Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: I am using AI a lot in terms of market research. My process for previously having worked with clients in terms of their marketing is I will go and find things on Reddit about their market, about their customer. Would go down like a Reddit massive deep dive research. I will go scout the Internet for information about the company, about the customers, the customer's needs. The research component used to take me days, if not weeks to to do per customer. As AI thing has made research is such an easy thing to do. Like it just made it an absolute breeze. Rather than going through and trying to figure this information out myself, I can ask ChatGPT or Claude and say, hey, here's my customer, here's their website, here's who I think their customers are. Give me a list of 20 or 50 articles or, you know, websites. That's going to give me everything I need to understand what their customers go through.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I'm here with William Wang of Black Belt Consulting.
I'm curious about your life experience that has brought you to this point and what inspired you to combine these disparate elements and bring them into the marketing that you're doing right now.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: Yeah. So first and foremost, thanks for having me, Jeremy. It's great to, to be here and, you know, have a chat about, well, things in life.
So I guess a quick summary of my life experiences was that, you know, grew up here in Sydney, Australia, you know, in probably one of the worst suburbs around. So I grew up kind of, you know, that kind of typical immigrant spring where we didn't really have much but, you know, it was still a pretty good life. Parents wanted me to follow the very safe path of, you know, becoming either a doctor, engineer or something like that. I was not smart enough to do that. So it defaulted the part of, to the path of going to corporate it. So the reason why I went to corporate it was because my dad was in it and I just figured, look, this is just going to be an easy path. He can help me with assignments, things like that. But I kind of wander around for a long while. Went into just a default job. I became a business data analyst, which kind of means I was just spreading, staring at spreadsheets from, you know, eight to six every single day and just hated my life.
The problem with that was, I mean, the challenge with that is that I was on a pretty good salary. So as someone who was, you know, 27, 28, I was making 150, 150K a year. But I really wanted to you know, I've always dreamt of going out on my own.
But when you've got that salary and you know, by that time I was married and my wife had my second child, I was like, hey, if I don't do this now then it's never going to get done. But how do you replace $130,000 a year salary, right? Like that's pretty difficult. So what ended up happening was I tried all this other stuff. I tried like E commerce, I tried affiliate marketing. But it's really hard to hit that level in terms of revenue by selling a 20, 30 or you know, 20 or $30 widget where you've got a 10 or 20% margin on it. So I ended up looking at a few things and you know, copywriting and consulting and actually doing marketing for people ended up being this thing that you can charge two or three thousand dollars a month for. And at figured look, if I can just get three or four clients per month, make 12 to 15,000 per month, I'm sorted. Like I'm sweet, I can work from home, I don't have to go on the bus every morning to go to work. Life's okay. So long story short, in the business side of things, I stumbled my way around for about two years. It took me about two years to hit that mark properly. And during that time I made every mistake in business.
Super introverted. So I didn't, I didn't like the selling, I didn't like the marketing of it. So it kind of was like this move that if in hindsight, if I'd known how difficult or what I needed to do to get to the point, I don't know if I would have done it. But you know, long, long story short, three years, two and a half year journey to hit that point. And then from that point on like we, I made every single mistake to the point where I couldn't make any more mistakes. And then the business kind of took off and I, I always say I accidentally built my previous business into a seven figure business without really meaning to, it was just like happened and you know, we just had to keep growing to keep chasing revenue. At a certain point I started to figure things out to enjoy business. And that's when you know, things, things happened.
Yeah. And then last point of that story is I sold that business about, about 12 months ago. And then you know, I've been training Brazilian jiu jitsu the whole way through and you know, got my blackout maybe three or four years ago. And so when I was thinking about this new business. It's like, well, what, what do we do? I still love marketing. I, I still want to consult, but let's bring some, some of the personal branding elements.
That was kind of the birth of.
[00:04:37] Speaker B: A blackbird consultant that I started my own karate adventure in the past four months and just graduated to yellow belt.
So definitely feel, you know, something in myself. You know, a lot of your points echo some of the things that I've been through myself of, you know, being in a corporate, you know, job. I worked for homes.com and just, you know, was stuck in this corporate nightmare where they thought a 2% annual raise was generous and would fight with employees over like $50 bonus. And it's just a soul crushing experience and I'm like, I got to do something else, I have to learn something else. And fortunately, you know, the skill that I was learning, SEO, you know, opened up doors and then ended up working for a really good software company for a little while doing SaaS and learning product marketing myself. So I definitely feel you on that side of making all of the possible mistakes of because at that point I kind of tried to launch my own, you know, freelancing. I've done, you know, all of the different, various versions. I've worked in house, I've worked for a good agency, I've worked for a bad agency, had a successful stint as a freelancer and unsuccessful stint as freelancer, you know, and everything in between. So what has it been? What has been your journey like working with a team and what are those soft skills that you've had to learn over the years to make things happen?
Um, and not just. Or maybe I'm putting words into your mouth, but is there something to those soft skills of being able to work together, put together teams and functions versus just doing the solopreneur thing. I'm just the, the entire thing carrying this.
[00:06:25] Speaker A: That's a really good question. So I mean, I'll give you some context into it. When I first started the business, my, my first business, I, I didn't think anything of like, I just thought, you know, I could easily do it myself and get to 12, 15k a month. And I very quickly figured out it was really difficult to like there's so many small things as an entrepreneur and a business owner you have to look at, right? There's like invoicing, chasing invoices, paying the taxes, doing all a million little scheduling appointments, like the million little things that it's really nice to get help for in my current business and in the businesses I'm about to acquire, I'm looking at teams as in as an AI enabled. So I think the teams thing has really changed. So there's obviously, and I'm kind of rambling here, there's obviously there's a lot of soft skills. You have to have a team. But in having grown a seven figure business, I realized that I like having a very small core team of highly competent people.
People who you don't necessarily have to micromanage or have a look at what they're doing every single day of the week.
I rather have competent people who know how to get their job done and you know, who are a players. So that's one thing that I've realized. Right. Well, my team in my last business we had about 20 people at our peak or about 25 at our peak. And it just got a little bit too much. Like it's just, you know, at 25 people we needed about three levels of management.
And because most of my team were about 90% of my team were virtual, we had about four or five local here in Australia and then we had about 20 in the Philippines. But to manage a virtual workforce, it's really difficult. Like you can't turn around and ask somebody a question. It's easy to get distracted by tasks that you know and you go into this massive rabbit hole where, where team members spent a day working on something or turn around or like that wasn't what we wanted to work on at all. So it's kind of, you know, very difficult to manage in that term. Soft skills. Obviously, you know, you have to learn about how can I inspire people, how can I lead people. But I also think in this day and age of the way that I'm going to build new businesses is really just, you know, give people a goal, give people a vision and then hire people who are competent and disciplined enough to, to, to do, do what they need to do.
[00:08:35] Speaker B: I think that's sometimes one of the harder things is figuring out where to let go of the back of the bike. You know, as a father, you know, I've got a 7 year old and a 12 year old and there's that moment where you're running alongside and holding the back of the bike and you know, you've set up everything in motion and if you don't let go, it's not going to work. But it does take that test of faith of I've got this, let's go, let's can I, you know, so definitely a vetting process. What are some of the ways that you've been, you know, finding talent or skill that kind of meets those criteria. Because obviously, you know, we're not in a day and age where I need a PhD to help me start my new business. You know, you might not even necessarily be looking for somebody who has a four year degree or might even accept somebody with an associate's or how do you go about finding the talent that fits that? That's right. Sized for your needs.
[00:09:37] Speaker A: I tend to start at the role that we actually need. So then the way that I've hired and I'm hiring in future is I'll look at their role and go is this a role that I. That needs a lot of creativity? Is this a role that needs a lot of thinking experience?
Do they have to have done this before or is this something that we can teach? Right. So is this an issue of we haven't done this role before, we need the experience or is this an issue of we don't have capacity to do something within the team but we have the SOPs and the processes in place where somebody can come in and easily learn the role.
If it's a role where I need more experience, I need to give the burden of responsibility to that person. Generally speaking, I will in future hire that locally to me.
So I will look at things like going to LinkedIn jobs or try and poach off of bigger companies. So I'll message people on LinkedIn who are in the roles that I want to hire for.
That's how I go to hire those roles. If it's more of a role where we have the processes, it's a matter of it's more of a junior role. There's not as much independent thinking required. Typically I will try and source that role from the Philippines or some other country where it can be done virtually just because the cost arbitrage is actually quite a good play.
So if that's the play, then I'd look at sites like onlinejobs.ph is probably my favourite. Upwork is great as well and just understand that, you know, you don't necessarily need to hire somebody who's full time. You can just get contractors or freelancers who are very, very good but don't have to sit with you or sit next to you in an office.
[00:11:11] Speaker B: I think there's definitely that component of making those workflow decisions that is a lot easier when you have a defined SOP and that's an acronym, you know, Standard Operating Procedure Procedures that as a freelancer I was kind of totally opposed, opposed to that personally because I viewed, you know, myself as a solopreneur, you know, SEO consultant. I'm going to do this boutique each time and you know, each, each business is unique and I want to treat it, you know, and I kept finding, figuring out that, oh, you know what, I keep doing the same thing again and again.
So maybe then, okay fine, I'll bite the bullet and I'll make a template for my SEO audit.
And actually there was an incredible amount of freedom in that because then I wasn't reinventing the wheel every single time before I put it on the bike to drive it, you know, to ride it somewhere. So what's been your experience with documentation with SOPs, with setting up structures for success to be able to, you know, hit criteria or goal in your goals in your.
[00:12:20] Speaker A: Yeah, so previously and with my current business, I'll speak about my previous business because that's the one that I actually had to implement a whole bunch of SOPs and things like that. Four weeks. Whereas consulting at the moment is, is kind of a bit more freedom based. Like, you know, we obviously tailor the structure depending on the clients that we're working with. But in the agency that I was running before, in the very early days, what I would do is I would go and just shoot loom videos of me doing a task.
So something simple like, for example, here's how we onboard a client, here's how we invoice a client. I just go and record a loom video. I'd hit record and say, hey, here's what I'm doing now. And I just go through and type it. And then I sent a loom video to my, my operations person who wasn't my operations person at the time. She was just a virtual assistant. But you know, through time and for working with me for about eight or 10 years, she, she became my director of ops just because she was just amazing at what she actually did. But she just take the loom video and take and go through and follow the same process. And she would be the one who creates SOP documents because she's the one taking screenshots as she's going through. So that was my kind of cheat or kind of hack hack to do it. I don't have the patience. I'm not a very operations or detailed person in terms of admin the operation. So I probably wasn't the right person to do the ops. So if you, you know, if you're the same way, if you'd like. I'm very much the big picture creative copywriter and I like to just sit here and just write things down on paper, whereas like, you know, pushing the buttons, things like that. Somebody else is generally better than me on my team. So they were the ones who created it, but obviously I'm the one. You know, if you can't create an SOP if you don't understand what you're trying to do, but it's also hard to create an SOP if you're not de detail orientated in the operation side. It's probably better to have that mix of, you know, do it once, do it a couple of times, but have somebody else watch you and document you to create the sop.
[00:14:07] Speaker B: I'm curious what your experience has been so far with leveraging AI and LLM based technology. Both let's. Because I see that as like two sides to the same coin. There's how you leverage it internally for ops and managing things, executing internally and supporting your marketing process. And then there's the flip side of, of, you know, Michael McDougall, my friend, calls it your least trained customer support representative.
So I feel like there's two conversations to have. So let's talk on the one side in terms of like operations, in terms of marketing, you know, effectiveness, what are the upsides and downsides to the tools that have been rolling out to professionals like us?
[00:14:53] Speaker A: Yeah, really good question. And I think something that's on everybody's mind at the moment, right? Like it's a, it's a hot topic in terms of operations.
You know, it's funny because I think operationally the way that we're using AI is we don't use it a heck of a lot.
But most of the software pieces that we do use, for example, a billing or stripe or things like that, they're starting to build AI into it. And so I think the AI component of those is more just for like reporting and finding trends, things like that.
I am using AI a lot in terms of market research.
My process for, you know, previously having worked with clients in terms of their marketing is I will go and find things on Reddit about their market, about their customer, or go down like a Reddit, you know, just a massive deep dive. Research, I'll look at, look at association websites, I'll go scout the Internet for information about the company, about the customers, the customer's needs. And the research component used to take me days, if not weeks to, to do per customer.
Whereas the AI thing has made research just such an easy thing to do. Like it just made it an absolute breeze. Right. So rather than going through and trying to figure this information out myself. I can ask ChatGPT or Claude and say, hey, here's my customer, here's their website, here's who I think their customers are giving A list of 20 or 50 articles or websites that's going to give me everything. I need to understand what their customers go through.
And so obviously within marketing, what I really need to understand is what are the pains, frustrations and goals that, that the end user has. Right, because they're the ones who are going to buy the products.
AI can come through and create this picture for me of, hey, your end customer is Mary. You know, she's 32, she's married. When she wakes up in the morning, her husband's ready up, he's getting ready for work. She's got work as well, but she's also got to get the kids ready for, for, for school. The alarm's going up, she's tired, but she has to drag stuff at it. Like it just gives you this amazing story from the perspective of the customer. And before I was the one who had to go and create that story or I was the one who had to go and create and look at, you know, comments on, on, on websites and you know, look at what people are saying. But now that's kind of getting delivered in a matter of minutes rather than days or weeks. So obviously that being said though, with AI there's just so much bs like it hallucinates so much stuff all the time. So you've got to be very, very careful. And so the standard rule I've got at the moment is nothing that we do that gets delivered to clients or that we tell clients to, to deliver for themselves. None of that is actually AI done.
So the output is still very, you know, hands on, human. But the research piece of stuff that, you know, that used to take us a lot longer, that can be AI assisted essentially.
[00:17:37] Speaker B: I like that mentality because I see that too. You know, even with, you know, I'm going to be transforming our dialogue here afterwards and handing over, you know, a version of it and I have to be like very conscientious and scan through because I've, I've generated some in the past and it's invented parts of the conversation and then asked, did you make that up? No. Are you sure? Oh yes, you're right. I'm sorry. There was a comic that I saw of like this magician that was, had a chatgpt bird that said, oh, the flame, the spell is this and they set themselves on fire. Like that wasn't the right spelling. I'm so sorry. You're right. That was this set yourself on fire spell. There's this moment here where it's kind of like figuring out the downside of having an eternal yes, ma' am created this digital assistant with, with its default is deference.
It lives to please, and it's going to use math to make up something.
And that something might be mostly true or it might be partly fictional.
Like, that's, that's a strange moment for us to have kind of this beta test technology, right? Like, if, if they tried to roll out this level of AI in 2012, it would have been just utter, like these companies would have been shut down for malpractice of releasing these models into the wild with such a huge error rate. You know, like you are getting, you know, Google out there saying, you know, adding gasoline to kitchen recipes, like really obvious mistakes that in the quality controls of just 10 years ago would, would have been impossible to sustain. What do you think it is about where we're at and technology that's, you know, letting us slide so much on, on something like AI hallucination?
[00:19:33] Speaker A: That's such a great question. I don't know. I mean, it could be partly human nature, right? Like, I feel like as things get easier, people just expect things to get done faster and with less effort. I feel like that could be part of it. And everybody just wants something done quickly like nobody wants to and obviously generalizing very much. Right. But, you know, there's less people who are willing to go and put in the hard yards or, you know, and this is going to sound like complaining, but a lot of the people that I start interviewing or that I'm interviewing for roles, they'll come out of university or like college and just expect a hundred thousand dollars a year with very limited experience or, you know, not having put the time and effort in. And I feel like. And it's not just, you know, people who have young people, obviously there's other people I've interviewed who, who are, are as young, but for some reason still expect a lot more than, than, than what the role's going for or, you know, what, what actually matches in my mind what salary is or things like that. So I think it's just maybe, yeah, it's a, it's a big question and it's a big answer. Maybe just the fact that people expect a lot for, for very little these days, or they just want speed and ease and they're just used to having things being super easy, super fast. And so It's a matter of like, well, yes, I can spend weeks getting this 100% right, or if an AI model can give me the answer.
And it's sometimes right, sometimes yes, 50, 50, or like 60% right. I'd rather have the answer now in a matter of minutes rather than having to put the time and the effort in the research in it. It might take me weeks. So potentially that, that could be it. Yeah, I mean, love to get your thoughts because it's actually such a good question. And yeah, I just don't know the answer.
[00:21:11] Speaker B: I think I was reading an article that Matt diggity pushed on LinkedIn and it was sourcing from a recent Google research which was pointing out that search behavior has changed and that actually the number that AI overviews tend to actually increase the number of queries that people are putting in to discover the same information. And it was kind of counterintuitive because from, from my own marketing perspective, we're seeing kind of a shrinking of the number of clicks that we're getting through to our science.
But the research from Google is pointing out that there's actually more people that when they want to learn about Taekwondo, they're not researching and pulling up a site. Instead they're pulling up YouTube videos. And if they're wanting to find out more about, you know, the current trends of SEO, they're not reading as many blog posts, but they're trying to find active forums or they're trying to find the right subreddit where the discussion is going on, or a Slack channel or a community. And so the search behavior, behavior has become almost more shallow in certain ways, you know, broader. People are expecting, you know, more, more, more faster. So it's like that easiness thing that you're talking about of like, more, better, faster results.
But they were pointing out that it also, with less pressure, you know, there tends to be more questions that get asked to solve the same, you know, question which, you know, like, that's, that's its own, you know, snake eating, its own tail situation of like, okay, well, Google just admitted that its results are crap and that people have to do multiple, multiple searches, breaking down more specific and more specific questions to try to get even closer to an answer. Because search is kind of breaking in certain ways. But at the same time, there's also, you know, a lot more specificity in you, the queries that people are putting in. It's, it's not, oh, oh, I need a wall in my backyard. It's, oh, you know, tell me the value and benefit of getting a precast concrete wall versus getting installed, you know, a chain link fence or a wood fence, you know, those type of deeper comparative things.
You know, used to be something that, where, you know, the expected search behavior was you'd find an article, you'd go deep into it and then it might of the answer there. But now there's kind of this like multimodal, you know, unlocking nodes, this query fan out model that, you know, Mike King and others in the SEO industry are talking about of, you know, how LLMs are stacking queries to build the answers to it. But that means that people are more likely to run down those thought chains which, you know, that's a positive and a negative, you know. And as we flip over from that conversation of how a, how we use AI on, to execute on the business, it comes to how, how are we fronting, you know, confronting this robot sandwich situation? You know, there's this conundrum, this of hey, you need to write for humans, not search engines. But in reality, humans aren't even coming to your site, they're bots. And so you're using a robot to augment the content that you're presenting, which is then presented to a bot, which is then transmuted into a snippet in AI for the actual end customer and may even as we move forward, come with extra operations to place an order or to get in touch and leave a voicemail or to schedule a reservation. You know, that certainly is, you know, part of Google's vision. So it has to be part of our marketing methodology to kind of bridge that gap of right for humans and robots. But not like a robot, but using a robot because you got to keep up with your competitors in terms of scale but also address the intent. It's like an ever, you know, thinning needle that we have to thread through. So what's your position on the information marketplace right now when it comes to copywriting? You know, love, I respect that digging in of understanding who the model is, who, who is the audience that you're addressing. But at the end of the day, what's your mindset around how you're crafting that content? Is it, you know, audience specific in terms of like, this is how I talk to people who get to my site. Do I change that for a particular platform that I'm trying to distribute to? What's your approach when it comes to distribution?
[00:26:02] Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting too because obviously, you know, I geek out about copyright and I kick out about, you know, every single word that goes onto a page. But then you're very right in that, you know, if how people are consuming is changing in terms of not even hitting the page, they're just using snippets and doing all of that, like how does that affect it? So I'm, there's, I segment in, in my mind and you know, remains to be seen if this is correct or not. But I segment things that, for instance, if I'm writing blog posts, I, I, I know now that, you know, I can be a little bit more fluid in terms of how I write just because likely that post gets picked up by AI rather than a human and actually showing a snippet. But my thought process around all of that is I've got to create media differently depending on the platform. So I'm very bullish on video media, for example. So I about to dive deep and invest a lot into my own YouTube channel, own video. And I think that's where consumption is actually going. And give me one second sneeze. It's, it's hay fever season for me. So I know this is just going off, but I'm thinking about, you know, the consumption model of people and for me, if it's copy that I'm writing for a funnel for an ad, I'm still very much of the opinion of this is has this has to be perfect because that's media that you're pushing onto somebody, right? So if I'm running meta ads, for example, example, I know that it's a real human, or generally speaking, a real human that's consuming the copy that goes onto the meta ad itself. And so I will still take all the time and effort I need to create that copy. If it's a YouTube channel, right, a YouTube video, the way I'm writing the script and the way that I'm presenting the video, it's very human and human. So I'm stripping out everything, but it's still very, very thoughtful, very contained, very much following afloat.
Whereas now if it's for like a blog or something like that, yeah, I'll use a little bit of AI assistance for that. So really depend on the channel that I'm writing for just in terms of how careful I am and how much I'm using AI to supplement that, that's.
[00:28:05] Speaker B: A great segue because I was talking with Matt Brooks of SEO Tarek that I think that the golden age of SEO being Google only or Google centric and digital marketing in general, relying so heavily just on Google has come to an end and cross channel Marketing is having a heyday. So with that comes the difficulty of choosing which channels to leverage. And what are the indicators that something a different way might yield more results? Whether that's going, you know, and hosting IRL in real life events, using Facebook organically, using, you know, organic on, on secondary social, or whether it's paid ads, email, you know, physical mailers. So what's your strategy with your clients in understanding the marketplace and understanding where should you be participating? How do you spread that out to have the most impact?
[00:29:06] Speaker A: Again, it depends on the business. So I'll talk a little bit about my own business at the moment and then potentially, you know, for, for some different business types. But in my own business, the way that I look at it is I've got to match consumption with where my people are. So I'm going bullish on a couple of key areas. And this is, you know, just to give you context, I never used to be like a content or a social media media guy. You know, my thoughts in the past were can I send cold emails directly to my audience or can I run ads and actually put my ads directly in front of the right people? I'm still bullish on both of those. Like I'm still sending cold emails to the market and I'm seeing, you know, they're effective. I'm still running ads and seeing that they're effective as well. In fact, both of them have actually turned around and become even more effective over the past year or two. But I also realize fundamentally that the brand element, like is that's so hard to replicate in terms of direct response stuff like the brand. Yes, it takes longer, yes, it's harder to measure. But I've just seen people who have built, you know, smallest, you smallest channels on YouTube and on Instagram, but have phenomenally big results from it. So I'm, I'm definitely going to be using those channels. The flow for me is because I'm such, consulting, such a, you know, business where people need to know who I am before they work with me, right? They need to know what my experiences are, what I've done, what I can help them do, my track record.
So I need to show that. And for me, the best way to show that is through YouTube and also social media. So YouTube's the big one for me. I'm investing a lot into that this year. And then Instagram, surprisingly, has been good for me as well. I've only just started on Instagram, but even with like a very small audience, I'm picking up a few hundred Views per video, which is very surprising to me.
The right views, I'm not sure but you know, the fact that we've, I can post a really drill up and get long term growth and every single day it grows and more people see it. That's kind of surprising to me because it means that the content's sticking around, which for me is, you know, I don't like creating content once and then having it just disappear into the efa. Right. And I used to be, I used to be a big fan of LinkedIn because, you know, you could get more from there, but it just feels like it's so transactional and kind of day by day at the moment. So I'm a little bit bearish on a platform like LinkedIn, but a little bit more bullish on like video content now. But you know, that's just consulting.
[00:31:23] Speaker B: Right.
[00:31:23] Speaker A: For my clients it could be different. Like if you're in E Comm or if you've got a software company, there might be the right play because software, I mean, you know, people searching for what you, what your software can do. Do you need to be on YouTube? I don't know. So it really does depend on like how your audience wants to consume and where your audience are.
[00:31:39] Speaker B: Yeah, I find with software it is very difficult to maintain like a good video presence mostly because if you are, are good at SaaS, your platform itself is changing, should be changing consistently. Like if you have an active product manager pushing, you know, modifications then you know, you have to really commit to providing like a new update, new updated version of that video showing that particular feature because one release and it moves over to another corner and, or maybe that feature gets pushed into another subsection. So that can be very difficult to keep up that medium as a marketing method. Although it does have its own, you know, benefit to have that feature release as the engine of your marketing and like featuring what's come out. But that also requires a really good connection between the developers, your, your product manager and the marketing team to align all the way through and consistently be able to do that. If you are, that's, it's a fantastic method. But yeah, there's other, other plays that are, if you don't have that going for you, you know, for SaaS, there's definitely, you know, a little bit safer to, you know, focus on the content marketing, the written word, you know, the help documents, thinking about, you know, satisfying as many of the customer support queries before they happen. With your marketing, you know, being a good provider for your own clients becomes a Great marketing channel. So it's not limited there. But I'm curious, when it comes to, you know, physical services or consulting with, with somebody doing, you know, installing pools on the service side of things, what's been your recent experience and what's your go to strategy for marketing mix and approach for, for service based businesses?
[00:33:29] Speaker A: Yeah, so service based businesses, I think, you know, I work with a bunch of them. I think they're actually great businesses because they're, generally speaking, unless you've got franchises across the country, you're limited in terms of geography. Right? You're. So for example, you typically would only service clients that are less than an hour or two hours away from, from home base, which means that just by nature of the geography you have less competition. So the strategies that I've, I always go to when it comes to those type of businesses like pool businesses, lawn mowing, gutter cleaning, what, whatever the service is, it's a kind of a combination of two. One is direct mail.
So just saying, hey, here's the area that I target, here's the area that I service. Can I get something in the mailbox of, of everybody who lives in this area that by far. And you know, as companies start ignoring that or as companies have fought, you know, to be do purely online, I find that the offline has really started to come around and to perform a lot better. So that's the number one thing that I'll do if I own a service business.
Do really good mail drops. Do them consistently and you should pick up work from that. The second bit is because you are limited geographically, ads like, you know, meta ads, Google Ads, for example, they become actually a little bit more effective because you're limiting the area which you're showing your ads. So you're not competing with countrywide companies. Limit the area and then, you know, you'd have to do any other targeting. Just have a good message, have a good offer, go to your local area, tell them that you're, you're, you know, someone who's from the local area. And advertising is actually a lot simpler on that one as well. The content, you might necessarily not want to be doing content as much. I mean, you don't, you know, most people when they're looking for services that they're, you know, they're probably not trying to do it themselves. So they don't need your video on how you do it themselves. Video is kind of secondary for me, although that could change going forward. But it's literally, you know, if you want more clients and you're in that kind of area, just go directly.
[00:35:16] Speaker B: Right, you mentioned it. I'm curious if you've had experience like either working with, you know, a franchisee type business where they've come in and asked for help, what's your thoughts on that particular model? Like, you know, you've got a franchise pizza restaurant or you've got a franchise roofing company. What are the upsides and downsides of if you're trying to be an entrepreneur, of looking for a franchise opportunity versus, you know, bootstrapping at your side yourself?
[00:35:43] Speaker A: Okay, I've got a. My thoughts on this have actually changed a lot over the years. And when I, I think earlier on I would have said, look, there's no point franchising. You know, you're literally paying somebody hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars just for a brand. Having gone through trying to build my, or building my own thing, I feel like there is a lot of value in having systems, right? In just having somebody say to you, when a customer or when the lead comes in, here's the emails you send, here's what you say on the first phone. He's how you convert them, he's how you charge them. He said, like, it just really makes business really easy. The flip side, I'm not fan of or, you know, I'm not for or against franchises. I think it really depends on the person that is going through the franchise. If you haven't run a business before, I think it's phenomenal, you're going to make way less mistakes, you're going to take way less time. But the franchise is also something that you have to pay a lot of money for. So that's the issue. And you've got less freedom to learn, you've got less freedom to explore because, because you know, if they're more established franchise, you can't do marketing whatever way you want. So if you buy a McDonald's, and this is an extreme example, if you buy a McDonald's, you're not the one who's going to be controlling the marketing. You're not the one who's going to be controlling how your brand looks. Somebody else does that, which is good, but it also can be bad, right? So you're never going to be a, I mean I know very, very wealthy franchise owners who own like 50 franchises and they're making a lot of money that way. But in generally speaking, are you going to be making as much as a franchise owner? Probably not. So just the balance of, you know, where you want to go, what works for you, what skills you have, what experiences you have. It could be good for some, might not be great for others.
[00:37:16] Speaker B: I'm curious, what was the worst mistake that you made if you're willing to diagnose it and what did you hopefully learn from that disaster?
[00:37:26] Speaker A: Worst mistake. Man, there's just been so many mistakes in business. Actually, I think the most expensive one has all to do with hiring. I've probably personally lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in terms of hiring the wrong people, setting them up for failure, setting them up in the wr. So I think if there's anyone that's obvious that that would be it. The mistake that I made was hiring the wrong way around in terms of what I needed for tasks at that point, then you know, Kit so.
And I don't want to be because when it comes to like I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm going to caveat what I say and have a disclaimer that it was all my fault. I'm not saying, hey, my employees into the right job because they did the jobs the best of their abilities, but their abilities were hampered by how I supported them and helped them with onboard help them to do what, what they could do. So I'll caveat that by saying that first. But I hired in the wrong fashion.
The hires that I had locally. I had a general manager, I had an account manager and then I had a copywriter.
And so it was all still virtual. And between the three roles, you know, we were paying about, I would say anywhere between $500,000 per year for three roles. Very expensive of roles. And the way that I look at it now in hindsight, first of all, I hired a general manager because I was burnt out and I just felt, you know, I don't want to be in the day to day of the business. So I hired for that role.
The recommendation from, from my network was that, well, if you're going to hire for a general manager, what are you doing next? You want to hire for an account manager so you're not stuck on phone calls, stuck talking to your clients.
The problem with hiring those two roles is that one, we weren't big enough for a gm. Like we just did not need a general manager. We just needed me to spend less and working in a few of the things on the business.
And so that was completely wrong hire and we completely hired the wrong person for the wrong hire. So we hired somebody who would have been great for a bigger business than what we were, but for the business of our size. She just wasn't quite the right fit. And then, you know, there was a few things going on with her personally and it just wasn't, you know, potentially the right time, right place and right company. So that was a big lesson. The account manager was more again, an extension of me just not knowing what we actually needed to hire for. Same kind of thing, very expensive account manager, you know, 100,000 doll per year plus costs associated with the hiring. And she was great at what she did. Customers loved her. But the problem was that my business, as I had previously, right, I had a marketing agency, the conversations with the clients was what would give me the ammo to go and write the copy to run the campaigns. And so having somebody as a layer between that meant I still needed to have the conversations. But it just became. So not only did I not, did I have those conversations anyway, I now had somebody tagging along to the conversations for no apparently apparent reason, right?
Yep. So very much a wasted kind of role. And then when I did hide the role that I did need, which was a copywriter, I hired that role again. I hired somebody who I thought was senior level, who probably wasn't, you know, so had a senior level salary, but probably wasn't senior level quality. But again, it came back to my, my fault of not giving her the right training to move her up into that senior kind of skill set. And the way that I should have done it was to hire someone local to me. So she was in another state, I should have hired somebody local to me, got come into the office every single day and sat next to me. Because then it's a lot easier to learn how I think about copy, how I approach the copy. And it would have been a lot easier for me to look at what she's doing and said, hey, you're actually not thinking about the right way in this case. Or hey, you're thinking about it the right way. But you've got to think for some more nuance in this area. And that would have been, you know, three to six month training process, but she would have been really, really good at the end of it versus having just somebody stick around for six months moms doing something virtually that, you know, every time that she came through, it was so far and away from what I expected, I just ended up doing it myself anyway. So. But that was the right role, done the wrong way and that was, you know, a massive learning experience. So I think a lot of my mistakes, especially the bigger ones that cost me a lot were to do of hiring, but more so how I approach it and how I manage myself and my stuff.
[00:41:32] Speaker B: That makes sense as to kind of wrap up, share, you know, how people can connect with you and kind of, you know, what you're working on now and how, what value are you bringing into the market right now?
[00:41:45] Speaker A: Yeah. So at the moment there's a couple of projects that I'm working on. The one that I'll talk about is Black belt consultant. So that's essentially with AI coming through. The marketing execution stuff is actually so easy now. AI has made it so much more easy. You don't need to go and hire, you know, tech people, designers, things like that. There's ways to do it, but what people are missing is, is a strategic piece. So if that's the case, you know, if people just don't have the strategy in place and need somebody to come along and go, hey, here's how you target the market. Here's what you should be saying, here's what you should be doing.
That's how I kind of fit into the picture. So if somebody wants me to have a look at marketing, if you're doing, you know, 25k a month, you want to get to 250k, hit me up. You can probably find me on LinkedIn.
You can probably, you know, send me an email. It's willlackbeltconsulting Co.
Or, you know, you can find me on instagram @black beltconsulting tint. I. I think it is, yeah. And that's kind of, you know, the thing that I'm working on at the moment.
[00:42:44] Speaker B: Fantastic. Thanks so much for your time, Will. It's been a great conversation.
[00:42:49] Speaker A: Thanks, Jeremy. Thanks for having me.
