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PPC Lessons From Enterprise Brands to SMBs | Sean Grabowski
29 Plays5 months ago
SUBSCRIBE TO LEARN FROM PAID MARKETING EXPERTS 🔔
The Efficient Spend Podcast helps start-ups turn media spend into revenue. Learn how the world's top marketers are managing their media mix to drive growth!
In this episode of The Efficient Spend Podcast, Sean Grabowski, founder of Keepers Digital Marketing, shares his journey from managing large enterprise accounts at top agencies to running a specialized PPC agency focused on SMBs. Sean discusses the nuances of media mix optimization, the challenges of scaling ad spend while maintaining ROI, and the importance of setting clear client expectations in both corporate and small business environments.
About the Host: Paul is a paid marketing leader with 7+ years of experience optimizing marketing spend at venture-backed startups. He's driven over $100 million in revenue through paid media and is passionate about helping startups deploy marketing dollars to drive growth.
About the Guest: Sean Grabowski is a digital marketing expert with 8 years of experience in paid media, having managed major accounts for top agencies before founding Keepers Digital Marketing. He specializes in Google and Facebook ads, helping SMBs optimize their ad spend and achieve growth through data-driven strategies.
VISIT OUR WEBSITE: https://www.efficientspend.com/
CONNECT WITH PAUL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulkovalski/
CONNECT WITH SEAN: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/sean-grabowski-6646056b
EPISODE LINKS:
https://keepersdigital.com/digital-marketing-blog/https://themindfulsteward.com/categories/
https://www2.deloitte.com/ph/en/pages/about-deloitte/articles/about-deloitte.html
https://www.groupm.com/what-we-do/
https://www.mindshareworld.com/news
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Transcript
Introduction to Adaptive Advertising
00:00:00
Speaker
There's really an adaptive approach to ads that is best, where you scale, you test some things, you see how that works, then you decide what to do next. And sometimes that can be conflicting when you're dealing with people who are thinking, we have this planned out, detailed list of things we're gonna do this year. Ads are not task-based. Running ads is not a task. It's not, you do this and then it's done. It's this ever-evolving thing that's based on the market and the competition levels.
Sean's Background in Paid Media
00:00:34
Speaker
Sean, welcome to the show, man. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here. I'm really happy to have a conversation with you today around all things media mix optimization, uh, management, paid search would be, uh, we'd love to give the audience just a brief background into who you are and some of the the work that you do. So yeah, let me know if you can give a 60 second kind of high level overview of, of your, uh, your role at keepers and your experience.
Keepers Agency and Its Focus
00:01:02
Speaker
Yeah, of course. So I've been in.
00:01:04
Speaker
I've been in paid media for almost eight years now. I used to work for some really large enterprise agencies, managing a lot of household name accounts. You know, Nestle, Deloitte are just a couple of names out of a long list.
00:01:18
Speaker
And I eventually left and decided to start my own agency. So because we're a smaller company, we deal with a lot smaller companies than Nestle and Deloitte per se, a lot more SMBs and medium sized businesses. But I run a, basically Keepers is my
Expectation Management in Advertising
00:01:34
Speaker
business. We're a small PPC agency specifically specialized on Google ads and Facebook ads for a wide variety of different business types.
00:01:43
Speaker
I definitely want to talk about the differences in working for large brands at a large agency versus working for smaller brands at a smaller agency because there's definitely nuances there. The experience that you had at um you know Group M and Mindshare is valuable. And for the audience, it may be helpful just to contextualize you know some of those learnings of working on larger teams. you know Maybe you're working with a specific micro business segment within a larger company. What are some the of the more impactful takeaways that that you had in those larger agencies?
00:02:29
Speaker
Yeah, I think, well, it is night and day difference. Let's say you were talking about Google ads and specific aside from you're still doing Google ads. There's a lot of rollover in terms of strategy, but some of the differences I would say would be, was that the question around differences primarily? Sure. Yes. Okay. So our, one of my takeaways, I guess I was part of it too, was some of the biggest takeaways from the corporate world are that you really have to manage expectations.
00:02:56
Speaker
ah so i would say I would say is one of the things that i I learned there. I would say I mastered it. I really feel like I mastered that. And that helps me in our everyday business nowadays is at the corporate level, you really need to manage expectations because you might be dealing with um you know a brand manager or the marketing director of a business or a line of business and what they're expecting.
00:03:22
Speaker
has a huge influence on whether they're happy with what you did and whether they're happy with what you do.
Relationship Management at Large Agencies
00:03:28
Speaker
so And that really is a huge thing in with small businesses as well, is basically there's a lot of nuance with something as technical as running ads online. There's so much complexity and and nuance to it. And if everyone's on the same page and you are very clear about what's going on, what we're shooting for, what we're capable of doing, what we're hoping to do,
00:03:50
Speaker
then that that's something that translates perfectly to small business as well. um So I would say the relationship management is something you really master at a big level because you're not dealing with a small account where you might send them a small update or a couple updates or even have a small monthly call talking about a few details. You're talking to these companies constantly and you're talking to them about a wide variety of things and you're educating them. you
Challenges with Large Clients
00:04:15
Speaker
Almost half your job is being a man an ad manager and the other half of it is dealing with people and dealing with relationships. So that is a huge thing that I think is really helping me nowadays that I got from that world, other than just being decent at ads as well.
00:04:31
Speaker
Sure. The expectation setting um part of a role is I feel like it's obviously crucial in all roles, but specifically when you are an external agency trying to get things done and you don't have all of the internal levers at your disposal, it becomes quite calm complex.
00:04:52
Speaker
Specifically, if you're trying to drive goals that require internal effort and change and and things like that, have there been any experiences with specific clients at um the larger agencies you were at where there was a disconnect between the goals that you were trying to strive for and the requirements on on their end? And like how do you think about that? Oh, absolutely.
00:05:22
Speaker
And you know even if I relate this back to what we're doing nowadays, we do have some decent sized companies. So I'm not saying that we don't have companies where there's a marketing manager part of a greater team. We have a variety of companies of that size. But you know I would say that just to be completely honest, the corporate world has much more... they're not They're not coming to us as the experts saying, I really have no idea, but I want good quality management.
00:05:47
Speaker
What is
Ad Performance and External Factors
00:05:48
Speaker
there to expect? They just set targets. It's basically the, we did this last year. Let's beat it this year with this kind of a target. So I think there are a lot of times very often, to be honest with you, where just really lofty targets were set for us. And they're just decided by the brand manager or the marketing director.
00:06:07
Speaker
And you know, we have to shoot our, we have to do our best to achieve them, but they're not really working with us in that way sometimes. Or it's kind of like, well, we did this last year. We need to do this this year. And it's not necessarily based on communication or intentionality or saying or forecasting. It's just based on hit targets.
00:06:24
Speaker
Can you think of anything anything specific? like i'm I'm thinking about just an example case study right now. it It could be that a business is going to say, all right, we did this amount of revenue last year and we have to hit this new target this year. But then in that is assumptions around what their conversion rate was for their product, what CPMs were, what competition was like, all these external factors. Can you think of an example of like when the expectations were too high and how you kind of had to communicate that down a little bit?
00:06:57
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I used to run ads for a company called Desjardins Financial. Anyone in Canada will know who they are. They're a really large financial institution that sells insurance nationwide and and does some banking as well. I think they do some stuff internationally across borders. And yeah, back in the day, I used to oversee their Google ads and you know there ultimately,
00:07:19
Speaker
the marketing director, sometimes they don't have experience with PPC, right? they are They're not exactly somebody who's been in platform and knows the nuance of it. And I think a really classic one is, hey, you know we've achieved this cost per acquisition at this ad spend. So that's awesome. That's actually pretty good. We hit our targets, they're profitable leads.
00:07:42
Speaker
So let's just scale our spend. And we'll scale it according to this this regimented you know media plan where next year in February, we'll lift to this. Next year in April, we'll lift to this and lift in terms of ad spend. And you know anyone who's in a media buying position, at least for a company that is really maximizing ad spend possibility, we all know that cost per acquisition often will rise as you're scaling. And you can do things to keep it down, but there is there is diminishing returns as you just try and crank ad spend to the moon. So that was ah that was a common one, I think, is is people just hoping to to retain the same level of cost per lead or cost per client when that changes. you know And I think that is one thing. in
00:08:28
Speaker
One thing in the corporate world that can be tricky is everything is forecasted and and budgeted and planned. But media is hard to plan these days. It fluctuates so much. you know I don't know if you saw this poll or anyone else listening, but in March, there was the big fluctuations with meta, just large fluctuations in acquisition prices.
Diversification in Advertising Strategy
00:08:49
Speaker
And you can't forecast that kind of thing. And you can't forecast when Again, I think this is kind of a conspiracy. I don't think anyone's verified it, but you can't forecast when Temu or Temu or whatever it's, however if you pronounce it, when they decide to pump billions of dollars into ad spend and it just impacts everyone else's costs per CPMs or whatever. So there's ah there's really an adaptive approach to ads that is best where you scale, you test some things, you see how that works. Then you decide what to do next.
00:09:19
Speaker
And sometimes that can be conflicting when you're dealing with people who are thinking we have this planned out detailed list of things we're going to do this year. Ads are not task-based. Running ads is not a task. It's not, you do this and then it's done. It's this ever evolving thing that's based on the market and the competition levels. And that can be something that is hard to, I mean, that's not even, I think the corporate world maybe has a little harder time dealing with it because it's so structured.
00:09:48
Speaker
But that's something that I think a lot of businesses struggle with in planning their advertising. 100%, I think a couple of tactical learnings from that could be always keep diversification in in mind, never be over-reliant on one channel or one strategy. And I say that with a caveat. If you're a smaller business, a lot of times you can be perfectly fine running just paid search and be profitable. But if you're going to be operating at scale, um that's a challenge.
00:10:19
Speaker
you know algorithm changes, macroeconomic factors, competition, the presidential election. There are so many things that you are not in control of that you can structure a campaign, but it's going to an ever-changing auction that has a lot of different dynamics. So yeah, I think diversification is important there.
00:10:42
Speaker
And then also just being able to to pivot quickly and not be too over reliant on these numbers. I think one way one way to say that is Yeah, forecasts need to be valuable. And I've seen that the best companies are able to respond when we're not hitting forecast while we make changes, right? Based on that, maybe we make pricing adjustments. Sometimes companies need to make changes in headcount. Sometimes people have to kill products, but that's just the reality of of the the beast that we're in.
00:11:23
Speaker
Exactly. Right. I have a couple of clients who just finished tech stars in New York and they are seeking investment, probably going to get some and. They are, you know, their investors are are looking for really strict plans. And it's something that there's been a couple of investors who understand that. And they're really malleable in their approach to growth. It's not my decision. I'm not advising them in any way because that is not my realm of expertise is who to take investment from. But I see those investors as people who get it. They're people who know how to actually grow a business and they're not behind the forecasting too much.
00:12:02
Speaker
They're more about, like let's find out how to grow and do it. you know Sometimes you need to have that mentality around this kind of thing. Can you think of any examples, obviously you worked with tens if not hundreds of enterprise clients. What's like the, the North star, right? Or what example of a client can you think of that you were like, these guys just were dialed in. They were doing everything right. Their strategy for optimizing media, for optimizing their business was complex.
Adapting to Platform Changes
00:12:30
Speaker
Yeah. From, from your experience, all the clients you worked in, what's like the top of the mountain?
00:12:35
Speaker
That's a really good question. You know, Deloitte actually had a pretty good campaign. To be honest with you, they're super dialed in with that, which I think makes sense. You know, they come from, they're ultimately a really big consulting firm.
00:12:47
Speaker
So they have very specialized knowledge. They understand how to look at things from a data-driven approach. So they understand the importance of setting up a detailed collection. I would say in my experience, they were one of the best. Again, I was based in Canada at Group M in Toronto. So we did deal with a lot of clients internationally, but we also dealt with a lot of Canada's biggest companies.
00:13:08
Speaker
I would say one of the other, probably the two other highest performing or ones that were the most dialed in were ah the weather network, which is a really big weather channel. um They had a really unique approach where we.
00:13:22
Speaker
they got paid a certain amount per impression for ad dollars. So we managed to get Google ads. It's a super unique approach, right? It's not based on acquisition of customers, but if they can get people to their site for less than what they get paid per impression of an ad, then they can just scale and and generate revenue. And we had a really sophisticated thing going on there.
00:13:43
Speaker
You know what, to be honest with you, this is a client I did a little bit of work on back in the day, and I ran into a friend in Toronto. I was in Toronto for Collision Conference a few weeks ago, and I ran into them. And I heard about i heard about a few strategies they're they're they're doing, but H and&R Block was really impressive when I was helping with their account back in the day. And it sounds like they're doing some of the most sophisticated stuff with Google Ads I've ever heard, to be honest with you.
00:14:08
Speaker
So it's just very data driven. There's a lot of, uh, they, they have basically full on data analysts as part of the Google ads team, which I think, you know, some companies do that, but not then the analysts are really creating really wild, um, strategies of this audience sees this ad at this kind of a time in the user journey. This audience sees this kind of an ad at this type of the, at this stage in the user journey. And.
00:14:38
Speaker
There's just so much data behind every single ad and every single decision. And I find, I found that really impressive. And that's something that they've bolstered over time. I think, again, I don't really know the specifics anymore, but it just sounds like they've doubled down on that kind of thing. Yeah. Another one I would say is is crave TV. They're kind of like a Netflix, a smaller Netflix, ah but only in Canada, I believe.
00:15:00
Speaker
Obviously leveraging data, hiring data analysts, super important. You know, something that I'm looking a lot more into is leveraging MMM or media mix modeling in conjunction with incrementality or matched market tests in conjunction with attribution to come to some level of, of answer.
00:15:22
Speaker
One of the challenges I think now is that segmentation and more technical adjustments on the ad platform level are going
Embracing AI and Machine Learning in Ads
00:15:33
Speaker
away. We have automated targeting. We have less ability to do exclusion audiences. Google has performance max campaigns. right like How do you think about that guy kind of dichotomy of the scale and the opportunity is in the granularity, but then you're losing that to some extent with some of these platforms? Yeah, I think it's pretty, you know, if I bring it back to what I was saying about audiences, in theory, if you if you have your audiences dialed and you're doing that externally,
00:16:06
Speaker
and you push those into your platforms and you run those campaigns there, I think you can still show the right types of ads to the right types of people with some level of control through external audience creation. I don't necessarily do that anymore because we're not dealing with those mass enterprise customers. you know Truthfully, at at for a small, medium business level or are a medium-sized company, like most of our clients have 100 employees or less. Let's put it that way.
00:16:34
Speaker
um A lot of them are 20 to 60 employees. So that's kind of the scale that I'm dealing with a lot these days. And I think that those types of businesses, I think a lot of marketers, there's this love-hate relationship with a lot of the changes in Google ads. I think probably more of a hate from from a lot of media buyers. And you know, that's fine. I think I'm the same. There's a lot of, there's, it's very situational. There's sometimes I'm really, um it's a little bit frustrating that you can only do things a certain way and you can't control it. And I'm even seeing some examples very randomly where, but yeah, basically when it comes to what I think truthfully, I guess what I'm getting at is I've leaned into some of that. You know, it just is the way it is. I don't have data analysts at my disposal. You know, I don't have a whole team of some of the smartest data analysts around at my disposal to really get into that nitty gritty methodology.
00:17:29
Speaker
and I just lean in. And if I can provide P-Max as a good example, you know, we all know it's an omnichannel ad campaign type. where you lose a lot of control. There are some cool scripts. you know I don't know if you've, I'm sure you probably are aware in some of the other people. There are some interesting scripts you can put in your account that do influence where PMAC spends. So you can spend a bit more on search or a bit more on other places. Those do exist. And we do utilize those and see some success. So you can try and control it. But if you ultimately, you know to really simplify it, it's an AI machine learning model.
00:18:07
Speaker
um And if you feed it the right data, it can sometimes do really good things for you. So I've just started to try and lean in and go more onto the, into the conversion tracking and nerding out about that.
Optimizing Conversion Tracking
00:18:19
Speaker
How can we track the perfect step that then if we get these black box algorithmic campaigns to optimize toward and some of the best results I've had all year are from that type of an approach. So as much as it can be annoying.
00:18:34
Speaker
It also, I think by just leaning in and embracing it, sometimes it it just is the way it is. It's not like you can, it's not like it's going to change unless every single marketer bands together and Google somehow decides to revert back. But I think that's a long shot.
00:18:49
Speaker
I want to talk about the conversion actions. What are some of the scripts that you're leveraging? To be honest with you, I'd have to lean on my team a bit for that. I think one of those is a Mike Rhodes script, like a really common one that a lot of people use. Uh, yeah, I, I, I'll be honest with you. I don't know the names of them off the top of the head, but a lot of them are. the Let me put it this way. There's a lot of pretty well-known PMAC scripts, um, that help help with PMACs. One of the great things about chat GPT is you can ask it to generate scripts for you.
00:19:16
Speaker
You know, so just like people, you can ask it for code. You can ask it to generate the code for a script. So one thing we've been experimenting with is when we have a unique idea of saying, Hey, this specific thing would be really good. You know, let's just, let's just say that our campaigns do better when it's raining outside and there are scripts for that. You can dig around on the internet, try and find them, or you can just ask chat GPT and get a script within seconds.
00:19:42
Speaker
So we've been really diving into just testing out a lot of like, I guess in theory, they're custom made scripts, but just keep in mind, if you do that, it sometimes doesn't work the first time and you have to go back and say, Hey, it didn't work this way. Fix it. Um, and then you kind of got to do a couple of rounds of revisions with it. But I think chat GPT is getting better at that as well.
00:20:00
Speaker
And then on the conversion action front, I'm assuming that you're meaning kind of splitting out conversion actions more granularly, passing back revenue values, ah segmenting them out to look at only specific user types, et cetera. But talk to me a little bit about your your framework. If I'm a, you know, marketer in charge of Google ads, and I'm thinking about optimizing conversion ad actions, what things should I be thinking about?
00:20:26
Speaker
Yeah. So, uh, I guess I'll say first and foremost is that I like to have conversion actions for every step. Um, and sometimes even more than that, you know, how much time did somebody spend on this page before they did the action or something like that? You know, the more the merrier, cause then even if you're, what you're telling a campaign to optimize toward isn't doing what you want and you have to test another action.
00:20:52
Speaker
You as the marketer can see the funnel. You can basically see it very simply in the platform of this is where people drop off. And people, you know we might like to think that's not our job, is to optimize people you know UX design, let's say, of CRO, whatever you want to call it. Some people, you know there's no right way. like Some marketers do it all, some marketers just do just do search campaigns within Google ads. Some people do all Google ads. you know There's no right way or wrong way to do it. But in my opinion, it's just bringing value. you know And if I can easily see where people are dropping off, I can easily just tell my client that and and come up with a ah CRO or UX design improvement. And I don't have to be a UX designer. I can just see that that's a bottleneck. That has helped me provide a lot of value to people. It's just tracking everything.
00:21:45
Speaker
Yeah, it's I would say it's it's pretty much tracking every step. And it depends if people are using a CRM. It can be really customized, right? Some companies, it's all on a web-based application, like let's say a credit card. you know It's a web-based application. People are filling out the form. And you don't necessarily need to be in HubSpot or Salesforce to see the steps. You can just track the pages.
00:22:06
Speaker
But sometimes it's all in HubSpot because it's like a lead for a high ticket service. And then you the sales team is following up with that lead multiple times. So simply put, we, it often involves Zapier or Make, um make IO, but we will usually try and set up, you know, we set it up so that HubSpot or whatever CRM can see every single lead that came from a source.
Balancing Automation with Manual Adjustments
00:22:31
Speaker
And then.
00:22:33
Speaker
Every single step along that user journey gets sent back into Google ads, Google ads or Facebook ads as a conversion. And then we can, you know. We might optimize towards step one just to get the momentum, and then step two, and then step three, and then step four. And eventually, you hit a step where it just does worse when you hit that step. You've gone too far. yeah Then you go back. And you've kind of, obviously, again, like I said, it's an it's an every evolving process. It doesn't mean it's going to be that way forever. It doesn't mean that as the sales process and sales team doesn't get better, that you don't go back and try optimizing towards step five again. But it does mean that for that, for now,
00:23:14
Speaker
It's not going to get the performance is peaked by optimizing towards that step. So go to that app and then start looking at other things. too Yeah. Like you mentioned, just the concept of diminishing returns earlier, there are events that you can optimize towards at specific spend levels. And then as you scale, other events open up because you have more data from those events to be able to optimize.
00:23:41
Speaker
It might even be within a specific event. Like you mentioned, I want to optimize for an email submit. Okay, that's working really well. Now I want to optimize for you know email submit that also fills out this specific section or is from this specific area or whatever event parameter you want you want to pass back to give an indication of quality. So that makes a ton of sense. and you know I think this kind of conversation we've been jumping around in a couple of different areas, but it just makes me think like but from a ah stoic perspective, you have to be able to play with what you have. And if there's going to be more automation,
00:24:22
Speaker
in certain aspects of what we call digital marketing, you can find the ways to manually change things with different event parameters or scripts for P-MAX or what it may be whatever it may be.
Building a Distributed Team
00:24:37
Speaker
Yeah, 100%. And I feel like this is something you you and I have chatted with about in the past. But know where I think marketing is heading, and this is an interesting like almost, I guess you could call it philosophical. It's not really philosophical, but it's like a debate around where technology is heading. But you know let's use PMAX as an example, or or even just max conversions bid strategy. An AI model is effectively replacing tons of manual tasks we used to all do as marketers.
00:25:04
Speaker
And, you know, to the layman, they might look at Mark. I mean, and I've heard this before is, Hey marketers, why are you guys still charging so much? You do 10 times, like you do 30, you do 30% of the work you used to, but marketing is not a task. Again, PPC is not a task based job. It's this ever evolving thing. So if everyone's using these AI bid strategies that now effectively replace a lot of the targeting and changes you used to manually have to do as a marketer.
00:25:34
Speaker
It doesn't mean that we don't have to do jobs. It just means that now this is the bottom, the baseline of the playing field. So what is the new thing that makes you stand out and makes you do better for your clients? And it just means there's more different things that you have to be ahead of the curve on. So I think like, sure, P max is now automates a lot of things and you lose a lot of control and.
00:25:55
Speaker
But that's just the way it is. There's nothing you can do about it now. What is the new differentiating factor? It's going to be like landing page experience, create the creative, setting up these full funnel marketing campaigns that are really unique, like the unique top of funnel message that matches a mid funnel and matches. a Just getting the things that we did a little bit on now become the things that we do, we need to really spend a lot more energy on.
00:26:22
Speaker
And I think those are the things that are differentiating our campaigns these days, at least, is like really nerding out on um the pages and the creatives. Right. It's like um we have new tools at our disposal. And so the top 10% or the top tier will be those that use those tools the more the most effectively.
00:26:46
Speaker
If you're not using chat GPT, you're now in a minority, but then within chat GPT users, there's going to be a hierarchy of who is the best at using chat GPT to do marketing, right? That's something that I think a couple of the times we've connected. I was really impressed by your utilization of generative AI in conjunction with kind of virtual assistants, distributed teams. Talk me through a little bit about that, that journey at Keepers and how you, you know, have really built out a distributive team that, you know, adds a lot of impact across different ah various businesses.
Systematizing Business for Scalability
00:27:30
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So just curious, what do you mean by distributive? You mean like, uh, just want to clarify that first.
00:27:37
Speaker
Well, I know that you utilize virtual assistants a lot and also just, you know, working with different, different channel managers distributed across different areas, right? You're not all in one location.
00:27:49
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's what I thought you meant. Yeah. Um, you know, I have to give a lot of credit ultimately to my business coach. Can't remember if you chatted with him. Mike mall is is kind of a genius and he's really transformed my company with a lot of hard work for myself too. You know, he's the advisor or or was for a long time, but basically, yeah, you know, I think a lot of the entrepreneurs that I knew when I started this journey, probably half of them were digital nomad type people.
00:28:16
Speaker
So it might just be related to the fact that they were my influence and they're doing really well, but they are people who are all over the place and they hire people from all over the place and they're fully remote teams. So yeah, you know, it, I think it all started truthfully with me hiring a Canadian, a couple of Canadian people first and.
00:28:35
Speaker
you know One of them ultimately left and got a full-time job. that's ah you know That's completely fine. That was a pretty early stage of my business. The other person didn't work out and it was a pretty bad experience for me. And then I hired two guys in South America and it was awesome. And it all started from there. It's just kind of this realization that there are really talented people all around the world. um the only I would say the difference is they maybe have had less experience, less less opportunity to hop into the corporate world and deal with you know like Let's just say Group M level work, you know working at a big corporate agency like Dentsu or Group M or Gale or something. They're just as smart as us. They just don't live in places where those are are like everyday job opportunities. So if you can take someone who's just as smart as yourself and teach them to be as good as you, it doesn't really matter where they're from. Obviously there are requirements. like Everyone who I hire is perfectly fluent in English.
00:29:31
Speaker
and You know, you wouldn't even, it doesn't matter where they are. They speak English just as well as anyone else. So that's obviously, you know, a non-negotiable when you're, you know, have a somewhat client facing business, but, or very client facing, but some roles are somewhat client facing. Let's put it like that.
00:29:47
Speaker
Yeah, you know, that's how it started. And then I met, yeah, I ended up hiring a VA and same thing, you know, she, I hired based on. I didn't hire her based on her having all the specs. I hired her based on her being ambitious and and and smart and excited to learn. And she's become like so amazing at her job. Like she's so good. I've just have, so I invested a lot of time in training her and it's the same thing. It's she's equally as smart as anyone else.
00:30:16
Speaker
She just hadn't hadn't been in a role where she gets to learn all this technical stuff that we do every day. If you're hiring for a role, do they have to be someone here or can they be somewhere else? And not to say, you know, I have people all around the world. I have a girl in Portugal. I have a guy in Calgary, Canada, a guy in Toronto, Canada.
00:30:40
Speaker
um two people in South America, two people in Philippines. And there's more people as well. There's another guy in Vancouver who's part time. So it's it's a pretty it's a pretty distributed team. Basically, I don't go into a job search. I go into almost every task thinking, how can I systematize this? like it It has to be a system or else it's not scalable.
00:31:04
Speaker
right You can't just say when we'll figure out how to do it every time. That is not a scalable thing because then you have to be involved every time. You don't know if the quality of the output is going to be good every time. It could suck sometimes and be good other times. That stuff can really hurt a business. You can't leave that up to chance. So everything needs to be systematized. And then the systems become, well, do I need a person to do that? Or do I need a freelancer to do that? Or do I need, or will chat GPT do that? Or will an AI model do that?
00:31:34
Speaker
And so in, in thinking about systems, I always naturally gravitate to, can this be automated, fully automated using software? And then can this be, so can can this be something I hire someone for? And the answer is different for everything, but that's kind of a methodology I take to every, to everything is.
00:31:54
Speaker
To be able to grow a business, you have to buy back your own time with systems. And people are systems. When you hire people, you hire them and you go, this is the system for doing this. You're now in charge of this. You can have autonomy and do it your own way, but we just have to have a predictable system and it has to follow these guidelines. So so really, I could talk about that all day, but and there's a lot of directions you can go with that conversation.
00:32:17
Speaker
Yes, ah for sure. Maybe just to take a step back, if we look at Keepers as a system within a lot within which there's many microsystems, how would you categorize kind of the the top ones? And and what is that what does that hierarchy of systems look like?
00:32:37
Speaker
Yeah. So, you know, ultimately we manage ads for people. So I have a specific guidelines as to, you know, this is how often we give people updates. This is how often we will have calls with these. And it depends on the size of the client for updates and call frequency. There's a system for that. So there's also a system for updating me, you know, setting me the updates at a certain point, the company got big enough that I had no time to do anything. I had no time to focus on business growth.
00:33:06
Speaker
So one of the, one of the guys on the team became a senior ad manager and basically everyone goes to him for questions so that I can buy back that time. So now he has a regular cadence of everyone on the team goes to him for specific questions about their accounts on a regular like monthly or or biweekly cadence. So yeah, there's a system for everything. There's a system for outreach. You know, I have two VAs.
00:33:30
Speaker
who help me with outreach and managing my own time and my own email inbox. So there's a system for, this is my email inbox, just review everything, see if I need to to answer it, if it's an email for me or if it's just a technical thing or if it's something else and push it into the push it into the filter or the folder where I know that I have to respond to that so that I don't have to spend time reviewing all my emails.
00:33:55
Speaker
Um, there's a system, yeah, there's a system for outreach. There's a system for reviewing job posts on Upwork and then how we respond to them in the best way. Um, and systems take a lot of time to develop, but ultimately if you were to really break down and this is, you know, this is like the four hour work week preaches this kind of thing. There's a really famous book called the emeth.
00:34:19
Speaker
I think traction even breaks this down, like a lot of entrepreneur books say it, and I'm convinced that this is kind of what business is, is you find out a task you need to do, you figure out how to how to do it, and then you go, how do I create a process so that we do it this way every time so that we get a good output every time? And then once you have that process, you can put somebody in there or some kind of software in there to get it done for you.
00:34:46
Speaker
And then you can move on to the next thing and you just kind of constantly are building. That's a yeah, that's how I look at it. Yeah, I love that. And I think like systems building as a skill set is a one of the most highest leverage skill sets you could develop. Yeah, I would agree. I would agree. I've met some pretty amazing. Yeah, through this world, I've met some people who You know, I think I, I guess I'm good at it because I've been able to grow a business based on systems, but I meet some people who are significantly better than
Managing Cash Flow and Profitability
00:35:19
Speaker
me at it. And it's just mind blowing what you can do when you can really master systems. um My downfall is I'm not a, I don't like project management software. You know, I just don't like that. I've got a notepad with my to-do list every day.
00:35:35
Speaker
I think some of the people who are the really best at it are the people who can master how to, they can basically look in a sauna or Trello or Notion, whatever you use and just see the rundown of an entire business and they can wrap their head around all that. I hire someone for that because that's not what I like doing. I like kind of being the creative mind behind the company, I think.
00:35:59
Speaker
What's your system for managing cashflow, profit, finances at a high level? Yeah, good question. So um I have my like project manager basically look at all our expenses every month and all of our revenue and where that rev or where the expenses come from and categorize that and put it in a spreadsheet. So then to be honest with you, I'm i'm actually working on how to improve this even more and make it on a weekly basis, because right now it's on a monthly, because, you know, look at it this way. We're all data-driven people. That's how to do a data-driven management approach, I think, is a lot of people call it a CEO dashboard. You know, what I do nowadays is I can go in and I go, okay, January, February, March, April, and I can go, oh my
00:36:51
Speaker
Expenses, my my people expenses just shot up that month. It also tracks how many new clients we got, how many clients we lost, what is the growth in revenue from those new clients? So it tracks like everything. And then by doing that, you can go, okay, something changed. We made less money this month. What caused that? And then you can just see exactly what caused that. And you can go, okay, well, what happened was we had higher churn than normal. So then again, yeah by tracking everything, you can see the bottleneck.
00:37:20
Speaker
And it makes it a lot easier to, if you're just looking at a business and you go, I don't know what's going on. Like we just made less money this month and it's been on a downtrend. You're shooting, you're shooting in the dark, you know, if you can track things, you can optimize them.
00:37:38
Speaker
And it's, I don't think, I think a lot of problems, again, it's easy for me to say, but I think sometimes business problems are really challenging. But a lot of times, like if you have less leads that month, if you come, if you go into your spreadsheet and you go, you know, I spent a whole bunch on, on new software tools, then you you can easily just go, okay, I like experimenting with new softwares to see what will change the business, but I'm going a bit too crazy. I just need to be a little smarter.
00:38:01
Speaker
And sometimes it can be as simple as that, that can solve the problem that your company has, but you're just not even aware that you're overspending on software because you're not measuring it. Do you have a North star? Obviously, you know, within the CEO dashboard, there's a million metrics that you can look at. Sometimes the challenge of the, the thought of what gets measured gets managed is that there's only so many things that ah one human being can measure and manage on a, on like a.
00:38:29
Speaker
you know In their brain, um maybe certain brains can fit in more. But I wonder, yeah, like what are maybe the top five, or what are the the more important KPIs that that you're looking at that are keeping you up at night? Yeah. So I have um i basically have like a profitability metric, like ah ROI. So that's probably probably the main, obviously, the most basic ones are how much revenue or how much profit happened that month.
00:38:59
Speaker
And ROI, those are probably the, the, the literally the two main ones. Yeah. Those are probably the main ones. I would say the ones that keep me up at night are the lead based ones because leads make or break a service business. So I'm always like, if we have less leads one month, and this is probably the anxiety of just being an owner is if we have less leads one month or two months in a row, I start to think, Oh man, I need to start doing something like.
00:39:27
Speaker
And that's just, you know, I do think that that's probably something that i I'm actually working on is to not just get overly anxious in those moments and not go, Oh man, this whole, this whole business is going down. I think that's the thing a lot of people with young companies go through because you just, you just haven't had the years of experience to know that it's going to be okay to go through it over and over and be like, it's fine. Just having a few leads doesn't mean that a few leads less doesn't mean the business is going to die.
00:39:54
Speaker
But um I would say that to yeah summarize it, that's the one that keeps me up at night. I'd like to really keep a close eye on those and be careful. It makes sense because you can look at profitability and ah ROI on a less frequent basis.
00:40:09
Speaker
Well, they're lagging indicators, right? So like, you could look at them every day, but are you making daily changes to affect them? Maybe not. And like, even with with lead, inbound lead volume, that's a that's a lead indicator. You can make decisions tomorrow. Then the question is, should I look at this weekly? Should I look at this monthly? Should I look at this quarterly? Am I looking at it too frequently? You know, should I plan out my lead strategy on a quarterly basis? And those are questions that business owners have to ask themselves.
00:40:39
Speaker
Yep. Yeah, exactly. Legging indicators. So you got to keep an eye on, yeah, you got to keep an eye on the things that are signs of where you're going to be next month or the month after. And you know, some of that stuff is even wrong. Like you could have two leads one month, but they're the best leads you've ever had. And one of them closes and at your revenue jumps up. So there is an intangible effect there too, where It's not a perfect ah perfect measurement system in something as nuanced as selling one person to another person.
Using AI for Content Creation
00:41:16
Speaker
Yeah, it could be like opportunity size leads multiplied by opportunity size, potential revenue volume or something like that. um
00:41:24
Speaker
Last couple questions, we kind of hit on this a little bit, but I think it's such a like fascinating discussion. If we think about businesses as a system, inputs, outputs, you know our our output is revenue, client satisfaction, client revenue, right?
00:41:43
Speaker
inputs all of the tasks and and things that we need to do to to get there. I like the breakdown of thinking about like per hour tasks. There's things that are high leverage that might be worth more as a value, things that are low leverage, simple, repetitive, recurring tasks. And if you think about this on like an individual human perspective, it's easy to break that down. But then Chat GPT and like generative AI kind of throws a wrench in this a little bit because there are ways that you could think about chat GPT as like this high leverage thing that can do strategic thinking for you. But I've also seen mistakes happen from that over relying on on chat GPT. I don't know if i'm how to kind of frame this question in the in the best way, but I'm like, where you know where should we be using chat GPT generative AI today? How do you think about this?
00:42:34
Speaker
you know, task ah delineation from high to low leverage, right? um I want to just spiel on that for a little bit. Yeah, yeah, that's a good that's a really good question. Maybe I'll tell this story really quick. But you know, I have another I have another website that is it is a business. um It's just a pretty small scale one about mindfulness. I think we've talked about it. It's basically a really it's a growing opportunity. And it's the thing I'm passionate about working on. And so I'm working on the SEO in the background there.
00:43:03
Speaker
And as soon as chatgbt came out, I immediately thought to myself, you know, there's these little moments in history where you can be some of the first people doing things and they can be really beneficial. And it's kind of makes me think of blogging. The first people who had blogs, just their websites ended up being giant publications and they have effectively created these crazy businesses and companies about their passions.
00:43:28
Speaker
And it's just because they were the first people doing it. So when chat GPT came out, I never was like, this is going to completely change my life. But I was like, I don't think many people are using this to create blog posts for SEO yet. So I just jumped in and started creating tons of blog posts there. And my website traffic went up like 300% in like that since chat GPT came out, basically off on that site.
00:43:53
Speaker
And it's still growing, just not as fast. Nowadays, there's a lot of changes where Google isn't rewarding you as much for AI written content. But if you look at it this way, if you just go in there and you go on the SEO front, you go, hey, write an article about meditation, just because my website's about that. It will just spit out some generic article that's boring and it's just repetitive info. But if you go in there and you curate it and you go, I want an article about this with this kind of a tone, can you please touch on these three things?
00:44:23
Speaker
And utilize this specific sentence here and make it curate to these keywords. And then you get it and you go back and you read it and you go, okay, change these three few things, or you do a little bit of human edits. It's still only took you like 40 minutes to create an article or 30 minutes. It's still a lot less than a written article, but.
00:44:45
Speaker
you won't get good SEO results from just the, write an article about mindfulness. Like you need to give it guidance and give it a lot of, you know, telling it what you want. And then I have articles that are written by AI that are some of my top ranking articles on that site. So I think the ethos of, that of, of AI is it can answer your questions really fast.
00:45:08
Speaker
Like when you have simple questions, you can get them really quickly. you know i i ask my I've been networking a lot more. I'm just finding I get a lot of work from network. And I like that. I love socializing with other business owners. So I'm like, this is awesome. I'm just going to do a ton of that over the next year. So um ah you know I asked my VA, my lead generation specific VA who helps me with business development. I basically said, hey, can you just look up some events?
00:45:36
Speaker
and I'm already leveraging her time, but she's leveraging her own time. Cause she just goes and asks chat TBT for a list. And that's a big way that we're doing it nowadays, but a lot of times, and this is just a little sneaky trick is I basically almost always ask chat TBT for references. I'm really into surfing and I was asking it a couple of questions about a surfer recently, just for fun. Cause I was like watching a documentary and I was like wanting to answer and it just spit out something completely wrong. And it's done that to me a ton where it just,
00:46:07
Speaker
makes an assumption based off information, and its assumption is completely wrong. If you ask it for a reference and you go, what is the answer to this? But please share where you found it. And it it doesn't give you those assumptions. So I do like to kind of, I use it as much as I can. we We use it as much as we can. But you got to be a bit careful nowadays with it, because it still will spit out assumptions.
00:46:33
Speaker
and That's a, that's my little fix for assumptions is just ask it for a reference. Right? Yeah. I love that. It's another high leverage skillset, how to prompt generative AI properly. And specifically, like, how do you, yeah, then it's like, the question is you're building a team. How do you train your team to to prompt it? Um, properly. Do you do any ah surfing out, uh, in Vancouver area, you get in the wetsuit 40 degree water.
00:47:03
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. No, it's cold. You pretty much always have a wetsuit. I actually just got back the other day. like I have kind of a background in the snowboard world. I used to compete in snowboarding. So anyways, a lot of my friends from that world live in Whistler, or they live in the surf towns here in vi here in BC. So I go there pretty often. I was there just the other day, and a bunch of them are my clients. So it's a fun way to get a business trip in, too. John, thank you so much for for being on the podcast and working folks find you.
00:47:32
Speaker
Yeah. So, uh, you can find me at keepers, digital.com. That's our website. The mindful steward.com is the mindfulness website. There's probably going to be a lot more content coming out there, including a revamp of that podcast that I used to do. Um, but otherwise you can find me on LinkedIn. If anyone has any thing they want to chat about, feel free to shoot me a message on LinkedIn. And you know, I'm always happy to connect with new people. That's one of my favorite things. Cool. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.