiding within generative AI, but the sheer amount of hype around it—and frankly—some of the crypto bros have gone crashing into the space, make me want to distance myself from it as far as humanly possible, just because otherwise, I feel like I get lumped in with that set. And I don't want that.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree. I know it feels like it's hard right now to, like, remain ungrifty, but, like, still, like—trying—I mean, everyone's trying to just, like, hammer in an AI perspective into every product they have. And I feel like a lot of companies, like, still don't really have a good use case for it. You're still trying to, like, figure that out. We're seeing some cool stuff.Honestly, the hard part for me was trying to differentiate between people just, like, bragging about OpenAI API addition they added to the core product or, like, an actual thing that's, like, AI is at the center of what it actually does, you know what I mean? Everything felt like it's kind of like tacked on some sort of AI perspective to it.Corey: One of the things that really is getting to me is that you have these big companies—Google and Amazon most notably—talk about how oh, well, we've actually been working with AI for decades. At this point, they keep trying to push out how long it's been. It's like, “Okay, then not for nothing, then why does”—in Amazon's case—“why does Alexa suck? If you've been working on it for this long, why is it so bad at all the rest?” It feels like they're trying to sprint out with a bunch of services that very clearly were not conceptualized until Chat-Gippity's breakthrough.And now it's oh, yeah, we're there, too. Us, too. And they're pivoting all the marketing around something that, frankly, they haven't demonstrated excellence with. And I feel like they're leaving a lot of their existing value proposition completely in the dust. It's, your customers are not using you because of the speculative future, forward-looking AI things; it's because you are able to solve business problems today in ways that are not highly speculative and are well understood. That's not nothing and there needs to be more attention paid to that. And I feel like there's this collective marketing tripping over itself to wrap itself in hype that does them no services.Joe: I totally agree. I feel like honestly, just, like, a marketing perspective, I feel like it's distracting in a lot of ways. And I know it's hot and it's cool, but it's like, I think it's harder right now to, like, stay focused to what you're actually doing well, as opposed to, like, trying to tack on some AI thing. And maybe that's great. I don't know.Maybe that's—honestly, maybe you're seeing some traction there. I don't know. But I totally agree. I feel like everyone right now is, like, selling a future that we don't quite have yet. I don't know. I'm worried that what's going to happen again, is what happened back in the IBM Watson days where everyone starts making bold—over-promising too much with AI until we see another AI winter again.Corey: Oh, the subtext is always, we can't wait to fire our entire customer service department. That one—Joe: Yeah.Corey: Just thrills me.Joe: [laugh].Corey: It's like, no, we're just going to get rid of junior engineers and just have senior engineers. Yeah, where do you think those people come from, by the way? We aren't—they aren't just emerging fully formed from the forehead of some god somewhere. And we're also seeing this wild divergence from reality. Remember, I fix AWS bills for a living. I see very large companies, very large AWS spend.The majority of spend remains on EC2 across the board. So, we don't see a lot of attention paid to that at re:Invent, even though it's the lion's share of everything. When we do contract negotiations, we talk about generative AI plan and strategy, but no one's saying, oh, yeah, we're spending 100 million a year right now on AWS but we should commit 250 because of all this generative AI stuff we're getting into. It's all small-scale experimentation and seeing if there's value there. But that's a far cry from being the clear winner what everyone is doing.I'd further like to point out that I can tell that there's a hype cycle in place and I'm trying to be—and someone's trying to scam me. As soon as there's a sense of you have to get on this new emerging technology now, now, now, now, now. I didn't get heavily into cloud till 2016 or so and I seem to have done all right with that. Whenever someone is pushing you to get into an emerging thing where it hasn't settled down enough to build a curriculum yet, I feel like there's time to be cautious and see what the actual truth is. Someone's selling something; if you can't spot the sucker, chances are, it's you.Joe: [laugh]. Corey, have you thought about making an AI large language model that will help people with their cloud bills? Maybe just feed it, like, your invoices [laugh].Corey: That has been an example, I've used a number of times with a variety of different folks where if AI really is all it's cracked up to be, then the AWS billing system is very much a bounded problem space. There's a lot of nuance and intricacy to it, but it is a finite set of things. Sure, [unintelligible 00:08:56] space is big. So, training something within those constraints and within those confines feels like it would be a terrific proof-of-concept for a lot of these things. Except that when I've experimented a little bit and companies have raised rounds to throw into this, it never quite works out because there's always human context involved. The, oh yeah, we're going to wind up turning off all those idle instances, except they're in idle—by whatever metric you're using—for a reason. And the first time you take production down, you're not allowed to save money anymore.Joe: Nope. That's such a good point. I agree. I don't know about you, Corey. I've been fretting about my job and, like, what I'm doing. I write a lot, I do a lot of videos, I'm programming a lot, and I think… obviously, we've been hearing a lot about, you know, if it's going to replace us or not. I honestly have been feeling a lot better recently about my job stability here. I don't know. I totally agree with you. There's always that, like, human component that needs to get added to it. But who knows, maybe it's going to get better. Maybe there'll be an AI-automated billing management tool, but it'll never be as good as you, Corey. Maybe it will. I don't know. [laugh].Corey: It knows who I am. When I tell it to write in the style of me and give it a blog post topic and some points I want to make, almost everything it says is wrong. But what I'll do is I'll copy that into a text editor, mansplain-correct the robot for ten minutes, and suddenly I've got the bones of a decent rough draft because. And yeah, I'll wind up plagiarizing three or four words in a row at most, but that's okay. I'm plagiarizing the thing that's plagiarizing from me and there's a beautiful symmetry to that. What I don't understand is some of the outreach emails and other nonsensical stuff I'll see where people are letting unsupervised AI just write things under their name and sending it out to people. That is anathema to me.Joe: I totally agree. And it might work today, it might work tomorrow, but, like, it's just a matter of time before something blows up. Corey, I'm curious. Like, personally, how do you feel about being in the ChatGPT, like, brain? I don't know, is that flattering? Does that make you nervous at all?Corey: Not really because it doesn't get it in a bunch of ways. And that's okay. I found the same problem with people. In my time on Twitter, when I started live-tweet shitposting about things—as I tend to do as my first love language—people will often try and do exactly that. The problem that I run into is that, “The failure mode of ‘clever' is ‘asshole,'” as John Scalzi famously said, and as a direct result of that, people wind up being mean and getting it wrong in that direction.It's not that I'm better than they are. It's, I had a small enough following, and no one knew who I was in my mean years, and I realized I didn't feel great making people sad. So okay, you've got to continue to correct the nosedive. But it is perilous and it is difficult to understand the nuance. I think occasionally when I prompt it correctly, it comes up with some amazing connections between things that I wouldn't have seen, but that's not the same thing as letting it write something completely unfettered.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree. The nuance definitely gets lost. It may be able to get, like, the tone, but I think it misses a lot of details. That's interesting.Corey: And other people are defending it when that hallucinates. Like, yeah, I understand there are people that do the same thing, too. Yeah, the difference is, in many cases, lying to me and passing it off otherwise is a firing offense in a lot of places. Because if you're going to be 19 out of 20 times, you're correct, but 5% wrong, you're going to bluff, I can't trust anything you tell me.Joe: Yeah. It definitely, like, brings your, like—the whole model into question.Corey: Also, remember that my medium for artistic creation is often writing. And I think that, on some level, these AI models are doing the same things that we do. There are still turns of phrase that I use that I picked up floating around Usenet in the mid-90s. And I don't remember who said it or the exact context, but these words and phrases have entered my lexicon and I'll use them and I don't necessarily give credit to where the first person who said that joke 30 years ago. But it's a—that is how humans operate. We are influenced by different styles of writing and learn from the rest.Joe: True.Corey: That's a bit different than training something on someone's artistic back catalog from a painting perspective and then emulating it, including their signature in the corner. Okay, that's a bit much.Joe: [laugh]. I totally agree.Corey: So, we wind up looking right now at the rush that is going on for companies trying to internalize their use of enterprise AI, which is kind of terrifying, and it all seems to come back to data.Joe: Yes.Corey: You work in the data space. How are you seeing that unfold?Joe: Yeah, I do. I've been, like, making speculations about the future of AI and data forever. I've had dreams of tools I've wanted forever, and I… don't have them yet. I don't think they're quite ready yet. I don't know, we're seeing things like—tha—I think people are working on a lot of problems.For example, like, I want AI to auto-optimize my database. I want it to, like, make indexes for me. I want it to help me with queries or optimizing queries. We're seeing some of that. I'm not seeing anyone doing particularly well yet. I think it's up in the air.I feel like it could be coming though soon, but that's the thing, though, too, like, I mean, if you mess up a query, or, like, a… large language model hallucinates a really shitty query for you, that could break your whole system really quickly. I feel like there still needs to be, like, a human being in the middle of it to, like, kind of help.Corey: I saw a blog post recently that AWS put out gave an example that just hard-coded a credential into it. And they said, “Don't do this, but for demonstration purposes, this is how it works.” Well, that nuance gets lost when you use that for AI training and that's, I think, in part, where you start seeing a whole bunch of the insecure crap these things spit out.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree. Well, I thought the big thing I've seen, too, is, like, large language models typically don't have a secure option and you're—the answer is, like, help train the model itself later on. I don't know, I'm sure, like, a lot of teams don't want to have their most secret data end up public on a large language model at some point in the future. Which is, like, a huge issue right now.Corey: I think that what we're seeing is that you still need someone with expertise in a given area to review what this thing spits out. It's great at solving a lot of the busy work stuff, but you still need someone who's conversant with the concepts to look at it. And that is, I think, something that turns into a large-scale code review, where everyone else just tends to go, “Oh, okay. We're—do this with code review.” “Oh, how big is the diff?” “50,000 lines.” “Looks good to me.” Whereas, “Three lines.” “I'm going to criticize that thing with four pages of text.” People don't want to do the deep-dive stuff, and—when there's a huge giant project that hits. So, they won't. And it'll be fine, right up until it isn't.Joe: Corey, you and I know people and developers, do you think it's irresponsible to put out there an example of how to do something like that, even with, like, an asterisk? I feel like someone's going to still go out and try to do that and probably push that to production.Corey: Of course they are.Joe: [laugh].Corey: I've seen this with some of my own code. I had something on Docker Hub years ago with a container that was called ‘Terrible Ideas.' And I'm sure being used in, like—it was basically the environment I use for a talk I gave around Git, which makes sense. And because I don't want to reset all the repositories back to the way they came from with a bunch of old commands, I just want a constrained environment that will be the same every time I give the talk. Awesome.I'm sure it's probably being run in production at a bank somewhere because why wouldn't it be? That's people. That's life. You're not supposed to just copy and paste from Chat-Gippity. You're supposed to do that from Stack Overflow like the rest of us. Where do you think your existing code's coming from in a lot of these shops?Joe: Yep. No, I totally agree. Yeah, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see how this shakes out with, like, people going to doing this stuff, or how honest they're going to be about it, too. I'm sure it's happening. I'm sure people are tripping over themselves right now, [adding 00:16:12].Corey: Oh, yeah. But I think, on some level, you're going to see a lot more grift coming out of this stuff. When you start having things that look a little more personalized, you can use it for spam purposes, you can use it for, I'm just going to basically copy and paste what this says and wind up getting a job on Upwork or something that is way more than I could handle myself, but using this thing, I'm going to wind up coasting through. Caveat emptor is always the case on that.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree.Corey: I mean, it's easy for me to sit here and talk about ethics. I believe strongly in doing the right thing. But I'm also not worried about whether I'm able to make rent this month or put food on the table. That's a luxury. At some point, like, a lot of that strips away and you do what you have to do to survive. I don't necessarily begrudge people doing these things until it gets to a certain point of okay, now you're not doing this to stay alive anymore. You're doing this to basically seek rent.Joe: Yeah, I agree. Or just, like, capitalize on it. I do think this is less—like, the space is less grifty than the crypto space, but as we've seen over and over and over and over again, in tech, there's a such a fine line between, like, a genuinely great idea, and somebody taking advantage of it—and other people—with that idea.Corey: I think that's one of those sad areas where you're not going to be able to fix human nature, regardless of the technology stack you bring to bear.Joe: Yeah, I totally agree.[midroll 00:17:30]Corey: So, what else are you seeing these days that interesting? What excites you? What do you see that isn't getting enough attention in the space?Joe: I don't know, I guess I'm in the data space, I'm… the thing I think I do see a lot of is huge interest in data. Data right now is the thing that's come up. Like, I don't—that's the thing that's training these models and everyone trying to figure out what to do with these data, all these massive databases, data lakes, whatever. I feel like everyone's, kind of like, taking a second look at all of this data they've been collecting for years and haven't really known what to do with it and trying to figure out either, like, if you can make a model out of that, if you try to, like… level it up, whatever. Corey, you and I were joking around recently—you've had a lot of data people on here recently, too—I feel like us data folks are just getting extra loud right now. Or maybe there's just the data spaces, that's where the action's at right now.I don't know, the markets are really weird. Who knows? But um, I feel like data right now is super valuable and more so than ever. And even still, like, I mean, we're seeing, like, companies freaking out, like, Twitter and Reddit freaking out about accessing their data and who's using it and how. I don't know, I feel like there's a lot of action going on there right now.Corey: I think that there's a significant push from the data folks where, for a long time data folks were DBAs—Joe: Yeah.Corey: —let's be direct. And that role has continued to evolve in a whole bunch of different ways. It's never been an area I've been particularly strong in. I am not great at algorithmic complexity, it turns out, you can saturate some beefy instances with just a little bit of data if your queries are all terrible. And if you're unlucky—as I tend to be—and have an aura of destroying things, great, you probably don't want to go and make that what you do.Joe: [laugh]. It's a really good point. I mean, I don't know about, like, if you blow up data at a company, you're probably going to be in big trouble. And especially the scale we're talking about with most companies these days, it's super easy to either take down a server or generate an insane bill off of some shitty query.Corey: Oh, when I was at Reach Local years and years ago—my first Linux admin job—when I broke the web server farm, it was amusing; when I broke part of the data warehouse, nobody was laughing.Joe: [laugh]. I wonder why.Corey: It was a good faith mistake and that's fair. It was a convoluted series of things that set up and honestly, the way the company and my boss responded to me at the time set the course of the rest of my career. But it was definitely something that got my attention. It scares me. I'm a big believer in backups as a direct result.Joe: Yeah. Here's the other thing, too. Actually, our company, Tinybird, is working on versioning with your data sources right now and treating your data sources like Git, but I feel like even still today, most companies are just run by some DBA. There's, like, Mike down the hall is the one responsible keeping their SQL servers online, keeping them rebooted, and like, they're manually updating any changes on there.And I feel like, generally speaking across the industry, we're not taking data seriously. Which is funny because I'm with you on there. Like, I get terrified touching production databases because I don't want anything bad to happen to them. But if we could, like, make it easier to rollback or, like, handle that stuff, that would be so much easier for me and make it, like, less scary to deal with it. I feel like databases and, like, treating it as, like, a serious DevOps practice is not really—I'm not seeing enough of it. It's definitely, people are definitely doing it. Just, I want more.Corey: It seems like with data, there's a lack of iterative approaches to it. A line that someone came up with when I was working with them a decade and change ago was that you can talk about agile all you want, but when it comes to payments, everyone's doing waterfall. And it feels like, on some level, data's kind of the same.Joe: Yeah. And I don't know, like, how to fix it. I think everyone's just too scared of it to really touch it. Migrating over to a different version control, tr

How can an omnichannel advertising approach optimize your marketing campaign's effectiveness? Today, Justin dives into the trends in plastic surgery and aesthetics practices marketing. He discusses how SEO is the key to success in this highly competitive space and how content is the biggest driver of local search rankings. He explains why investing in organic SEO and supplementing it with paid ads can benefit your surgical practice and the importance of video in plastic surgery marketing. Discover how to plan for success when creating an omnichannel advertising approach using short video assets and the best ways to prepare with themes, topics, and influencer involvement for maximum impact.  Tune in now to get these expert tips on marketing plastic surgery practices! [00:01 - 04:11] Winning the Search Game: Optimizing Your Plastic Surgery Practice with SEO and Content [04:12 - 08:09] Automating Your Process to Generate Reviews & Increase Google Business Profile Visibility [08:10 - 11:47] Leveraging Video and Social Media: Planning Ahead for Success [08:10 - 13:02] Wrapping Up! Key Quotes: “A content program is a foundational piece to SEO and winning search, especially if you're in a major metropolitan area; it really is the key driver.” - Justin Knott “If you're doing a really good job from an advertising standpoint using search ads and programmatic display advertising, you really should be able to get in front of the right type of patient with the right type of buyer profile and buyer intent.” - Justin Knott “Get video and get up there and begin an omnichannel advertising approach.” - Justin Knott Subscribed Yet? Now you can! Subscribe to the Patient Convert Podcast and never miss a new episode! Subscribe for emails or use your favorite podcast app via Email, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, or Stitcher, or visit my website intrepy.com Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.   What We Do Check out our Healthcare Marketing Agency – Intrepy Healthcare Marketing Check out our physician liaison training platform – Physician Liaison University. Leave a Rating & Review for Other Listeners! I hope that you have found this episode and any others you have listened to to be helpful in your growth as a healthcare marketer or practice owner. Please consider leaving a review on one of the channels above. The best way to do that is to rate the podcast on Apple Podcasts and leave us a brief review! You can do the same on Stitcher as well. Your ratings and reviews help get the podcast in front of new listeners. Your feedback also lets me know how I can better serve you. Thanks for listening. Justin & Kelley Knott

“Marketing touches every part of the business. Marketing is…equally as important to sales organizations as ‘sales' itself.” Justin Mink has spent a career in leadership and founder roles at companies that have grown from 0-1000s of employees, raised millions of dollars in capital, and that have been valued at over $1B. In 2007 he moved to Dallas from the Washington, D.C. area to launch the Franchise Division at digital marketing firm ReachLocal, helping take the company public while pioneering digital marketing best practices for franchise brands. Today, as a Professional Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) Implementer, he helps entrepreneurs and leadership teams solve root problems and lead more effectively through a simple set of proven, practical tools. He lives near White Rock Lake with his wife, Kate, son, Jude, and a very old and well-fed dog named Titan. Questions and topics we covered include: What is the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS)? The difference between a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) What you need to know as a marketer to eventually become a CRO What it takes to be an internal leader (an intraprenuer) at a company The definition of a leader that nobody wants to follow and the signs that you're working for a bad leader How does a degrading company culture change performance over time? What should marketing candidates be doing to impress recruiters and hiring managers? And more! You can connect with Justin here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinmink/ You can also connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kennysoto/ You learn more about Justin's services here: https://www.eosworldwide.com/justin-mink Our Podcast Partner - MarketerHire If you're looking to hire expert freelance talent this year to scale your business (and impress your boss), check out MarketerHire. MarketerHire vets freelance talent so when you hire an SEO expert, Email Marketer, or even a Fractional CMO—you're not wasting your money or your time. You can hire your first freelancer and get a $500 credit by visiting: www.kennysoto.com/hire

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Successful Life Podcast. I am your host, Corey. Berrier, and I'm here with my man, mark Sherwin. What's up brother? What's going on, Corey? How are you my man? We doing all right? Doing all right, sir. It's that time of year, man. Everybody's in in go mode. Finish up the year strong. It's interesting you say that because I right there, I'm right there with you. Right? I'm, you and I are thinking exactly the same way, but I tell you what a lot of people this is, I feel like this is separation season. The people that are digging in and doing the work right now are gonna far surpass everybody that's not doing the work right now. That's taking it easy and taking it easy since Thanksgiving. And the issue with that is, unless, and I we didn't really tee this up, but unless people are marketing for, again, we didn't tee this up, but , if people are not marketing for the first quarter right now, if we're not doing our work right now, , we're gonna feel that in the first quarter. Any marketing company like myself, right? Since I started this company almost 13 years ago, I can tell you my busy season is right now. Every marketing company's busy season is right now. Why? Because most contractors, this is their slow season. They're, the phone's not quite ringing as much. They're analyzing how their summer went. They're doing a number of things. And now it's just go time, right? Call up your marketing company, okay, how can we prepare? Right? Those are the calls that we're fielding, and it's near constant. And it's an absolute wonderful time to prepare now for the spring, as you said. So, yeah, we're busy. Preparation's key. Like if you're not prepared you're gonna suffer consequences. And I mean, it just goes with anything in life. It's not just ju just not your business, but. . If I don't prepare for my, whatever it is, if I don't prepare for Christmas, come Christmas, I'm gonna be in trouble. Right. So, but it is a big difference. And this is the time where people just need to really focus. It, it just, it's not time to let off the gas. So Mark Leaves nearby is the name of your company. You said you've been, had been around for 13 years. You're pretty local to me. So tell us a little bit about, leads nearby. Tell me a little bit about why you started this company. What was the reason behind you starting a marketing company? Well, my business partner and I, Bob Maita started leads nearby about 13 years ago. Him and I had worked at one of the largest SEO companies in the country. Keyboard ranking it was a. It was a very bad day happened. There was about 315 of us at the time. And I had started very early in the [00:02:30] company and all the executives got let out in handcuffs. So from there everybody kind of went their own ways. And wait a minute. You keep just state the people got hand let out handcuffs. Hold on. , I gotta hear a little bit more about this. It was a publicly traded firm and it was from, the story was, it was just cash off the top. And they were pocketing at it. were the cash cow and the publicly traded, firm and and yeah, so that was bad. It was really bad. The, that's we all went our separate ways. I ended up at another digital agency that didn't quite work out. Bob ended up at a another agency that didn't quite work out, and then we both ended up. He got recruited to go work for the Yellow Pages. I got recruited by him to go work at the Yellow Pages in the digital age digital side. And it was wonderful. We got in there, they've got all these resources and such, and they sat us down. They said, you know what? We've got a, we need a plan for our digital marketing. They were just starting to think about that. At that point in time recently, actually the Yellow pages mark, just there was Dex Nose. Okay. So was it a reseller? Was it, so here's why I'm asking the question actually, just more personal. Was it, there's a local co company called Reach Local, right? Right. And I'm not, is it something similar to that? No, it was it was Dex Nos Rhh Donnelly. Okay. David business.com and that kind of thing. Anyway we sat down with them and we showed them, we laid out a plan to show them how to generate more leads for themselves, for their salespeople. , how to generate more leads for our customers and how we were gonna generate more revenue overall. Just from the interactive division basically having people pay to be a lead and the, we'll call 'em the ceo, stuck his feet up on the table, went to the bot back page, ended up throwing the 50 page deck down and goes, ah, that's the problem. Our salespeople aren't gonna make enough money. I said, what? Well, they're a union. They're not, they're gonna wanna make more money. And I'm like what does that mean? I'm showing you how they're going to make more money by getting more leads in here. Overall, the company's gonna make more money, and ultimately there's going to be more value to the advertisers. Couldn't care less about any of that. All he want he cared about was the salespeople making more money. About two weeks later, Bob and I got asked into an office, gave our given some severance checks and asked to leave. We took our severance checks and said, there's gotta be a better way. There's gotta be a company out there that can provide value to the home services industry. Home services was [00:05:00] chosen, and here's the best part. Bob happened to be looking for a new air conditioning system at that time. He happened to have an appointment for a new air condition. The owner of the company was coming in to meet with him, to give him a presentation on a new air conditioning system. Those two got talking about marketing. That guy, that company was with the same yellow pages that we just got fired from. So he became our first client. How about, and he's like, I'm done with them. What do you guys can do? And we took our history and our background, and we built them an awesome plan. And immediately he started seeing dividends. . We took that, parlayed that into the next 5, 6, 7 clients and they just started to snowball. I was in Nashville, Tennessee at a one of the first Service Nation Alliance gatherings. And we were invited. We were all we have was a tablecloth and our computers with some business cards. And I walked, I had a line of people around the corner waiting to talk to me. It was absolutely phenomenal. So we specialize in the home services industry and we did very well for them. And that just snowballed Today. To date, I'm the only salesperson in the organization. I have people who help me obviously, but I'm the only salesperson in the organization because, and this is kind of one of those differentiators. I don't want just everybody, right. I interview my clients just as much as they interview me. , right? Are we the right people? It's not about volume for us, it's about quality and longevity. Some of those clients have been with me for almost 10 years. You don't earn that by being fly by night. So that's how we built the company. It's how we're different. I specialize in every single client of mine, including prospects have my personal cell phone number like that, that their success is what keeps me up at night. So that's the kind of differentiator that we go to market with. Man, I didn't know that story obviously, so I, that, that really changes how people I would hope, would look at you in this company because most marketing people. don't have that story. Most marketing people haven't stumped their, skin their knees and busted their teeth in and gotten back up. Most marketing companies, sell ads or they [00:07:30] sell, it is, a lot of marketing companies are not really marketing companies. They're Facebook buyers. That's what they are. And they're just disguised as marketing people. So it's really refreshing to hear that you've had some issues in the past and Yeah. Figured out how to overcome those. Yeah, and really what I heard out of that Mark was that it's about relationships. Yeah. It's not about, it is, it's a hundred percent about relationships. You gotta listen, you got to, care. Right. Not everybody fits into the round pegs, square hole. Right. Yellow pages they're adep at that you give them a hundred dollars and they do exactly the same thing with that a hundred dollars as they do for the guy down the street. And we're not that way. At all. You can't, it's not a blanket solution, right? I mean, everybody's business may not be a significantly different, but they're all different. Yep. They're all different. I have a general guide, right? Everybody has a general guide. You're gonna go down that path, but in the northeast, , you're gonna have boilers, you're gonna have something different than you're gonna have in the southeast. And it's that understanding that most major, a big I'll call 'em conglomerate or yellow page. do the same thing over and over again expecting different results. And that's just not something that we do here. Do you wonder? Sometimes I want I wonder this, sometimes I wonder if there, there are certain there are certain sales trainers, there are certain marketing companies, there are certain people, there are certain names in the industry. That is, they're pretty well known. . And here's what I wonder often, and I observe a lot, I pay attention a lot, but I often wonder is I, are the people working with those people because of that's just who you work with, right? That's just a guy, right? And that's just who everybody works with. And nobody really pokes holes in some of these things. At least that's my observation. Did that make sense? It does. You have to, and in a line, it's the same with customers. Your clients people do business with you because one, they like you. I've been called a really good salesperson. I don't have much formal training. I have some, right? I sold radio, television cars. I've done sales predominantly for most of my adult life. I don't fancy myself as a salesperson but. people do business with me. They align very well. The people that, that my employees that I hand them off to, they're gonna feel in an experience a very [00:10:00] similar fashion to when they talk to me. So I find that transition, right, once you're talking to whoever you're talking to, that transition over to the next phase. Cuz I be very honest, I can't handle everybody. I can't talk to everybody all the time. I can't handle your accounts. So I hire the right people. I have absolutely amazing team working behind me for me, lifting me up, making what I say and do, easy to say and do. I have a saying, I love what I do. I love who I do it foreign. I love who I do it with. And that is not, it's not word vomit. That's not that's actual that's the what I've built this team around that. And this isn't really a say a podcast about what leads nearby. A lot of people don't know my story. And I'm happy to say it . will tell you, at the end of the day, my success, my growth, my company is predicated on my people and my clients. I've taken less money. I've done whatever I can to make sure that those two are the priorities. My family being is a priority as well. So, another pe another thing that a lot of people don't know about me is I'm a man of faith. I'm not perfect. Nobody is, but I am a man of faith. I'm an elder in my church. I really love helping it, I not be involved. I love doing that. And I will tell you not this conversation can go on and on about Mark Sherwin. Lee Nearby was developed and built around providing value. . I truly believe that there was an opportunity in this industry to help service-based contractors with ha give them an authoritative company who knows what they're doing, but give them somebody that they can trust. There are no shortage and everybody listening to this, you have a story on a negative experience with an SEO company. There was just a Facebook post about it, right? Don't, SEO stinks. They're all snake oil salesman and all this other stuff. That's my industry. That's something I've gotta battle, right? And it is, you're right, there are books that you combine and you read the 15 page pamphlet and or the back of the book, and you're suddenly a online marketing expert. I have to deal with them. So there's just had this, the other day, client signed up with me and she's like, mark that, the last two we signed up with burned us. That's terrible. How do you, I feel so bad, but that just makes me want more to provide the value. And it [00:12:30] makes it hard though, for us. It makes it re I cuz I understand you're saying, bro. It makes it awful. Terrible. Yeah. I'll so to that end what we're trying to kind of reimagine what value means, leads nearby and what I can show you. Oh yeah. You're number one. Hey, we got rankings. Look at all these ran. Oh wow. We got more traffic than ever before. Look at this. This is great. And you guys, oh, this is so awesome. This is exactly what I'm supposed to look at, right. . My answer to that is, though, supposed to look at, that's what we think. That's what I want you to look at when I don't have any other story to tell you is look what number one ranking that I got you. I did. I don't care about your number one ranking. You know what I care about? Revenue. Your bottom line, your dollar, your market share. I care about the things that mean something to you, your pocket, your family, your employees. And to that end we've begun late this year. We launched a program called Primo. And its entire purpose was to prove our, what we were doing was generating an increase in your revenue, in your target areas where you want to grow, where the, show you where the opportunity exists in your tar, in your service area. Instead of testing the big giant net. of, oh, we're gonna do paper click all through here. Cause that's my service area. Now I'm drawing circles around within there and saying, that's where I want to, that's where I want to, that's where I want to because those are the areas that are gonna generate the most return on your investment. And it has been kind of one of those aha moments. Like, we got it, like we're impacting market share revenue. Your third your third place ranking on a particular keyword that you fought so hard for is generating exponential amount of revenue. Yeah. That's awesome. Let's go. How much more revenue can we get from a different placement? It's not about number one, it's about how much revenue am I generating from number three, how much revenue am I generating from being found further out on your service area, on your Google business profile? I, these are the things that we're starting to try to focus our client's energy and effort on. And help them understand is what we ultimately, as an industry should be judged on, is revenue [00:15:00] generated lead volume. I'm good with that. Not number one ranking I can influence. It's so funny. Somebody's like, mark, you, I want more traffic. Great. I can influence traffic tomorrow. Just write a bunch of blog posts. And if as long as you as a service area business in Raleigh, North Carolina could care less about getting traffic from New York, I'm good. But you're a service area business in Raleigh, North Carolina. Guess where you want most of your traffic from Raleigh, North Carolina, So we spend time with that and help our clients with that, help them become the authorities, help them become the quintessential expert in their area on their topic and that revenue number, and looking at that at the end of the day, that market share, how much of that market do you own in your priority zip codes? It's been the aha moment that we all search for in our business lives. And we are, that, that's what we've been going to market with. And ultimately I'll tell you the long-term plan is I plan to tie my revenue, what I get paid on my ability to hit those numbers. That that, that's interesting. All right, so let's go back for a second, just for anybody that's listening, brother. So let's just say I just started an HVAC plumbing company, right? And yeah, and I'm looking for a digital market. I'm looking for a marketing company, and yeah, all these options, and I'm listening to this and I'm thinking, all right, so he said, I'm not gonna hit all the service areas. I'm just gonna hit specific service areas. What, if I don't know anything about marketing, what do you mean? Define, kind of break that down for me if I'm, let's just pretend I don't know anything about marketing, because there's a lot of people that could be listening to this that may not know. Talk about it. Okay, go for it. Marketing is okay. You're you're starting your own business. Awesome. Welcome to the club. It's a ride. The first and foremost thing that I need you guys to understand is that you need to be focused on why somebody needs to do business with you. What problem are you solving? Is it just, you started the business because you're a plumber and want to start a business because you're a plumber? What problem, what thing that the plumbing company that you work for, you wanted to break off and do on your own? Why? What was the purpose? Is it just money? Is it, I don't know that answer, but you're generally solving a problem. I broke off and I'm solving a problem in this industry because, I believe that the Yellow Pages was doing you guys wrong. [00:17:30] What did you break off and do? That becomes what if I don't know that? What if I don't know that though? What if I just say, you know what? I just, screw the balls. Right? I just saw him making all this money. I hear that a ton. And that's quite frankly my, I wanna, I see all these guys getting all this money from being purchased. I want that. Right? Totally. There's a plan. How do we get there? Why should somebody do business with you? Okay. Once you have established that that why somebody does business with me and know it's not because you have the best and well most well-stocked trucks. No, it's not because you're the nicest guy. Okay? Those can be things that you can say, but what is it that's different? What is it that, what problem are you truly solving once you establish that? . Now that's not an easy question. Your marketing company can help you, ask your friends and family, ask people around you, what is your most frustrating thing with the plumber that you've had last time in your house?  That's fascinating that you said that. All right. So that's, that is such a great point. I gotta stop you for just one second. You're basically, I'm gonna stand there. Go ahead and stop when you need to. No, you're good. But you're, understanding what the market wants, right? And you said ask other people. I would encourage maybe people not to ask a friend and family, cuz they're not gonna be honest with you. But what you could do, if you wanna know what you should specialize in is, talk to the people that are out in the marketplace, right? Find out what the problems are, find out what this plumbing company's doing, find out what they're doing, find out what they're doing wrong, find out what they're doing right, and figure out which one of those things that aligns with you. Or if it's, I'll just use this as an example, if it's if it's drained, right? You and I both know that not everybody's qualified to do drains, right? Not all plumbers even wanna do drains, but if you are really good at doing drains, then you could specialize, right? We know Ellen, RO, I'm sure you know that name, I think it's zoom drains maybe. Anyway, they specialize in just drains because that's what they're good at. Now does that mean they don't do anything else? No, but they lead with the one thing that they do Well, and of course they do all the other things. Right. And I think that's maybe what you were saying it is. And, yes. Absolutely. I'll give you the example. Okay? When you go in and in a technician comes to your door and you open that door, right? And the first whiff of you open the door and the first whiff you get is a smoke. [00:20:00] Guy just got done smoking a cigarette or something, right? You, he didn't open his mouth. And that homeowner, who's probably not a smoker at that point, is immediately turned off to the, to, to whatever that could, he could be the best plumber on earth. And if he smells like a smokestack, he's gonna have that problem. This is what I'm telling you, like, these are the things to understand When you ask friends or family, when you ask people in the marketplace, well, whoever you ask as many people as you can. What problems do are out there so that you can address them. We're the cleanest cut guys out there. We roll the red carpet out. We, there's so many things that you can, Hey, that's my message. I'm not that guy or a girl. Right? That's not who we are or wanna be. That's a market, that's a brand, that's something that you can go to market with. My people are excellent at it. I'm good at it. . I've hired the right people to help with that. The second part of that is do build it and they will come right? It people all the time. They'll call me up, mark, just build me a website and the leads will start rolling in. And I'll be able to pay for your bill next month once I have a website. I'm sorry, we're not right for you. Wrong answer. Right? It's not build and you will come. Why People are smart today, right? They've got all these choices. What's different about you? Why are they gonna choose you? And that brand has everything to do with whether or not somebody even recognizes you. Do yourselves a favor. Go to Google. I want and anybody listen to this test, this theory out, go to Google and type in bear repellent. It's a fun experiment. Who would you choose on that page? , 90% of you say 80% of you are going to choose Amazon or r e i. Why? They've done their best job of branding Amazon. I know I'm gonna get it in two days. There's gonna be some reviews there. R e i. Yeah, they're specialized in that. The number one on there is like Bear Smart or Bear Mark. That's, they probably have the best products and the most experience, but somebody you've never heard of. Now think back to Plumber. Plumber near me. Never heard of, oh yeah. I've seen these guys around Call and they're in the third spot, or they're so right. I am looking, in my mind it's a psychological event, right? I'm looking, I'm Nope nope. I'm looking for reasons not to do business with you as much as I'm looking for somebody to do business [00:22:30] with. A hundred percent. So we spend a lot of time in helping clients understand that, in that it's not magic. . It's just not, I wish it was, I'd be a rich man. We joke around, mark, just pick up the Google phone and call surrogate. Nope. It doesn't exist. I love helping those clients more than I want them to be a client of mine. I will sit down and I will educate any person that calls up. No problem. Give I love that aspect about what I do and give them ideas and help them build out. I've probably had five last month that I did the exact same thing for who's the first person they call when they're ready to sign up with a company like mine. Hopefully I am. Makes sense. It, I totally agree. And it is important. The brand's important. Understanding the messaging, right? I would love for you to talk about that for a second. How many times do you, and I'm not necessarily saying your people, but I see this a lot, right? The messaging in the email, right in the funnel or whatever, the email chain that you're getting, it's a little bit different than what the other messages are. And that incongruence is the same as that dude walking up on the front porch as a smoker to a non-smoker. It, I get asked this question all the time and let's get that out there, right? Seo, I mark seo, my website. so I show up. I want you to think of Google as a person, and this goes right back to messaging. So don't think I'm going in a different direction here, goes right back to messaging. there are, when you SEO something people are constantly, you how many keywords does it have to say in the exact way that it has to say it? And there's gotta be a certain percentage in the first 300 words, and there's gotta be minimum of 300 words. There's all these like general rules about seo o and yes, those things are kind of your basic, that's what you should minimally do for anybody. What we end up spending a lot of time is why should Google rank you over anybody else? And it gets back to the messaging and it gets back to Google rewards content, unique content, fresh perspectives, right? If you guys take nothing away from this, something that to go to your SEO company with is how can you be the quintessential expert in your area and on your topic of what you do. Palmer electrician, doesn't matter. What can you do as the expert to show [00:25:00] Google that you are in fact the quintessential expert in the area? Now, that gets into your messaging. That gets into we are the authority because we're willing to provide the most information, answered, the most questions that people have on the particular topic, the most AC repair. We should just use that, right? I don't want AC repair, air conditioning repair. Everybody wants that as a term. Great. Why should Google rank you over anybody else? And when you can understand that your messaging on your website isn't about how many times did I say the word AC repair? It's about how much information do you provide on your site about the topic. air conditioning repair, the types of air conditioning repair to expect. How much does it generally cost? Okay, what kind of air conditioning repairs, what's the timeframe? Right? There are so many questions that people have of the general topic and when you can help your website be the authority that my friend is one of the key pieces. It's in your message, how your message comes across that gets people there, then it's the tagline, right? Fix today or it's right or right. Fix right or repaired whatever it is, right? I want your message to come across at that point because that is going to detail whether or not the client does business with you. I'm gonna arrive in a fully stocked truck. That's when that is important. Google wants to know, did you educate my search of the client when you get there? Man, all of a sudden the light bulbs go off. You're a featured snippet on the search results page. You're part of the questions that, that Google asks right? And provides answers to. That's where you start showing up, and that's when you start getting the best search volume coming in for your most important keywords. And that's the messaging. So I want to hit, I want to, I wanna go back on something that you mentioned that was really important. When people go to your website, they do not care about you. They don't care about your family. They don't care about how hard you work to start the business. If they don't care, you know that any of that crap, they care about what you can do for them. You just mentioned that when people go to your site, they wanna learn about what it is they wanna learn about. Here we're talking about HVAC systems. So have an article about HVAC systems, right? It doesn't need to be your whole website, but you need to have information so people can learn about it. [00:27:30] Guess what? They're not gonna be able to put the HVAC unit in themselves. Like, you're not doing anybody a disservice by putting it on there. Nope. However, massive disservice if you're driving traffic about how great this deal is and they get to the site and it's about you, and well, I just use you and Bob in this scenario. They get to your site and it's about you and Bob's story like that doesn't make sense. We see that doesn't make sense. I'll tell you the biggest thing for us and anybody out there understand that your client cares that you're gonna answer their problem, their concern to them that the faulty air conditioner, that is the most important topic. They're con biggest cons. They're the only one in the world at that moment in time with that exact problem, and they're desperate for. they're hot, they're cold, they're not supposed to be. There's water where it's not supposed to be. There's a switch that's not working when it was before. These are primary concerns. How quickly can you get out there to solve them? We earn plate. Google's not going to reward you because you have a well stock truck. Google's gonna reward you because you have a well-informed website that does that, that educates that person on that particular topic at hand. Whatever their concern is now, when they get to your website is when, Hey, I need those trust signals. I need that that I need to feel good about who's gonna show up on my house. All right. The second most, and this is almost I haven't talked to many other agencies about this, but in my agency, the second most visited page, almost every one of my websites is the About Us page. , including leads nearby. They wanna know who you're gonna do business with. They want, you got me there now, who's gonna show up at my door? Who am I gonna be talking to? Right? Oh, wow. Hey. Yeah, I see some of the people they were, oh, that's great. Yeah. For whatever reason, it goes back to some of that family, right? They wanna know that they can trust you. That you're not just some robot held back on getting their money. It's no, don't do that. Be family oriented. Be show off your people. I know they're not photogenic, believe me. I know. But figure out a way to make them photogenic. Whatever that may be. I don't know. There's a guy that was in Oklahoma and most of you guys are gonna know him. Chris Hunter [00:30:00] guys weren't that photogenics. What'd he do? He went out and created caricatures out of all of them. . He made it fun and people ate it up. I got a electrician down in Atlanta. He went so far as to take pictures of all of his people doing things that they loved on the side, snowboarding and all right? He had all these cool pictures of his people doing the activities that they loved, not in their uniform. These are the kinds of things that bring a family aspect. Oh yeah, these are the people I want my, they're fun. They're cool. They're gonna solve my problem. Or maybe they're just like me, right? They could just, like, that's the, I may not be a snowboarder, but I may see this guy that's, whatever. Well fill in the blank, but I can see myself in that guy or that girl, whatever it is, right? Yeah. uh, Chris would tell us stories and the guy in the Atlanta tells us stories. People will call up and ask for that guy or that girl. because of their background, right? Hey, I'm a we'll use a Raleigh thing, right? I'm an NC State fan. I don't want, I don't want a Tar Hill fan showing up at my house, . And that's a real thing. It's, it totally is. Yes. I don't know about you ever there in the country, but here that would be a real thing. That would be a real thing. Think about, the Georgia Bulldogs. You got that whole thing down there. You got Texas you's got tons of that going on. Yeah, it's a thing. I mean, hey, maybe a great strategy to align yourself with whatever the most popular thing is, or what I'm not saying be as honest, but hey if all the other technicians advice to the technicians of all the other guys, like a certain team, like the other one, whether or not you're do or not, cause people will pick you just because. They will that hundred percent they will. Because people want to do business, people they know, like, and trust. Inter like them. Same thing. Same thing. Alright, so let's dive back into I, I want you to dive a little bit more into Primo. I don't know that we really talked about it in as much detail as I'd like, so yeah, go ahead. What's your question? So my question is if, alright, so I, and I know that there's only certain things that you could tell me about it, but I guess why is this, other than the service areas or why is that important? Maybe that's a group question. Why is it important to not hit the whole triangle and just hit the service areas that you were talking about earlier? It's extraordinarily important to hit your entire service market. Okay. [00:32:30] Where's the best opportunity for return on investment? Isn't like you want your budget to go. You want your budget to, to have its best bank for the buck. And if I'm spending where people aren't going to spend with me or from, if I'm spending in an area where I'm just not the right households, it's just I'm getting clicks, but I'm not getting opportunity. This should tell you that our, and what our primo is proven is that's not your primary area. There's just not enough opportunity in that area to impact it. It's from a revenue perspective. So what we ended up doing Primo was born, I'll start at the beginning. Primo was born out of this necessity that clients were asking for reporting what they were asking for. Validity. Mark, what you're doing for me is great. Everybody up until this point has showed me ranking reports and traffic reports. They don't know how much money they're making from those efforts. Then they, people started getting into, oh, let's do more tracking. Let's provide some attribution to it. Wonderful. Great. I have, I'm all about attribution. What we couldn't uncover was I'll tell and most of you on this call, if you're a business owner, you guys are gonna understand this. You've dumped money into a location for months and just not getting any more revenue out of it than you did before. What we find is that you've hit a market share cap. Take that same, we'll call it a hundred dollars that you that you're spending over here and getting a half a lead. And you take that same a hundred dollars and you apply it to an area where you don't have market saturation. Take that same a hundred dollars and apply it there. The, it's a mu that a hundred dollars might be two full leads at that point. It goes further. . Now I know what most of you're saying, mark. I wanna push the envelope. I wanna push that percentage of market share up. I wanna own the entire thing I do too. But you know, as well as I do, it's gonna cost more. Each lead that you get when you hit that top is going to cost exponentially more to get, because you have to break a relationship or whatever the case is, it's gonna cost more. Whereas some areas around your cer in your service area have great home values, great demographics and psychographics have everything that you're looking for. From a total home perspective. They don't have a preferred partner. Let's go after them. Let's focus our [00:35:00] energy on what we can in that area. Instead of using your paper, click budget and drawing a giant circle, draw smaller circles. And what we uncovered, Corey has been breaking phenomenal, is when you target at that level, you end up with. Far more impact. That a hundred dollars goes far further, the revenue is still there. And you impact market share. And I can tell you, unequivocably, oh, we hit the top of that market share, let's start taking dollars and put 'em into the next one while still maintaining what you have and you continue to grow your service area on that way. Now this is new. I'm I don't have like all these statistics and everything I'm gonna be able to share with you on this call, but what I can tell you is when you impact, when you show a client where they have been dumping money into and not gaining any more revenue from, and he takes that dollar and he moves it over to a zip code, and all of a sudden he's got, he can visibly see that zip code in his, he has service, tighten in his service, tighten rack tracking, generating more revenue than ever before from a simple switch. retargeting switch. Yeah. We're on something Customer for life. That happened. That it, yes. And he even said, he is like, all right, where's my next zip code? Where are we going from here? We looked at his overall reporting and we increased his market share by 1%. Doesn't sound like much to anybody. Maybe not. That's a huge, what does that equate to? Just for anybody listening, just give us like a number of what that 1% really would mean, depending on the size of your company. Could be a million bucks like it was for this company. Alright. Good example. a, It was a million dollars in revenue, attributed revenue to a particular zip code. So let me ask you something like I, and I wonder this I don't wonder this. I see this in certain different companies that they might be marketing. to a lead, and let's just say they're in Winston-Salem. Let's just pretend they're in Winston-Salem. Sure. But they've got Mar but there's, they've got but they're targeting Greensboro. They're targeting Burlington. They're targeting Pilot Mountain. , you're talking about an hour and a half distance between one lead to the next. And I have to scratch my head on that one because it, unless you've got enough trucks that, that doesn't matter. But I'm talking about somebody that's doing $2 million a year that don't [00:37:30] have before trucks. And that matters a lot. That matters to Tom, right to, it could kill you. Take your service area and you shrink it down. Your service area is that big generally because you want as many leads as you can to keep your four guys busy. My goal, shrink your service area and find enough work in that four for those four guys in the smaller service area. Right. Get that guy in the same area. Now, look I'm not a, I'm not a trainer on, on that side of it. Through our, Corey, I'm sure you can help. I know there's a lot of people out there that can help organize somebody's day, organize their schedule, work on quality lead scoring, that kind of thing, so that you can wait your schedule properly based on where you're gonna be. But for the guy that, the one 2 million, right? When you're sitting there, you're like, I'm going a half hour across town, hour and a half across town. Your marketing should be focused on where the highest propensity for opportunity works. It is then you coordinate your schedule with it. I spend a lot of time in helping clients shrink their service area before growing it. I help clients figure out where they should grow to. I'm helping with the Primo Report. The Primo report is showing them where they should put their new office. Where they should buy a company, right? What is the op market opportunity in those areas? I if you're going back to your original question, if you're a new company and you don't know where to stick your flag, this report will help you identify The biggest op best opportunity might not be in downtown Raleigh. It might be in an outskirt, right? Let's go down to Garner. Oh, Smithfield. Yeah. That seems like a good area, right? But this will help you understand that. Well, the truth is does it matter? Like if you're making money out of that area, does, do you really care where it is? Like provided Then it's, within distance, obviously, who cares, right? Who cares what neighborhood you're in? As long as you're making money, as long as you're making money, but the how quickly you make the money. That's true. Why it matter, right? If I'm in downtown Raleigh, I am dealing with every other downtown Raleigh company. But if I move a little bit in the outskirts, there's a lot of good homes around here. right? I wanna own this area on where there's really good homes and I have less competition to deal with, especially on Google Maps. Okay? Now you're impacting your Google Map placement with a properly developed, properly positioned office. We all know, right? Google shows your office within a five mile, 10 mile radius, depending upon the number of compe [00:40:00] competitors. Now I'm gonna, Hey, I'm getting a little bit more bang from my buck, where before if I was in downtown Raleigh or downtown, whatever, I get that little net because I got so much competition. Stop trying to be like everybody else. Stop trying to be, was Houston had over, no, I don't even remember now, 3,600 H V A C companies in and around there. Don't what pub, what part of that are you or do you want to own? What part of that do you want to dominate? Dominate it. Then expand, then look to grow. You can be a very big company in a very small area, like around Houston or even south of Raleigh. I just looked at a map the other just today, right? Tulsa, Oklahoma. And I looked just south. There's Broken arrow and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is such a huge opportunity for him. I never thought about that. That's why I'm here. Makes total sense. Well, it really does make sense. I'll tell you the side. Another benefit of doing it the way you just said is imagine your branding, right? Your vans, that if you're the plumbing company we're talking about now you're getting this super small service area. Guess what your brand's getting seen by that really small service area. And in their mind, perception is you're everywhere. Right? You're all around my neighborhood. So I assume you're all over the country because it matters to me, right? And guy, guys and girls that are listening to this. That's exactly correct. What Corey just said is exactly correct. Now it's still on you. Do not trust. Do not assume that your client now is going to recommend you to their neighbor. Ask, start handing out referral cards. Hand out door hangers. Do whatever you've gotta do. Every job becomes two jobs. Do not let that opportunity slip past if you've got 'em on the phone. Hey, did you, I, it sounds like your water heater's kind of old is that similar with some of your neighbors? Do they want like a free inspection or anything? Ask, these are opportunities that. . There was a old H V A C guy told me this. He's like, mark, go on to the days of wearing a tool belt and going to work, right? Everybody is responsible for the start asking questions even on the when that first call comes in. These are business coaching things that just the guys that are, and guys and girls in the field. Please understand these are questions that lead to more revenue for you, more income. [00:42:30] Yes the company does better, but at the end of the day, you do better for you and your family. You grow, you are problem solving out there. Everybody offers if you're proud of that, if you're in the trades, sorry to cut you off. No. Be proud of that. That's the huge thank you, right? Be proud of that. I can't. Fix, my, my septic system, I can't fix drains. I know. To pour draino down there and all, y'all just shrugged. Oh my god. Draino, no. Alright. But that's what the homeowner knows they're asking you, come in. I had a my, my son flushed his underpants down the toilet when he was a baby. The potty training thing washed his underpants on the toilet, clogged that sucker up. Good. I called three plumbers. One finally showed up. Yes. Totally smelled like he was smoking. Yes. Destroyed the bottom of my toilet with his little plumber or, thing. And but in five minutes, had the underwear out and then turned around and goes a hundred bucks. And I go, what did a hundred dollars get me? He goes, well, it's an hour of time. I said, great, let's go for a walk. And I walked him all around my house, Hey that spigot is leaking, this is right. And he, Hey, can you flush that right? How much to cost? I was literally trying to train him on how he should have approached me. There was more work to be done in that house, and he was ready to leave with his a hundred dollars in his pocket. Great. A hundred dollars for five minutes of work. I totally understand. He wants to go to the next five minute job. I get it. But there was more money to be made at my house and he didn't have to travel any, any further. I actually heard that a little bit differently. I was like, oh, so I paid for your hour of time. Well, I might as well get you to fix everything you could fix during this a hundred dollars hour of your time. Because customers would absolutely run with that. Yes. And I, hundred percent I change more. Yeah, absolutely. You paid him for his expertise, not his time, and that's where he messed up. Yeah. So these are the things like, and these are the experiences that your friends and family, colleagues, people around you people just in the community, just start asking like, what problem? What problems are very typical of a plumber or H V A C company? Well, there's a guy here locally right, Corey six and fix, he established his, he was an H V A C guy. He was a story written about him. He was an H V A C guy. He's not even my client. He was an H V A C guy only getting so far in, in getting leads and his company's only getting [00:45:00] so big. I don't remember the original company name. He talked to a bunch of people and their biggest concern was, how fast can you get out to my house? Well call by six, and it's fixed by today. Oh, he has 40 something trucks last I knew on the road, just in the Raleigh market, and all he does is fix. I don't, here's why that, he turns it over to his old company. And here's why that works, mark. Cuz we all want everything the Amazon way. So guess what? You're no different. Your service is zero. No different. None. None. Everybody's used to the Amazon way, right? I hit the button. It's there in two days. Yeah. Is that fair to the con? No. But does it matter if it's fair? You gotta understand where your customer's brain is. Then you've got me. Then you've like, I don't want to call another plumber. I honestly don't. I have no desire to call another plumber. I wanna know I got a guy or, yeah. I wanna know. Yeah. And, but now you got me. What are you gonna do with me? Well, I didn't tell you this story. One of the first things that happened to me, I saw I it was a local company put windows in in my house. I bought a house. And the windows. I mean basically just draft Central. So I hired a company to come out. This was before I even started leasing nearby. Hired a company to come out and they showed up and they did their work $15,000 later. And I, I remember right, I didn't have that kind of money. I had to take a home equity loan out. It was all kinds of, it's a big deal. I was the one calling him up, going, Hey do you do this? Hey, do you do this? I got more money to spend and I felt kind of used like he could care less after he got his $15,000 from me that whether or not, and he could a great job, he installed Windows, everything that was not the problem. He missed them opportunity for to own my home. I had more stuff to do, so I started calling his competi. people that like you didn't earn it. My wife just had a she owns her own company. She just had a person come into her house and to her place to polish and wax the floors. It's a health organization, right? And she does speech pathology and they were clean and polish the floors. They gave her a really high number and I told her it was gonna take a really long time to do. And she said yes. They still haven't showed up. They still haven't given her a date that they're gonna come in. Then they finally called her. We were just on a little vacation in Nashville. They called her by on a [00:47:30] vacation, Nashville, and they're like, we have too many little jobs. We can't handle your big job, so, we're just gonna have to decline. Like, are you kidding me? We just went two months round and round, finally agreed on a price, and I was just asking you for the time, and now you can't do it. She calls one guy up. Yes, ma'am. I can be right out there. Before and after pictures on his website, she'll tell you that's exactly what sold her was the before and after pictures. That's how she made the decision, was I see the floor before. I hate it. That's what it's gonna look like after sold. And he is a thousand dollars cheaper and can do it a day sooner, a day. Shorter. Yes. There's so many stories out there of people do the right thing by your clients. Guys. Do the right thing. Answer the right answer. The phones care. When you answer the phones, and when you do, I can guarantee you it's a change in your business and your philosophy. Corey, how many phone calls have you listened to? Pete Plumbing, Pete speaking. Like, are you kidding me? , how can I help today? What's going on? What's wrong? Oh my gosh, you've got a geyer in your front yard. Let me get right out there. Let's make that a priority, that there's two, ways to think about that. And one is want to know that my problem is you can help me with, is a concern to you that it's a priority and you wanna help me, right? So news flash folks, you don't have to, you don't have to spend more money in marketing to get more leads. Just train your people to execute when the leads come in and you will save money on marketing. This is why I'm dealing with Corey. This is why I have aligned myself with his training, because I cannot agree more with that statement. I honestly, I've listened to phone calls and I've had clients quit. Marco, we quit. True story thousand leads sent via a text message campaign. He had a thou, this guy had a thousand leads verifiable in six months, a thousand leads. He responded to a grand total of three, three of them. He responded to his excuse I just want 'em to call. Can't they just call and he quit my program? Okay. can't I can't fix that. I can't like, you can't. Somebody wanted to do business with you initially. Earn the opportunity to call them and work on your terms. [00:50:00] Then you can do that up until that point, gotta deal with them on their terms. And most of the time it's as simple as picking up the phone and being nice and showing up on time and you've. Most of the battle if you just do those three things. The first and this girl had no con my first client, and this girl had no formal training that I know about at the time, and she just get on the phone. Sweetest southern pie. Oh my gosh. We absolutely want to help you. Oh, good. Thank you. Okay, great. You can hear the relief in the customer's voice with just that one. Oh, my, oh, good. Good. Gosh, we can absolutely help you. That one qualifying statement in a sympathetic tone and a solution oriented, like, we can help you done that. That person was hooked. She booked everybody that came in. Yeah. She's absolutely phenomenal at it. Well, think of, mark, think about it, and I know you'll agree with this. When, even as a customer, we don't know what the problem is, right? We call you because we're scared. , we are confused. We may have something going completely sideways. We don't know how much it's gonna cost. Yep. That's what's going through our minds. When your CSR answers the phone, h a ABC Plumbing, and we're like, what? You're not gonna help me with my problem. You don't even care about me. You don't even care about your stuff. Your answer on the phone like that at at the end of the day, guys services like Corey, Corey himself helps marketing companies like me look better at the end of the, that's what it counts to. If I, if you can, if I can, if Corey can take one more lead. If you're, if I send you 10 leads and you close four of 'em, but he can close one more. Help you close. One more. I that's a huge number at the end of the day in the revenue. , and that's why I've aligned them. I know where to target. I know how to target. I know I, I know the means to which to reach your target audiences. I know messages that are going to resonate with them. That's all on me. When I get that phone to ring, when I get that text message to come through, when I get that smoke signal to happen, I don't care if that person has reached out in some way fashion reform to you. That's the baton. That's when a marketing company goes, yeah, we won. We got it. Here's your baton. Go for it. And if you continue to let them slip through, don't answer the phone answer the ah, they'll leave a [00:52:30] message. No, they won't. Don't assume that. Answer the phone every single chance That thing comes in, answer every email within as, as quickly as you can. . Those are the things that differentiate you over or anybody else. How many times guys have you gotten a lead and call them the next day and they already have an appointment with somebody else? Most of the time they're gone. You lost them. They're gone. They're gone call. You're a hundred percent right, dude. You're absolutely right. And here's the thing, mark if I'm a contractor and I suck an answer on the phone and I hate email and I don't like text messages, in fact, I really don't even want anybody to bother me. I just wanted to pay me. And guess what You can do, . You can hire somebody to do those other little things that you hate doing, and you can just run the business and do it. Well, imagine that somebody answered your calls for you. I get it, everybody. I get it. But there are companies, there are people that, that. This is one of the biggest areas that most smaller contractors start contractors starting out fail at. They try to be everything to everybody. They try to wear every single hat in the company. I had one guy, he's like, oh, I just need the phone calls between three and four o'clock in the afternoon. It's the only time I have available to answer them. Like, I'm sorry, people have a con, I have a problem at two in the afternoon. They're gonna have problems at 8:00 PM they're gonna have problems when they first wake up. If you're not answering the phone, they're gone. And I can't make them call at a certain time. And again, these aren't ideal clients and maybe they're extenuating circumstance. Maybe they're, maybe I'm just telling stories on the far ends of the spectrum. I don't know. I just know that I hear them. I hear them more than I should. And I can tell you your marketing company can absolutely help. I if you'd like to give us a shout, great. But I will tell you that your marketing company can do wonders. Give them the ammo they need, give them the information they need. It's all this is me giving you kind of the secret sauce guys. Give them the information and the help that they need. And the most important thing is pick up where they feel like they've won, they hand that baton to you. It is you're responsible for the revenue, not in your marketing company. You're responsible for closing that lead, booking, that lead, not your marketing company. Your marketing company did everything that right. At that point, I've gone so far as I've created programs and products that actually try to book the client call. Right? Oh fine. You're not [00:55:00] that good at it. Here, let me give you tools to help with that. Right. It's only so far I can go though. You can't make people do things. You just can't. And you would, until the pain gets great enough, there'll be zero changes. I don't know. It's yeah I hate that call though. I hate that call that the pain is too much. It's tough. But here's what I'd like, you know what I'd like to leave everybody with, and then I, you can leave everybody with something. Mark, it's really simple to email Mark if he's got, if you have a problem with your marketing, if the numbers dropped, email him, text him, send him a message and say, Hey Mark, we are not selling enough hot water heaters this month. Is there something going on with that? Maybe we should shift the marketing to whatever. The other thing is, you need to focus on what you're not getting a lot of leads on. But guess what? If you if the customer doesn't call you and tell you how are you ever gonna do, I'll tell you there's a if you're not busy and you're supposed to be, it's just your time of year, whatever it is, and you're not busy, your marketing's not working for you. Yep. When you're busy and you're supposed to be, your marketing's doing pretty good. When you are booked two weeks out and turning calls away, your marketing company is exceeding expectations. That's the realm. That's the where I like to work, right? I like people calling me and saying, stop what you're doing, cuz I've got, I'm booked too far out. , for the H V A C guys listening if you're, mark, if you are not busy when it's 900 degrees out in the summer, you're not busy. Your marketing's not working. You are just not found anywhere. They don't have the opportunity to get to you. That's when you call a company like mine. You call somebody that can help my clients. This is the, like I said, this is the busy season. I don't hear from them during the summer. Right. Frustrating. I want 'em to hear from them cuz I wanna prepare for the winter when they're not gonna be busy, but I get it. They're busy, they're running their company, they're on record pace. We've had 60% growth this year for one company in residential 30% for another, 43% for another. There's no shortage of opportunity growth this year. Not all. I don't take all the attri attribution. Right. They give it to me. You are instrumental in helping me get to that point mark. And that's, that, that's the realm that we work in. That's the stories that we have. That's the and again, leads nearby as a differentiator. I'm the only sales guy in [00:57:30] the organization. If you, I'm the owner of the company, you'll have my personal cell phone number. You can email me today, mark leads nearby.com. Very simple. M ark leads nearby.com. That will get to me just reference this in the subject line.  Great. Right? I'd love that as an opportunity. I don't work with everybody. I'd rather give them free. I like to give a lot of people free advice. I hope you took away something from this too, the people that are watching. Corey, I hope you took something away from it. But there's a that's what I'm hoping people walk away from by listening to this. I know it's a little longer paper than most of your podcast, and I appreciate that sticking around this long. , just let me know how I, well, I did fail to ask you one more question unfortunately, and I gotta ask this because I think it is one of the separators and it shows your humbleness that you didn't mention this. But you all have spec, you all have dedicated team members. You don't have one person doing all this crap. You've got an SEO person, you've got a paper click person. You have, I can't go down to all the lists. I've met with all of 'em, obviously, but you can, it's important because a lot of companies just have that one guy that's just doing all that crap for you. And I don't know about you. Well, I do know about you cuz of how you structured your company. That doesn't make much sense. Can't be a specialist in everything. . I've hired former marketing people from H V A C companies. I've hired people from different walks of life. SEO experts, pay-per-click experts all of them with a passion to help. One, one of my one of my people her husband is a plumber, right? These are, I can't stress enough the importance of having somebody that understands the industry that you're working in that loves to help this industry that's what their sole focus in leads nearby. Sole focus is working with the trades, working with service area businesses. It's where we have cut our teeth. I don't have a lawyer division. I don't have a, I don't have a real estate division. I have I work with and for. Home service contractors and B2B contractors, right? I do have a quite a few of those actually. So I'm very good if you are traveling to someplace, I can help you be found in those places. That's the general consensus there. The, and this is, please understand my humbleness is I am, I take personally every client's success. [01:00:00] I have hired the right people. They support me in everything that, that I say and do. And sometimes I say things and they're like, mark, I didn't know that we could do that. And I said, you, we, you didn't know that we could do it, but I knew that you could do it. There's nothing, I don't sell anything that we can't do. My people are extraordinary at that. For any of my people listening, love y'all. The I'll go to, I'll go to bat for any single one of them. My people know this. I just had one not recent, not long ago. Leave me only to come back six months later because where they went was awful. And loved what we were took less money maybe, I think it was. Anyway, but she's phenomenal. These are the stories. These are the people I've hired. I'd have everybody's in-house. Everybody, yes, works from home, but everybody's in-house. These are, I don't, I farm out very little and the things that I do farm out are replicatable stuff. But my people are all in-house. My designers, , this guy's rock. My social media team. Are you kidding me? I have the right people. Seo. This guy is like a chip off the old block, right? I, if I built my SEO person, it'd be great. So these are the people that I have. At your disposal. They work in pods, we call them. So they work in small teams and you have access to them as a, as you'll have a team leader and then you'll have the people in the pod that you have access to. And that's how we have built this company. Again, I'm the only sales guy. I have a 30 plus, I have a excuse me 23 plus person organization soon to be 23 person organization and plus four executives. I'm the only sales guy, and I did that for a very specific reason. That keyword ranking I worked for that was a sales based organization. Get 'em in, get 'em out, whack the credit card, all that stuff. I am anti that. That is not what we do here. My sales process is long. I make sure that you are. Comfortable with the decision your marketing company should be, shouldn't be selling you anything. Just like you, you don't want you, you want people to buy from you. You don't wanna sell to them. It's exactly the same situation here. I vouch for that. I can vouch for you being a hundred percent that way. Cause that's how we started this relationship. , it was a sales pitch for either one of us. Like it just made sense that, people get it right. I think people get it. I hope they do. I do. But I agree. And this is a, I appreciate you, explaining all that because I do think it's important that people understand that there are subject matter [01:02:30] experts on your team dedicated to those specific things that'll be dedicated to your specific account. . I don't know too many people have that. I don't know anybody else actually. I'll tell you a quick story. My content team are again, phenomenal at what they do, constantly learning. You know what the biggest frustration is? And I want, no, they don't know what a capacitor is. No, they don't know right? What a, a electrical panel does on the side of a house. They don't know you do. And what they're desperately trying to do is drag that information out of you in any form they can get it, so that they can articulate that back as subject matter experts on your website help you become that authority. So when times that any content person sits you down and starts talking, think, how much could I possibly tell this person that I know about it? , that's only going to help you. Well, that's the magic, right? Because most of us I'll speak for me and most contractors that we don't wanna understand this stuff, right? We don't wanna understand all the, we wanna make sure whatever we deposit, whatever we give you money that we're gonna make an ROI on that money. That's it. Yep. Right? That's the bottom line. And guess what? Bottom line provide that. Right. You can provide that. You'll not give people canceling. Right. I'll report on it. Absolutely. Yeah. I appreciate the time, Corey. Where can people find you? You wanna give out your number, market leads nearby.com. And if you are so in choose, just know. Just like you, I get a lot of spam messages and voicemails and stuff. I might not answer right away. Please introduce yourself, but you can call me on my cell phone, (919) 830-7471. Like I said, every client and prospect has it. You might as well. So I'm good with that. Yeah, and maybe just for everybody listening don't call Mark, text him. Like if he is just a little bit easier to keep up with things don't call, because that's just, that's a, first of all, nobody really wants to use the phone anyway. But yeah, I think it's best for you. Text, I'll set something. We'll set something up pretty easy. Even if you call the main line (919) 758-8420 th they'll help you get on my calendar. I've got a Calendly link that we can send out and get you on my calendar. And again, this is all about just exploratory information. If I can give you free stuff, I will. If I can give you free information, yes. Why? Because that helps me and my, my, my reputa, that's my reputation. That's the legacy I wanna leave behind [01:05:00] is that people came to me and they got something from it that they could use in the future. And even if it's a little piece that I impacted you in a positive way, I'm good. So thank you brother. I appreciate you. Appreciate you, man. Thank you for the opportunity and hope to hear from if you have any questions, you got it.   Mark Sherwin  mark@leadsnearby.com Lead Near By  Leadsnearby.com

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.On today’s show, we have Shawn Merani, Founder and Managing Partner at seed-stage focused Parade Ventures which recently closed a $40MM+ oversubscribed Fund II. In this episode, we talk about the basics of LP relationship building, founder support during tough times, and his view on larger VC’s invested in seed.About Shawn Merani:Shawn Merani is the Founder and Managing Partner of Parade Ventures, a pre-seed & seed stage-focused venture capital firm.Previously, Shawn was a co-founder and partner at Flight Ventures, investing in early-stage software, internet, and mobile companies across a variety of sectors. Shawn’s investments include Dollar Shave Club (acquired by Unilever), Sapho (acquired by Citrix), Moveworks, Trusted Health, Clubhouse, Side, Plastiq, Jumpcloud, amongst others.As an operator, Shawn was a founding partner of Liquidnet’s Private Shares marketplace, which enabled over 750 of the world’s leading asset managers to invest in high-growth, pre-IPO companies. He grew the marketplace to $150MM+ GMV in the first two years. Prior to Liquidnet, Shawn was Senior Director of Business Development at ReachLocal. Shawn has a BA in Economics and a BS in Business Administration from the University of California at Berkeley, as well as an MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management.In this episode we discuss:01:04 Why Shawn decided to found Parade rather than joining an established firm07:09 What are red flags and signals of alignment when looking at early-stage founders10:10 How Shawn rises above FOMO when looking at deals12:44 The lessons he learned between Fund I and Fund II and why he was able to raise so much more16:10 How Shawn partners with LPs to build trust and relationships18:24 How Shawn sourced his LPs20:44 How Shawn approaches investing in this market22:25 Is there any difference in leading rounds in 2022 vs. 202124:59 When is it right for a company to press the gas in a downturn27:40 What the next few years look like in venture capital31:20 How large, later-stage firms getting into seed will affect the market33:35 Shawn’s biggest contrarian view about investing35:11 The biggest career lesson he’s learned36:46 The biggest misconception of seed investingI’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Shawn. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you’d like to be considered as a guest or have someone you’d like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on Twitter.Podcast Production support provided by Agent Bee Agency This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ventureunlocked.substack.com

In this episode of the “Living from your Art” podcast, I talk about a new experimental strategy for Facebook Groups in which you could reach potential local customers. To make a living off your art, you always have to stay creative in the ways to find new people to contact!

We all want our ads to perform better. What's the secret?The secret is pretty straightforward have a strong offer. You may think you have a strong offer but is it converting? It's all about testing, you need to test different offers.On this episode of Growth Hack we bring in Rahul Alim to talk strong offers aka lead magnets.Rahul is the founder of Custom Creatives, a Digital Marketing Agency that connects companies with their dream clients. He has helped brands such as Realtor.com, Geico, Advertise.com, Reach Local and 1,000's of local businesses.With 16+ years of experience running his agency, he now coaches agency owners to grow 6 figure businesses with his proven G$D Sales Method. His real talk yields real results.For more episodes and information, visit us at www.papidigital.com/podcastFollow Papi Digital for Marketing Expertise and Insights on: Facebook: www.facebook.com/PapiDigitalLinkedin: www.linkedin.com/company/papidigitalInstagram: www.instagram.com/_papidigital/

On today's episode, Dan Crowley speaks with Rob H. and Rob W. Pedersen, a father-son duo helping to lead A Tool Shed Equipment Rentals in Silicon Valley, California. With their close proximity to Google, Facebook, and other internet giants, the Pedersens understand the importance of both online and offline marketing to aid their business' success. Today, the Pedersens discuss their marketing plan and include some helpful tools and tips they have discovered along the way. Thanks so much to today's sponsor, Reach Local. And thanks to you, our listeners! Stay tuned for more Peer Talk Podcasts coming soon.

I got to interview Rahul Alim. Rahul is the man behind the Marketing Agency, Custom Creatives. His Agency has worked with Realtor.com, Geico, Advertise.com, Reach Local and 100s of local businesses. He also coaches digital agency owners on building 6-figure, sustainable agencies. His mission is to help entrepreneurs get out of their own way by moving from an unsustainable “do it all“ mentality to building a rockstar team that gives them the ability to create an assembly line in their business to create growth and freedom in their business. We spoke about: His journey to now. What motivates him. Weaknesses he turned into strengths. Advice for the audience. And much more. This episode is sponsored by Nova Zora Digital experts in digital marketing. *Disclaimer: The views and opinions on Roman Prokopchuk's Digital Savage Experience are those of the guest's alone as their own, and the host's alone as his own. Information provided by the guest is fact checked to the best of our abilities. By providing background information to the show, the guest acknowledges that it is as accurate as possible. The show does not endorse, promote, or is in association with the guest's business interests.* --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/roman-prokopchuk/support

Shawn Merani, entrepreneur and venture investor, has started two venture funds and been an operator at early stage companies including Liquidnet and ReachLocal. Shawn has invested in some amazing companies including Clubhouse, Dollar Shave Club, and Stance. He shares his definition of "hustle" and the challenges of raising money for a venture fund vs. raising money for a company.Listen and learn...How to raise your first venture fund.Why the goal of Parade Ventures is "to be the first call great founders make when raising money."Shawn's secret to getting access to over-subscribed deals with high-profile investors.Why Shawn makes it a priority to meet every one of Parade's founders every other week.The biggest mistake founders make when pitching investors.What one entrepreneur did to convince Shawn to invest in a first meeting.References in this episode:Intro: book in-demand experts for a video callSonar: change intelligence softwareMoichor: animal diagnosticsZi Wang from TimelessParade Ventures

In this episode, Candice and Jim host Stacey Hull, a digital marketing specialist with Reach Local. You'll learn the basics of online digital marketing, and some pretty cool pro tips as well.

Rahul Alim is the founder of Custom Creatives, a Digital Marketing Agency that connects companies with their dream clients. He has helped brands such as Realtor.com, Geico, Advertise.com, Reach Local, and 1,000's of local businesses. With 16+ years of experience running his agency, he now coaches agency owners to grow 6-figure businesses with his proven G$D Sales Method.

Quick Links:The Agency Profitability Toolkit - Get the templates, formulas, and frameworks we've used with our consulting clients to help them double their profitability in under 60 days, absolutely free.For more information on our Agency Profitability Systems and Consulting, check out https://parakeeto.comLove the podcast? Leave us a review on the platform of your choice at this link.Guest Links:CustomCreatives.comTwitter @Rahul_AlimLinkedIn @rahulalimFacebook @rahulalim805YouTubeAbout Rahul Alim…Rahul Alim is the founder of Custom Creatives, a Digital Marketing Agency that connects companies with their dream clients. Throughout his career, he has helped brands such as Realtor.com, Geico, Advertise.com, Reach Local, and 1,000's of local businesses.With 16+ years of experience running his agency, Rahul now coaches agency owners to grow 6 figure businesses with his proven G$D Sales Method. In short, his real talk yields real results.When he's not helping to connect dream clients, he spends time with family at Dodgers games and Galaxy games. Want more from Rahul? Check out…

Today's episode sponsored by Reach Local features NCG Director of Operations, and Senior Business Coach, Kathryn Freeman, accompanied by another of our NCG Coaches, Colin Nolan. Having effective one on ones with your employees is crucial for employee development. From keeping employees engaged to the most appropriate time for scheduling, Kathryn and Colin share a recipe of sorts for maximizing the success of these meetings in this week's episode of Out of the Hourglass.

On “Media Champions,” our host speaks with experts within the media community. This week Susan St.Denis speaks with Evelyn DeJesus from Garnett/Reach Local.To learn more check out reachlocal.com

 My Total Life Freedom local friends and local networking friend Eric Laylon intersect for a second episode. In "Don't Fight Google or Facebook, Fight for Lunch", my friend Eric Laylon from ReachLocal shared great marketing tips and stats on the digital giants. I followed this with a story of who paid for lunch. In this episode, I am copying the format!  Last week in my local MCBA meeting, Eric ran the business education segment and taught on the benefits of using Alignable for marketing. I've personally avoided it, but Eric gives some great points and tips that may have persuaded me to look into it more. Thus, I wanted to share it with you. LinkedIn is a business platform for business owners and professionals (employees). Alignable is for small business owners locally (not nationally like LinkedIn). The platform is already niched to local and small business owners, which makes it a natural marketing companion to in-person local networking. Alignable has niche groups that you can join of "like interest". Eric says he has gotten so much more business through Alignable vs LinkedIn because of the platform's ability to hyper-niche. Eric explained that you can set up your profile with "who you'd like to connect with". Then, Alignable takes your preferences and puts you in front of those people. Eric uses the premium $30/mo version because the free version limits you to the # of people you can connect with. I thought Eric did a great job presenting Alignable and it really intrigued me. What do you think? Do you use this platform? I'd love to hear about it if you do.A few leads came in this week. The first one was military-like. My friend James Hardy of the Carpet Guys was in an online group and saw a request for a house cleaner. He was in the process of typing in my name and website when something else caught his attention. The owner of a local cafe gave my name first. He recommended me and then texted me. "Ken, do you clean for the cafe?" I said no, but I do clean the owner's home. Then he told me about the recommendation to Steven Hunsberger. I thanked him and shared that Steven is the president of my chamber and we're friends. Then I contacted Steven and he felt so embarrassed that his friend Ken and the only cleaner of 400 members in his chamber didn't come to mind when he was looking for a house cleaner. There are multiple takeaways here. First, I am so thankful that I was triangulated by multiple friends to recommend me and they all knew each other! Another is that I have done a poor job in communicating that I clean houses to Steven in all of our interactions including our recent breakfast! Steven knew that I cleaned offices, but had no idea that I did houses too. We talked on the phone and I answered all of his questions in hopes of educating him on the various options he had for hiring a house cleaning service.Read the rest of this article at the Smart Cleaning School website

On this episode of the Community College Marketing MasterClass, Interact Content Manager Wyatt Otto and friends discuss TikTok, the newest social media platform sweeping the nation. They discuss how TikTok works, best practices, and how community colleges can best be using it.This week’s guests are Sara Sampey, lead videographer at Interact; Jamie Wagner, executive director of Media Prefs; Amy Hazelhurst, senior internet marketing consultant at ReachLocal; and the fabulous marketing and public relations team at Cape Fear Community College: Sonya Johnson, Julie Martin, and Erin Fabian. 

In this episode, I have an important lesson to share from a new friend of mine in the digital marketing space on the power of Facebook and Google. Eric Laylon is a consultant with ReachLocal. He understands the online landscape more than almost anyone that I know. He's a new member of the MCBA networking group and had a chance to share a presentation on his work. I asked many questions as I wanted to understand a little more of the trends he's seeing in 2021. Google drives 85% of all online traffic and still dominates the online search landscape. Bing is #2 because Comcast uses them as a default, but they use Google ad platforms. Google will continue to dominate. If you're not visible on Google, you're not visible.Google My Business is a free way to create SEO for your business through images, reviews, articles, and deals. Ads are an excellent paid option to generate leads.Eric says you should be investing 3-5% of revenue into marketing for average returns. 8% is aggressive and 3% is slow growth. Invest 60-70% of this marketing budget on digital. This is what the large companies are doing in 2021!Facebook is similar to google. They have 223 million users in the United States alone out of 331 million people. That's 67% of the US is on Facebook. A business page is free and allows you to create interest for your product or service for free. Ads (like Google) are an excellent paid option as well.Thank you Eric for teaching and sharing the trends and stats for 2021! My takeaway is simple. If you ever want to be found in your cleaning business, you have to be on Facebook and Google as they represent 67% of the country and 85% of all online searches. And you can access both for free through a Facebook business page, personal page, Google my business profile.That was quick and to the point! Let's dive more into my own solo cleaning business. I have used digital marketing to grow my solo cleaning company in 2020. I tried everything, but focused on Facebook and Google My Business digitally while attending local networking to round out my marketing strategy. I didn't use any paid advertising and grew my company by $60,000 in revenue in 2020. Going forward, I plan to continue. I did get an idea this past week that I had originally planned in 2019 and never did it. I am the only cleaner in a 300 - 400 member chamber of commerce. Many members know who I am now since I've been helpful in leading webinars for the chamber, but I figured that the majority do not know me. I could cold call them and try to fleece them for business. I don't operate like that. Here's what I'm going to do. I'll make a list of the members that have an office that is a good fit for my office cleaning company. These are buildings under 5,000 - 6,000 square feet that need cleaning weekly or less. Once I have the list completed, I'll send emails with personal videos to the owners or contacts through the chamber to say hi and introduce myself. From there, I'll see who has any interest in connecting more with me. I'll schedule Zoom calls or breakfast meetings with the ones who want to know me. Then I'll add these new friends to my twice-monthly newsletter. I am guessing that 150 of the members fit into my demographic out of 400. Out of the 150, I wouldn't be surprised if I can connect and add 30 to my newsletter. Who knows from there. Those 30 could be 10 clients at $500 - $800/month in the future, which is over $60,000 of annual revenue! Either way, I make new friends. Win-win.Read the rest of this article at the Solo Cleaning School website

Is digital marketing dead? No, it's far from it. Rahul Alim and I discuss everything from digital marketing and why you need it in your business to why you may not need a college education like society has programmed you to believe. This why a great episode and I know you will enjoy it. Here is a little background on Rahul below.Rahul Alim is the founder of Custom Creatives, a Digital Marketing Agency that connects companies with their dream clients. He has helped brands such as Realtor.com, Geico, Advertise.com, Reach Local and 1,000’s of local businesses.With 16+ years of experience running his agency, he now coaches agency owners to grow 6 figure businesses with his proven G$D Sales Method. His real talk yields real results.Be sure to check this out on all platforms including iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, ResourcefulAgent.com and many more. You can also reach me on Instagram or Facebook @ResourcefulAgent -Want to reach Rahul at Custom Creatives? I've included his social media links belowWebsite - https://customcreatives.com/winFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/rahulalim805Twitter - https://twitter.com/Rahul_AlimLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahulalim/YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXcRlcs-hxFDLvmltSzNkxQInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/rahulalim/_I really enjoy hearing what you guys think of these videos, please take a second to say "Hi" in the comments and let me know what you thought of the video....Also if you enjoy these videos and my channel it would mean a lot to me if you subscribed :)_ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/resourcefulagent/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/resourcefulagentTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@resourcefulagent?lang=enLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-silvius-091aa7190/

Rahul Alim is the founder of Custom Creatives, a Digital Marketing Agency that connects companies with their dream clients. He has helped brands such as Realtor.com, Geico, Advertise.com, Reach Local and 1,000's of local businesses. With 16+ years of experience running his agency, he now coaches agency owners to grow 6 figure businesses with his proven G$D Sales Method. His real talk yields real results. https://www.facebook.com/rahulalim805 https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahulalim/ https://youtu.be/Y5ezSrcpBGc https://www.instagram.com/rahulalim/ https://twitter.com/rahul_alim --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

✴️Episode #50✴️

Rahul is the man behind the Marketing Agency, Custom Creatives. His Agency has worked with Realtor.com, Geico, Advertise.com, Reach Local and 100s of local businesses. He also coaches Digital Agency Owners on building 6-figure, sustainable agencies. His mission is to help entrepreneurs get out of their own way by moving from an unsustainable “do it all“ mentality to building a rockstar team that gives them the ability to create an assembly line in their business to create growth and freedom in their business. Connect with Rahul: https://customcreatives.com https://www.facebook.com/rahulalim805 https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahulalim/ https://youtu.be/Y5ezSrcpBGc https://www.instagram.com/rahulalim/ https://twitter.com/rahul_alim

This week Jason Fishman speaks with Frank Frausto, Chief Marketing Officer of Beyond Enterprizes. Frank walks us through how he was able to Test, Optimize, and Scale his businesses.   Frank Frausto is a Google veteran of over 14 years and has experienced first-hand the evolution of the world’s most recognizable startup from a private valuation of $18 billion in 2003 to today’s market capitalization of $740 billion. Currently, Frank serves on the Chief Digital Marketing Officer of Beyond Enterprizes, a strategic investment and advisory firm empowering blockchain investors, funds, startups and entrepreneurs to reach their goals. Frank started at Google as an Account Manager back in 2003 when he was part of Google's first inside sales organization. As a founding member of the New Business Sales team, he partnered with some of Silicon Valley's top businesses, and acted as their digital marketing consultant, helping guide some of Google's most strategic clients to profitability. Pursuing his passion for helping others find success, Frank became Google's lead sales trainer, where he coached Googlers in 12 different countries on product and sales knowledge. Currently, Frank serves as a digital marketing consultant and trainer for Google's channel partners. He designs, develops and delivers customized product and sales trainings for companies such as ReachLocal, AutoTrader, and YP.com, thus creating more effective digital sellers and account managers in their organizations.

On today's episode, Dan Crowley speaks with Sophia Homfeldt, the President of Bullet Rental & Sales, and Demita Torrans, Owner of Dots Rental & Sales to discuss women in business. An important discussion for everyone, Sophia and Demita discuss their experiences as owners in the rental industry. Thanks to our sponsor this week, Reach Local, and thank you for listening, be sure to tune in next week for another new podcast!

On this episode I had the pleasure of hosting someone who literally changed my life.  I met Seth Winterer in 2007 at the Digital Dealer conference.  Seth had been leading sales efforts at ReachLocal and was tasked with growing their automotive business.  It took a few months, but I ended up working with Seth and the ReachLocal team for a few years where we built millions of dollars in automotive SEM business.  On the surface, Seth is calm, calculated and considerate.  If you're fortunate enough to become his friend, you find out he's also quietly confident, very competitive and extremely capable.  I consider Seth among the more elusive jedi-like digital marketing professionals.  He's part salesman (and a damn good one), part Don Draper, part level 5 leader (Good to Great reference) and part passionate father who loves Porsche, a little heavy metal from time to time and baseball.  Seth is the founder and CEO of Digital Logic in Shreveport, LA and an old friend I know you'll enjoy hearing from.

Aaron Wild, from Reach Local, joins the show because I speak to a lot of businesses where Google Ads would be a great option for them but they, for whatever reason, shy away from it. Maybe they don’t like spending the money on advertising. Maybe they have had campaigns in the past but managed it themselves and they didn’t have great success and so they don’t think Google Ads are a very good option for them. It is strange to me because we can conduct concrete research to tell us if Google Ads are likely to pay off, they are so highly trackable it is not funny so you’ll know your exact ROI each month,  we can set our own budget, and we can stop and start them with a click of a button. In the past, I used to offer Google Ad campaign management for people but those were the days when it wasn’t as complex or as competitive as it is today. That’s where Reach Local comes in. Founded in 2004, Reach Local operates in 5 continents and has had over 19,000 clients, having delivered them over 201 million leads with a lead being a phone call, email, or web event from one of their campaigns. That’s why, these days, there is no way I’m as smart or as organised as Reach Local so I can’t, in good conscience, charge people to run their Google Ad campaigns. As such, any of my clients who need Google Ads, I simply introduce them to Aaron and let him and the team do their thing and generate leads. See omnystudio.com/policies/listener for privacy information.

We have our next AAF Houston free webinar July 15th at 1 PM. Erin Green with Reach Local will share how advertisers can tap the power of YouTube to tell their story. Go to AAF-Houston.net to register. Get a preview, right now.

Dan Whitfield offers you a “client-centric” coaching approach. He builds relationships based on the life and business philosophy of “People Matter!” Dan’s entrepreneurial experience and real-world sales leadership promote genuine bonds steeped in trust.With a capacity to fulfill the dual role of consummate champion and caring critic, Dan provides actionable insights. He works collaboratively to identify solutions and create meaningful strategies for overcoming challenges. His consultative engagement style empowers clients to freely evolve and grow in the face of today’s ever-shifting landscape.Over the last 15 years, owners and leaders of companies such as InXpress, ReachLocal, DexMedia, ZipLocal, and New Horizons Computer Learning Centers have partnered with Dan to achieve unparalleled corporate resurgence. When working with a coach, both individuals and organizations seek outcomes that move the needle. Dan’s coaching partnerships ignite key performance in the areas of sales acceleration, revenue generation, as well as client acquisition and retention.Learn More: www.coachup.ioInfluential Influencers with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-dan-whitfield-owner-operator-of-coachup

Dan Whitfield offers you a “client-centric” coaching approach. He builds relationships based on the life and business philosophy of “People Matter!” Dan’s entrepreneurial experience and real-world sales leadership promote genuine bonds steeped in trust.With a capacity to fulfill the dual role of consummate champion and caring critic, Dan provides actionable insights. He works collaboratively to identify solutions and create meaningful strategies for overcoming challenges. His consultative engagement style empowers clients to freely evolve and grow in the face of today’s ever-shifting landscape.Over the last 15 years, owners and leaders of companies such as InXpress, ReachLocal, DexMedia, ZipLocal, and New Horizons Computer Learning Centers have partnered with Dan to achieve unparalleled corporate resurgence. When working with a coach, both individuals and organizations seek outcomes that move the needle. Dan’s coaching partnerships ignite key performance in the areas of sales acceleration, revenue generation, as well as client acquisition and retention.Learn More: www.coachup.ioInfluential Influencers with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-dan-whitfield-owner-operator-of-coachup

Dan Whitfield offers you a “client-centric” coaching approach. He builds relationships based on the life and business philosophy of “People Matter!” Dan’s entrepreneurial experience and real-world sales leadership promote genuine bonds steeped in trust.With a capacity to fulfill the dual role of consummate champion and caring critic, Dan provides actionable insights. He works collaboratively to identify solutions and create meaningful strategies for overcoming challenges. His consultative engagement style empowers clients to freely evolve and grow in the face of today’s ever-shifting landscape.Over the last 15 years, owners and leaders of companies such as InXpress, ReachLocal, DexMedia, ZipLocal, and New Horizons Computer Learning Centers have partnered with Dan to achieve unparalleled corporate resurgence. When working with a coach, both individuals and organizations seek outcomes that move the needle. Dan’s coaching partnerships ignite key performance in the areas of sales acceleration, revenue generation, as well as client acquisition and retention.Learn More: www.coachup.ioInfluential Influencers with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-dan-whitfield-owner-operator-of-coachup

Dan Whitfield offers you a “client-centric” coaching approach. He builds relationships based on the life and business philosophy of “People Matter!” Dan’s entrepreneurial experience and real-world sales leadership promote genuine bonds steeped in trust.With a capacity to fulfill the dual role of consummate champion and caring critic, Dan provides actionable insights. He works collaboratively to identify solutions and create meaningful strategies for overcoming challenges. His consultative engagement style empowers clients to freely evolve and grow in the face of today’s ever-shifting landscape.Over the last 15 years, owners and leaders of companies such as InXpress, ReachLocal, DexMedia, ZipLocal, and New Horizons Computer Learning Centers have partnered with Dan to achieve unparalleled corporate resurgence. When working with a coach, both individuals and organizations seek outcomes that move the needle. Dan’s coaching partnerships ignite key performance in the areas of sales acceleration, revenue generation, as well as client acquisition and retention.Learn More: www.coachup.ioInfluential Influencers with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-dan-whitfield-owner-operator-of-coachup

Interact teamed up with Google and digital marketing partner ReachLocal to provide a webinar on the shifts that are taking place in digital behavior so colleges can reach students in the right space and at the right time. The webinar was recorded on April 16th, 2020 and covered a range of topics, including:Google's education insightsthe student journeyhow to better understand and connect with students todayhow putting this in practice can lead to a successful campaignBecause Google's content is exclusive and is made available only to the webinar attendees, this podcast episode is an abbreviated version of the webinar, reviewing some of Google's key takeaways and focusing on the remaining parts of the presentation with content provided by Interact and ReachLocal. Both groups build on Google's segment by showing colleges how they can shift their digital marketing strategies to maximize the return on advertising investment. To view the recorded webinar and access supplementary materials including the presentation, visit Interact's news center at news.interactcom.com.

James 1:27- "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world." We know that the Lord has a heart for orphans, but how can we join in? That's what Eric and Matt discuss in this week's episode of the Calvary Life Podcast with lifelong Calvary member and Acres of Love advocate, Erin Kruiewicz! Together, they talk about Erin's lifelong heart for adoption, her journey to get involved in Acres of Love, and how she met her son for the first time! If you would like to learn more about Acres of Love, visit their website here or follow them on their Instagram or Facebook pages. You can also learn more about how Calvary is helping serve the orphans of Orange County by visiting our Reach Local page.

Elizabeth is joined by Nicole Wagenecht (Head of Channel Sales, Reach Local) and Aron Warren (Partner Development Manager – ANZ, Reach Local) to discuss why you should look at marketing (digital or otherwise) for your small […] http://media.rawvoice.com/joy_gotmoney/p/joy.org.au/gotmoney/wp-content/uploads/sites/343/2019/09/Cost-of-Not-Marketing-Nicole-and-Aron-FINAL.mp3 Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:16 — 52.8MB) Subscribe or Follow Us: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS The post #GotMoney: The Cost of Not Marketing appeared first on #gotmoney?.

ReachLocal’s Amy Hazlehurst joins Interact President Cheryl Broom to discuss how community college marketers can leverage the unrivaled power of YouTube to reach student prospects, extend their college brands, and get the most out of their ad dollars in this inaugural episode of the “Community College Marketing Masterclass” podcast!

Interview begins: 07:03Debrief begins: 48:43Bryan serves as Capital Factory's Vice President of Accelerator and Investment Fund.Bryan is a business development and investment professional experienced in portfolio management and venture capital transactions. Prior to joining Capital Factory, Bryan established the Blackstone Launchpad and UT Dallas Seed Fund at the University of Texas at Dallas where he actively advises students, entrepreneurs, and early-stage ventures and serves as a member of the entrepreneurship faculty. Bryan is a founding team member and at Fixd Repair, an insurance technology and home services business where he led the business corporate development strategy. Bryan has spent his career working with and investing in venture-backed startups including ReachLocal, LevelUp, and Fran POS.​//Capital Factory's mission is to be the center of gravity for entrepreneurs in Texas. Last year more than 100,000 entrepreneurs, programmers, and designers gathered day and night, in-person and online for meetups, classes, and coworking.They meet the best entrepreneurs in Texas and introduce them to their first investors, employees, mentors, and customers. According to Pitchbook, Capital Factory has been the most active investor in Texas since 2013.Founded in 2009, Capital Factory is based in Austin, Texas.Learn more about Capital Factory: https://www.capitalfactory.comFollow upside on Twitter: https://twitter.com/upsidefm Subscribe to the update: https://upside.fm/update

Dr. Robert Jeffress shares the importance of equipping pastors and laymen with pertinent Bible studies to initiate discipleship ministries with those serving in government.

Find out how contractors can use the world’s largest community-based traffic and navigation app to get found by more homeowners Did you know the average person spends 101 minutes driving each day? That’s a lot of time in the car that could be spent discovering your business…join us as Waze’s Head of Channel Partnerships, Justin Nabozna discusses: - Latest Waze Driver Insights - How can we help you drive success this year - Working with our Waze team

First Up: Shep Hyken’s opening comments discuss the company Talkdesk, their upcoming roadshow, and how to improve your customers’ experiences. Featured Interview: Shep Hyken interviews Gadi Shamia, COO of Talkdesk, about how you can improve your customer service. The interview begins with Gadi sharing some background on himself and  Talkdesk, a cloud based contact center platform that connects their support team to their customers. Gadi gives us the backstory on Talkdesk and shares some examples on how Talkdesk has improved upon existing technology to create a simpler cloud solution for support agents. That leads to a fascinating conversation about how technology has impacted customer service, and what tools and solutions you can use to make for a better customer experience. Top Takeaways: Make it easier for the customer. You need to ensure what you’re doing impacts the customer in a positive way. Provide self-service options for your customers. Empower your team. – Using current technologies, we have the power to make customer information available to our teams to allowing them to assist the customer the best way they can. Knowledge is power! We can’t teach empathy, but we can provide agents with more information so they can be empowered to understand the customer’s issue from the start. Don’t deflect calls. If a customer is calling, take advantage of the opportunity to resolve the customer’s issue yourself. Do not send a customer to a website or a self-service option. Nowadays most customers only call when self-service options have already failed them, whether they couldn’t find the solution or they couldn’t understand the self-help option. This is your opportunity to connect with the customer and build a relationship. Spend less on marketing and more on customer service. Once you get a customer through the door you can do a lot to retain them, which is much more cost effective than trying to always focus on new customers. About: Gadi Shamia is the Chief Operating Officer at Talkdesk, the world’s leading call center software start-up. Gadi has had much success throughout his career working for such great companies such as Adobe, SAP, and Reach Local - just to name a few. Shep Hyken is a customer service and experience expert, “New York Times” best-selling author and your host of Amazing Business Radio. "(Today most people use self-service options first) So, when you call customer service you don’t do it because you have to, you do it because self-service failed you.”  – Gadi Shamia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeff Stein is an Internet Marketing Consultant (IMC) at ReachLocal. He specializes in working with small to midsized businesses by educating them through the consumer buying journey. He finds it critical to understand the business he is working with as well as the ever-evolving internet landscape. By leveraging data analysis, and software platforms he turns advertising into a profit driving engine for business.

Gadi Shamia. He’s the chief operating officer at Talkdesk, the world’s leading call center software platform. It’s backed by DFJ, Storm Ventures and Salesforce Venture. Talkdesk has grown 8x over the past 2 years and has over 250 employees along with their thousand customers including Box, Shopify, Dropbox and Weather.com. Prior to Talkdesk, Gadi founded a company that was acquired by SAP and now generates $5M in global business. He was also a senior VP at SAP and a general manager at ReachLocal. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The Innovator’s Dilemma What CEO do you follow? – Marc Benioff Favorite online tool? — Gmail and Slack How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6.5 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Gadi wished he knew that he would be fine so that he could stress less about it   Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:44 – Nathan introduces Gadi to the show 01:26 – EchoSign was acquired by Adobe 01:31 – TopManage was acquired by SAP 01:53 – Talkdesk is a cloud-based call center solution 01:58 – It is fully-integrated 02:26 – Talkdesk charges users per license fee 02:44 – Talkdesk is a SaaS company 02:54 – Average pay per customer varies 03:01 – A company with 50 users would pay $5K-7K a month 03:28 – Per seat cost is around $65-125 depending on the subscription 04:02 – Gadi joined Talkdesk 3 years ago 04:16 – The call center space is an interesting market 04:22 – It is still dominated by all players such as Avaya, Cisco and Genesis 04:35 – Talkdesk already has a proven product 04:41 – Talkdesk has a couple of hundred customers who like the product and has been using Talkdesk for years 04:53 – Tiago, Talkdesk’s CEO, was one of the reason Gadi joined Talkdesk 05:14 – Tiago is the co-founder and his co-founder left Talkdesk after 4 and a half years 05:50 – Gadi believes that co-founders leave because they might not feel as excited as they were in the early stages 06:01 – Co-founders staying is also devastating for the company 06:10 – When a co-founder can say that he’s leaving and he has done his job, it’s a healthy company 06:44 – Talkdesk has broken the million ARR 06:57 – Talkdesk had 50 people when Gadi came in 07:17 – Tiago was the only salesperson at Talkdesk when he started it and he was able to get remarkable brands to use Talkdesk 07:43 – Gadi met Tiago through Gadi’s friend from Storm Ventures 08:06 – Gadi and Tiago met in 2014 several times 08:38 – Talkdesk currently has 1200 customers 08:48 – There are around 50K seats 09:06 – Average MRR 09:43 – Alot of Talkdesk customers are e-commerce customers and they are seasonal 10:32 – Talkdesk is at a net negative churn 11:00 – Talkdesk talks to their customers about their seasonal needs and adjusts the annual licensing fee 11:42 – Talkdesk respects Workday, Salesforce and works with ServiceNow 12:48 – The best companies will get 110-120 in aiming net revenue expansion 13:03 – Most companies that have worked with Talkdesk benefit from it and grow 13:10 – DoorDash grew from 40 seats to 800 13:38 – Talkdesk currently has a team of 250 people 14:40 – Talkdesk’s growth is mostly from new sign-ups 14:56 – Talkdesk has raised a total of $24.5M 15:01 – The last round was in 2015 15:15 – Talkdesk is neither raising rounds or talking to Salesforce 15:34 – Talkdesk focuses on building a real business 16:24 – Talkdesk is still burning cash 16:53 – Most of Talkdesk’s customers pay annually upfront 18:13 – The Famous Five   3 Key Points: When a cofounder leaves, it means he’s done his job and the company is healthy Be in a company where you believe in the product and know that you can accelerate its growth. Building a real business is about the service you provide your customers in helping them achieve growth.   Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Hotjar – Gives Nathan a recording of what is happening on a website or where people are clicking and scrolling on the website Organifi – The juice was Nathan’s life saver during his trip in Southeast Asia Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Freshbooks – Nathan doesn’t waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Matthew Johnston, CEO of HM.CLAUSE, a global seed producer, explores scaling up in the seed business, the agricultural economy, creating long term partnerships with regional food producers, and the need for innovation and responsible management. HM.CLAUSE is a global leader in the production and sale of high-quality vegetable seeds tailored to local environments and customers. Series: "UC Davis Graduate School of Management's Executive Speakers and Special Events" [Agriculture] [Business] [Show ID: 31749]

Matthew Johnston, CEO of HM.CLAUSE, a global seed producer, explores scaling up in the seed business, the agricultural economy, creating long term partnerships with regional food producers, and the need for innovation and responsible management. HM.CLAUSE is a global leader in the production and sale of high-quality vegetable seeds tailored to local environments and customers. Series: "UC Davis Graduate School of Management's Executive Speakers and Special Events" [Agriculture] [Business] [Show ID: 31749]

Matthew Johnston, CEO of HM.CLAUSE, a global seed producer, explores scaling up in the seed business, the agricultural economy, creating long term partnerships with regional food producers, and the need for innovation and responsible management. HM.CLAUSE is a global leader in the production and sale of high-quality vegetable seeds tailored to local environments and customers. Series: "UC Davis Graduate School of Management's Dean's Distinguished Speaker Series" [Agriculture] [Business] [Show ID: 31749]

Matthew Johnston, CEO of HM.CLAUSE, a global seed producer, explores scaling up in the seed business, the agricultural economy, creating long term partnerships with regional food producers, and the need for innovation and responsible management. HM.CLAUSE is a global leader in the production and sale of high-quality vegetable seeds tailored to local environments and customers. Series: "UC Davis Graduate School of Management's Dean's Distinguished Speaker Series" [Agriculture] [Business] [Show ID: 31749]

Matthew Johnston, CEO of HM.CLAUSE, a global seed producer, explores scaling up in the seed business, the agricultural economy, creating long term partnerships with regional food producers, and the need for innovation and responsible management. HM.CLAUSE is a global leader in the production and sale of high-quality vegetable seeds tailored to local environments and customers. Series: "UC Davis Graduate School of Management's Dean's Distinguished Speaker Series" [Agriculture] [Business] [Show ID: 31749]

Matthew Johnston, CEO of HM.CLAUSE, a global seed producer, explores scaling up in the seed business, the agricultural economy, creating long term partnerships with regional food producers, and the need for innovation and responsible management. HM.CLAUSE is a global leader in the production and sale of high-quality vegetable seeds tailored to local environments and customers. Series: "UC Davis Graduate School of Management's Dean's Distinguished Speaker Series" [Agriculture] [Business] [Show ID: 31749]

Matthew Johnston, CEO of HM.CLAUSE, a global seed producer, explores scaling up in the seed business, the agricultural economy, creating long term partnerships with regional food producers, and the need for innovation and responsible management. HM.CLAUSE is a global leader in the production and sale of high-quality vegetable seeds tailored to local environments and customers. Series: "UC Davis Graduate School of Management's Dean's Distinguished Speaker Series" [Agriculture] [Business] [Show ID: 31749]

Matthew Johnston, CEO of HM.CLAUSE, a global seed producer, explores scaling up in the seed business, the agricultural economy, creating long term partnerships with regional food producers, and the need for innovation and responsible management. HM.CLAUSE is a global leader in the production and sale of high-quality vegetable seeds tailored to local environments and customers. Series: "UC Davis Graduate School of Management's Dean's Distinguished Speaker Series" [Agriculture] [Business] [Show ID: 31749]

Matthew Johnston, CEO of HM.CLAUSE, a global seed producer, explores scaling up in the seed business, the agricultural economy, creating long term partnerships with regional food producers, and the need for innovation and responsible management. HM.CLAUSE is a global leader in the production and sale of high-quality vegetable seeds tailored to local environments and customers. Series: "UC Davis Graduate School of Management's Dean's Distinguished Speaker Series" [Agriculture] [Business] [Show ID: 31749]

Matthew Johnston, CEO of HM.CLAUSE, a global seed producer, explores scaling up in the seed business, the agricultural economy, creating long term partnerships with regional food producers, and the need for innovation and responsible management. HM.CLAUSE is a global leader in the production and sale of high-quality vegetable seeds tailored to local environments and customers. Series: "UC Davis Graduate School of Management's Dean's Distinguished Speaker Series" [Agriculture] [Business] [Show ID: 31749]

Andre Archimbaud is an Internet Marketing Consultant at Reach Local as well as the host of the NYStandard podcast. He's an avid music fan with a background in professional baseball. His professional background includes National Public Radio, Yahoo and CBS Radio.  Hear his story on this week's episode.  This Week on Why I Social, Andre and I discuss: Working with statistics and scouts for MLB Why sometimes listening to music isn't enough And of course, Why Does He Social?!  Share your thoughts on this week's episode with #WhyISocial Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Soundcloud, Google and Otto Radio.  Follow at @WhyISocial. Do you have someone you'd like to see on the show? Tweet me at @CBarrows or @WhyISocial using #WhyISocialGuest  The Why I Social podcast is brought to you by Zoomph. Zoomph transforms digital marketing with real-times streaming analytics. Our platform provides you with an end-to-end solution to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business from start to finish. Learn more about Zoomph at http://bit.ly/WhySocialAnalytics  

Google AdWords Series Overview In my experience of owning a company that builds websites for tradies and contractors, over the years I've observed a number of scenarios where people may be familiar with a certain phrase, or word by it's name, however they've lacked a true understanding of what that word represents. A prime example of that would be websites. Very often when we scope a company, I'll be told that they need a website because they want to make their phone ring more. Having a website will help in the sense that now you have a tool that can allow youth be found on a search engine in a direct search, however it's unlikely that it's going to make your phone ring unless you apply a marketing strategy to the website. Another very misunderstood ‘buzzword' is AdWords. In this series, I'm joined by John from Reach Local as we shoot to break down the myths around Google AdWords and paid marketing. We explore what types of business AdWords suites and we discuss the reality of how much money you need to be spending to make your campaigns affective. We also discuss how paid marketing (also commonly referred to as SEM and Pay-Per-Click) fits into what I like to call the ‘digital ecosystem'. Episode 3: When you hear me refer to ‘The Digital Ecosystem', I'm referring to the multiple variables that work together to form a product. Yes a website is a website, AdWords is AdWords and SEO is SEO, however it's important to understand how they all affect each other. I'm always preaching ‘Beware of specialists' and by that I mean the following. If you go to an SEO agency and what you need is an AdWords campaign, chances are you'll leave with an SEO agency. Having an understanding of the ‘digital ecosystem' will empower you to ascertain where you might be dropping the ball in relation to your online representation. It will also arm you with enough general knowledge to not be led astray by ‘specialists'. This episode brings a close to this series, however if you're questioning what the next steps are for you and your organisation, in relation to setting a marketing agenda, reach out to us as we can certainly help you make the correct decision. Likewise, if you're currently running an AdWords campaign and you're questioning it's effectiveness, we can potentially help you improve your conversions and as a result make your dollar go further. Reach out to info@TradieWebGuys.com.au and make a reference to this Google AdWords podcast series. From there, we'll steer you in the right direction. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Google AdWords Series Overview In my experience of owning a company that builds websites for tradies and contractors, over the years I've observed a number of scenarios where people may be familiar with a certain phrase, or word by it's name, however they've lacked a true understanding of what that word represents. A prime example of that would be websites. Very often when we scope a company, I'll be told that they need a website because they want to make their phone ring more. Having a website will help in the sense that now you have a tool that can allow youth be found on a search engine in a direct search, however it's unlikely that it's going to make your phone ring unless you apply a marketing strategy to the website. Another very misunderstood ‘buzzword' is AdWords. In this series, I'm joined by John from Reach Local as we shoot to break down the myths around Google AdWords and paid marketing. We explore what types of business AdWords suites and we discuss the reality of how much money you need to be spending to make your campaigns affective. We also discuss how paid marketing (also commonly referred to as SEM and Pay-Per-Click) fits into what I like to call the ‘digital ecosystem'. Episode 2 In Episode 2, John and I explore one of the more misunderstood elements of Google Adwords. That being budget. Contrary to what you have have ben told by dodgy marketing companies that are only interested in taking your money, your potential results are very dependant on budget. A smarter way to look at how to ascertain what you need to spend on a campaign is to reverse engineer it like this. 1. How many converted jobs do you want (per week, or month) Eg: 10/week. 2. How many leads do you need to make a conversion. Eg: I'm converting at 10%, which is 10 leads per conversion. 3. How much does a click cost me. Eg: $20 4. How many days do you want your ads to appear? Eg: 5 (Mon-Fri) Now you can roughly work out a budget 10 leads at $20/lead = $200/day $200/day at 5 days = $1000/week $1000 at 4 weeks = $4000/month You can see from this example that it can be an expensive outlay and if you conversion product, or service cost is less than your spend, then you should potentially spending that money elsewhere. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this episode of Education World News, David K. Ewen, M.Ed. speaks with Dr. Lan of Dr. Lan Academy to discuss the major differences between traditional education and education in the high tech era.Dr. Lan Academy is an online education service provider located in Southern California that provides Online Live/Interactive Classes. Dr. Lan Academy places the student in the same online room with the best teachers in the business! Primarily focused on students in the United States between grades 5 through 12, we bring passionate teachers and students together using the most sophisticated technologies on the internet to create a high quality and highly effective learning experience that is affordable and easy to access. Dr. Lan’s goal for Dr. Lan Academy, a California S-Corp established on the basis of his two-year-old personal teaching business, is to bring the best US teachers to students around the world.  Dr. Lan has worked for three public companies (Citigroup, Zenith Insurance, ReachLocal) for the last 20 years in IT, banking, insurance, and Internet marketing.  He has extensive experience in management, technology, teaching, and non-profit organization leadership. Dr. Lan earned his Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics at Peking University, and his Master’s and Doctoral degrees in Applied Mathematics at UCLA.A representative of Dr. Lan Academy explains, "We provide above-average students between grades 5 and 12 with instruction by teachers with graduate degrees and/or extensive teaching experience in their subject area, so that students can reach their highest potential in a variety of academic subjects."

On this episode of Education World News, David K. Ewen, M.Ed. speaks with Dr. Lan of Dr. Lan Academy to discuss the major differences between traditional education and education in the high tech era.Dr. Lan Academy is an online education service provider located in Southern California that provides Online Live/Interactive Classes. Dr. Lan Academy places the student in the same online room with the best teachers in the business! Primarily focused on students in the United States between grades 5 through 12, we bring passionate teachers and students together using the most sophisticated technologies on the internet to create a high quality and highly effective learning experience that is affordable and easy to access. Dr. Lan’s goal for Dr. Lan Academy, a California S-Corp established on the basis of his two-year-old personal teaching business, is to bring the best US teachers to students around the world.  Dr. Lan has worked for three public companies (Citigroup, Zenith Insurance, ReachLocal) for the last 20 years in IT, banking, insurance, and Internet marketing.  He has extensive experience in management, technology, teaching, and non-profit organization leadership. Dr. Lan earned his Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics at Peking University, and his Master’s and Doctoral degrees in Applied Mathematics at UCLA.A representative of Dr. Lan Academy explains, "We provide above-average students between grades 5 and 12 with instruction by teachers with graduate degrees and/or extensive teaching experience in their subject area, so that students can reach their highest potential in a variety of academic subjects."

Segment 1: Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist of Canva, an online graphic design tool. Formerly, he was an advisor to the Motorola business unit of Google and chief evangelist of Apple. He is the author of The Art of the Start 2.0, The Art of Social Media, Enchantment, and ten other books.Segment 2: Sharon Rowlands is the CEO of ReachLocal. She has more than 20 years of experience leading multi-billion dollar companies serving small- and medium-sized businesses, financial markets, and enterprise customers.Segment 3: Barbara Rozgonyi is the CEO of CoryWest Media, a strategic marketing consultancy. Barbara blogs at http://wiredPRworks.com and was noted as a top 50 content marketing influencer on twitter.Segment 4: Sam Rosen is the founder and CEO of MakeSpace. Prior to MakeSpace, Sam was Upfront Ventures' first Entrepreneur in Residence. He was featured in Forbes' 2015 “30 Under 30” list in the consumer tech category.Segment 5: Nellie Akalp is a serial entrepreneur and small business expert. She currently serves as CEO of CorpNet.com, an online legal document filing service, where she helps entrepreneurs start a business, incorporate or form an LLC, and offers free business compliance tools.Sponsored by Sage, Nextiva and Co

In this episode Dan Kaplan, CoFounder of periscopeUP interviews Shane Ostrowski, Sr. Account Manager at Reach Local.  Listen in as Shane discusses why you should consider advertising on Bing, Yahoo! and Facebook, not just on Google, and his advice for small business landing pages. Shane has been with Reach Local for seven years, and serves local small businesses. View the full video interview at www.periscopeUP.com/blog/podcast-shane-ostrowski Like This Content?   We’ve got more great practical advice, tips, and examples of how to get more leads and sales from your website… Podcast episodes: www.periscopeUP.com/podcast eMail Newsletter: www.periscopeUP.com/signup Courses, eBooks & Presentations:  www.periscopeUP.com/learn Services: www.periscopeup.com/services Twitter: https://twitter.com/periscopeup Google+: http://plus.google.com/+periscopeUP

In this ninth episode of I Live In Dallas Radio, co-hosted by myself and Jason Channell, we interview Mike D. Merrill, who is the Director of Marketing for the locally-based global online marketing company ReachLocal. Merrill is also the chairman and past-president of the Social Media Club of Dallas. An Interview with Mike Merrill Mike has consistently brought value to the Dallas community as far as leadership in marketing, social media education, and volunteerism. He is on several boards including the Volunteer Center of North Texas, which represents over 2,500 volunteer organizations. This Internet radio show was recorded in a private room at The Gent's Place, located in Preston Center, a shopping area in Preston Hollow, and a stone's throw away from President George W. Bush's neighborhood estate. In this radio show, we ask Mike to recount his story of how social media improved his career after finding himself laid off from a technology sales job back in 2009. He started his own consultancy, Bacon Marketing, and eventually was asked to head up the social media department for ReachLocal, a worldwide online marketing company with over 22,000 clients. We also ask him to tell us how he rebuilt the Social Media Club of Dallas to become the 2nd most attended social media club in the world. Mike also gives some expert tips on how companies use social media and how you as an individual can use it find or get a better job. An Interview with Ben Davis of The Gent's Place In the second part of I Live in Dallas Radio Episode #9, we speak with The Gent's Place Owner and CEO Ben Davis. The Gent's Place is a men's grooming and lifestyle club with several locations including two in the Dallas area. Davis gives us his background, how The Gent's Place came about and garnered business through the use of savvy social media marketing. He also informs us of the unique services they offer for men such as haircuts, hand and foot "repair", shoe shining, massages, and straight razor shaves. Davis was named as a 40 Under Forty Award Honoree by the Dallas Business Journal for 2012, and is quite an impressive guy. Listen as: Mike reveals his three best social media job-hunting and personal branding tips Mike shares how he grew a fledgling organization to the 2nd largest social media club in the world . Ben explains everything a men's lifestyle club entails Ben reveals how social media grew his business to three stores.

Please click on the POD button to listen to the latest Atlanta Business Radio  show podcast broadcasting live each Wednesday at 10am EDT from Atlanta, GA, USA.   Here's how to listen to the podcast of our show. First click on the title of the show you are interested in. Then there should be a player in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Now just press play and the show you chose should start playing. You can also download the show to listen on your mp3 player. We are now available on iTunes, click this link and you can find all our past shows. Press SUBSCRIBE and you will automatically get the latest show when you sync your iPod to your computer.Today's show is brought to you by TAB of Northwest Atlanta.The Alternative Board of Northwest Atlanta brings together owners of privately held businesses to overcome challenges and seize new opportunities with a combination of peer advice and strategic business coaching. Board members meet monthly to learn from one anothers successes and mistakes and create more valuable and profitable companies. Achieve Greater Success with Peer Advice and Coaching with TAB of Northwest Atlanta.  www.tab-nwatlanta.comWe started the show off with Marshawn Evans, inspirational speaker, entrepreneur, attorney, author and survivor of Donald Trump's The Apprentice. Marshawn shared some wisdom from her new book "S.K.I.R.T.S in the Boardroom: A Woman's Survival Guide To Success in Business & Life." To learn more please go to her website www.skirtsintheboardroom.comNext up we had on our good friend Leslie-Anne AcAllister from ReachLocal. Leslie-Anne explained why she is known as The Google Girl. She also shared some great tips on getting the most out of your web advertising and if you are currently using Google AdWords you need to call Leslie-Anne. She will be glad to help you make sure you are getting the most bang for your AdWord bucks. She is a great networker and has helped a lot of people associated with our show. Please check out her website www.reachlocal.com. She is truly an Intenet Marketing Specialist who can help you grow your business.We closed the show with Al Burroughs. Al is the Sound Engineer with The SOS Band as well as an affiliate with VM Direct the parent company of HelloWorld a great video email solution for your business and your home. Al explained multiple uses for this unique product which you reall have to see to understand completely. Please go to Al's website www.TV4UnMe.com and check out the demos.Also if you know of a business in Atlanta that we should know about please email Amy Otto at Amy @ atlantabusinessradio.com and we will try and get them on the show

In this episode, Patricia Baronowski-Schneider is joined by Rahul Alim Founder of Custom Creatives, a Digital Marketing Agency that connects companies with their dream clients. He has helped brands such as Realtor.com, Geico, Advertise.com, Reach Local, and 1,000's of local businesses. His Agency has worked with Realtor.com, Geico, Advertise.com, Reach Local, and 100s of local businesses.He also coaches Digital Agency Owners on building 6-figure, sustainable agencies.His mission is to help Entrepreneurs get out of their own way by moving from an unsustainable “do it all“ mentality to building a rockstar team that gives them the ability to create an assembly line in their business to create growth and freedom in their business.Tune in to learn more!For more go to: www.strategicadvisorboard.comConnect:Strategic Advisor Board: www.linkedin.com/company/strategic-advisor-boardPatricia Baronowski-Schneider: www.linkedin.com/in/patriciabaronowskiwww.pristineadvisers.comRahul AlimWebsite: https://customcreatives.com/Blog: https://customcreatives.com/blog/Twitter: @customcreativesLinkedIn: @customcreativesFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/customcreativesEmail: info@customcreatives.com