SEO Podcast The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing

Strategies for Maximizing Value and Navigating Complex Deals with Jonathan Baker Ep. 631

• bestseopodcast.com • Episode 631

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Jonathan Baker from Punctuation joins me, Matt Bertram, to explore strategies for maximizing business value through strategic M&A and succession planning. Learn how to enhance profitability, strengthen market positioning, and reduce founder dependency to make your business more attractive for sale. For marketing service firms, we emphasize the benefits of niche specialization and standing out in competitive markets.

Selling a business is complex, involving political dynamics and nuanced relationships. Drawing from my own experience selling a business in my 20s, we discuss understanding critical deal terms like earn-outs and employment agreements, adapting to new management, and addressing stakeholder conflicts. Jonathan shares real-world examples and cautionary tales, underscoring the importance of thorough preparation to protect your interests.

We also dive into agency growth and profitability, tackling strategic decisions like selling versus continued growth. Topics include fee revenue per employee, avoiding scope creep, and distinguishing personal financial contributions. Whether preparing for a sale or pursuing growth, this episode offers actionable insights for informed entrepreneurial decision-making.

Guest Contact Information: 

- https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathandavidbaker/

- punctuation.com

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The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing podcast is hosted by Internet marketing expert Matthew Bertram. The show provides insights and advice on digital marketing, SEO, and online business. 

Topics covered include keyword research, content optimization, link building, local SEO, and more. The show also features interviews with industry leaders and experts who share their experiences and tips. 

Additionally, Matt shares his own experiences and strategies, as well as his own successes and failures, to help listeners learn from his experiences and apply the same principles to their businesses. The show is designed to help entrepreneurs and business owners become successful online and get the most out of their digital marketing efforts.

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Speaker 1:

Howdy. Welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I'm your host, matt Bertram. Today, I have a special guest for you. Before we get into it, we're going to be talking about M&A, and so there's a lot of people that transactional entrepreneurship. A lot of people have businesses. They're maybe passing down their kids you might be listening you're taking over a business and you're trying to go through some digital transformation with that business to generate leads online. This is the podcast for you. In addition to lead gen, though, there are a lot of other things to consider with a business, and also if you're looking to potentially exit a business, there's things to consider. So you should be able to turn your business into more of a tech company or an online company or a SaaS company. You can increase your multiples that way, especially for service-based businesses. There's a lot of ideas around doing that, but getting some ideas for succession planning, I think, is critically important. I am going to build a series. I have a lot of people that I've interviewed over time that have talked a lot about M&A and buying and selling businesses, so I'm going to put together a list for you.

Speaker 1:

On YouTube. We're going to be doing a lot more shorts and you'll probably see us around other places, but thank you so much for everyone listening on iTunes 12 Years Strong Again. If you do find any value in this, please share it like it, subscribe to it. It really helps the channel and, without further ado, let me introduce Jonathan Baker from punctuationcom. Punctuationcom. Jonathan, thanks so much for being here. I don't know, I can't talk today. We're talking about punctuation. I can't speak.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1:

MNA side. Sorry, today I just don't know. I'll let you kind of take it from there as far as like a little bit of your backstory and then we can just jump into how buyers determine the value of a firm, to just kind of set the stage for everybody in the conversation.

Speaker 2:

Sure. So I started my career working in marketing strategy, working for a lot of CPG brands, fortune 500, and then left that to start a craft brewery in Atlanta, ran that for 11 years, still have my ownership, but I have two business partners running the day-to-day. It got a little too big for me to be having fun. And we had also recently gone through an M&A experience. We had a seller approach us, got pretty far down the line, ended up getting left at the altar and that experience really piqued my interest in M&A.

Speaker 2:

That experience really piqued my interest in M&A so I saw an opportunity to jump over to help my father build out his business Punctuation. He's been working with marketing service firms for 25 plus years helping them grow, and those clients are now asking like, hey, can you help sell the business, what am I worth? Row? And those clients are, you know, now asking like hey, can you help sell the business, what am I worth? And so we work exclusively with small to mid-sized marketing service firms. And then I work on the M&A side helping them find buyers or helping buyers find sellers, doing valuations, helping generally with succession planning, usually with kind of smaller marketing shops.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, my wife's family business needs those exact services, yeah, and I think a lot of other people do as well. So, yeah, so let's talk about it. A lot of people are growing their business. They're really attached to it, right? They're like this is my business. I poured out my heart and soul, uh, in this business, uh, and, and a lot of times, uh, what they're looking at at the value of their company is a lot different than what maybe a potential buyer is looking at, right?

Speaker 1:

And and you know it's their baby. Don't call their baby ugly sort of thing. Maybe that's like a good analogy, but like to approach it from a very analytical standpoint. What are buyers looking at when they're looking to buy a business or someone's looking to exit? What are the things you should be considering?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean first and foremost unfortunately maybe is profit. So profitability is really number one, and even if they're not buying you exclusively for profit, they're going to be negotiating with you based on your profit. So profitability. But a close second would be your positioning how strongly you are focused on a particular niche or industry, or you know even a horizontal positioning niche or industry, or you know even a horizontal positioning when you think about the size of companies that are buying firms like this. It tends to be.

Speaker 2:

You know other larger full service firms, and so they are trying to buy a book of business, right, well, or they're either trying to buy profit, they're trying to buy capabilities, they, they're trying to buy capabilities. They might be trying to buy people, yeah, but they're buying something that would be harder for them to replicate, and so the more, the deeper you can go in your own positioning, the easier it is for you to sell. It also gives you pricing power, which is great. Beyond that, they're looking for something that it's not heavily dependent on the founder. Obviously, it's fine if you're involved, it's great if you're involved, but they don't want. You know all the client relationships connected to you. They want to make sure there's a strong business development process in place, and I think one of the last big important things would be your client portfolio and making sure that it's balanced, that you don't have one kind of gorilla client, um, so client concentration.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, and I've seen that. I've seen that a lot. We saw it in our business uh, early on as we were growing into the enterprise category. Um, that first client, uh in the beginning, was 42% of our revenue early on and so it was very risky. And I actually just had a buddy of mine that we used to work together at, about an 800 person agency. He was running a vision and they lost a big client and had to lay off like close to 100 people, and so you know it and it happens in this industry a lot, and so not just talking about marketing firms, but all small businesses run that risk too of that big client.

Speaker 1:

And also how people are running their books. As far as profitability goes, definitely for small businesses is an issue. I think the, the, the brand positioning and the market leadership, um, uh, in that book of business in that category is really like a unique selling proposition when, when someone's buying because there's not, there's only so many people that have that kind of specialty, and I think that that market leadership component, um, maybe with certain kind of processes, uh, or something like that, where it's replicatable without you, I, I agree, is kind of that. That phase um, where you know is is it a solo entrepreneurship kind of role or is it like a truly a business? And, and I've seen with a lot of small businesses, when you're, when you're selling whatever it is, the owner's book of business has to be transferred to other account managers, other leadership and those roles have to be maintained. There's kind of like a typical history or process for people to move from like one quadrant to another quadrant.

Speaker 1:

If you're a rich dad, poor dad kind of person. But you know, tell me a little bit about what you learned about the ins and outs of the M&A process, and you know you talked a little bit about that emotional toll. I think a lot of people don't understand, when your business is being scrutinized, how that affects you. Certainly, I think people that run campaigns and politics and we've done some of that kind of stuff in the past Everybody's looking at you, everybody's evaluating you, everybody's looking at every nook and cranny of your business. That's hard for some people to process. I don't know what was your experience when that was happening and how did that maybe tug on you a little bit? You hinted at that at the beginning of our call.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think what I expected going in is that it was going to be more of an objective, straightforward process, right? Like where there's this spreadsheet and both parties agree on it and then like you give it to a lawyer and they make it words. But it's a lot more nuanced than that. It's a lot more relationship driven. There's a lot of kind of political stuff going on, and so it's. You know there are ups and downs.

Speaker 2:

I think, generally what I you know what I talk about will apply to any professional services business, even though our experience as marketing firms, the process and the way that these deals are done, is the same across professional services. You know, generally you're going to get a certain percentage of money up front and then you're going to need to stick around for two to three years, sometimes longer, during an earn out, to get the rest of that money, and so one of the big things that you need to watch out for throughout the process is am I going to be comfortable with, with this person or this business as my boss for a little while? Right, because you know, two to three years yeah, it's sure it's not that long, but at the same time, you haven't had a boss in years, right? So is this going to be something you hate Cause? If so, you're going to want to leave, which means you're leaving a ton of money on the table, right, because you only got a percentage up front.

Speaker 1:

Man, interesting, I did sell a business in my 20s and it actually was more of like we started a bit. I was working at a company, I broke away and they funded me and so we all had like percentage of equity. I grew really really fast and they ended up wanting to buy me out and and so, um, you know, through that process, you know, we, we came to terms and I exited and then they didn't realize how critical I was and I they actually had to pay me to come back to finish closing out um, a few of the sales process deals, and also I had signed a pretty extensive employee agreement and non-compete and stuff like that, and there's a lot of things that, well, in my twenties I didn't really learn or consider or why this is important. But you know, those deal terms are incredibly important. I mean, you know, talk a little bit more about, like you know, things to look out for, things to.

Speaker 1:

Like you talked about being aware that someone's going to be your boss and if you don't do what they say, you meet that requirement. And if there's some politics involved, right, that requirement and if there's some politics involved, right, and that's that becomes very dynamic, depending on if there's multiple partners, or you know someone buying you and selling, or the integration how all that works. And you know sometimes if there are politics, they might be trying to make it difficult for you to complete your contract, to get that payout right. Like I mean, not everybody is, you know, approaching this with the same goals in mind and the same business interactions, and a lot of these interactions when people are exiting, I mean, what's the process look like?

Speaker 1:

Because you know, I've heard different things, so can you talk a little bit more about, kind of those deal terms and stuff like that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So I think a lot of people approach this from like a hard number perspective. So I want to sell my business and I want to get $5 million for it. So $5 million is the deal I'm looking for. Well, let's say you find a deal and then they're going to give you 40% of that upfront and the other 60% is contingent on hitting certain targets and sticking around. So that means that you're actually only guaranteed $2 million. That other three, that 5 million number, has nothing to do with that three anymore. You have $2 million and then you have to think about what do I need to do to get that other three or more? And so it's really about like mitigating your risk and your downside.

Speaker 2:

A lot of times, your earnouts are going to be tied to hitting certain revenue targets, for example. So what happens if you don't hit that target exactly? Do you get nothing, or can you step it down and maybe you get a little less? A little less. You don't want those targets to be so rigid that you're going to just completely lose out. You also need to think about your employment agreement. So you're going to be working for them. That means that you now have a salary again. You now have bonus potential maybe. How many hours are you going to be required to work? Is travel going to be required, like all this stuff that you would ask if you're interviewing for a job right Now? You have to think about that stuff again. How strict is that non-compete? And that does matter a lot, depending on what you want to do with your life post-earnout. And what recourse do they have? Can they just get rid of you and if so, do you get severance or do you lose your opportunity to get?

Speaker 1:

that equity. Well, jonathan, a buddy of mine, that's a marketing agency really focused in the real estate space. He ended up selling and he had a podcast that he had started and a publication that he had started at the same time and while those terms weren't exclusive in the deal when he exited, weren't exclusive in the deal when he exited, they told him that since he started it when he was at, you know, when he built this agency as well, there was some kind of association with that and he had to, like he got into a legal whatever about it, but ultimately he had to change the name. Yeah, and that was. You know, there was a whole contracts thing of. This is a different service, but you can't like that.

Speaker 1:

There was a lot of things that, you know, I don't think he thought about when he thought it was going to be a clean exit. It turned and he's like I got this other stuff going on, I'm going to let this thing go, I'm going to focus on this, and then it really put the brakes on all that and and he had to start over and it was. It was quite a painful process for him, um, even though he thought this was like an excellent deal when he looked at it.

Speaker 2:

Right, yeah, I mean you do need to make sure you have car belts for all the right stuff, the um. You want to. You want to like love working with the people that you're selling to, but you're still going to want to protect yourself on paper to the extent possible and just hope that you never have to look at that piece of paper again. Right, so you got to make sure you're protected on paper, even if you really trust these folks.

Speaker 1:

That's always what the paper's about, right? No one looks at the paper until something goes sideways, like everybody like hopes that they're on the same page and they work it out. So I want to circle back to brand positioning and benchmarking and maybe hear you talk a little bit, because you work exclusively with marketing firms. I mean, there's a lot of agencies and freelancers and kind of smaller agencies to bigger agencies that listen to this, that I mean I get calls consistently and I'm sure others are as well.

Speaker 1:

If that's something that someone's thinking about doing, how do you hone in a little bit more on what makes you unique and how are you looking at comps or bids, marketing in that area? Um, if you're general, right, um, then then then it's harder. And there's, the comps are wider, uh, certainly, uh, riches are in the niches you want to niche down, uh, to what you're focused on. But I'm just curious, with the deals that you've done, uh, where have you seen the best multiples as far as them differentiating themselves? And what were the KPIs or benchmarking that you were looking at when that evaluation came? Because if someone's thinking about this, I don't think people are like, oh, I'm going to sell and then tomorrow they sell, right? I?

Speaker 1:

think that there's a process and you can kind of shape where you're going and take certain actions as you move in that direction.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think you're right and you alluded to this earlier on, but buyers are really looking for predictability of revenue. Future revenue like the past is great, but what's the future look like? And so, to the extent that you can, you know highly desirable uh industries, basically where where folks have disposable income to spend. So, uh, legal services, uh, medical services, financial services these are all focusing on those where you know, where they're not as concerned about writing you the big check. If you can get that work, that's a really good thing.

Speaker 1:

Oh yeah, well, you can definitely look at it and say how well is that business doing and what size type companies are you working with? And I think the real crossover from what we've seen is um, is it the owner's money, right?

Speaker 2:

That's right, or is it the business's money that's right in the?

Speaker 1:

check and, and those two uh numbers, even if they're the same amount, are managed and and viewed very, very differently. Um, so I think that there is a case on the enterprise side, but if you can build a sustainable model or a SaaS model where you can service in volume and scale, there's huge opportunity there as well. Right? So it depends what you're selling and what you want to do on how to build maybe that next layer. There's a great graphic that I'm sure you've you've seen.

Speaker 1:

I went to a, a digital marketers conference back in 2017 in New York and it was. It was just all about agency growth and they haven't done one in a long time. But, man, I was like it was awesome because they had this chart and it showed where people get stuck from growing from a small agency to a large agency and what are the possible things that they're looking at, like whether it be like a productizing services, you know the scalability on the sales process, like there's a lot of stuff that you have to solve when you're at an agency and I've, I've actually done not, um, you know, business planning or anything like that, but a lot of people that have come to me for SEO coaching, uh, it turns into agency coaching and agency problems, and how to deal with this client and how to you know, like it, it, it.

Speaker 1:

It kind of morphs pretty quickly into I'm dealing with this issue, how, how do you solve that?

Speaker 1:

Or how do we sell on this new service or, um, you know, and and, uh, I have two clients that, uh, you know, have off and on been uh, hired me, uh, and, and I think it's just like an easy solve.

Speaker 1:

But it becomes this kind of ongoing thing and I think that there's an accountability component and we are launching at MatthewBertramcom a coaching program and I'm also for oil and gas, we're launching a CMO insights course and that's through my oil and gas marketing and sales podcast. But I'm just seeing a need here where, as an operator for a long time, um, I I didn't really uh understand how much of a need there is for consulting and coaching and people that are are doing the work or trying to implement this Cause a lot of people have the right strategy or they've heard it work for somebody else and it just doesn't seem to work for them Right, and it's like getting getting that all kind of put together. I mean, when you're benchmarking, let's kind of get back to that. What are you looking at when you're looking at benchmarking and how are you assessing those comms?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there's I mean, obviously a number of different factors, but I'll say one of the most powerful benchmarks is really simple and it's the amount of fee revenue per full-time employee and we definitely use that internally yeah.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and you know we see agencies get stuck at around 160,000, like that's the ceiling for a lot of firms. But if you, if you start running your firm the right way, positioning well, you can see that go up to 220,000 or even higher. We've seen it higher than that too. We look at utilization in a way that's a little bit different. So we're going to look at all employees, not just the billable employees. And if you've got some kind of internal hourly rate that you're using for estimating purposes, how good are you at turning all the hours worked in your firm into dollars at your stated hourly rate, right? So we're going to again divide that into your fee income and your goal should be 60 percent. The average we've seen is 42%. So the delta between 60 and 42 is pure profit. That is just pure profit that you're leaving on the table, likely by over-servicing accounts or not estimating correctly. But once you see that gap, you got to work to close that gap and it's. You know it's a slow process but that goes straight to your bottom line.

Speaker 1:

Well, you know one of the things when I was doing some coaching with a big publicly traded consulting executive, he was educating me on not digital marketing perspective, but just like knowledge workers, like consulting across the board. And you know he said that there's an erosion of at least typically 25% of scope creep. So like, whatever you quote the deal at over time and the over-servicing of accounts is standard across all industries and that a margin can get eroded, typically around that number, and so a lot of people if they're pricing their services 20% or 30% or whatever, over margin many times they break even or they get upside down.

Speaker 1:

And I think that there's a lot of agencies out there and that's why I bring it up that are probably in that situation where they're like we're delivering good work, we're doing great things and we're taking care of our clients, but we're not making any money and it's because they're not pricing their services high enough or looking at the value of what they're delivering as their expertise to get it to a place that internally there's profitable, because the client just looks at I'm paying this fee and I want all this done for this price, and a lot of times. One of the biggest issues that we dealt with was we took our hosting and separated our hosting into a separate. It's not a separate company yet, but it's under a different brand. The billing's different. You know we need to separate the well, the accounting gets ported in, but essentially that's a separate entity and and issues that you have on the hosting side are different or webmaster services sides than your marketing bucket. And when we started to separate those out there, we saw a huge profitability increase on the marketing side and we saw a need for greater customer service on the hosting side per se.

Speaker 1:

As far as little changes, right. And then we implemented like a service hour where you can buy a service hour and we can make all those changes as needed. Or we have like a technical support plan that it's included, xyz, whatever and just separating that out to understand what you're getting and that help for accounting purposes, right, everything's broken up into the buckets. That makes sense. You can trace that line down. So there's a lot in, I guess, the setup of how you're tracking stuff, and if you're not tracking it or you don't have visibility to it, then it's hard to improve it, right? I want to keep fleshing this out. I think benchmarking and maybe how people are looking at their internal KPIs that they're tracking, especially now that we're doing this towards the end of the year, people are looking at next year planning. What are some recommendations or things that they could do.

Speaker 2:

I mean. Another interesting one, I think, is just the amount of money that you have in the bank. An asset.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there's obviously a too little amount, but there's also a too little amount, but there's also a too much amount and understanding how that relates to your client concentration. So the higher your client concentration, the more money you need in the bank, because if you do lose that big client, you're going to need enough money to be able to make smart decisions for, you know, three to four months in order to get back on your feet. Right, if you don't have that issue, then you can keep less money in the bank and I would say anything above that. A lot of people like run their businesses very conservatively and they'll keep really healthy bank accounts, but in our experience that can actually lead to sloppy decision-making. If you've got too much money in the bank, you might not fire that person as quickly as you should like. Loan it back to the business, that's fine, but you need to run your business as if you're running an actual business.

Speaker 1:

Let's talk about growth, then let's talk about deploying that capital to increase your rate of growth. If you have a ton of money in the bank account, scalability, I think, is incredibly important. Of like, do you need to hire more people? What does your process look like? How are you going to put that money to work Right? If it's just sitting there in the bank? It's kind of like a, you know, a reserve asset, but it's not. It's not helping you grow. You know, or or you might be paying it out, I don't know and what that mix looks like, but you know how important is growth and like what are some of the factors that you've seen involving that. If you could speak to that a little in America that we overuse and strive for too much.

Speaker 2:

I like to focus on you, your personality, what makes you happy, what do you enjoy doing at work, and then build a company around that. For some, it will be growth right If we're talking SaaS?

Speaker 1:

right, If you're talking SaaS, you're looking at like number of users and things like that. But no, that's interesting to hear that. I think it's about predictable cashflow, right. I think it's the biggest thing of what you're buying. And how long have you had those clients maybe? Right, how consistent of a reoccurring revenue source are they? Maybe?

Speaker 2:

Well, yeah, I mean, for me it's about lifestyle. So maybe selling the business isn't the right move. Maybe you just run it and then shut it down because you don't want to boss again. You just want the freedom to make your own decisions. So it is a really personal choice. Growth is often the right move, but not always. Sometimes you might have someone who's just not a good people leader or just hates managing big teams, and so you know, the bigger you are, the the more removed from the work you become and the more your time gets focused on managing people, and for some, that can feel like you're, you're, you're trapped.

Speaker 1:

I you know we're getting into personal preferences I would tell you, you know, if you don't like managing people, you should try to hire somebody that does, or or that's good at it, right, and and maybe maybe hand that off. I mean, one of the things that we do, and I'm I'm not looking personally to sell the agency. Really, the agency for me, like, was, let me, generate a lot of high quality individuals that can work together as a team to build things online, and it's more of a hub and spoke model. So we're starting to build businesses, that the marketing dollars flow back into the agency, that we control the different products that we launch, whether it be supplements, whether it be coaching, whether it be hosting. We view the agency almost as a team of people that you can access and you know their capabilities to apply digital marketing to other businesses. Right, like there might be an opportunity. We bring it in, it's it's non-traditional, uh, or it's sorry, it's traditional. We digitize that business, we increase those multiples, um, and then, uh, we can, you know we help that the client do that, or you know, we could sell that off, like we haven't got to the point where we've sold anything yet, but we're seeding a lot of different businesses, giving them more of a runway, giving them a preferential kind of marketing with, like backends.

Speaker 1:

And I, I do have some agreements, um, where, where I have like a percentage of whatever um, whether it be revenue or um a percentage of ownership which you know, you, you aren't. You don't want to have more than 9% um in my opinion, uh, because, uh, then you gotta be on all the credit card statements and everything else. But also, if you don't have more than 51%, you're just riding along with what's happening, right, like so there's a lot of different things that you have to learn as you get into business, and how to take digital and apply to that. I mean, if someone is looking to sell and there's a lot of agencies, like I think that there's probably going to be a lot of agencies that want to sell as these big boys start, like from people I know I know one person that sold to a big conglomerate and AI has not been instituted on a mass scale, okay, and they're really taking their time to build the processes to roll it all out.

Speaker 1:

I think, as that AI rolls out, the leverage of these big companies is going to grow tremendously and it could squeeze out some smaller players, and so you know. I mean, how are you viewing or what are the things to look at? And this could be a situational thing, it could be a regional thing Like. But I know that there's these big conglomerates out there that keep buying up agencies and kind of stacking the books to business. I mean, when do you sell and when do you keep building? I mean, how do you view?

Speaker 2:

that? When do you sell and when do you keep building? If you are having fun building, I would say generally, keep building. Sell when your goal is not to build anymore but it's to hit a certain number, right. Or you've reached a certain age where you know that you're going to get burned out, so there's no. Or you think you might've like kind of capped out with where you are without significant investment. So you might reach like an inflection point where you're like all right, we've grown it to 50 people, but I know that if I want to grow this thing bigger I'm going to have to hire a whole other layer of middle management which is going to crush my margins. Let me sell now while I still have that nice upward trajectory on the P&L and then growing it can be someone else's financial problem.

Speaker 1:

You know, I think that that's a good point, Like when you hit, when you hit that number, like do I need to do that or are we okay? I mean going back to kind of succession planning, like I mean there might be people internally that you can bring up to kind of take over the reins.

Speaker 1:

I mean, I I think like, yeah, uh, esop or you know something like that where you can sell, sell it into uh the team. I think when the team uh has pride in in what they're doing and what they're doing it with um, you know, I I have a uh another buddy that um, he had a great team and that company got sold to a bigger company and that other company had new processes and came in and and a lot of the people went with it but it lost its magic.

Speaker 1:

You know, it lost its magic. And so I mean, you know, I don't know how there's so many different decisions to make, and I guess it depends on, um, everyone's different kind of situation, and and I know that that's what you're good at doing is is helping coach and consult those agencies. Let me ask you, though, like let's circle all the way back as kind of like a last question and and talk about lead generation, and you know what you've seen consistently companies do that win. Right, like there's probably gotta be like a company that that you, you consult with, that sells. They figured out a couple of different components. Right, they figured out these components.

Speaker 1:

They you know they're, they're probably selling in a certain kind of way. They look kind of similar, right Like you know what this animal looks like when you see it maybe. Um, I'm curious what? What does that look like to you first? And then, secondly, what's like one secret of unknown secret of digital marketing for agencies that you've been able to see so many different successful businesses. What are they doing that other people might not be like? What's one unknown secret of internet marketing?

Speaker 2:

people might not be like. What's one unknown secret of internet marketing? Yeah, so let me start with the first question. Um, a focus on inbound is really one of the big um, you know denominator, common denominators. We see outbound you can flex up and down and that's fine, but you need you need to focus on inbound in a really steady way in order to get the that lead generation train moving and keep it moving Like it's.

Speaker 2:

It's kind of about inertia and you don't need to focus on every kind of inbound. You need to focus on the stuff that's going to work for you, given who your customers are and what your personality is. So if you hate public speaking, maybe don't focus on speaking, right. If you love talking, maybe do focus on a podcast. If you love writing, you could focus on writing a book. There's so many different kind of combinations of things and you don't have to do all of them, but pick two or three that work really well and I would say try them all. See, you know right, you're going to see what works, what doesn't. Get some quick information and then focus in on the the two or three inbound strategies that are going to work for you and then layer on outbound as needed on top, and that can be, you know, ab testing, like Google ads.

Speaker 2:

You know we do a lot of LinkedIn ads. We have played around meta, but it's never worked for us and like it kind of intuitively makes sense. But, like you know, we don't have a social media presence. Everyone tells you to have one. We don't and we don't need one, so don't feel like you have to go out and get an Instagram. In terms of a secret, an unknown secret that we've seen work, we've seen work, let me.

Speaker 2:

Let me focus on, I mean, I do think it comes back to not trying to do everything. Well, and internet marketing, digital marketing is like this huge beast of a thing, right, but think about who your target is and where and how they are consuming information and where they are finding their trusted sources, and focus on that. Don't just let everyone tell you that you have to be posting on LinkedIn daily and let that drive your strategy. Maybe it's not even online primarily. It could be like trade shows, right, but there are still ways to engage online using some of these other assets. So, even you write a book, that's an offline thing, but there are a lot of ways to use that online to get more bang for buck.

Speaker 1:

I love what you've said about just follow your passion right and you're going to attract the kind of customers that will respond to you right. And that could be different on any different channel. On how a lot of interestingly enough, a lot of companies that are agencies when they hire us so we actually have marketing companies come to us for marketing and people use all kinds of different contractors, but it's primarily focused on generating that inbound, and so a lot of the questions I'm asking is well, how have you gotten to this position so far? And a lot of people are like networking and people know who I am and that sort of thing, and and and really I was always of the opinion when I, when I actually started at this agency, it was like like, what's the, what's the magic sauce? Right? Like, how do? How do we drink our own Kool-Aid? If we're going to sell these services, they need to work for us, right, and so anytime we're developing a new process, we're always testing it out. We're trying it out and once it works for us, we expand it to our clients and then after that, we would productize it and sell it to anybody that would want to come in and do that, and that's been quite successful.

Speaker 1:

And you know the inbound you can actually turn up and turn down as well by enhancing it with advertising, right, absolutely, increase those funnels and that's really what I've seen. You know the Google rule. I talked about this on the last podcast, 7-11-4. So you know they need to consume seven hours of your content, need to see it 11 times on four different channels, right? And it doesn't matter what that combination is or how you come up with that. That could be in person, that could be anything. That's what you need to do to attract your ideal customer where they are right.

Speaker 1:

Wherever you're trying to connect with those people and who's ever going to connect with you. You can build that, and I've seen that, like a lot of our clients for a long time were people that are taking over their parents' business, that their parents' business was run like it was started, however, many years ago, and I think the same thing is for agencies, right, depending on when the agency starts. If they don't continue to reinvent their self to stay on the cutting edge, they're doing things like they learned how to do it. That worked for a while and then what I'm seeing is a huge degradation and some of those old strategies don't work as well anymore and you got to continue to adapt and change, and so there's a lot of different factors to consider.

Speaker 1:

It's funny you're looking at businesses. For a long time, my first business was a recruitment company, right, so I was looking at individuals and I was assessing businesses and people and you start to see a lot of patterns and commonality with what works successfully. I think that this was extremely helpful for a lot of people out there that have a good size book of business and are looking at, like what to do next or considering it If they want to get in touch with you, jonathan, to find out more information. How best might they do that?

Speaker 2:

Just go to punctuationcom. You can sign up for our newsletter. We put out insights weekly. We have a podcast. You can subscribe to there as well, and you can just contact us as you need us.

Speaker 1:

And is that not like one of the best domains? If you're listening to this punctuationcom, I mean, that is just I can't believe.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean we bought it from someone, but I can't believe that they sold it can't believe that they sold it.

Speaker 1:

I mean it, it, it, it's brilliant. And that's where the IP comes into for some of these businesses, based on, maybe brand recognition or name or even domain, is a consideration. Um, well, thank you, jonathan, so much for being here. Um, thank you all for for listening. Uh, if you do need some consulting, coaching, um, reach out to Jonathan. You can check out matthewbertramcom. I've already started to get people. Uh, I got someone on my calendar later today that that came in through that.

Speaker 1:

That's a, a brand new brand that we're launching. Uh, I keep saying I've been, I'm going to do it and I'm finally going to do it. Uh, got a lot of books out there. Check out the podcast. Just search. Um. Matt Bertram, if you found value in this, please share it and send me a note. I love to hear feedback so we don't have who all our listeners are. That's not how podcasting works. So leave a comment, leave an emoji, reach out to me. I'd love to connect with you If you want to grow your business with the largest, powerful, most awesome tool on the internet. Reach out to EWR Digital for more revenue in your business. And until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now.

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