1
0,00:01,000 --> 0,01:03,000
Welcome back to another episode of Never Been Promoted. Hi. I'm your host, Thomas Helfrich. Thank you for tuning in. Our mission is to help a 1000000 entrepreneurs get better entrepreneurship, help them unleash that entrepreneur by cutting that tie to all the stuff that holds them back, all the fears you hold on to, all those excuses you know you make. We do that through meeting other, you know, entrepreneurs and learning from what they're doing in the world and what they've learned along their way. And today, we're gonna be joined by Rich Brooks of flyte new media. This guy is like, you know, like a goat in in the, in the marketing world. He's been doing this for 30 years, so you should learn so much today from this. 1st and foremost, today though, if you have never been here before and this is your first time, thank you so much for coming. And I hope you can enjoy the podcast and enjoy the YouTube channel. I hope you come back. And if you've been here before, thanks again. The only call to action I ever do is to ask for the, 5 star review on Apple or Amazon or your favorite music podcast player and give the YouTube channel a follow @neverbeenpromoted. But let's add in the Rich Brooks.
2
0,01:03,000 --> 0,01:25,000
Thank We were talking off camera about this, Rich. How are you, first of all? I'm doing excellent. It's it's a good day. I'm just back from a couple weeks of business and personal travel, so I'm feeling good. Yeah. You, you're up in, Portland, Maine. Is that right? I am. I'm looking right out now on Casco Bay in the Atlantic Ocean. It's a beautiful view and beautiful day here in Portland. One of our customers You see the traffic report now.
3
0,01:25,000 --> 0,01:35,000
Well, one of our customers' summers up there, which I love people who have enough money to use summer as a verb or winter. And so you're
4
0,01:35,000 --> 0,01:59,000
an okay place to be in part of the United States now for another 6 weeks, and then it's over. In terms of the amount of tourists that are coming, yes. The town weather. Yeah. The in the dead of winter, I can make it to the bridge in about 2 minutes of driving. And the worst days in the summer will sometimes take me 35. I actually ended up buying an ebike because I only live, like, 7, 8 miles out of town. So it's more refreshing and not much longer for me just to ride my ebike in and out of work.
5
0,01:59,000 --> 0,02:02,000
I like and you get a little risk in there in danger.
6
0,02:02,000 --> 0,02:08,000
There is 1 or 2 places that it is a little risky. Yeah. They need better sidewalks or better, bike paths.
7
0,02:08,000 --> 0,02:21,000
You know, I try to randomize these a little bit. flyte new media, though. How do they get a hold of you? I'm gonna start with the contact information first. Like, let's why do we have to wait to the end of a podcast, Dusheemus? Alright. Sure, Dale. Let's do this. So, if people wanna reach out to me,
8
0,02:21,000 --> 0,02:41,000
if they wanna go to our website, which is an agency website, we do websites, SEO, digital marketing. That's take flight, flyte.com. And, if they wanna get in touch with me, I'm the Rich Brooks on every social platform, and LinkedIn is my jam. So you can always find me there and just let me know why you wanna connect so, so that we can connect.
9
0,02:41,000 --> 0,02:50,000
Yeah. And, and you before we do your backstory and talk about your podcast a little bit here, I do wanna start with a bit of a icebreaker.
10
0,02:50,000 --> 0,02:52,000
Okay. Let's break that ice.
11
0,02:52,000 --> 0,03:07,000
If you, this isn't for me. This is for you. I know you're very uncomfortable in the camera. So, if you got arrested for something and no one knew about it, I just heard you got arrested. Yeah. What would they assume you did?
12
0,03:07,000 --> 0,03:23,000
If they just knew I got arrested, and, let's say that it would probably be protesting some inequality in the United States or elsewhere in the world. I'm going with that answer, Thomas.
13
0,03:23,000 --> 0,03:28,000
That is that is a that is a large scale answer. I like that. Yes.
14
0,03:28,000 --> 0,03:34,000
Well, it's my guess in DUI or something like that, you know, which
15
0,03:34,000 --> 0,03:42,000
Yeah. Would that's that's just rude. Changing lanes illegally in in an ebike, definitely possible. I mean, you know.
16
0,03:42,000 --> 0,03:59,000
Speeding would probably be a good one. I do tend to have a lead foot. I'm really working on being a less aggressive driver, not a slower driver, but just, like, understanding that not everybody wants to go 90 on the highways. So I'm We don't have to sit down. We just need a a Jeep Jeep Wrangler and just
17
0,03:59,000 --> 0,04:07,000
just ignore traffic and just get to the exit another way. That's Absolutely. That may or may be my youth of how I got in trouble sometimes. Alright.
18
0,04:07,000 --> 0,05:57,000
Do you wanna give a little on your backstory? A little bit about you? Sure. Happy to. We as a company just turned 27 years old, meaning I started this business 27 years ago. At the time, it was just me out of my apartment building websites for some local companies. And, background 19 that was 97. 99, I moved up to Port Lemaine to be with my, then girlfriend, soon to be wife, then later on ex wife, still friends, but loved I wanted to move to Maine. I love the idea of Maine, and I was very excited to come in. From there, got a few clients, and I had a few clients tell me they wanted to give me more work, But that meant I had to hire people. And they basically said, well, if you don't, then we're gonna have to find a bigger company. So that's really what forced me to start hiring people. And it was basically my own interest in marketing and psychology that got me to move out of just doing websites to do search engine optimization. Like, I didn't want people just paying me to make pretty websites. I wanted to them to invest in their businesses. So that led me to SEO. Later on, I had a client who asked me, hey. How do you put images in email marketing? That's how long I've been doing it. That that wasn't a common thing back then. So started getting to email marketing, and then somebody said, I love Howard Dean and his blog. Can we do blogging? So then I had to figure that out. Then it was social media, webinars, so on and so forth, digital ads. So a lot of it's just been responding to what are my clients interested in. And me also seeing opportunities. You know, I was an early adopter to social media. You know, everybody says you're an AI expert these days. At most, I would say, I'm I'm intrigued by AI. I use it every day. But it's about understanding what are the client needs and also then finding out the things that I think are going to come next and kind of putting those together into an agency. And and I think that in hiring the right people has been our success story for the past 27 plus years. That's the true version of it.
19
0,05:57,000 --> 0,06:18,000
Yeah. Well, well, I appreciate it. And and I know off the you know, we've spoken of of Cambria before and that you do a lot of your interest in marketing through a very old fashioned method of, like, meeting people and and and interacting with them. I know it's crazy. Talk about that a little bit because you it's a defined strategy. It's something you actually consciously go do. So you would talk about this. Yeah. So
20
0,06:18,000 --> 0,08:22,000
it's more like I would I would say that some of it's networking. And I there was a time when tweet ups were a thing, and even when they stopped being a thing. I used to host the tweet ups, which basically was Twitter in real life, but it was a networking event that I would put on locally here. And it was to get to know some of the other creatives in town first, but it was just also a lot of fun and stuff like that. One of the biggest ways that we get business is I go out and speak. I love presenting. I love presenting live in front of an audience. The bigger, the better, the more exciting it is. And it's been, like, I know I'd love to say, oh, as a digital marketing agency, all of our business, all of our ROI comes from digital marketing. But the truth of the matter is that although we have a lot of success in, say, running Google Ads and Facebook ads for our clients, We've had no success in running ads for ourselves. And I've talked to other agency owners and a lot of other agency owners say the same thing. It's just a saturated market. It's very hard to do anything in that. So you wanna find the places that you really can make a difference and connect with people. And the older I get, the more I realize about the importance of strong relationships. Especially, it depends on the kind of business you wanna run, but I would rather have fewer clients who we are spending more time with and really working with them to develop strategies and outcomes that they're looking for. And so, you know, when I was younger, I'd go to a business event. I'd have a 100 business cards in my hand, and I'd hand them all out. And now I walk into a business, networking event with 10 cards in that silver, little cardholder that I got for some bachelor party or something. And I never give out more than 2 or 3 because I only wanna give them to people who I might actually care about talking with. And I'm finally having 2 or 3 conversations at a networking event rather than the 50 that I felt I had to check off, in years past. That shift has been really big for me because you get to know people at a deeper level. It doesn't mean that everyone's gonna turn into a business client, and I wouldn't want that. It's just about you start to get to know people and understand things at a deeper level than you would if you're just trying to collect as many business cards as possible.
21
0,08:22,000 --> 0,09:27,000
Yeah. It and and one thing I miss about those some of the live events that, you know, whenever I've created 1 or been to one that has this, I always found this most effective is the speed networking. Like, hey, everyone line up, and we're just gonna go buy each other. Introduce yourself for 2, 3 minutes. Exchange a card and just make determinations if you want to meet with that person. I would definitely exchange the card because, like, the truth is you could still network and you met and you may know someone, you know somebody. But you're right. The ones you actually want to follow-up with, it's like, you know, I'm a CEO of this or I'm this or that, and I see what you're doing. We got to find time. You definitely meeting with that person, right, versus Yeah. You know, I like to I've never done a speed dating or speed networking thing in my life. Have you found them to be effective? Oh my god. They're so effective because you you're basically getting to meet everyone in the in the we're not we're talking like, you know, 50 people or less type of events. You meet everyone in the in the event, and the idea is you got you literally have a minute, say what you're doing, that's it. Like, cool. There might be something here. Meaning, like, that person fits my profile. You know? And then you just that was enough that's enough to be like, hey. We did the icebreaker. You got 15 minutes. That that it's very effective
22
0,09:27,000 --> 0,09:53,000
to to just weed it down. That might be worth trying. Because like I said, I used to put on more networking events pre COVID, kinda moved away from that. But, you know, we still put on con we put on the agents of change for those people watching, which is we're coming up on our 10th annual, conference that we put on here in Portland, Maine, and that has a networking component to it for sure. It's mostly local businesses and marketers, owners and marketers, but there is an opportunity to do networking at that. And I certainly do networking at that,
23
0,09:53,000 --> 0,10:26,000
but, but I will have to try the speed dating approach for sure. So depends how many people you have, but I would say if you could break it up, like, hey, guys. Next 10 minutes are speed dating. Don't have to participate. You're strongly encouraged. And you just line it up. And if you've already met and, like, you just go by and every it's a minute and beep beep and just you know, you get through 10 minutes. You're gonna meet about 10, 15 people. There it is. You know? It's it's like trading hands with the queen queen or king, except you get 30 queens or kings right in a row. Right. And I would go with COVID elbow still. I would say encourage COVID elbow and maybe just little you you know, you go by and just juice them up with that little hand mixer.
24
0,10:26,000 --> 0,10:30,000
Just sauce them all up like So no deep body hugs is what you're saying?
25
0,10:30,000 --> 0,10:38,000
You can. Different type of event. Yeah. To a different kind of event. It's you know, you guys do a different main. So
26
0,10:38,000 --> 0,10:40,000
Exchange Lobsters.
27
0,10:40,000 --> 0,11:01,000
Yeah. Lobsters. Alright. Tell me about something. Tell me about your customers over the years. And and what I mean by that is how have you seen a customer evolve? Meaning, like, the the maturity part of it's you figuring it out, but also Right. How have you seen customers evolve over the years?
28
0,11:01,000 --> 0,13:40,000
Well, I've definitely seen people become savvier when it comes to digital marketing. There's no two ways about that. And actually to tell a story about our conferences, when I first started putting on the agents of change conference in year 1, we actually set up laptops. This is like 12 years ago. We set up laptops with members of my team to help people get on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, which were the 3 big platforms at the time, because most of the people who were attending the conferences weren't even on them. So we had to get them on them just so they would know what we were talking about. And these days, people come and they are already on the platforms they know. And they're looking for advanced tactics. So I definitely seen maturation or a more sophisticated audience over the years, coming to these events and and just as far as being clients, but kind of like what you hinted at, there's also this thing where we've kind of changed who our ICP or ideal customer profile is. You know, at first, especially when it was just me, I take on anybody who needed a website and had money. But as time went on, I started recognizing that there are certain jobs, certain businesses, certain industries that we just tend to do better in. So I've been more interested in pursuing those kind of clients. So we sat down a few years ago, and we really identified that our best clients as we looked at who we enjoyed working with most, who gave us the most business, who was the easiest to work with, that it was usually either the owner or a head of marketing who had the owner's trust. So they didn't have to always go back and ask the owner for more money or more this, whatever. They were in control, and they had the they had the bandwidth and they had the, long enough leash that they could actually make the decision to bring us in and do these do the projects. And as time has gone on, we've moved up market. We're looking for longer term relationships with bigger companies. I mean, still small compared to many other agencies out there. But we've realized that we cannot really help people who are just starting out or people who are rubbing 2 nickels together because we have a certain amount of expertise in r and d that we're constantly investing in ourselves, in our people that requires a higher payout for us to be able to keep those high levels of quality and expertise going. It's not gonna be for everybody. And it sometimes sucks because I started with all these people. Like, my first websites were $500. And now we're doing websites that sometimes are $60,000 or more. And we also still have $10,000 websites. But it's that constant moving up market because we just find that we're able to do richer, more valuable work when we're at going after that particular clientele.
29
0,13:40,000 --> 0,14:31,000
Right. And and I think it's a is a is a takeaway is my own agency on a really focus on LinkedIn. Right? Is you start someplace you can handle the business and you have an expertise in. And even like where I've seen it, like, where we hired, we we used to work with lots of individuals. We we try to we steer away from the individual because though it's their business, it's the same suit, different pocket. And so you're they're always rubbing either they're super successful, they're always rubbing nickels together. What you described as also somebody who has a budget, an understanding of investment, and and them spending 100 k with you in a year is, like, why either hire someone to get 1.25% of things done or hire that team to get 10 x done? And that is where you graduate, I think, too, in any businesses. You start you have to do it consciously take that upskill. When you made that move, did you pucker up a little bit because your sales cycles get longer?
30
0,14:31,000 --> 0,16:19,000
You're you're you're not carrying payroll potentially without revenue coming in or to talk about that transition because that's that's a I softened yeah. I softened the blow by not making a hard shift, and I don't think that there's anything wrong with making a hard shift. But there is that, you know, where is my next meal coming from vibe? So as we did it, we kept our current client base. And we have, you know, some recurring revenue streams, from some of the smaller clients. But we started kind of gearing our content, gearing our marketing, the events we would attend and the events that I spoke at towards a more sophisticated, slightly larger type of business that would be able to use an outside digital agency to help them run some or all of their marketing. So it's a very conscious effort, but we didn't give up on the small fries, and we certainly tried to keep as many of our clients as possible. One of the things that we could have done better over the years, and it's this up you know, this battle every time is when do we raise our rates? You know, which helps you get rid of some of the people who maybe you can't serve very well anymore. And listen, I picked up clients who told me that their agencies basically outgrew them. It happens. Right? Sometimes our clients outgrow us. Sometimes we outgrow our clients. It's the nature of life. It's the nature of business. No hard feelings. But for us, it was, let's hold on to these clients and take care of them as long as we can. But there may come a time, and we've had this before. Like, I've told clients, it's like, there's nothing more we can do because your website was built 12 years ago. Like, literally, this is why you don't get any traffic. This is why you don't get any conversions. Here's our new web prices. If this is too much for you, and I understand it may be, we're probably not not the right, vendor for you anymore. And, you know, that's just the way it is. But we try to soften the blow by keeping as many of those clients and keeping them satisfied while we started to turn our attention to bigger clients that had bigger budgets.
31
0,16:19,000 --> 0,16:40,000
Are you seeing, in the market for mark for the people who buy marketing? So this is probably not targeted individuals. It's much more towards the marketing manager, director, marketer of 1, if you will, where they have been kind of falsely led by AI, and they think they can do way more than they think they can. Like, I don't need agency anymore. I have my 4 AIs to this. Are you seeing this kind of
32
0,16:40,000 --> 0,18:53,000
I have had very buyer or misled buyer out there? I've had very little interactions with people who have told me that, but I belong to an agency mastermind that I started. So me and 3 of my friends who run agencies in other parts of the country, we get together every couple weeks and we talk about everything in our businesses, and AI has obviously been a conversation we've been having for a year and a half now. Some people have seen people cut back and literally their clients have told them because I think Chatipi can do what you do. And it's definitely a concern. Right? Because at first, when you first start using it, you're like, it's like a person in there. Like, there's, like, the smartest person in the world in this box. And the more you realize the more you use it, the more you realize, like, all of the shortcomings. And this is true with every every, new invention. Right? There's this huge belief that it's gonna change everything. And then it doesn't live up to the expectations and everybody starts downplaying it, and that's actually when it takes off. So my deal right now on my AI journey is getting AInto our workflow. Like, what does the SOP for flyte new media look like with AIn there? How do we, implement it consistently into our SEO, into our paid search, into our paid social, into our content creation? Where do we stop using AI? Because I would never type out a prompt, have it generate even a social media thing and hand that off to a client and say we're done. Like, that's terrible. And if you do that, then you deserve to lose your business to chat GBT and other AI. But what we do is we use it to help us, you know, when I'm writing an article right now about email KPIs, and I asked chat GBT to give me a framework. So I would know what should Include because it's humans miss ideas all the time. Chat GPT can pull all those ideas in, and then I may decide I'm not gonna write about this section, but it's very unlikely you're gonna miss anything. Or after I write an article, I might ask Chat GPT to edit it for me and make recommendations on improvement, clarity, all this sort of stuff after I've trained it in my voice, after I've told it my buyer, persona, and see if it makes any changes that I agree with. And to be honest, sometimes I say, oh, that's actually pretty brilliant. But very often I say, no. This is why I went for became an English major because I know how to write. So
33
0,18:53,000 --> 0,19:46,000
Yeah. And and and that's, I think out there, you know, and you're if you're an entrepreneur, you're out there, you know, trying to buy marketing services, be aware that a human element, these technologies accelerate augment, they do not lead. And if they are leading you, you have a big problem because you're getting really far behind your competition if you're using it as as as the leader thought leader of your group, of your of your of your business. And I keep seeing this play out more and more. People are like, my content's flat. I can't get and, like, so you're using AI for your engagement. You're using AI for your replies. Like, you it's just it's vanilla. Like, people Well, you said you're on on LinkedIn. And one of the things I'm hating about LinkedIn these days is the fact that they make it so easy for you to generate, an AI response. An AI post gets an AI response, gets an AI comment, gets an AI response. I'm like, when do humans actually have a conversation anymore? Like, for me, that is such a waste of everybody's time.
34
0,19:46,000 --> 0,20:35,000
And I went to, I went to MACON last summer, the marketing AI conference that they have out in Cleveland. Great amazing event. But one woman was talking about how awesome it's gonna be because you'll wake up in the morning and AI will have already gotten all your responses ready for all the emails that came in, and then they'll do it. And I'm like, that sounds like a hellscape to me. Like, why would I want all of this to be done by computers? Like, I wanna make connections with people. Like, at the end of the day, I'm not selling to AI. I'm selling to people. Like, this is an amazing life changing, business changing tool. And that's what I think we have to remember. It's gonna make us better if we know how to use it. That's what I'm trying to teach my team. That's what I'm training them up in. That's what I'm focusing on myself. But the idea that at this stage of the game, it's going to do what we do is a recipe for disaster.
35
0,20:35,000 --> 0,21:35,000
Well, I don't actually don't think it ever catches up because once the machines start talking to each other for the purposes of sales or promotion or marketing itself, it has no value because you're no longer connecting with a hue and you're trying to convince another AI that this might be the best response. So I'm having my own kind of revelations lately where I had one marketing strategy for our company where for years we've been out there commenting on other people's posts. Now there's AIs that can do it. And so it's losing its trajectory and value of what we do as an agency, though we do it with humans. And it's not distinguishable enough until you've done it a few times to say that AI thing is not going to work because there's no one on the other end of the button. Right? There's just people. And so I'm going to like, listen, we're the more live events. We're going to actually go shake someone's hand, meet them, and they're like, I need you to help me go do this because I don't get it or I don't need it. And I'm with you on that. And that's why I originally brought up the the idea of networking and being in front of events because I think more people are moving to that. I think we're moving a full rebound back over of, let me interact with some humans locally
36
0,21:35,000 --> 0,22:17,000
to to see what's going on. I agree. And I think things like like StreamYard and Zoom have done incredible steps forward. And, obviously, this is all COVID induced. But the bottom line is, like, I love I love getting on Zoom calls with people because I love seeing their reactions. I love seeing if I'm boring them or if they're engaged or whatever the case is. It's always better to meet in person, but that's not always feasible. And we're in the top right corner of the country. Like, outside of local businesses, like, it's hard for us to get anywhere. So Zoom does allow us a level of intimacy that we never used to get through the telephone. But, you know, obviously, in person is best. But when that doesn't work, the idea of having streaming conference video, incredibly powerful tool.
37
0,22:17,000 --> 0,22:37,000
Oh, yeah. And when I say, like, in person, that that's for your local whatever else when you actually meet somebody or at a conference or at least hop in on a Zoom. So it's another piece. But when your whole interaction's online, you're trying to get someone to take a call to action, so to speak, that doesn't involve a human, I think that's, you know, that's getting getting harder and harder. I because I think there's so much noise in the world. I keep on trying to figure out how
38
0,22:37,000 --> 0,23:15,000
to inject more of the personality of me and my team into everything that we're doing. And we started doing things, and these are not new ideas. But, you know, everybody writes a blog post. They now get a byline at the bottom with their photo. And I'm rethinking our, doing our entire welcome sequence via email with photos and videos from our team talking to people because I really want them to understand that this is a team of actual human beings locally locally sourced, you know, that work here in the office most days or from home. And and, like, we're a team of people who actually care about this sort of stuff. And I think that that's goes a long way. We're looking to make human connections even in the age of AI.
39
0,23:15,000 --> 0,23:47,000
What's your, what's advice do you give to that that marketer of 1? You know, the company might be a 10,000,000 to a 100,000,000, and they're they've been tasked with everything with minimal, like, you know, capabilities budget. What what do you what do you how do you how do you because that's a that's a that's a part for a business that's super important, but that person's super stressed. What what's the advice you give to that to that person? That's really tough, and it depends on whether they have the ear of their supervisor or boss. But there's no way for a company that big that they can rely on one person to do all of their marketing. Because marketing,
40
0,23:47,000 --> 0,26:48,000
the longer we do it, especially in the digital marketing arena, the more nuanced it becomes. I mean, first, it's like, okay. There's marketing, then there's digital marketing, then there's SEO. And then within SEO, there's local SEO, and then there's organic SEO. And, of course, then there's paid search as well. So in my team, we try and develop those skills for individuals with some backup as well. But then even within that, there are agencies who niche down even further. So you may have people who are b to b SEO specialist versus b to c SEO specialist. You may have people who are technical SEO specialists or really good at doing SEO audits or really good at doing inbound, you know, getting links. You know, I just spoke with somebody today who basically does digital outreach. It's it's more or less PR, for SEO, getting their clients into relevant art digital articles online either as, you know, getting quotes or or using their material. So there's so many specialties. There's no way you can be that one man or one person band that's gonna do it all. And you need to be able to go to your boss and say, alright. So I work 40, 60, maybe 80 hours a week, hopefully not. These are the things that I can do, but we need a budget to do all these other things. And the other thing is, like and this is the kind of our ideal client to somebody who knows enough, is creative, understands the business, but maybe doesn't keep up with every last thing that's going on in Google Ads or Facebook Ads or SEO. Maybe they're not the strongest copywriter or they don't have time to do all the copy that's needed. I mean, we have some clients who have 100 of thousands of pages on their website. And I mean, even an agency of our size can't handle all that. You certainly can't do with one person. So it's like, for those people, they have to develop resources, whether they're freelancers, or whether it's an outside agency. And, yes, obviously, AI leverage AI as much as you can, but that's not gonna get you all the way there. There comes a point where a human being can only work so many hours, and then it becomes that John Henry situation, the guy who, beat the steam, this what was it? The steam engine machine and then dropped dead of a heart attack. And that's not what we want for any of the marketers out there. So I think it really does come down to understanding what your limits are and being able to talk to your boss. And listen, I go to the subreddit for marketing and digital marketing. And I see these people complaining about how much work they have and how little resources they get. And I don't say this online, but my advice is get out. Like, honestly, get out, you know, like the movie, get out. Because you're never gonna do anything. You're always gonna look bad. Find a place where you, have the trust and the ability to grow as a marketer. Sometimes taking a lower paying job and learning under somebody else can be the greatest step forward you've ever taken. So that would be my advice. Either get the resources you need to get that job done, and that means it's not a one person job, Or start looking around. I know it's not quite the job market for job seekers that it was a couple of years ago. But there's still a lot of great jobs out there and companies that care.
41
0,26:48,000 --> 0,27:30,000
I think it's I mean, that's fantastic advice. If you're if you're in that spot where you're stuck as a marketer and you're like, you're not in budget, that you're being told to do a 1,000 things, why can't AI do it? Right. You know? But, you know, the flip side is if you do get budget, don't try to do it all your own on AI either. I mean, find a really good partner, and I'm I'm not trying to, like, you know, shamelessly plug what you guys do, but you do it. You have a lot of great things going on because you've earned it over 27 years. You you didn't start off, but you you start off with websites and you've built the components that help serve a customer, which means you have capabilities. And And for those people out there that are maybe marketers trying to start their own company, I will tell you start with a niche and own it, and they get a couple of core customers that really trust you, then maybe you can go bridge to the next thing.
42
0,27:30,000 --> 0,29:09,000
That's a great, great piece of advice too because yeah. So I've seen this because I have one, like, one leg in the kind of entrepreneurship, small business world, running an agency. And then I have this other one where I had this idea where I was gonna be, like, right up there with John Lee Dumas and Amy Porterfield. That was gonna be only, like, teaching people how to make money and and build their less. And, the side of me that runs an agency went out, or the other side lost depending on how you look at it. But I saw their success, and I look at somebody like Amy Porterfield or Lewis Howes who started off in a very specific niche. Like, Amy Porterfield was the organic Facebook the organic Facebook person early on, and that's all she talked about. And then she kind of built up that audience in there. And then she started expanding and talking about email list building and webinars and all these other things. And then it became this entire digital marketing brand. And she's fantastic. Right? Lewis Howe, same thing, started only talking about how LinkedIn changed his career path. And then he started adding in YouTube and these other things. And then his podcast is just like, he grew it. And now he's talking about legacy. But that's the pathway whether you're doing it, you know, as as a marketer or as somebody who wants to become like an influencer slash digital guru is start with the narrowest niche possible as long as it's big enough for you to succeed. And once you built up that audience and built up that expertise and proven yourself, it becomes much easier to then to expand. And I'll often say, it's a lot faster to fill up a test tube than it is a bathtub. And what I mean by that is, you know, if you focus your niche, you focus on one niche, you become an expert so fast in that niche. It just has to be big enough to support you. That's the only caveat that I would have there.
43
0,29:09,000 --> 0,29:35,000
Yeah. It will and and stable enough to. So meaning, like, you know, if it's a new social media platform, might be big enough, but if it's all over the place, you know, if you do this. Let me take a little pivot on you a little bit here. So if you were, you know, going back, you got well, I wanna get to your podcast. So so go back when that started and and talk about that a little bit, what the mission of that is a little bit. But where has that evolved to, and how does that work into your own marketing?
44
0,29:35,000 --> 0,33:55,000
Yeah. So this is actually my the agents of change podcast, which is a digital marketing podcast, actually was my 2nd podcast. And I had been blogging and I had been just getting into social media. I met Mike Stelzner, who runs social media examiner. He kind of mentored me, and I was getting ready to I just been putting on with 2 friends, an event we called social media FTW. And after 3 years of putting it on, the band broke up. No hard feelings. And I decided that I wanted to put on a conference myself, but I didn't wanna just focus on, social media because as an agency owner, I saw the benefit of SEO. And I also this is 2012, was like, I think that mobile's gonna be big. Right? Like, people are just not talking about it the way they should. So I created this brand, the agents of change that had 3 agents, and I love comic books. You can see all the Spider Man in the background here. But, the 3 agents were search let me see if I can hold this. This is the old branding. Search, social, and mobile marketing. Right? So, that was the idea behind it. And so we we basically started this conference, and I also had another I started a podcast called the marketing agents, which after a 100 episodes, I realized I don't need 3 brands, and I just merged the marketing agents podcast and renamed it the agents of change. So the last, 400 plus episodes have been under this brand, but now I just call them all the agents of change. The whole idea was I wanted to interview people who are smarter than me, and that is a long list, I'll tell you, Thomas, where I could talk to them. 1st, it just started with friends. It was just the people I knew from going and speaking at these conferences. I'd asked them to come on the show. We talk about whatever their area of expertise was. Now after 500 plus episodes, you know, people are beating down the door. I'm getting 3 to 5 requests a day to come on the podcast. I've got now this whole process that I send people through where my VA vets people, then she gives me a very shortened list because I can only take on one new guest a week. I don't wanna do any more than that. So, but it has definitely helped in many ways. One is, if I have a question about something, I go find the expert, and I get their time because they wanna come on the show. So although we get so many inquiries, like, just today, there was a guy I saw. He called himself an email marketing nerd, focused on deliverability. I'm like, I gotta get him on my podcast. We had a great conversation. So I learn about it, and I build relationships. I also use the podcast as a way of vetting the people who speak in my conference. People always send me, you know, like, inquiries. Hey. I'd love to be considered to be a keynote. I said, first step is get on the podcast. I send them the link. So this is a way for me to build rapport and understand as I curate the speakers for each year, how is this gonna shape up? Is this gonna be a valuable event for marketers and owners to come to? And then the other part of it or another part of it is the idea of generating leads for my business. And although I don't push Flight Media very hard during these podcasts and I try and put the focus on the guests, the bottom line is, you know, sometimes it just comes out naturally. Sometimes I'll offer something like a free consult and I'll get inquiries. But it all started with years ago. Everybody's saying you gotta give a sponsor for your podcast. That's the only way to make money at this. And Yeah. John Lee Dumas, who's a friend of mine, and he was just skyrocketing at this point. He had published this article exactly what you should charge per podcast. And I looked at it, and I'm like, I will make $200 a month for running 3 ads during every single episode. And I'm like, I don't wanna do that. I don't want the extra work. For $200, I'd rather just, like, get ramen instead of, you know, red beet. Like, there's just I didn't see the value there. And just as I was kinda going through this, like, is this worth it? Somebody tweeted out an episode on Twitter. It was all about CRO, conversion rate optimization. And he says, I need help with this. So I replied to him, and he replied to me, and we took into DMs. Then we got on email, and then we got on a phone. And he is still a client to this day. And he spent well over 6 figures with us, all from that podcast. And I don't know how many episodes I would have to do to get to 6 figures in ad revenue. And now I don't have to have any ads on my show. The only sponsor is flyte new media, or if we're having an event like the agents of change conference, the agents of change conference. And it's just, I think, more enjoyable for me, more enjoyable for the audience as well. And there's nothing wrong with sponsorships. I don't wanna like anybody thinking like that. It's whatever works for you, but this is what worked for me.
45
0,33:55,000 --> 0,35:02,000
Well, right. And if, you know, the people are chasing the Joe Rogan fame model. Sure. That works because you you'll get you got the base. But the truth is there's so many podcasts, the chance you coming outside of a very small niche. Once again, you gotta be super niche with with it. You know, and and we like you like, we use ours for meeting lots of experts. You know, you'll get invited to this community. We're starting for entrepreneurs. It'll be much, you know, denoised. We have a monetization strategy, but it's not sponsors. If people wanna sponsor if if he wants to sponsor the show, I'd listen to them. But I it's not the certainly, it was like the last thing on the list. So I'm with you. Right. It's it's actually a way to get to meet people going back to some of the original things we had talked about. You know, I love tiebacks. It's about getting to meet more people, getting some getting sucking the room out of the air a little bit. If, you know, once again, you if people wanna get ahold of you, they should they should get ahold of you at your at your guys' takeflight.com. Right? Takeflyte.com. I have it on the screen there. Do you have any, like, typical, like, hey. Listen. Have you heard this podcast kind of things? Or is it no. Listen. I'm too big now. Like, if you show up, I'll I'll I may help you, or what's your what's your
46
0,35:02,000 --> 0,36:54,000
what's your goal? Well, for if anybody reaches out to me, at least we're gonna get the conversation started. And I'm just rich@takeflight.com. I'm not gonna turn anybody away. And I love if I can't help somebody, can I put them in touch with somebody I know? So I'm more than happy to do that. People can certainly reach out to me. They can connect with me on LinkedIn. If they wanna get a better sample or a bigger sample of what I do and what I talk about, they're already listening to podcasts, so they can check out the agents of change podcast that comes out weekly. We're just about to drop episode 530 6, I think, around there. So it's been over a decade, yeah, of doing podcasts. That's probably where most of my content is these days. But I love like, my favorite part of my job right now, because I've basically given away all my web design, all my web development, and most of my marketing, to my teammates who do a better job at it than I do. But what I love doing is just talking to people about their businesses and understanding, like, how do you get in front of your core audience? Do you understand who your ideal customer persona is? How are you going to kind of bring them or be part of their customer journey? I don't talk about sales funnels. And maybe this is just a semantic thing. I talk about the customer journey. So it's like, where can if this is a customer journey, where can you set up the roadside attractions and the information booths along that pathway so that you can invite people in? And, yes, I do some outbound marketing and and maybe doing presentations as outbound. I'm not sure. But most of what I do and the way that I get the best clients, the best fits for me is more on the inbound side. So it's a little bit of both. But getting out there and educating people, I found always attracts more of the right type of people to you. And if you do it correctly, it's almost like verbal judo. It also keeps away the people that aren't good fits for you, which is incredibly important to your sanity, your sleep and every other aspect of your health.
47
0,36:54,000 --> 0,36:57,000
Well, a 100%. Like, you know, you get
48
0,36:57,000 --> 0,37:52,000
you don't wanna fire a client, but sometimes you need to. But also realize Oh, it's sometimes that's the best thing in the world, isn't it? Like, let's be honest. Like, letting a client go who's been disrespectful to you or your team or whatever it is. You know, I always try and mend fences. But we actually, had a situation not too long ago at the beginning of this year where a client was very upset because we weren't doing anything because we had not gotten any of the material from him. And I said, alright. Well, let's just calm down and let's kinda walk through this. How can we get back on the right track? And I did. I calmed him down. And then all of a sudden he stood up and he started yelling at, this woman who was sitting with me. I said, you know what? I'm sorry. This just isn't working out. I'm gonna refund your money, but we're done. And I hung up. And my heart was beating a mile a minute. Like, I was freaked out having done that, but then it was recorded on Fathom. And so, I have not been able to watch it, but but teammates of mine have watched it. And they're like, oh my god. You were so chill. It seemed like you were the most relaxed human being on the planet. I'm like, not inside. I wasn't.
49
0,37:52,000 --> 0,38:54,000
You you, not the auto buyer, but I have a similar story this year where we had a 10 k a month client, which for us was, you know, it's a good that's a good plan. Right? And they had hired a new marketing internal person to kinda coordinate everything. And listen, I got 20 years consulting, worked I've worked for I've seen some awful people. This human was probably the most disrespectful unprofessional human I've ever seen ever. And I thought it was just me. Me as it might just be in, like, you know, I'm trying and I thought so I started bringing the fathom into the meetings. And, you know, And I thought so I started bringing the Fathom into the meetings. And and the one of our last meetings, I actually put it to to the AI, and I said, tell me your your interpretation of this meeting. It wasn't very kind to her. Just put it that way. Yeah. Interesting. Didn't wanna hear that client, but I I couldn't take her. The team couldn't take that anymore. It was just like, oh my god. We gotta either I was like, you gotta get rid of her or we're we gotta move on, and so we moved on. One of the first when you're really starting out early, you have to be a little bit more accepting and,
50
0,38:54,000 --> 0,39:28,000
you know, of other people's foibles. But as you start to build out your agency or your career, whatever it is, you start to get to pick and choose who your clients are. And again, the more you put up those barriers to protect yourself and your team, I think it's if you're in a position of authority like I am, protecting your team goes an incredibly long way. When they see that you care about them and they're not you're not just looking to make money off of their hardship, that's gonna be a huge change for you. And they'll go to Matt for you every time. So I think that's very important too is to understand what your responsibility to your own teammates is.
51
0,39:28,000 --> 0:39:30,000
2 years ago, same thing. We I would say that that is spot on by example. We had a a customer it's just difficult. I say we have difficult customers, guys. Part of what I said we have to do, we have to deal with it. And then my lead guy who runs our team said, hey, this guy I was like, how is he? We were kind of always joking about, hey, he's difficult. He's like, yeah, he's kinda I don't know. I was like, what? He's like, I don't know. I feel like he's a racist. And I'm like, really? And and so I was like, alright. And so in the next meeting, I came in, and I just said, hey. You know, listen. This isn't working out. He he was about to go through his typical rants. I was like, could you pick a number for what you'd like for a refund? He's like, what? I'm like, well, this isn't working. I don't think it's we're gonna and he he said some numbers like, alright. And he's like, what what? I was like, well, I just refunded that to you. Thank you. We're gonna move on now. And my team was like, thank God. They were like I don't know how close people were about to quit. And I was like, oh, my gosh. So here we are 2 years later, same team. Speaks volumes. You don't wanna keep a bad egg around that still sets it up. No. Take care of your people. I appreciate it. The Rich Brooks. Thank you so much. Agents of Change, definitely check check out that podcast. It's, it's excellent. You do a really good job with all you do, so I appreciate it. Thank you, Thomas. This has been a great conversation. You're a great host. Well, you know what? I'm not 500 in, but and I love that you can get down to 1 podcast a week, and I appreciate you saying that because I'm getting a lot of practice. We're doing 8 to 16 a week right now just to keep up with sponsored episodes. Yeah. Wasn't on my business plan this year. So Alright. Hey. Listen, people. I will tell you. You go what you do is you move your your sales calls from 30 minutes to 15, and you get just as many in in the year in a month. That's great. So There you go. Burning out both ends of the candle then a third end, if that was even possible. Rich, thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate this. We'll put his, all his contact stuff into the show notes, but thank you again. Absolute pleasure. And, for all those, you know, who are still there with us and and listened to this point, thank you much. If this was your first time, I do hope you come back. And if you've been here before, keep coming back. It's great. Get out there. Go unleash your entrepreneur. Get all these things that you're holding you back, things that are tying you down, the fears, the excuses, whatever it is, even people, just you gotta learn how to cut that off so you can get out there and become, your own best entrepreneur. And if you learn anything from today, I do hope, you take it and do something with it. But until we meet next time, get out there and go unleash your entrepreneur. Thanks for listening.