Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted interview host. I'm here with Dave Valentine. Why don't you give yourself a quick introduction and we'll get into the weeds pretty quick.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
So I'm a marketing expert. Been in digital marketing and advertising Since Friendster in MySpace is where I got my start and texted in tweets, which my junior staff is appalled by.
And over the past 12 years, I've been in the entrepreneurial and business ownership space. So I've either started or acquired 11 different companies. I've sold nine of those. Smallest one we sold for six figures. The biggest one we sold for eight figures.
And a lot of my strengths rely on go to market strategy for entrepreneurs and business owners across the globe.
[00:00:50] Speaker A: So I see that the world has really changed when it comes to entrepreneurship and the, the boundaries and the capabilities out the gate.
Generation ago, it took serious capital. You had to have a storefront and a yellow pages entry and you had a business.
Now there's AI tools that can help people do no code to take ideas from concept to launch.
I had an idea for kind of small business and went from idea to having a site and posting about it and getting a client within 24 hours.
So how has the immediacy and power of access in the digital marketing age been something that you've been influenced by or have leveraged or. Or regret?
[00:01:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's easier to start a business now than it's ever been in the course of human history. It's so, so easy. To your point, Jeremy, I mean, if you have a laptop and an Internet connection, in fact, you don't even need to have a laptop. You could have a phone. You're good to go.
The more challenging piece that. The part that's hard to deal with is it's more challenging to scale than it's ever been.
There's no longer simplicity of market channel adoption. Before, you know, even 25 years ago, you would not have a person that would bring in a TV on their shoulder and say, hey, I saw your ad on TV for the cars here and I'm here to buy it.
But now there's this element, especially in the marketing and advertising world of I want to attribute every dollar that I spend to a dollar outcome.
So I think that the challenges faced by owners and entrepreneurs at this point in the world is that you can start anything in a day, in a couple days. To your point, you can get a client in 24 hours if you know what you're doing.
That being said, it really is hard to scale because there's so many channels to be on. Which one do you prioritize? Which one do I stick with? How do I get where I want to go? And digital channels also, which is different than traditional channels, change at such a rapid pace. They're literally changing every single week. So what worked last week may not work this week.
[00:03:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:22] Speaker B: What worked last month certainly may not work this month. So I think that as we get into the digital space, the benefit is if you could fail quickly and make adjustments that actually lead to success.
[00:03:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:33] Speaker B: Then the downside is, man, it's really hard to figure out a channel that you can stick with because they change so often.
[00:03:40] Speaker A: That's true. And as a middleman in that equation, I often feel that push and pull as an SEO consultant of, hey, we want to attribute specifically down to predict for us, if you're going to create this content over the course of a year, you want to make this content, how well is that going to rank? How much traffic is that going to earn? How many leads is that going to turn into? How many leads is that going to turn into a sale? Because we've got a quarterly budget to set.
I'm like, well, there are pieces of it where I can make some assumptions and create decent models to kind of map that out, but it almost feels like there's like a mismatch of that type of fairly solid business planning of quarterly, like, hey, I need to know for the next quarter, for the next two quarters, for the next year, what to budget and what to expect out of it.
How does that uncertainty, like, you know, channel switching, even SEO, which is often a wildly successful channel or also can be not so successful immediately, or it might have. Like, I have worked with many clients where we had 10 articles and we published them. We were sure that one of them was going to go off, and they didn't. Another time we launched 10 and we're like, this one's going to be the best. And it was not. It was another one took off. And then another time, you know, an article that had been okay and an algorithm came and move the needle, and suddenly that's the popular one. So when you're facing that entrepreneur question, like, how do you handle that uncertainty or bake that into the equation.
[00:05:33] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's really understanding the rules of the game. So one of my favorite things to say is the difference between an amateur and a pro is not their understanding of the game.
It's not their skill level. Rather, it's their understanding of the game. So the Amateur plays by the rules all the time. The pro knows when to break them.
So we see this a lot in sports, right, where a veteran player knows how to get away with a holding call. In football, we're recording this during the NFL playoffs.
There are certain things that you can do when you're a professional in a space that you kind of just know. So one of the things when it comes to SEO, Jeremy, you and I know this. Being in this space, the marketing space for a long time, SEO is the way to go. It's a foundational element to every marketing plan you can ever put out there.
However, it's like investing in a 401k plan. This is not something that we're going to see immediate returns on. And if you think that if you're like, I need to see returns this month, next month, two months from now, you probably need to gonna, you're gonna need to look at another channel that could be cold LinkedIn outreach, that could be cold email, that could be digital advertising that could be putting out flyers on car. There could be all sorts of other marketing channels that you go through. There's some that go really quick and you get snap results and you get that revenue flow going. And there are others that just take time.
[00:06:56] Speaker A: Right.
[00:06:56] Speaker B: And so it really depends on where you know what business you're in, what you're up to, what direction you had. I just had a call this morning, Jeremy, with a company that came to me looking for, you know, digital ad services.
And they're looking for CIOs chief information officers. And they, they have, it's a SaaS platform. They have a few customers already, but they only have a few. And so I told them they're not ready for digital ad stuff right now unless they have a boatload of cash that they're willing to test. And the reason being they don't have their messaging figured out yet. They don't have their positioning figured out yet.
So my recommendation to them was keep sending out messages on LinkedIn and interact with people that way and invest in SEO. Because the SEO, while it's going to be a long term investment, you're not going to see anything from it for, let's just say a year on average, maybe a little bit longer, maybe a little bit less.
You're still not going to see anything. So invest in a channel that's going to eventually pay off while you continue to do just every day, pounding the pavement, as it were, on LinkedIn.
[00:08:06] Speaker A: That makes sense. Thinking of SEO as a foundational piece that ties into these. And I've had other conversations about how SEOs need to better position themselves, cross channel and cross team to kind of cross those boundaries. Because we, we tend to get super focused on this technical SEO aspect or this link building aspect or this content marketing aspect. But there's so many cross channel ways to benefit your company by say, designing your content marketing to tie with your email outreach. Maybe your company had a big email list.
Knowing that you can create content that has an internal audience allows you the freedom for your metrics to not be so dependent on, oh, these have to perform organically because there is that mindset. I've been in a situation where the client's like, I'm not getting any leads. What can you do on SEO? I'm like, you're asking the wrong question.
Yes, there are some things that, that we could do that are probably going fix.
Maybe we can look at conversion rate. That's as close as you get to helping with closing leads and getting instant business.
Everything else is much more long term. You gotta go to different channels. But that doesn't mean that the content that you create shouldn't be pushable through another channel. I always likened it to in an octopus, like, the website is where the beak is, that's the head. And you munch things there and you send out your arms and you bring them in, whether it's on traditional social, whether you're on Slack Channel, on forums, on LinkedIn, on Quora.
Send your efforts out and bring them back. Because that's not owned media. You don't own Medium, you don't own Instagram. The there could be a presidential election and the owners could decide, hey, anything democratically related isn't going float up anymore.
Like overnight. Algorithms can shift. I was working with a client that had a network of regional Facebook pages and they were getting tons of organic traffic for real estate in like 2009. And they're like, I've printing money left and right, selling homes. This is great.
And they I'm like, you got to fix your site because you don't own Facebook. Three years later, Facebook groups are dead, Facebook pages were dead, and all of that organic traffic evaporated. Unless you're willing to pay up the wazoo.
[00:10:59] Speaker B: Yep.
Yeah. And that's, that is the difference between what used to be true and what is true now. Right. So like when we think about, you know, again, 30, 40 years ago, you put up a billboard, the billboard was there.
That's still true. The billboard just stays there.
You know, you did an ad on TV it got eyeballs. Everybody used to watch linear TV. We'd watch ABC, we'd watch NBC and we'd, I mean, 20 years ago we were watching the Office, brand new, and everybody was, people were engaging with it on a regular basis and that those channels still exist. But even within those channels there's nuance. Right. So like we have a client that is a well known knife company and they ran ads every single Monday Night Football this past season, only on streaming services, not on linear. So they had to be on ESPN plus, they had to be on YouTube TV. They had to be. Right. They had to be somewhere else.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:04] Speaker B: And it was very, very successful.
That being said, that channel didn't exist 20 years ago. It was just TV.
[00:12:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:13] Speaker B: You know, and, and there are ways to change everything. And to your point, Jeremy, it's like we think, oh, look, I, I have a friend built up a huge TikTok following.
Huge. Well over 150,000 was monetizing it, doing great. It disappeared for a day.
Now the algorithm's weird. He's like, dude, everything's kind of gone.
So there's.
You have to own your own property. Website's a great place, like the one place you can really do that outside of a physical location. And SEO is the bedrock of what drives people to the site.
[00:12:54] Speaker A: What do you think of the moniker that even your website, the performance is questionable. But in thinking about your email acquisition or your contact acquisition as the true well that you can always dip out of,
[00:13:13] Speaker B: I think it depends on how you're using it. Right. So like when I think about people's websites, I think about it as if it were a storefront. So a lot of people, whenever they build a website, they don't think about it that way. They think I'm giving information out. So they look at it more like an old school trifle.
And I think, and I assume this for you too, Jeremy, I'm like, no, we got to tell people where to go, make a purchase or do a transaction at least. Even if that's just, hey, I want to meet with you. Where do they go to do that? And so many people don't have that. They don't think through it that way. But it would be odd if I went to, you know, coffee shop I'm sitting in front of and there was no counter, you know, and they were like. And it was like, hey, I came in to get some coffee and I'm like looking around and no one's there to help me. But there's all these pamphlets about coffee this is what a lot of sites that I see are like. There's a lot of pamphlets about coffee. Yeah, there's nothing there.
So when it comes to your email newsletter list for service providers and for D2C, like just upselling a product.
Yeah, your newsletter, your list is vitally important.
But I know a lot of companies that have lists of 20, 30, 50, 100,000 that they don't do anything meaningful with.
What I mean by that is they've got a list, they email them a newsletter that's like, here's what's cool, here's what's happening. By the way, did you see it's Jim Bob's work anniversary, has been here three years. So, you know, and it's like, weird.
[00:14:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:44] Speaker B: Instead of going, hey, if we're gonna have this, then it has to be something that's driving leads, driving sales, driving web traffic. Like, it's gotta be driving an actual business modality that's getting us where we want to go. And I think so often, brother, and I'm sure, again, I'm sure you see this too. It's why part of the reason why you're asking people let those, those email lists just go stagnant and then they try and reengage it every now and again and they'll do a campaign and they're like, I don't know, I just didn't get that much traction. It's like, yeah, they don't expect to get good content from you. Like, yeah, that's, that's it. So I think like everything, you have to love it and nurture it and lean on it.
[00:15:25] Speaker A: I think what I, what I am seeing is underdeveloped, both in SEO and in digital marketing is an attitude of, Of over focus on initial acquisition and not a focus on maintaining that engagement. Because the first, you know, the upfront cost of training an employee is always greater than retaining an employee. And the same is true of clients. The upfront cost of going and getting a new shiny customer to come in the door is always greater than getting somebody who you've already sold to buy again. And I think in all channels, we, a lot of digital marketers are guilty of this, but a lot of SEOs don't think about the reacquisition process. We think about search volume and we think, oh, they're, they're going to, you know, I want to reach the unbranded people, you know, who are doing that volume. Oh yeah, you're branded is great, but I want to grow your unbranded, you're like, well, yeah, I do. You do, but they add your name when they know you. And you should be trying to get people to know you more. And you should have a plan and a strategy to, you know, if it is a storefront, then you want an area for people to hang out and congregate and, and do stuff with each other there. That draws more people in because other people's word of mouth is so much more effective than if you have to constantly be phishing people and pulling people in. If you're constantly sending out people to push them through the doors or lure them, you know, dangle $2 bills to, to bring them in the shop that's a lot more expensive than somebody really liked the coffee niche. It's a good environment.
They're going to bring somebody else in and then you've got two customers.
I don't think enough people take that cafe approach.
And with the ubiquity of so many fantastic tools for any website, it's a drop in the bucket to add, you know, discourse, which is like a forum, or create a part of your site that is content that's aimed specifically at people that already know about you. That's not like, yeah, Bob's birthday, who cares? Nobody cares about Bob. But like, solutions to make this process go faster, you know, like to use this thing better like that. It's not even like there's always that top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel. I think there's another side to the funnel too, of like, they've paid, they've engaged their customers, their clients.
How do you, what, what continued value do they. Do you give them to turn them into brand ambassadors?
[00:18:28] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I think there's also the element too, right, where there's the loyalty factor. So, like using the cafe model, you know, a lot of places they, they take like your credit card poll punch points now or whatever on stripe or square, and it's like, hey, do you want to opt in for rewards points? Sure. And then eventually, over time, you get something back. So, like, for me, there's a. I take a CBD to go to sleep every night. Super helpful. For me, the brand that I buy from, they give me loyalty points. So like once a quarter, I don't have to pay for any CBD gummies because it's, I've already paid for it and I'm getting reward points.
[00:19:11] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: And so they're, they're. It's easy for me to recommend them and do that. The other thing that I think that a lot of companies miss out on. And it happens more with services than it does with tangible goods. Because there is something in our, our brains, right, that just goes, that's not tangible.
Therefore it's harder to think about it like that. But I, I do believe that doing this model really does work. Where we go, okay, I get, I get what that looks like for a coffee shop, for restaurant, for whatever.
I don't quite get that when I think about my friends that have an SEO agency or an accounting firm.
You know what I mean? And there is something that we should be thinking about one of the ways that I've found.
So word of mouth is still the most powerful marketing channel out there, period, Full stop. There's all sorts of research around it. So to your point, Jeremy, like, that's a big deal. One of the things that we found in all of the firms that I've owned, we've done referral programs where we've paid people like, hey, we will give you money if you refer somebody to us. And then we've said, hey, we want to refer people to you.
Yeah, would you do the same in return?
The volume difference.
You would think that if I pay someone, I'm gonna get more. No, they love the goodwill of, hey man, I just want to send people to you.
[00:20:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:38] Speaker B: Cuz like, I know, you know, if I ever know that somebody needs a roofing service in Dallas, send them your way. You know what I mean? And that just makes a felt difference of we're on the same team, we're helping each other out. How can I help you out, Dave? Yeah, well, man, I'm looking for people that are, you know, looking to do some advertising in the digital space. If you know anybody, just love a reference. Oh, dude, I've got three people sick.
So I think that if you keep the currency in a space where it's like goodwill, we're all trying to help each other out. That goes a long way.
[00:21:09] Speaker A: I think. You know, as humans we are very relational. You know, we came from tribes, we came from groups and you know, there is that inbuilt mechanism of wanting to be in the in group and there's, there is kind of a negative perception of like trying to buy your way in to somebody's good graces. Like it can be useful. And it's not to say that straight up referral programs or straight up affiliate programs are necessarily bad, but it's kind of that boundary line that MLMs, you know, play around on of.
Okay, well, they're being awful friendly. Are they awful friendly because they Want me to buy shampoo or are they awful friendly? Because they're awful friendly. So I think there's a little bit of wariness that some people have developed reasonably because everything that we have in marketing, somebody exploits. You know, like I register a domain within seconds, I've got spam emails, spam form submissions.
You would think that WordPress by now would have had out of the box some sort of instant solution to prevent, like their basic forms from being spammed or comments from being abused. But no, here we are year 20 and we're still getting the same, even worse form spam out of the box.
What do you think about the approach of substituting, you know, a traditional form with a, you know, sign into our Slack channel or a jump into our, our. Our sales portal or our community, like having, having that conversion going somewhere, either whether that's Discord or Slack, or a custom platform where instead of asking them to fill out a form, which we know that, sadly, I think the metric is 80% of submitted forms on websites that are valid are not replied to, period.
Period.
So these small businesses are terrible at it to begin with, of actually following up. And also the immediacy is gone too, with a form submission.
And you are also creating that extra friction of.
I've received personally dozens of form submissions of people looking to contact. I reply back in depth, nothing. Ghost. Like, why did you contact me then? Like, what the heck, man? Like within minutes or within hours. So I think. What do you think about that type of approach of thinking community, opening those doors, finding ways to, you know, make that instant contact?
[00:24:08] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think a couple things there. One, I'm a big believer in not having forms on websites. If you're going to take a form submission, just take a calendar meeting instead. Could be 15 minutes, could be 30.
Have them get just directly on your calendar. That's number one when it comes to the community question. Jeremy, it's all. Again, there's.
This is one of those things where it's like, there's no wrong way to eat a Reese's.
[00:24:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:34] Speaker B: Just know what you're doing. So if you're going to do the community route. Yeah, it's a really interesting route, brother, because people don't have a box for that in their mind. They don't expect that that's going to be the call to action. So it's kind of fun.
[00:24:47] Speaker A: Right.
[00:24:47] Speaker B: And also all of your branding, if you're going to do it that way, all of your marketing needs to be geared towards join the community, join the Community. Join the, Join the community so that they, when they see an ad, when they see an email, when they see organic social posts, they go, oh, well, I'm going to join the community. That's what I'm doing. That's the call to action that I'm taking versus showing up to the site and assuming I'm going to fill out a form.
Okay, Booking a meeting is adjacent to filling out the form or calling them adjacent, but not the joining community is totally, totally different. So I just think it has to be one of those things where you have to know it's going to take longer in the sales cycle if you're going to do it that way.
[00:25:32] Speaker A: Right?
[00:25:32] Speaker B: You're building trust rapport on the front end. And I do think that there's, there are a lot of people who are more built to do that sort of selling, you know, where they build a relationship with a person. That person comes to them, approaches them and says, hey, Jeremy, I'm, I'm interested in your services.
What do we do?
And that's very different than my approach is like, dude, I'll just talk to you and tell you if I can help you or not. And a lot of times I tell people, you're not ready for me, but here's some free consulting, right? And so my stance is always to give, give, give, give, give, realizing that those people come.
So many stories over the past 20 years of people just being like, hey, I'm not ready for you. And then three, four years later, Dave, I saved your email. I loved our conversation. You helped us out so much. We finally got over this hump. We'd love to engage.
Let's get a time on the calendar, let's talk.
So I do think it's just a matter of understanding what the trade off is compared to a direct response of, let's have a meeting, here's to fill out a form.
If you're going to do the community route, just realize that that means you now have to maintain a community. It's a lot of work.
[00:26:48] Speaker A: That's true. The trade off is there of like, they're coming in warm, coming in hot.
And that might also speak to.
And I see businesses trying to solve this and SaaS trying to solve it for them. Of, oh, AI bots will handle the conversation for you and make the introduction and do all of the things for you.
I have as yet to have a thoroughly satisfying interaction with a chat interface on a website. I even had a situation with a newsletter that it gave an error message and said, contact Support.
I went to their support and it started a chat. Five minutes into the chat, the chat tells me, you can't get customer support at your free level. You have to pay for it.
I'm like, I'm on your free platform and you told me to contact you through support, your support, and now you're telling me there is no support.
Right.
[00:27:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
It's interesting right now with AI, right, because I think that it's, it's the new shiny object that everybody's like, ooh, fun.
And everybody's freaking out because of the implications.
We're just not, we're not close yet to having it function self serve, off the shelf for the general, even business, consumer. Yeah, it's not ready for prime time yet.
So it's fine. Like, I, I think that there are some things that are really helpful about AI. I'm actually speaking at an AI event this coming week.
There are things that can be, that AI can be leveraged for.
It's not ready to just go live and be your sales agent or your customer support or it's just not yet.
[00:28:42] Speaker A: I'm trying to remember whether it was Mike Buckbee or Morty Oberstein who said that AI is your least trained, worst informed public relations officer.
Yeah, you've got Copilot from Microsoft, which really isn't ready. You've got Gemini, which really isn't ready. GPT, which is really not actually ready.
And now they've slammed in these search components and they've got these LLM search things. People are like, oh, it's data from enterprise. What's the speed of light? Where's the local business near me that sells widgets that, that are for your left hand? Like, okay, the widgets are down at Jimbo's Shop. Okay, there is no Jimbo's Shop. They made it up.
Or if you really are Jimbo's Shop, then you have to feed the beast and try to figure out the game of showing up now in this second layer being really thorough and explicit, which I can tell you, I've done probably 500 technical SEO audits in my career, at least on different sites. And one, one site truly said everything that they did on every page, every form was tracked and submitted, full conversion rate, every page, everywhere was fully tracked accurately in Google Analytics once.
[00:30:12] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:30:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
And everybody else missed either literally not saying what they did. You know, it was a picture of restaurants. I'm like, oh, where's your restaurant? Like, no, no, we swap out.
We do rebranding for restaurants. Like, okay, the best customer Service is what you say on the homepage that does not communicate that you are a restaurant rebranding service.
So there's some fundamentals that people are missing and the robots are going to miss it too. They don't understand nuance.
[00:30:46] Speaker B: Right.
Yeah. And I think that if we.
My favorite thing to do with AI is to augment human capacity.
[00:30:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:56] Speaker B: So like it's great to.
I've done a few things with AI that I think are helpful in the marketing space in particular. So one is I tell the AI about myself, about clients, I educate it about it and then I help it come up with ideas together. We're like, it's like we're bouncing ideas off each other. We're coming up with new thoughts about campaigns we can run.
And it also allows me to. It knows my voice so I can say, hey, I need to send an email to so and so can you give me a draft of that? And it's like 80% there, you know, so it does save me some time.
[00:31:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:35] Speaker B: But it doesn't replace people.
[00:31:37] Speaker A: No.
[00:31:37] Speaker B: And that's true. I really think that we are further away from replacing people with AI than anyone would like to admit.
[00:31:46] Speaker A: I think that's true. I mean it's very useful. I can take the transcript, which is 30,000 words and I use it to find the quotes, what are the key quotes in the conversation which would be a pain in the butt to do by hand listening. When did he say that?
And then take this section that's telling you to do X, Y and Z. Can you turn this section into an SOP like standard operating procedure or highlight. Find SOPs in this conversation and give me the block of text around it. I find more discrete specific tasks are met with better success.
Especially at a scale of 30,000 word transcript.
It'll kind of do the task and then quit in the middle and be like you. Here you go. No, you only did wrote like three sentences. So you're right.
I think there's.
I don't think we've seen anything like this before. Of so many half assed software solutions. Baking in quarter baked mvp.
Not even M, not even.
Forget the V just MP minimum product. It's not even viable. It's just that's baked on top of this, on top of that.
So I think it's for digital marketing, for SEOs in general and for businesses using those tools. I think it just comes down to awareness of everything is half baked. So don't expect fully blown solutions out the gate.
[00:33:29] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And if you go into it with that mentality, then you're going to have better results, right? Because it's all about, what is it? Happiness is expectations minus reality. And you know, it's one of those things where if you go, oh, this is gonna. Everything's no, you're not gonna be able to replace staff. You're not like, if you go into it going, hey, this may free up some of my team. They, they may get four hours back a week of their time.
You're probably going to be happy, man, because there are some things that can help there. And I think that there's more automations like Zapier and make and all that actually lead to more time saved than anything that you're going to do with AI. And it's simply an automation.
So I think that there are some things that are a lot more established technology that actually yield more positive results as far as time saved, human time and power augmented than AI at the moment. And of course, as part of the conversation's been, right, Jeremy, that's going to change.
So it won't always be this way, but for the foreseeable future it is.
[00:34:43] Speaker A: So then I think it comes down to the reason why businesses are now harder to scale and I think will continue to become more difficult to scale, is because it's truly about neuroplasticity. It's not anybody can fit this cog. Pick up the stamp, stamp the piece of paper. Pick up the stamp, stamp the piece of paper.
Now you need to try to find employees or nurture your employees. Find people to work with, partners, collaborators in flexible models that where, hey, I can't tell you exactly what needs to be done to get this done. I need this done.
If you need me to handhold every second of that exact process the entire time from A to B, we're going to have a problem because this process is going to change next week, two months, a year. It's not going to stay the same. The predictability is gone. And I think a better appreciation of founders for the value of human capital is what I would push for.
Because I sat in, I was at a hosting company and I worked my way up from customer support reps, senior rep, support supervisor, marketing department, product manager. And I got into the big league room and they're like, oh, yeah, our budget's bad, we're overspending on human resources. Let's cut Johnny. He's getting paid the most. I'm like, guys, Johnny Camacho does the work of four of the other call reps. He can literally close emails Run a ticket and have a distinct conversation at the same time, like, sorry, we don't have the budget. He's the most expensive human resource.
They cut him and we had to hire four people to do half of his job.
Then six months after we lost his favorite customers, they're like, johnny's gone. Oh, man. And they left Churn increased company wide because they had to cut that one. Human resource was the biggest thing in their budget.
They couldn't have changed their CEO compensation. No.
[00:37:05] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I think that you're right on that too, man. Like, I. It's one of the things that gets lost for entrepreneurs and small business owners at some point is that the business is as good as the people.
And when you own a. When you're leading a massive corporation with 80,000 employees, if you cut 4,000 employees, 5% of the workforce, it's a huge number.
Statistically, that organization may have the ability to weather that sort of layoff.
A layoff.
I'm a huge believer in this. Layoff should only happen whenever the existence of the company is in danger.
Otherwise, to your point, Jeremy, executives and stakeholders need to cut themselves out. I've done this before. I've had to cut my salary to zero.
[00:38:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:08] Speaker B: I've had to take no money for a while. You know, the first firm that I started, I didn't take a paycheck for two years.
And then when I started paying myself, I paid myself 30 grand. That was it. You know what I mean? Like, it was just because. Because to your point, man, like, there are people on the team you can't afford to lose. And then there's the flip side of that. You have people. And I've also been in this camp too, Jeremy, where I got too precious with people.
[00:38:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:32] Speaker B: Where I got, you know. Well, this person's been with us for a long time. They understand what we're trying to do. And I don't know that there's anybody better out there. And then you go looking, you go, oh, I found a lot of people that are better out there. They're only 10% more expensive, you know, or they're the same price or whatever.
[00:38:48] Speaker A: Right.
[00:38:49] Speaker B: And so I think there is that element of really understanding who are the drivers in the organization, making sure they don't leave. To your point, Jeremy, it's like, I think that the pervasive wisdom is your A players would leave your organization for a 20% raise.
[00:39:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:08] Speaker B: So just give them the 20%.
And I've also done. Done that as well. I've taken pay Cuts in order to give that 20 raise to my A players and told them that. And that does something too. Right. Because then when you have somebody, you're like, hey, man, just so you know, I'm giving you a raise. We're taking on my paycheck. You're too important to go anywhere. The loyalty.
[00:39:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:31] Speaker B: Skyrockets. And they're like, so I've had a number of staff. They're just like, dave, I don't want to work with anybody else. And so I've worked with them in multiple businesses. Right. Just because they were like, dude, you're the best to work with. And I think that if you build that culture, you're going to attract great talent and great clients and great customers as a result.
[00:39:50] Speaker A: So I know you've got, like, broad experience across the board, kind of wrapping things up. I like to give, like, super duper actionable item.
After they listen to this, go do this, and it'll do this. And it's good because of it'll do this for you. So what's your super tactical action item?
[00:40:14] Speaker B: Yeah. So when you. When you ask that, Jeremy, are you asking for, like, something that they can go do to help their business today or something that they. Yeah, let's engage with me or.
[00:40:24] Speaker A: Well, I'm going to ask you, like, I'm going. Of course I'm going. Let you say where you're at and everything like that. So this is more like it's unscripted SEO. I'm assuming most people listening to this either do SEO or want to know more about SEO or would like to think they would like to know more about SEO.
So adjacent to that space on the spot.
[00:40:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that if you're looking to increase your SEO, what. One of the things that you can do that's really, really beneficial is backlinks. One of my favorite ways to do, to go get backlinks is being on podcasts just like this.
This is one of my favorite things to do, is have a meta conversation about this. So there are a few sites that you can go out there. The way that Jeremy and I got connected was on Pod Match, I believe.
And there's another site that I really like, Matchmaker FM. Podmatch, I think, is like 25 bucks or 30 bucks or something like that a month for a single user. And then Matchmaker FM is $130 for the year. Essentially, it's a mark. Those are both marketplaces where podcast hosts and podcast guests can meet. And so I have someone on my team that she Spends an hour a week and she'll reach out to 10 people, maybe, maybe eight. And out of those I'll get four to six people that are like, hey, we want you to be on the podcast. Yeah, those backlinks are really, really helpful and it gives you content to go share on your social media. Also helpful. Like there's so many benefits from this and if you're going to be scrappy about some of your backlinking and content, this is a great way to do it. I'm a huge advocate for it. And I'll also say that I've gotten so many leads out of being a guest on podcast, it's absolutely absurd. So I can't. The bang for the buck is so high for your SEO and lead generation. I can't recommend it strongly enough.
[00:42:22] Speaker A: 100%. Ben, you sold it. So where can people find you?
Where do you hang out? What's your social media poison?
What's your company name? How can people discover Dave?
[00:42:37] Speaker B: Absolutely. So yeah, if you want to go find me on social media, it's just Ealdval D Valley BV A L.
I'm active on Twitter, Instagram, Tiktoks where I'm most active and hopefully that is still a thing when this airs then additionally my my company is is called finch, just finch.com. you can just check us out there. We're performance marketing agencies so digital advertising in the E commerce and lead generation space is our bread and butter.
If you're a listener of this podcast and you're looking to do some paid advertising, I'd actually love to throw out a great offer Jeremy to your listeners if that's cool. Go for it. You can hit me up. It's just dave.valentine.com is my email. Mention the name of the podcast and we will run your ads for 90 days with no minimum ad spend for only 10% of what you spend to let you try before you buy. So it's that whole thing that Jeremy was talking about before. We actually lose money doing that, but it's an opportunity for us to invest in a bunch of different brands and entrepreneurs that are trying to grow their company and getting an outcome fast with digital ads. And it's a great way. As your company scales, you don't just need the foundation, you also need some other elements as well. So invest with Jeremy, do some SEO. When you're ready to grow up and evolve into doing some advertising, get some leads, get some sales going.
Hit me up with that email and be happy to work with you.
[00:44:05] Speaker A: Thanks so much for the conversation. Dave.
Yeah.
[00:44:08] Speaker B: Love being here, Jeremy. Thank you.
